CHAPTER 2 – THE NOTEBOOK OF DEATH

The weekend had come and gone too fast for a certain teenager. He certainly wouldn't have allowed it to go any faster if it didn't know what was coming for him. It was on Monday that Noel received the terrible news that put him in a state of shock.

"Class, before we begin, I regret to announce… for those who still haven't heard, that Catherine Formosita from classroom 402… passed away last Friday night. Please pray for her soul." The class adviser began the new week with this greeting. Murmurs started to erupt in the class.

"Catherine? That beautiful girl from the honors section?"

"Wow, it's really a shame…"

"Cathy was one of my friends! Why did she have to die so young?"

"This is the first time I had a batch mate who passed away."

"What are you looking so complacent about? A schoolmate died! Don't you feel sorry for her family at all?"

"Hey, it's not like I don't care about it, it's just…"

"What was… the cause of her early passing away, sir?" Heads turned in his direction.

He knew this was coming but he just had to know why. The only girl he ever looked at, the one who inspired him to study, the girl who was cute and smart at the same time, the girl who meant a great deal to Noel… had left this world just like that. Not only did he feel broken and destroyed because of the melancholic news, he also felt utterly terrified at the possibility that it was his fault.

"Well… it was strange. Miss Formosita was an extremely healthy girl. She had no irregularities in her any of her medical documents and yet she gave in to a heart attack. Doctors are still searching for further causes." A heart attack. It was like what the black notebook had said.

Last Friday, Noel chose to draw the very girl whom he was infatuated with for the longest time. And he had labeled his drawing with her full name. "No. It's impossible. It could never have happened because of that. It was simply a coincidence. How could she have died just because he wrote her name in a notebook… that actually said it would happen? No! It's impossible! Tonight… tonight, I'll prove to myself that it's just a scary coincidence. I'll play that little notebook's game. It's impossi-"

"Hey, you're sweating like crazy." Fred told his friend. Since the both of them sat right next each other in the classroom's seat plan, they could easily chat all they wanted to.

Noel stated part of the reason why. "How couldn't I? Cath is dead… It's almost like I'm dead too."

"Jeezus, you sound really emo. She's just a girl, you know." A classmate from behind remarked.

In his increased impatience to go home as soon as possible, Noel had to endure that specific day go by minute after crawling minute.

"She's just a girl, huh? She may be the person who changed my life but I also agree that she's just a girl. She's just a girl and that's what I like about her. She isn't like any of my other female classmates here who either act too girly to bear or aren't like girls at all."

It was a good thing that the driver comes early every Monday because on other days, Noel's younger brother has to be picked up first. Just as the bell marking the end of the day rang, he was the first one out of the classroom. After heading down three flights of stairs, he reached the first floor and just as he was about to pass the large mango tree, he halted and looked up. Part of him wished for another notebook to fall from the sky or for the real owner to pop up asking him if he had found a small black notebook lying around last Friday.

But it didn't come. So he stopped wasting his time, went out of the school campus, got in the black Ford Lynx that was waiting for him and set off for home.

Fifteen minutes later, he was up in his room with the black notebook turned to the page he had drawn onto. Noel looked at the name he had written with both irritation and defiance. "Let's see… whose name do I write? I don't want it to be anyone else from school. It has to be someone famous… and annoying." He wrote the first person that came into his mind, "The president of the Philippines, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo."

As the sky outside was becoming a darker hue of orange, the seemingly triumphant teenager started to do his homework for that day. But barely five minutes had passed before the annoying voice of the maid barged into his room telling him to turn the television on and put it on the local channels. "Quick, before you miss it!"

"What?!" Noel reluctantly got his remote control and did what the maid said. He pointed the remote at a corner of the room, where his medium-sized television stayed half-hidden among the mounds of broken-down electronic gadgets that littlered one side of his room. Around this time, different kinds of novellas were supposed to be showing but they were apparently interrupted by an emergency news flash. The captions read, "PGMA, Hospitalized due to Heart Attack?"

He felt his heart drop to his feet and he thought, "Heart attack? But… HOW?!" He looked at the president's name written in the notebook with really messy script-type lettering but he quickly closed it so that the maid couldn't see the president's name right under Catherine's. "How can this be? This… is impossible."

Noel listened to the newscaster properly.

"Just a few minutes ago, while she was in the middle of a meeting with several company founders, president Gloria Arroyo fell unconscious due to a heart attack. Paramedics shortly examined that her heart had indeed, stopped. She was rushed to the nearest hospital via helicopter soon after-"

He turned the television off because he had heard enough. The maid complained. "Hey, why'd you turn it off?"

"You go watch television downstairs. Personally, I don't really care. Not even if all of the country leaders in the world die." And at that, the maid left the room.

Noel stayed silent while sitting on the edge of his bed and staring at the notebook, which lay on his study table.

It seemed to defy everything that he had always believed in. He never really believed in spirits or ghosts, moreover a notebook that could kill people. He was an atheist who would never have believed in anything if he didn't have any proof or if it didn't abide with the laws of physics. To him, magic was just sleight of hand and camera tricks; the Bible was just another best-selling fiction novel and ghosts were just figments of scared people's imaginations.

And yet here this notebook was, staring at him with all its innocent lethality.

"Why did the notebook just drop from the sky like that and why did he have to pick it up? And what was he supposed to do with this notebook now that he has already killed two people? … Just what can I accomplish with this notebook in my possession?

"I can… I can eliminate all the people who annoy me. But wouldn't that make me a murderer? So now I'm a murderer who got away with killing the country's president and my crush. Though some deaths are needed to build a happier life. I'm sure most of the world would agree, although reluctant at first.

"Wait. The entire world? What if… I try to change the Earth with this one notebook? I can't use this only for my own happiness so I won't just eliminate all the people who annoy me. I'll also eliminate all the people whom I deem… absolutely worthless. And I'll start with cleansing the Philippines. With this notebook… With the Death Note, I can do it.

"This is going to be so much fun!"

CHAPTER 2

END.