LOCKER LETTERS (Prologue)

There’s this store two blocks away from my house called “Locker Letters”. When I first saw it, I honestly thought it was just some random stationery store because of the word ‘letters’ on the name. I pass by this place all the time when I go to school, so I felt pretty stupid when I found out it wasn’t anything close to a stationery store.

The concept of the store is actually pretty cool. Its aim is somehow towards social interaction. This is how it goes: the store is filled with small lockers from floor to ceiling and each locker unit is rented out to two people. The catch is, though, these two people who will be sharing lockers with each other will be chosen randomly. What they do is, when you rent a locker, they just pick out a random unit for you. You can’t choose the unit you will be renting because the idea is to share the unit with a stranger. Everyday, or whenever you feel like it, you put in a letter or letters in the locker. Your locker partner will receive it and send you a new one, so it’s like you’re interacting with each other through your own personal mailbox. You can choose to reveal your identities immediately or you can remain anonymous for as long as you want. If you think about it, it sounds pretty stupid because you can just go and talk to your friends in person if you need someone to talk to, right? I mean, personal interaction would still be better for some people. Well, if you were an 18-year old boy like me, whose life seems to be crumbling down, having someone to talk to, and being anonymous to that someone so he/she can’t blab to everybody about your life, seems like a pretty darn great idea. So, one day, I stopped by the store and rented out a locker.

“Sign here”, the girl at the registry told me and so I signed my name: Elmo Magalona. She gave me the keys to my locker. “Hope your letters have a great stay here!”, she told me.

I nodded and smiled tightly, then walked towards the locker areas to hunt down my locker: number 530. I was stopped by the guard at the entrance to the hallway for lockers 525 to 535.

“Someone’s still in there”, he told me.

I nodded and waited. I forgot that one of their policies was that only one person could enter a hallway at a time, just so the anonymity of the locker owners remained. I looked up when a girl came out of the hallway. She glanced in my direction and our eyes met for a while. I was about to smile at her out of courtesy but she immediately bowed down and walked away. I shrugged. So much for being courteous, I thought as the guard motioned to me that it was my turn.

I walked into the empty hallway and found my locker. I opened it and was surprised to see that a letter was already there. I took the orange envelope from the locker and put it in my bag then walked home.

“I’m home!”, I shouted out when I got inside the house.

“Elmo… stop shouting, you’re giving me a headache”, Maxene, my older sister, complained from the couch.

“Whatever. I’ll be in my room, drunkie”, I said, climbing up the stairs.

“What did you say?”, Maxene asked me, irritated by my haughtiness.

I continued climbing up the stairs without replying. She was suffering from a massive hang over from the college party she went to last night. I can get mean to my siblings, sometimes, but I wasn’t mean enough to add to her suffering so I let her question go.

When I got to the upstairs landing, I could hear my mother and father arguing in their bedroom, which was across from mine. I shrugged and slammed the door to my room as soon as I got inside. My parents were always arguing, lately. There was nothing new about that. Some of my friends were even telling me that their parents were talking about my parents possibly getting a divorce. At first, the idea hurt me. But I got so numbed out by their fighting that I eventually stopped caring about what they do altogether.

I dropped my bag, and my body, on my bed. I opened my bag and took the orange envelope. I was about to open the envelope when my bedroom door suddenly opened and my mother stood at the door, watching me.

“Elmo, what are you doing? No plans of doing homework anytime, soon?”, she asked me. I’d like to think she was just asking nicely and out of curiosity, but her facial expression told me she had other ideas in her head. See, my parents, well my entire family, always compare me to my older brother, Frank. He’s an athlete and always gets good grades. No, wait, he gets better than good grades, he is always at the top of his class. Whenever my parents see me “slacking off”, they think I should do better and “be like Frank”. I’m actually sick of it. And right now, knowing that my mom was watching me lying in bed and doing nothing, I knew that she was mentally comparing me to Frank again.

I smiled tightly at her. “I just got home, mom. I’m gonna rest for, like, a nanosecond then I’ll be off winning Pulitzer Prizes for you guys, I promise”, I answered.

My mother huffed at me. “Don’t be sarcastic with me, Elmo Moses”, she said, then she walked away.

I sighed, stood up, slammed my bedroom door closed and locked it. I flopped back down on the bed and closed my eyes for a while. Sometimes, I wish I could just die and see how they would react. Maybe they’d throw a victory party or something, he thought. He knew he was being morbid and overly dramatic, but this was life for him. He opened his eyes again and took the orange envelope, which had fallen on the bed when he got up, and finally opened it.

Hey You!

Hi there! Looks like we’ll be sharing lockers from now until infinity! Haha, kidding (or maybe not). Anyway, I just dropped by to say ‘Nice to meet you’ even though, in reality, we haven’t really met because I’m writing the first letter of this exchange haha! I’m talkative aren’t I? Well, I’m warning you now, I can be quite a handful (or in this case, a ‘paperful’. Get it? Cause it’s letters and it’s paper… okay never mind). Anyway, I just want you to know that I’m excited to hear about you from you! Hope to hear from you soon!

Sincerely,

Elmo smiled. It was a short but witty letter. I wonder if this is a boy or a girl?, he thought. He got up from his bed, went to his desk and wrote his first letter to his locker partner.