Bluebook
Matt Whelihan


Seeing her in person made no difference. That half-moon smile was the same as the pictures—bright, but bordering on too wide. It created a pleasing contrast with her dark hair and dark eyes. And she talked about Dave, like she knew him, like she remembered him. She talked about classes, teachers, assignments, blunders that made high school history. And I remembered it all, but I didn’t remember her.
 
There was an odd guilt, like I was leading her on, but I had nothing devious in mind. I wasn’t taking any pleasure in holding back the truth.
 
I smiled and acknowledged her stories. I had been there, surrounded by the names she mentioned, but she had not been present. And how do you explain something like that? You’re a blank spot, Donna Keller. You’ve been photoshopped out of my past. I didn’t know you existed until five days ago.
 
I wanted to ask her about the bluebook, but I was scared of how significant it might have been, like looking at pictures from your wedding day and asking your spouse what the occasion was.
 
                                                                                 ***
 
I found the bluebook in my parents’ basement. It was in one of eight cardboard boxes marked “Neil.” They had plans for new exercise equipment, a bar, maybe a hot tub, but the basement was full of the kinds of things we pack away because we’re afraid of missing them.
 
In the first few boxes, I unearthed action figures, board games, baseball cards, and chipped, deformed pottery made for a merit badge. I dumped it all into thick, oversized garbage bags. Each item was a quick hit of nostalgia, a sign that I had participated in some past life, one before puberty and responsibility.
 
And then there were the high school boxes.
 
Here were the track medals, the history and biology notebooks, the CDs and the Nirvana posters. And, tucked between a National Honors Society certificate and a framed prom photo, was a bluebook.
 
It would have gone right in a trash bag if I hadn’t noticed the feminine handwriting on the cover. In the space provided for a name was “Donna Keller.” Beneath that, on the line for the course title, was “Neil McMonagle.” Finally, came the date: my senior year.
 
It was an unknown work in the museum of me. Everything in those boxes triggered memories, gave credence to moments no matter how small, made it easy to see the chalkboards and backpacks and cafeteria tables of high school. But the bluebook meant nothing.
 
I wondered if Donna Keller was an invented name, a character from a movie I had watched or a book we had read in AP Lit. But the contents of the bluebook only complicated things.
 
Each page was a tribute to me, presented in careful, curving script. There were top-ten lists that ranged from “Funniest Things Neil Said During Chem Lab” to “Things Neil Eats for Lunch.” There were cartoons of me and Dave. There were haikus that described the way I dressed and the station wagon I drove to school. There were the colleges I had applied to with lists of humorous pros and cons for each.
 
And, on the final page, there was a thank-you note.
 
“Dear Neil,” it said. “It’s a shame I only have one page for a thank you because I could fill an entire book. But I guess I’ll just keep it simple. Like Mrs. Ryan always says, ‘Wordiness is one of the seven deadly sins.’ So thanks for being you Neil McMonagle! No one else could do it just as well.”
 
It was signed in immaculately slanted cursive, Donna Keller.
 
I wanted to bask in the compliments, to indulge my ego and treasure the fact that someone had devoted so much time to the minutia of me, but without knowing who Donna Keller was, I found myself stuck between trepidation and joy. I felt a bond to this person who was no more than a name and some handwriting, but I was also uncomfortable with her pointing out things I had forgotten about myself, with her knowing the eighteen-year-old me better than I knew anyone.
 
I found my yearbooks in the next box. The edition from my senior year listed her in the index: Keller, Donna. I flipped to the photos of the Prom Committee, The Girls Varsity Volleyball Team, The Yearbook Staff, and the senior portraits. And there she was, a short girl who tilted her head slightly in pictures. Her hair was dark and vibrant, her eyes the color of the root beer candies my grandmother kept in a glass bowl on her coffee table. It was the first time I saw the crescent smile. The corners of her mouth seemed to stretch beyond her eyes. And I just stared, hoping visual stimulation would provide the answer.
 
But there was no connection.
 
I couldn’t picture her opening a locker or raising her hand in class. I couldn’t remember where she sat during the chem labs she mentioned in the bluebook. I had no idea what her voice sounded like, who she hung out with, or why she would have created this tribute to me. And I wanted to know.
 
This was not seeing an actor in a movie and struggling to place where I had seen him before; this went past annoyance and straight to concern. I didn’t just fear a gap in my memory, but the chance that this was not the only gap. Something solid and unnamable had been removed from my life without my consent. Some people paid good money to help them forget another person, so how had I done it?
 
                                                                                 ***
 
After a day of rummaging through boxes, I met Dave at the bar and brought the bluebook with me. We got a booth beneath a flat screen TV and ordered beers and wings. I slid the bluebook across the table. My only preface was to say, “Check out what I found at my parents’ house.” I needed to get an unmitigated reaction from him. I needed to see him furrow his brow as he tried to remember the phantom that was Donna Keller.
 
After flipping through the book, he laughed.
 
“I never knew Donna Keller had a thing for you,” he said. “That’s crazy.”
 
“So you remember her?”
 
“Well yeah. I mean we didn’t hang out with her that much, but I remember her from class and seeing her at dances and parties. So, did you and her ever hook up?”
 
“No. At least, I don’t think we did.”
 
I sipped my beer.
 
“Here’s the thing,” I said. “I can’t remember her. Not at all. I even looked at pictures.”
 
“Come on. She had the table next to us in lab. She worked with Shauna.”
 
“I remember Shauna, but not her. It’s kind of freaking me out. How can I just forget someone?”
 
“Don’t get all dramatic on me.”
 
“I’m not. I keep looking at the pictures in the yearbook, and there’s just a gap. I even started reading stuff online about partial memory loss and jamais vu.”
 
“What the hell is that?”
 
“It’s the opposite of déjà vu. You see something you know, but it seems unfamiliar. Like people going home and not recognizing their own house. But I don’t think it’s that. I just… I just don’t know her at all. I was really hoping you’d have no idea who she is either.”
 
“No, I remember her—only pieces—but I remember. Lots of stuff from high school is only pieces now, like what the guidance counselor’s office looked like. I can see Mr. Jameson sitting behind a desk. I don’t know if the desk is wooden or metal or what he had on it, but I can see him. You have to be able to think of at least one—”
 
“I’m telling you. I’ve been reading stuff. Sometimes people can erase events or images if they were traumatic. Maybe something like that happened.”
 
“Donna Keller did something traumatic to you? There is no way. And how would I not know about it? I think you’re just having a momentary issue. Give it some more time. We’re getting older, but not that old. You’ve got a good thirty or forty years before Alzheimer’s sets in, pal.”
 
“Funny. Thanks for the advice.”
 
I wanted to lay out a couple more of the theories I had found, but I knew they would sound ridiculous, like something from a Philip K. Dick novel. “Well, Dave, what may have actually happened is that I paid to have some debilitating memory that hindered my everyday functions removed, and Donna Keller was somehow attached to that horrible memory. Or, maybe I just made sure to have the entire process of memory removal erased as well. Have you ever seen that movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind?”
 
I just wanted him to understand my sense of dread, but how do you explain what it feels like to know something in your mind is not operating correctly? It was not the type of glitch that could be repaired; it was not a device to be replaced. It was an error in something we expected to work, something we spent no time worrying about. Our lungs would not forget to breathe and our memories would be created without us having to tell them, “This--this right here—lock it away, please.”
 
“Maybe I need to see her,” I said. “I’ve been thinking that might be enough of a push, something jarring enough to fill in the blank.”
 
“Maybe,” he said as he started to flip through the bluebook again. “I mean, I’d want to see any girl that was this into me.”
 
                                                                                 ***
 
It didn’t take long to find her online. Her hair was a bit shorter, and crow’s feet had emerged around her eyes, but the smile made her easily recognizable. No one would doubt that the girl in my yearbook and the woman on my computer screen were one and the same.
 
Reaching out to her wasn’t difficult either. It was as if I were trying to get in touch with a fictional character. Her rejection would be nothing but fantasy, just as her existence seemed to be.
 
I sent her a message, and I avoided lying. I didn’t write that it would be great to see her again, or that I was recently recalling some moment we had shared, but I also didn’t mention the bluebook or my inability to recollect her. I told her I was glad to find her (which was true), and that I’d like to hang out if possible (which was also true).
 
And while it was comforting to have the message out there, to be working towards a resolution, the whole thing felt paradoxical. I was asking a stranger to hang out, a stranger that somehow already knew me, a stranger who might value time with me more than I was comfortable with. A few hours later, Donna Keller responded.
 
It was a warm reply that made me think of the message at the end of the bluebook. “Thanks for being you Neil McMonagle!”
 
She made the references to high school that I had avoided, references I knew, but ones that she played no role in. But, more importantly, she said she’d love to meet up for a drink. After a couple more messages we decided on a place near her work.
 
I wasn’t expecting an epiphany—some mental fireworks and a montage of our dearest moments—but I knew that seeing her in person was my best hope for remembering her.
 
                                                                                 ***
 
The smile was more engaging in person. Donna Keller was charming and genuinely happy. Seeing her sparked a nervous reaction. The figment, the girl who existed solely as photos in my yearbook, was now a living, breathing figure.
 
I had stuffed the bluebook in the back pocket of my jeans before heading out, but I had no idea what I planned to do with it. As I sat down, I could feel it under me; I could picture the doodles and lists.
 
I felt like I was on a blind date. We asked each other about jobs and living situations. She talked about her dog, and I mentioned a vacation I had coming up. But the strangeness of it, of knowing that she was updating her mental file on me while I was receiving my first impressions of her, was enough to make me uneasy. It felt like an elaborate lie. Like I was toying with her. When she switched to reminiscing about high school, things only got worse.
 
I was able to share the memories: Jamie Hess’s 16th birthday party, Mrs. Guffey accidently showing us the nude scene in The Crucible, the cops showing up at Bill Rittman’s shore house during senior week. I had been there for each one of them, but the discussions didn’t help to make her appear in those moments.
 
I hoped she’d mention the bluebook. I hoped she’d give me an opening for talking about it, maybe forcing me into telling her the truth. But it didn’t happen, and the book stayed in my pocket.
 
Her smile wouldn’t let me take it out and pass it over. It wouldn’t let me confess my complete lack of knowledge about her prior to that night. The only thing I knew for sure about Donna Keller was that smile, and I couldn’t watch it collapse under a hurtful admission.
 
So I sat through our drink feeling that odd guilt, feeling like I was lying and willingly deleting some part of her. And I wished it was the first time that we had met, that we could continue to get to know each other.
 
When we said goodbye, we uttered the requisite, “We’ll have to do it again sometime!” but I knew that wouldn’t happen. I couldn’t feign recognition or pretend we had a shared past again.
 
                                                                                 ***
 
I met Dave at our regular place for my debriefing. He was watching Sports Center on a TV above the bar and sipping an amber beer. I exhaled when I sat down next to him.
 
“That doesn’t sound promising,” he said.
 
I got the bartender’s attention and ordered a drink for myself.
 
“It didn’t work.”
 
“Jesus. That must have been an awkward interaction. Did you tell her?”
 
“I couldn’t do it. She was so happy, excited. I didn’t want to weird her out, so I just kind of stumbled my way through it.”
 
My beer came, and I downed half of it in one go.
 
“So what now? What’s the next step? Meet her again? Look at some more old photos? See a hypnotist?”
 
He started to laugh.
 
“Thanks for the serious consideration,” I said. “But I don’t think there is a next step. I’ve spent the past week pretty much questioning my sanity. I think the deeper I dig the more that feeling will grow.”
 
We sat in silence for a moment, watching highlights from a baseball game.
 
“You know when you’re a kid and you first hear that the universe is endless?” I said. “You try to picture this wall of stars out there at the edges of it all because you need some way to comprehend it. And then the next thing your little-kid brain does is says, ‘But what’s on the other side of that wall?’ And suddenly you feel really vulnerable and confused. It’s something you can’t wrap your mind around because there is no way to picture it, no model to look at, no examples. Eventually, you get distracted by Nintendo or your mom yelling at you to clean your room, and the world settles back into being easily understood.”
 
I took another long swig of beer.
 
“I’m having that little-kid moment again,” I said, “and I’ve tried the internet, and I’ve tried Donna Keller, and I’ve tried drinking with you, but things aren’t settling back into being easily understood this time.”
 
“Maybe you should try Nintendo,” Dave said.
 
He laughed and I ordered another beer.
 
                                                                                 ***
 
The next day, back in my parents’ basement, I moved on to the last two boxes, the two that contained the bits and pieces of my college life.
 
There was a Norton anthology of British literature and some shot glasses, the random contents of desk drawers, and an old pair of sneakers. With each item, there was a fear I’d find something else unfamiliar, something else that pointed to a part of my life I could no longer recall.
 
When I was done, I had condensed all of the boxes marked “Neil” down to one. Everything else was now in trash bags, no longer aides to memory. I knew I would take that single box, drive it back to my apartment, and put it in a closet where it would stay until I moved again.
 
There was just one thing left: the bluebook.
 
I could keep it and continue to pick at the mystery, to suffer each dead end, to question the functioning of my brain and wonder about other malfunctions, other missing pieces. Or, I could destroy the one thing that birthed all of these issues, the one thing that made Donna Keller real and missing from my mind, the one thing that reminded me who I had forgot.
 
I counted the trash bags on the basement floor. I looked at the stairs and then at my shoes. I noted the empty space along the cement wall where the eight boxes had once been.
 
It was time to go.
 
I dropped the bluebook into one of the trash bags and tied a knot at the top. I lifted the remaining box, the one that contained my new, curated past, and I left the basement and Donna Keller behind. 









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About the Author: 
Matt Whelihan is an assistant professor of English at Wilmington University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as Slice, Cleaver, Midwestern Gothic, MAYDAY Magazine, and New Plains Review. In 2017, he received an honorable mention in Glimmer Train's Short Story Award for New Writers contest. He lives in the Philadelphia area.

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