the challenge.
We manage to cook spaghetti together without incident, and as we go to sit down at the kitchen table, I notice that Mallory has chosen my usual seat. I move to Michael’s chair without comment.
I look at the clock and imagine Michael and his father might be as far as the Ohio border. Well, in good weather, they would be. I’m grateful for his dad’s four-wheel-drive monstrosity, today.
“Casey keeps a journal, don’t you, Casey?”
It takes me a moment to realize it is Angel speaking. She sounds like her mother, too.
“I’m sorry, what? I was distracted.” I heard her; I’m stalling. My heart throbs in my ears.
Jewel pipes up. “We were talking about journals in school. We write in them every day. I was writing about alligators yesterday. Did you know they’re as old as dinosaurs? But not extinct.” She says it “ess-tink.”
Angel twirls her spaghetti around her fork. She’s only playing at eating, making stage business out of it. She turns to me, her face placid. “Yes, and I was saying that I just learned you write in a journal, too.”
I reach out for my glass of water, my hand just on the edge of shaking, and take a sip. “Yes, I do.”
“Really?” Mallory says, leaning forward over her plate. “I had this shrink once who told me to do that, but I could never find the time, what with Mike always working at the paper, and I had three little kids to deal with at home.”
“It can be therapeutic,” I say, settling my glass down with extra care. I turn to Angel and add, “You can vent things you don’t really mean. You know, get things out when you’re frustrated.”
Angel shifts in her chair to face me. “But you must mean it, at least partly, or you wouldn’t feel it. It’s not like you write lies in your own journal.”
“But sometimes you’re overreacting to a situation, and then you settle down and realize what you were feeling wasn’t real.”
Angel shrugs. “That doesn’t feel like a very honest way to live, if you ask me. I’m up-front about my feelings.”
“You could say that.”
Angel’s eyes narrow at me, and I gulp. She goes on, a little smirk playing at her lips. “Anyway, I’d be afraid a journal would be discovered, and read. Then what?”
It’s drafty in here, but the air feels jungle-hot to me right now.
“Well, you hope people will have enough respect to leave your things alone.”
Mallory breaks in. “One thing you’ll realize, my dear young Casey, is that mothers don’t get any privacy. You give that up along with sleeping through the night. You can’t hide anything from them.”
Angel has not looked away from me yet. “And why would you want to?”
Jewel says, “Does your diary have a lock, Casey? I’ve seen them with locks on them.”
“No, it doesn’t,” I say, standing and taking my plate to the sink. “I’m going to eat later. I’m not feeling very well.”
I walk to the stairs, willing myself not to turn around. I can feel Angel’s eyes on my back the whole way.
I crawl under the covers of the unmade bed. The sheets are cold. I huddle into them, cocoonlike, trying to warm them with my body heat.
Angel says she’s up-front with her feelings, and she’s not kidding. But I can’t believe she doesn’t have secrets, thoughts so deep and scary she can’t post them to the Internet.
Maybe she senses what I know for sure, that exposure makes you weak. Maybe that’s why she won’t admit to having any at all.
I can see the allure in that.
When I was in middle school, I was dumb enough to take my diary to school. It was a real diary back then, with a purple cover that said “My Diary” in silver letters, and a little lock. Those little lockable diaries were the “in” thing at my school back then. Ashley, the popular girl on the student council, had one, so I heard. It had been a Christmas gift, and I remember excitedly waiting until January 1, so I could start writing on the first dated page.
I’d wanted to show my friend Tina. We were all showing off our Christmas gifts, after all. Backstreet Boys CDs and stuff like that.
I took it to fourth hour because lunch happened in the middle of fourth-hour class. I’d stuck it in my binder, and then because I got to class really early, I ran to the bathroom to check the cover-up on a super-ugly nose pimple.
As I