But I was mad.
I had to calm down.
I mean I really had to sort of relax.
I kind of waited a minute.
I waited to calm down.
Of course, I can’t just say that Laura had wanted to bother me with it. I mean, I don’t think it was, like, her plan to deliberately hurt me. I felt pretty hurt and it did piss me off a lot.
But then I sort of thought that if she didn’t want to hurt me—I mean, if that really wasn’t her plan to sort of just shove the thing in my face like my mom always had—maybe she was doing it for some other reason.
Maybe she was trying to tell me something.
Maybe she was like the girl in the book.
Maybe she was trying to tell me that.
But I didn’t listen.
It never even occurred to me then that she wanted to maybe, like, share it with me.
Sharing is something they talk about when you’re little, like six. I think it’s by the time you’re maybe ten that sharing goes out the window.
But she’d meant to share it with me, in a way.
I put the book back. I mean I just sort of stuffed it back into the papers where she’d hidden it.
I must admit, I felt pretty stupid.
I wished I’d talked to her about the book.
I wished I’d read it.
I wished I’d had the nerve.
I really bet I should have read it.
Because I hadn’t shared anything with her.
Well, maybe a little.
Maybe something.
But I felt I really didn’t deserve to look at the book anymore.
She could keep it.
It was hers.
I thought she’d probably earned it.
I was lying on my back again by now, in the dark. Just a little sunlight from the windows fell in bars across the floor. I was breathing better, sort of relaxed.
The diary was on the floor next to me. I looked at it.
I rolled over to the closest bureau and opened the bottom drawer. I grabbed all her lacy underwear. It felt scratchy in my hands. It was the only place I hadn’t looked, the only things I hadn’t touched.
Now I touched them.
I lifted them out and there was the key.
I crawled back across the floor, opened the diary, and read it straight through.
It wasn’t very long. I mean, just a few hundred pages, and she’d used up less than half, making entries daily if she’d felt something was important or exciting but usually just weekly, and sometimes less than that.
She’d started it when she was a kid, around ten. That was the first part of it, what I’d call the happy part, the entries printed in big handwriting and dated in the upper corner of the page, like she was writing something for school. I admit I skipped a lot of that, because it was all pretty much the same: happy times with her mom and stuff about gymnastics competitions, with lots of exclamation points after saying how excited she was to be winning a prize or taking a trip somewhere with her parents and Jack.
And then it got darker, I mean after she turned twelve, and there were many fewer entries, less excitement, and fewer exclamation points, too.
It broke off completely when she was turning thirteen but started again when she was fifteen, the handwriting now small and neat, etched across the pages, sort of frantic, with a different kind of excitement, and no exclamation points at all.
But it wasn’t just the handwriting that had changed.
It took me an hour to read it, and when I was done, I went back to my favorite occupation of staring at the ceiling.
I never was a kid pressured by his parents to do anything.
I mean be anything.
But Laura was.
I don’t really understand parents who do that. I mean, I understand wanting your kid to be somebody important and encouraging them to be the best and all that. I mean, in one way I can see how it would be great. There’d be lots of pressure, sure, but you’d get to learn something really well, and that would make it sort of worth it, as long as your parents knew when to let up.
As long as they knew your breaking point.
Laura’s life had been all about gymnastics, but she never told me. It was over by the time I met her. All I ever saw her do was a couple flips in the park.
I know I shouldn’t tell you this; I know how wrong it is to just sneak into somebody’s room and look through all their things and read their diary and everything and completely sort of expose them, but you have to know. It’s important that you know because then you’ll maybe understand.
I guess the one thing I felt bad about was that there was very little about me. There was almost nothing about me—I mean at first—and I admit I tried to find what she’d said about me, because I very much wanted to know what she felt and whether I’d really ever meant anything to her at all.
But she said almost nothing.
I met a boy last night. He’s very cute. I like him. He’s different.
Okay, that was me. And except for a few entries about places we went together, that was about it.
It hurt my ego. I admit it. I loved her so much and she thought so little about me. It really hurt. All the early entries about me were so simple: I went to the movies with him. I went to the park with him. Last night Jack drove us to the rink; he can’t skate worth a damn.
Of course, she could barely even say that because of everything else she said, about her mother, about her father, about gymnastics, and how she felt about herself.
At first even she didn’t know how she felt about herself.
It came slowly.
My life is perfect! she had written. She was ten.
