It said: You asked me twice if I was okay and I said yes both times and I want you to know I was lying, and that I’m glad somebody asked. Then about a page and a half in fifteen-year-old handwriting, and it is not a suicide note — that’s the first thing I checked and the thing I’ve had to say out loud to four people since. It’s an account of what was happening at his house, written plainly, the way a kid writes when he’s rehearsing telling someone. The last line says he’s going to talk to me on Wednesday.
The fourteenth of October 1997 was a Tuesday. He was never in school again. I remembered the boy and I remembered a family that moved, and it never once crossed my mind in twenty-eight years to wonder whether moved was the whole story — because it was 1997 and a secretary said it in a hallway and I had a hundred and forty students and I believed her.
He’s alive. That’s the thing I found out in November and I want anybody reading this to have it before they get further. He’s forty-three, he lives in Georgia, he was removed from that home in the third week of October by a caseworker whose visit had nothing to do with anything I did. He’d never gone back for the locker because he’d been picked up from a classroom and driven away the same afternoon.
I called him in December. It took about forty minutes to work up to it and then he answered on the second ring like a normal person. He remembered me instantly. He remembered the two times I asked, both of them, and where we were standing. He said he’d thought about that notebook for years and had assumed it was in a landfill. I mailed it to him in January, insured, and he texted me a photograph of it on his own kitchen table with three words underneath: somebody did notice.
