Alex Rost: THE BLUE PEN • Cleaver Magazine

Alex Rost
THE BLUE PEN

I’m writing this with a blue pen. Traditionally, and consistently, I’ve always been a black pen kind of guy. I think most of us are. You can say that about a lot of things. You can say, “Most of us are…” and then you can move on.

But I bought a blue pen. Two, actually. I have three, but I only bought two. I stole the third one. The one I’m writing with right now, in fact.

We were at Office Depot, my girlfriend and I. We’d gone to Barnes and Noble first but ended at Office Depot. Office Depot is where the blue pens came from, where they were bought and stolen.

What we went to Barnes and Noble for, and then Office Depot, wasn’t blue pens. We needed notebooks. My girlfriend has a respectable job, and had more practical reasons to buy notebooks. She’s a therapist. People tell her their problems and she helps them work through those problems. Some parts work, trauma therapy. She uses a lot of notebooks.

Me, I tell my problems right to my notebooks, and that’s why I need them—so I can write a couple thousand words about blue pens and feel better. It knocks off all the needs they say a person needs to be happy—something to do, something to hope for, and something to love.

And I love myself.

I think.

We went to Barnes and Noble first. It was in this plaza next to a dying mall. The mall used to have big stores like Macy’s and Lord and Taylor. Now it has the Niagara Emporium, which is like a giant department store-sized consignment shop. And fish. They sell exotic fish, too. The whole place smells like algae. It’s where I do most of my Christmas shopping.

The plaza next door used to have an Old Country Buffet and a Best Buy and a Bed Bath and Beyond.

Now it’s just a Barnes and Noble and a Petco. A mortgage loan company moved into one of the vacant spots. Not a bank, but a loan company. Which is like a loan shark, but for people who play it safe.

“Barnes and Noble outlasted them all,” I said when we pulled into the lot.

It was busy. The huge parking lot for the strip mall was empty except for the spots in front of Barnes and Noble. They were pretty full.

“And it’s poppin’,” said my girlfriend.

“I don’t understand. Barnes and Noble outlasted Best Buy? That’s gotta be all management, right?”

“Oh yeah, sound investments for sure.”

“The CEO keeps ’em in the black.”

My girlfriend parked and we both looked up at Barnes and Noble. It was bright and I could see people moving around inside.

“I always thought it was weird, that phrase,” my girlfriend said.

“What? In the black?”

“Yeah. It sounds bad. Black does.”

“I know what you mean. I’ve had that same feeling before.”

“Are we in the black?” she asked.

I thought of all the different things that could mean, and all the different ways I could respond to all those different things.

But instead I just said, “Yes.”

“You know the last time I was in Barnes and Noble?” I said.

“Yeah.”

“I’d gotten a gift card for Christmas or my birthday. I was all excited. I like, never buy new books, you know?”

“I know.”

“I was like, ‘a new book? Nice.’ I figured they’d have everything, you know?”

“Yeah, and then you couldn’t find anything.”

“I told you this before?”

We were in the store now. It was bright and smelled like clean books and air freshener.

“Yeah,” she said.

“I spent like an hour looking.”

“I know.”

“And then I bought a notebook.”

“You told me.”

“It was a good notebook.”

The notebooks were near the front of the store. We peeled off wrappers, keeping an eye open for employees ready to tell us we weren’t supposed to open them before buying.

Usually in those situations, I figure it’s a three-strikes-and-you’re-out deal.

They catch you once, and you say, “Sorry, I didn’t know.”

They catch you again and you’re like, “I really need to see what the pages look like,” and apologize.

They rarely catch you a third time, but if they do, what you say is nothing. You just leave.

I’m particular about my notebooks. I like them wide ruled, with a ribbon for a bookmark and an elastic cord you can wrap around the whole deal.

My girlfriend isn’t picky. She goes through a lot more notebooks. She’s economical.

“College ruled sucks,” I said, peeling a leather bound notebook from the rack and opening it. I had no intention of buying it, even if it checked all my boxes of needs.

“Yeah? Why’s that?” my girlfriend asked.

“The lines are too close together.”

“Right.”

“I write pretty sloppy.”

“I know.”

“And the ink smears easier, cause you’re writing in those small lines.”

“You right, you right.”

I put back the leather notebook, picked up another. I ran my thumbnail along the plastic to cut it open.

“College ruled is for babies,” I said.

“The name says otherwise.”

“I know. It’s fucked.”

We looked for awhile. They were, like, all college ruled. Except for this one with Kamala Harris on the cover, and another with a rainbow pattern. I held the rainbow one in my hand for awhile before putting it back.

But we didn’t leave, not just yet. We were curious. Curious about how Barnes and Noble was beating the odds. How they’d outlasted Old Country Buffet and Best Buy.

“This is how they’re doing it,” my girlfriend said when we saw the racks and racks of board games.

She picked up some party game and started telling me the rules, but I wasn’t listening. I was looking at a box of Risk, the WWII edition. I wanted to pick it up, but I didn’t want my girlfriend to know I didn’t care about her game.

“Right,” I said, staring at Risk. I wondered how the map looked. If it was just Europe and Asia and North Africa, or if America and the rest of the Western Hemisphere made the cut.

“Oh, cool,” I said.

I thought that if I were playing Risk, Germany would actually be an ideal country to control. It’s centered, the perfect attacking spot.

“Sounds fun,” I said.

I wondered what kind of bonus you got for holding Germany. I thought of playing, and having Germany, of getting the Germany bonuses and attacking France, then Russia. Taking Europe over with a grin, saying, “Germany rules! I love Germany! Guys, you missed out. Germany is the shit.”

She put her game back on the shelf and I picked up Risk before she could say anything about anything else. It was everything I thought it would be. I put it back and didn’t think about it again.

“Barnes and Noble is actually pretty cool,” I said when we were leaving.

We didn’t buy anything, and I thought that we left a bigger impression on them than they did us.

Office Depot shared a parking lot with Barnes and Noble. By sharing a parking lot, I mean that you didn’t have to drive on any roads to get there. Just big, empty suburban lots.

It was in another plaza, not connected to Barnes and Noble and Petco and the graves of fallen retail giants.

The lot around Office Depot was empty, about as many cars as there were employees, I guessed.

“Can I park here? Is this alright?” My girlfriend pulled up to a spot next to the handicapped. The lines marking the spots were faded.

“Babe, this isn’t Barnes and Noble.”

We found our notebooks right away. Wide ruled, ribbon bookmark, an elastic band to wrap around the whole deal. And no plastic to rip through.

A much more self-aware store, Office Depot.

“This place isn’t going to last,” I said.

And now for the pens. The blue pens.

I already had a pack of black pens in my hand, the kind I liked, tried and true, when we saw this display with cubbies of pens you could test. There were like a hundred different pens and several pads of paper. We knelt and got to work.

We were writing things like—

This one feels like it’s bleeding.

This one is chunky.

And This pen is pretty good. I think I like this pen.

I slipped that one in my pocket.

Then my girlfriend wrote, “Your handwriting is cool.”

I wrote, “Thank you. Yours is alright too.”

She wrote, “Just alright?”

She put like three question marks with an exclamation point at the end. “Just alright???!”

And I wrote, “Yeah it’s pretty good.”

“Just pretty good?” she wrote back.

I shrugged.

She wrote, “What’s wrong with it?”

I wrote, “It’s kind of plain. Like a lot of people have handwriting like that.”

“What’s that say?” she said, pointing at the word ‘plain.’

“Plain.”

“At least you can read my handwriting,” she said.

“Hey, I can read most of what I write.”

“Yeah. Most of. Exactly.”

We kept testing pens but stopped writing to each other.

“You know,” she said, “I’m pretty self-conscious about my handwriting.”

“Why?”

“When I was in fifth grade, when everyone starts trying to work on their writing style, this girl made fun of it.”

“Fuck her,” I said.

“A bunch of girls. They all wrote so nice. I tried so hard to write like them, to make it nice like that, but I never could.”

“Maybe that’s why it’s so average. Maybe that’s why so many girls have that same style of handwriting. Because they tried to copy someone else’s and couldn’t, and just fell into mediocrity.”

My girlfriend took a pen and wrote, “Fuck you.”

I scribbled it out.

Then she wrote, “I love you.”

I circled it twice, then wrote, “I love you.”

And then we kissed.

After we kissed, she wrote, “At least you can read my handwriting.”

I wasn’t looking, fully engrossed in the blue pen I was testing. She tapped what she wrote.

I glanced and said nothing.

I wanted to try the pens I set aside to buy, the tried and true pens. I had my thumb under the plastic wrap where it meets the cardboard backing, ready to pop it open, but thought to have a little look for an employee first and saw one looking right at me.

We were the only customers, and by default, the coolest people in the store.

I got up off my knee and headed down an aisle where I could open the unbought pens in peace.

“Are we done?” my girlfriend asked.

“Not…yet.”

I popped it open, took a pen out, and went back to the pads.

I wrote, “This is the one I was going to buy.”

“Can I try it?” my girlfriend asked.

She didn’t like it, said the point was too small.

“Yeah,” I said, “you write big. You’re more of a bold kinda writer.”

“Didn’t I just say I’m sensitive about my handwriting?”

“That’s kinda like an acceptance type of issue, isn’t it?”

I went and put my opened pack of pens back on the rack, and grabbed the same pack, but unopened.