The rain had let up by the time Ari managed to disentangle himself from Zoe and collect his tips for the night. The promise of a cool summer evening with all the humidity knocked out of the air sucked him into a long meandering walk 'home.' It was dark when his sandals finally hit the pastel-painted steps up to the hostel's front entryway. He'd circled the block in wide orbits a few times throughout the evening, threatening to call it a night. He returned again and again to the bug-choked bustle of the lakeside boardwalk instead. He needed to be anonymous in public for a while. He needed a purely homeopathic dose of human connection. 

He keyed in the four-digit code on the front entry’s sticky keypad and let himself in with zero fanfare. Prayer flags and tapestries dragged on the top of his head as he made his way up the protesting stairs. He was getting - had gotten - too big and too tall for New England’s cramped interiors.

The life he’d made for himself at the hostel was decidedly cramped. He tried to forget about it.

The shower water on offer at Ari's combination job and home was never that hot, but the cubicle - one of three in a neat row - with its crinkly plastic curtain offered something like privacy. He washed himself off in a hurry. Food appealed more than extra time spent with his rattling brain.

It was catch as catch can when it came to food availability. The hostel was, as had been reiterated to him several times during his interview for the job, no bed and breakfast. 

There was always boxed pancake and waffle mix in the kitchenette off the common area. There were almost always eggs. The tap water in Queen City was potable.  Ari collected and combined these items. He rinsed the fork and set it in the drying rack.  He'd fried up six pancakes before he remembered that he was cooking dinner for one, or cooking dinner at all, or in the kitchenette, or awake. When he came around to himself again he couldn't recall what train of thought had carried him away in the first place.

He ate his dinner - all six starchy slabs of it - with margarine and sugar at one of two pastel-painted picnic tables that made up the hostel's informal dining area. 

He shouldn't have taken the card. But he'd been... what? Curious? Compelled by politeness? He'd taken it, and he had it, and he was very aware of its shape in the pocket of the same pants he'd changed right back into after his shower.

As he was polishing off the last of his food and rising to go to the sink, it occurred to him that he could just toss the card in the trash under the sink and forget about it. So he did.

He went to the bank of tall windows that made up one wall of the common area and settled in the window seat in the corner farthest from the kitchenette. It was a popular spot for reading books and catching end-of-day weed naps, so he was pleased to have caught it empty. The whole place felt empty, for the moment at least. Any guests not yet conked out and resting their feet would come lurching back in a couple hours, which meant he could enjoy the seat for a good long while. Before long, Noah would slide out from behind the guest services desk by the entryway and turn off the biggest lights in the common area, but Ari wouldn't need light for long. From his soaked bag - now disgorged of its contents and hanging upside down on a hanger in the stairwell - he had rescued and kept on his person two things: his phone and its ever-present earbuds, and his pocket notebook. There were enough feral pens and pencils circulating in the hostel that he hadn't felt the need to fetch one of his own.

There was one tucked into the crumby crevice between the window seat's cushion and the wall, even. Ari rolled it down the ladder of his fingers and considered it. It was a plain straight stick of ballpoint pen marked with DUKE'S LAUNDRY in bold orange printing on the barrel. The unseen caretaker of the launderette around the corner from the hostel was kind enough to leave a cup of the pens out for patrons to fill out crosswords or sudoku. Ari had only taken one because he still reflexively collected pocket-appropriate local ephemera.

They'd grown apart, Ari and the notebook. He'd bought it on a stop in his long drive out from his parents' house where he'd spent a long month rotting after the news on Maya's death fell on him that afternoon at school. He was going to do their Big Roadtrip alone, and his parents had let him do it. They'd let him get away with a lot, he'd come to realize. It was around the time he sold the car - which did technically belong to him in every legal sense - that the disguised demands that he return to school or move in with Blake began.

Since then, the slim volume had ballooned with clippings and printed photos pasted into its pages. The first two thirds rippled with the undulating texture of his heavy-handed cursive writing pressed in with dozens of cheap ballpoint pens. Guests had seen him writing in the poor little off-brand Moleskine a few times, told him he ought to be proud of it. He wasn't. 

Nowadays, the notebook was like an old friend he'd outgrown. The kind of guy who's still funny in all the same ways, only he embarrasses you now. 

He didn't open it to the old pages anymore.

That night, he only had the energy to squash one thought out of his brain and onto the page.

‘Seeing things again.’

His entries in the book were always this short. He'd rationalized it as a kind of emotional bookmarking, leaving evocative little lines for his brain to pull on like loose threads when he finally regained the ability to write.

But that was for later. For the moment, he would fall back on routine and stare out the window with his earphones in, listening to other people's songs. And for the first time in a little while, he would feel some guilt over listening to them on a phone he'd let Blake buy for him when he had plenty of money to buy his own phone.

In time, the lights went down and he was left lying in the wedge of lamplight from the street. He'd be on cleaning duty the next morning, starting at ten, which would mean getting up at nine thirty. He had time. He could wait.

He wound up waiting another hour, through the first wave of returning party animals, before he slipped out of the window seat and returned to the kitchenette. He pinched Caerwyn Cain's business card from the trash under the sink - he hadn't even recycled it - with sinking resignation and a curiosity he was reluctant to admit. He whisked it back to the window seat without so much as a glance around to make sure no one watched him slink away with a piece of garbage.

On the back, in neat block handwriting, a series of freshly-familiar names formed two little columns. Ari found himself thinking that the guy's notes were probably very easy to read, something Ari wished he could say for his own handwriting. Then he reminded himself that Caerwyn Cain was creepy and had brought all this noise into his life without anyone's permission, and told himself it looked like the handwriting of a freshman girl whose main personality trait was how organized her class calendar was.

He punched Nadav Sherman's name into the search bar of his phone's browser first. And why?

Because he remembered the name. Didn't even need the list.

Because Nadav was a jumper, like Maya.

It took a few tries and some fine-tuning of his search terms. After adding a range of dates yielded only impersonal obituary listings, he decided to get personal.

'Nadav Sherman blog'

Everybody had a blog - except Ari - and Nadav Sherman was not exempt from this. The blog with Nadav's name in the subheading alongside another, Rebecca Waltch's, was called The Short Stacks. 

He'd been a children's librarian.

A hollow-eyed skim of the About Us page revealed a man a few years Ari's senior, who'd probably been an older teenager when Ari was getting driven to Burger King to make up for flopping his big impromptu exam. Nadav looked like Buddy Holly, if Buddy Holly had managed to reach an age at which his hairline might start to creep backward.

He looked nice, put together, and just on the edge between normal and eccentric. He reminded Ari of the perpetually single, potentially gay eldest counselors at summer camp.

Photos of him in a colorful pirate costume dominated the page. Rebecca was less visible. Rebecca, it was evident, was not the character Nadav was. She wrote the final entry on The Short Stacks, a site that had gone unchanged since.

The Terrible End to a Wonderful Journey

When I agreed to co-head this blog two years ago, I never would have imagined that I'd see it through to the end. Even more, I couldn't have foreseen it would end this way. I didn't see myself writing the internet a farewell to the man who grew from a chatty co-worker and into my closest friend over the course of two years. It's surreal. It's terrible. It's every awful thing words can't say.

But I can't just make this about me. I'm grieving in my own way and I guess this post is a part of that, but I don't want that to overshadow the joy Nadav created here and in the hearts of his friends and everyone he met at the library. I never saw the kids in the summer reading program light up like they did after Nadav took it over. It was like night and day, to borrow a tired phrase. They loved Nadav because he read along with them. They loved Nadav because he spoke on their level, no lower. They loved his energy, the same as we all did. They loved his reviews on the Staff Picks shelf, even the unkind ones, because they embodied a sense of fun and curiosity we as adults are too eager to strangle out of the act of reading.

Nadav was an amazing young man, and I feel that we should remember the good he did in this world more clearly and more mindfully than we remember his departure from it.

With love, for the final time,

Beck Waltch

The comments section was open, which suggested to Ari that Rebecca didn't know how to close it. The single surviving comment suggested she'd abandoned the site and the entry. Otherwise, he couldn't imagine anyone choosing to leave the comment visible. 

It was posted by someone identifying themself only as Guest. Classic inappropriate comment behavior.

All this back and forth about Davey is really starting to grind on my nerves. I'm gonna keep the language as friendly as I can because this will wind up linked somewhere on Short Stacks, I KNOW, and I don't want any misguided kids and grannies with broken hearts to read something vitriolic about what happened to a good guy like Davey. This is a post for me but I'm scaling it back for innocent bystanders. Okay? OK.

People are on here saying Davey was stressed. They're saying he took on too much and never made enough money to justify his education and the whole deal with Becky just aggravated things (how DARE you put blame on her at a time like this?) and that's all just. Bull. It's bull. I know it's bull because I was there, because I watched him get up from the picnic table and start up the fire escape without saying a goddamn thing. I was leaving for the day, he was at the table drafting something or other for the site. He said hi, I said bye. I forget what I wanted to ask him that made me turn around at the sidewalk, but I remember how calmly he took those steps.

Davey wouldn't dungeon somebody with even maybe seeing that, not because of stress or whatever. Davey wasn't stressed, he was some kind of sick. He had to be the kind of sick that scours away the best parts of you from the inside out. One of those nasty silent killers people blame on anything (or anyone) else.

Enough.

Ari zipped the window off his phone screen and stuffed the phone itself in the same crevice from which he'd taken the pen. He sunk down in the window seat and pressed one side of his heated face against the cool window. Eventually, he slept.

I’m amped to see you still reading! Just a reminder that if you’re reading this during launch week (April 6 2026-April 10 2026) this once-daily schedule is launch week only. Starting next week, regular updates will drop every Tuesday and Thursday until this case concludes in a few months. I hope you’ll stick around.