Chatterbox

She died very suddenly, though none of us could have known what lay inside her.

Her name was Kimi, Kimi Ngyuen, and she was from Korea or Singapore, or somewhere like that. We never learned much about Kimi. Her family didn't speak very good English, though Kimi spoke it well enough to understand lessons. We tried to befriend her, but Kimi was shy and I'm ashamed to say that we took to bullying her. We were elementary school girls and extremely clicky. Kimi was an outsider, she wore strange clothes, she didn't speak like we did, and we made fun of her for it. Most days she just sat in the back of class, sat on the pavilion at recess, and said little to anyone.

When she died, it surprised everyone.

Kimi lived in a small apartment complex in a not-so-great part of town. Her family worked for her uncle, Mr. Juin, who owns a market in the neighborhood they lived in. Kimi had been working there after school, helping her parents pay the bills, and she had been making a delivery on her bike when someone abducted her. They found her bike just sitting on the curb, wheel spinning slowly, and the police didn't seem hopeful in their investigation.

Her kidnapping was all the buzz around school, and my friends wanted to talk about little else. Marrissa, our sort of leader, said she betted she had just made the whole thing up so people would be friends with her when she was "found." Leanna said she shouldn't say things like that, but you could tell that she didn't really feel very scandalized. She said she had been praying for her, praying they would find her safe, but even at ten, I doubted it. I kept my mouth shut on the matter, personally thinking it was terrible. No one should just get grabbed off their bike as they tried to help their family.

A week later, they found her body in an empty lot near her Uncle's shop. Mom wouldn't let me watch the news report about it, but Marrissa said that the newsman had said she was chopped up and left in pieces. "The news thinks it might have been something to do with her Uncle, but they don't seem to know much about it.” A service was held for her at the local Korean Baptist church and I saw a picture of her parents lighting a little paper boat and floating it out for her. Her two sisters, one of whom was in the first grade, were there too and I remember thinking how awful it would be to lose someone like that. My own sister wasn't very nice, but I still didn't want anything like that to happen to her.

A few days later, Mrs. Hurd stopped me as I was going out to recess and asked me if I would put the stuff from Kimi's desk into a box.

"Her parents are coming at the end of the day, and I really need to be outside with the other children. Just put it on my desk and come outside when you're done."

I saw the pack of Marlboros in her hand and guessed that childminding probably wasn't the only thing on her mind.

Marrissa stayed to help me, and I found that Kimi's desk was surprisingly neat. My desk looked like a garage sale, but Kimi's desk was very organized, and it was easy to pack her stuff away. Marrissa cooed over her Hello Kitty pencil box, but I reminded her that we weren't allowed to take her stuff. The pencil box, her notebooks, her folders, and a cute little art supply case went into the box, along with a Hello Kitty eraser and pencil set. Marrissa looked over it all greedily, but I wasn't trying to get in trouble for taking things from a dead student, especially not when the teacher had trusted me to pack it.

We were loading some of her notebooks when a small purple book fell out from the middle of them. Marrissa pounced on it before I could even fully register what it was. I told her to give it back, that it didn't belong to her, but Marrissa was already opening it and leafing through it.

"Oh no way, it's her journal!"

"Give it Marrissa. It isn't yours. We need to put it in the box before someone see's it."

"No way. No one knows about it so who's going to miss it. Unless," Marrissa got a mean look on her face, "you're going to tattle on me?"

I stopped complaining then and let her slide the journal into her pocket. Marrissa and I had been friends since first grade, but I hadn't forgotten how mean she could be either. She had bullied me in Kindergarten for the better part of half the year until I had come to school with a brand new backpack one day and she had fallen in love with it. Marrissa had said someone with a backpack that cool had to be friends with her and Leanna and I had been part of their click every since.

That had only been three years ago, and I wasn't in a big hurry to go back to the way things were.

Marrissa and I were friends, but Marrissa could be mean when she wanted to be as well.

"I won't tattle," I said softly, more to myself than to her.

"Good," she said, snatching the pencil case out too before I could get the lid back on.

I set the box on the desk, and made sure that Marrissa was gone before I left too.

The idea to make the chatterbox was Marrissa's, as so many other bad ideas usually were.

She read the journal to us at recess, taking delight every time she or Leanna were mentioned. My name even came up a few times, though it was usually by association. It appeared that Kimi had been keeping a journal of people who had wronged her, as well as of how they had wronged others. Quite the little spider was Kimi, hiding away and listening to people as they gossipped or went about their lives.

"Hmmm," Marrissa said, getting a mischievous look, "I've got an idea."

She turned to the back and tore out an unused page, beginning to write the predictions for her chatterbox.

If you're unfamiliar with the item, it's probably because it has a million names. I've heard them called fortune-tellers, whirlybirds, paku paku, salt sellers, cootie catchers, and any number of other things. Sometimes when I post about them online I get little fights started over what they're called. People have a thousand different names for them, but they seem to be something known worldwide. They are little devices that you put numbers in, picking numbers randomly until you get your fortune and learn your fate.

Marrissa had already started writing the same old things she always did whenever she made one of these. They were never very creative, usually things like you’d marry a millionaire, that you would be a princess, that you would have twenty children, that sort of thing. She was always very predictable, but she never seemed to include anything bad in her predictions. Marrissa, despite being a bit of a brat, didn't like for bad things to happen to her or her friends. When she made the Chatterbox, it was always the best outcome.

"Okay, pick a number."

I looked at the chatterbox questioningly, "What are you doing?"

"Isn't it obvious?" Marrissa asked, "If Kimi knew so many secrets, then maybe she won't mind telling us our futures."

The idea of using a dead girl's paper to tell our fortunes made me shudder, and I shook my head as she turned to Leanna.

"Come on Le, let me tell you your future."

"Eh, I guess it couldn't hurt." Leanna said, "Five,"

Marrissa opened and closed the device very fast before holding it out for her to pick another number.

"Seven," she said, smiling as the little paper creature plopped open and closed very quickly.

"Three." she finished, and Marissa opened the flap.

"You should tell Jana what you," Marrissa stopped suddenly, realizing that she had read the words before she quite put together what they said.

"Tell Jana what?" Leanna said, smiling but looking a little nervous.

Marrissa looked at me, "Did you write something on this while I wasn't looking?"

"No," I insisted, "when would I have had the chance?"

Marrissa started to call me a liar but she huffed out a "hey" as Leanna took the chatterbox and looked at the tab.

She looked confused when she got the chatterbox away from her, but she looked angry when she was done reading what was on the tab.

"You should tell Jana what you did with Mark at the lake,” Leanna tossed the little paper thing in Marrissa's lap, "I told you that in confidence! I only kissed him because you said I should!"

"Le, I didn't write that." but Leanna was already storming off, heading for the picnic tables.

Marrissa looked back at me, holding the papercraft out as though inviting me to take a turn.

"I don't really want to do it. It's kind of creepy."

Marrissa groaned deep in her throat, "Oh my God. Here, I'll do it."

She picked numbers at random, moving her fingers very quickly as she selected her fortune. Marrissa looked mad, furious even, but that wouldn’t stop her from reading her fortune. The fortune that Leanna read had shocked her, and she was interested in finding the ones she had written so she could feel okay again. It was a fluke, she must be thinking, and now she was going to prove it.

She opened tab number three, and I could see her hand shaking as she read it.

"Felicia doesn't like you. She pretends to because her mom asked her to."

She looked up at me suspiciously, but I just put my hands up and looked at the words inside.

"It's not even either of our handwriting. Your handwriting is swoopy, and mine is super sloppy. This handwriting is way too neat to be either of ours."

Marrissa looked at the handwriting and then flipped open the journal as if looking for the source.

She stared at a few of the pages before slamming the book shut and taking the Chatterbox with her.

I asked her where she was going, but she didn't answer.

Turned out where she was going was on a tour of the playground.

I didn't realize what was going on until a group of angry kids approached the playground monitor with a frantic Marrissa in tow.

The lead girl, Felicia Spalding, looked livid and Marrissa was trying to tell her how sorry she was with every step she took.

"Mrs. Conway, Marrissa is telling lies about my friends and me."

Mrs. Conway, a broad grandmotherly woman with hands like slabs of beef looked at Marrissa and then back to Felicia.

"What's going on girls? What's this about lies?"

"I didn't write it!" Marrissa wailed, waving the chatterbox in her free hand.

"She wrote lies about us in the chatterbox. Her box said that my mom had gotten an abortion, and it said that Cindy was adopted."

Cindy, the tall girl with the wavy brown hair that hung with Felicia and her click, was crying and shaking her head.

Other kids had similar stories. Some said that her chatterbox had told them that their parents were getting divorced. Others said that the predictions claimed to know about things they had done or things they had said. One of them even claimed that it told him that his aunt would die later this week, and she was in the hospital with cancer.

"Marrissa, hand me that thing." Mrs. Conway said, her face growing dower as she listened to the long list of complaints against Marrissa.

Marrissa gave her the folded paper, seeming loath to be rid of it, and she almost cried out in anguish as Mrs. Conway tore it into pieces.

"The next time I hear of something like this, I'll give you after-school detention. Stop writing lies about people and the rest of you go play."

They all dispersed, Marrissa looking down at the pieces of the chatterbox as they drifted in the wind.

I hadn't walked up with the rest, but I was still close enough to hear Felicia tell her not to expect to go to any of her parties anymore.

Marrissa changed after that, and it seemed to me that the chatterbox was the reason for it.

For the rest of the day, she just sat at her desk and looked down into her lap. I couldn't see what she was fiddling with at first, but eventually, I saw that it was another one of the chatterboxes. I was shocked. Hadn't she learned her lesson after the first one? Her book was open, but her hands moved below the lip of the desk in a rapid series of jerks and swoops. She would flick it once and twice before opening the corresponding flap and reading what it said. Every answer seemed to make her more and more agitated. She would take it off her hand sometimes and seemed on the verge of ripping it to shreds before gently sliding it back on and starting again.

"Marrissa?" Mrs. Hurd asked, drawing my attention back to the front of the class and drawing Marrissa back from her stupor, "would you care to answer number four for us?"

Marrissa shoved the chatterbox into her desk and looked down at her open textbook as she searched for number four.

"Uh....seventeen?"

Mrs. Hurd blinked, "That would be correct if we were still in our math lesson. We've moved on to geography. Are you feeling well, Marrissa? You don't seem yourself today."

Marrissa turned beat red, digging through her desk to find her book.

Mrs. Hurd had approached her desk, I suppose wanting to see if she might be feverish, and when she stooped to pick something up, I saw that the chatterbox had fallen out as Marrissa searched for her book.

"Oh, what have we here. I remember these from when I was a little girl. We used to use them to tell each other's fortunes. I can't believe kids still make these for," but as she had been talking, she had been opening one of the flaps on the chatterbox.

She glanced at the tab as it came fully open and her words ended as abruptly as they had begun.

Marrissa looked up at her as her geography book came open and the look on her face was enough to tell me that she didn't like what she had seen there.

"Get up," Mrs. Hurd whispered, her voice barely containing her rage.

"Mrs...Hurd?" Marrissa asked, unsure of what was happening.

"Git your," she curbed her next words, "things and come with me. We're going straight to the principles office, young lady."

Marrissa looked up, confused, but collected her things and went with Mrs. Hurd to the office.

She never came back to class, and when I asked Mrs. Hurd she only told me that her mother had been called after something she had written in the chatterbox.

Marrissa was suspended for five days, and she was taken out of class with Leanna and I and put in another fourth-grade class.

Leanna said it served her right for writing lies about people.

"She made her bed and now she has to sleep in it. I would have honestly forgiven her, but not after what she said about Mrs. Hurd."

I asked her what she had said, and Leanna leaned in like it was a big secret.

"I heard she had written that Mrs. Hurd was cheating on her husband with Mr. Sizemoore."

"The P.E. teacher?"

"Yeah. Can you imagine? She's lucky she didn't get expelled."

When Marrissa came back to school, she was a very different girl. She looked frazzled, her red hair looking unkempt, and she seemed to constantly pull at her clothes. She was nervous and twitchy, and she seemed obsessed with the little chatterbox. She would ask people to pick a space and ask them to make a choice, but most people would just walk past her without speaking. It's tough to be labeled a social pariah at ten years old. She had lost all the friends she had except me, and I wasn't even sure I still wanted to be friends with her. When I saw her at recess that day, sitting by the fence and fiddling with the chatterbox, I sat beside her and asked her if she was okay.

I could smell a smell around her, and it wasn't an altogether healthy smell.

"I can't let her beat me," she whispered, her face very close to the chatterbox as she worked the mechanism.

"Who?" I asked

"Kimi," she said just as low, and when she opened the fold on the Chatterbox, she sobbed and closed it up to start again.

"Mara," I said, using her nickname, "Kimi is dead."

"Not all the way dead," she said, and when she opened the tab this time, her fingers crumpled the space and I could read the message written there before she could close it.

"Your mother thinks you're crazy."

Marrissa pushed me suddenly, and the fence scratched my back as I slid sideways.

Through the small tears there, I could see her lunatics face as she pushed it inches from mine.

"That's not your fortune. Don't read other people's fortunes!"

Mrs. Conway must have seen something because she started walking over.

I got up and walked away quickly, not looking at Marrissa as the playground monitor approached her.

That was the last time I spoke with Marrissa, but not the last I saw of her.

For the next three months, I saw her on and off. She became like a wraith who haunted the school. She stopped asking people to look at the chatterbox. She just sat off by herself and played with it, cringing and sobbing every time she opened a flap. The more I saw her, the worse I felt for her, and eventually, I decided to try and bury the hatchet.

I decided that after school I would go visit her at home and try and see if we could reconcile.

I also wanted to see if there was any sanity in her to save.

She hadn't been at school the last couple of days, not that anyone but me had bothered to notice. When I arrived at her house, her mother seemed happy to see me. She told me that Marrissa had been feeling poorly lately and that maybe a friend might cheer her up. Marrissa's mother looked like she hadn't slept in a few days and even at ten, I noticed that she approached Marrissa's room like there might be a wild animal behind the door.

She knocked, slowly and hesitantly, and told Marrissa that I was here to see her.

Marrissa said nothing.

She knocked again, asking if Marrissa was awake?

Marrissa said nothing.

Her mother opened the door slowly, and I could see Marrissa sitting at the desk with her back to the door.

She never moved when he mother walked over to her, and as I stood in the doorway, I couldn't help but take in what appeared to be the lair of a crazy person. Some of the details would come to me afterward, but many of them were seen in the split second that we often use to see details and access if a threat is present. The floor was full of Chatterboxes, like a flowerbed of folded paper, and her mother seemed to be stepping over them gingerly. The outsides of them were covered with words, all of them written in that neat, spidery handwriting. The writing on the wall was all Marrissa's though. She had written on the wall in anything she could find. The scrawls were a messy jumble of pen, pencil, paint, charcoal, and a rusty red color that may have been her own blood in a few places.

The words were strange, not making a lot of sense.

She Watches.

She whispers

She tells me

I'm crazy, I'm insane, I'm a disappointment.

She Haunts Me.

Most chilling of all was the rusty red smear of the word Kimi over the head of her bed.

Like she had traced it with a bleeding finger.

When her mother started to scream, I was turned away from the bloody words as if someone had slapped me.

She was screaming Marrissa's name, again and again, shaking the ragged scarecrow she had become.

She begged me to dial nine one one, and I ran downstairs to do just that.

The paramedics couldn't figure it out. They said it was like her heart just stopped and no amount of CPR or defibrillation could bring her back. As they laid her out on the ground, I could see her face frozen in a rictus of fear and shock. Looking to the desk, I saw the chatterbox she had been toting around this whole time. It was grimy and covered in fingerprints, but I believe to this day that it was the same one that Mrs. Conway had destroyed all those weeks ago.

The open flap was blank, the surface stark and unmarred.

I can't imagine what she could have read there, and I honestly didn't want to find out.

I'm in high school now, eight years have passed, but I still remember the lesson I learned from Marrissa.

It's unwise to mess around with the possessions of the dead. Their things are better left undisturbed, their memories left unread, and it was the last lesson Marrissa would learn too late.

If it's a lesson I ever forget, I have a reminder on my desk every day.

You see, when I came back from Marrissa's funeral, the Chatterbox was sitting on my doorstep.

I can't prove it was the same one, I know that it can't be the same one, but that didn't stop me from scooping it up and putting it in my pocket before my mother could see it.

I heard it whisper to me that night.

Its whispering is little more than a mutter as I sit here writing this.

It gets harder to hear, but it never goes away, and that's why I refuse to touch it, let alone use it.

Let Marrissa and Kimi keep each other company inside that thing for the rest of time, for all I care.

I don't want the knowledge they hold that badly.