32. Julie #2
But nothing feels right, it never has.
I should want to leave this crazy town and my crazy parents. I should care about what car I’m gonna get when I turn sixteen. At the very least I should be looking at girls.
But I’m not. Well…I don’t look at those girls.
They all seem so superficial and…well, boring! They all dress the same, look the same and think the same.
Ugh…that’s how it should be, no? That’s how the normal world works but I don’t understand it and it makes me angry. But WHY it makes me angry, I don’t understand either.
The only time I don’t feel like my head is about to explode is when Julie is around. Any time she’s there, everything feels easy and right. I don’t feel this insane need to be someone I still haven’t figured out.
She laughs at my dumb jokes and always smiles when I’m around.
I’m not stupid, I know she’s not smiling because of me, but her smile…it helps.
But Cal has been giving me a weird look anytime I asked if his little sister could come play with us, so I haven’t asked lately and that’s yet another reason for my anger and confusion.
You’d think something would change this year? But no! Same old bullshit.
Why can I be like Luke or Callum? Why can’t I be normal?
I’m off to sleep.
Let’s see if I manage to not get into a fight again tomorrow.
G.O.
***
Not Dear Diary,
Before you go blaming me for being a dumbass…I got into a fight for a good reason today.
I mean it!
That little idiot, Owen, was calling Julie names again and I told him what’d happen if he did. I warned him, didn’t I? Secretly, I hoped he would slip in front of me because my knuckles were itching to smash into his stupid face, and he finally did.
I thought Julie would be upset when I broke Owen’s nose. Not because she cares for him—I checked, she doesn’t like him—but because Birdy is the sweetest girl alive. I swear, she’s too good for this world.
I’ve never even seen her cry or be upset over something and if anyone should be angry, that’s her, but she’s not. Never is. She just takes all the names and insults everyone throws at her and waves them off, smiling.
I asked her once why she didn’t fight back, and she told me she was. She was fighting with kindness.
Poor Julie, she had no idea those idiots didn’t understand her methods.
Thankfully, mine worked much better.
I wasn’t even mad when Mom lit up all her candles and sat me in the living room to decompress. It was worth it. And Julie wasn’t mad at me.
Nope, when Owen fled like a little rat he is, clutching his nose, she jumped up, smiling and something funny happened in the bottom of my stomach. A flipping sensation. You know, like the ones you get when the roller coaster falls down.
What the heck was it?
I have no idea why I’m still asking you questions. I’ll have to see if Cal and Luke if they felt that before, if it was normal.
G.O.
Griffin, my poor, confused Griffin. He tried to fit in but the mold he was using didn’t fit his shape.
I remember those days. I remember them so vividly. He did get into fights almost daily. He was always angry…but not around me. I used to dream it was because we were special. Because I was special.
Turns out…I was.
All of the old, crusty memories I managed to distort are coming back to me in a new light. The sighs he’d let out when Cal would tell me I couldn’t play with them. Those weren’t from exasperation as I thought.
Griffin was sad. He was sad I wasn’t coming with them.
Any time the guys would sleep over our house, Griffin was the first to wake up and run to the kitchen for breakfast before the other two were awake. He told them it was to make sure he beat them. But…but I always woke up early. I always had breakfast before Cal managed to wake up.
And Griffin was there, talking to me. Smiling. Oh, sweet daisies, he was smiling.
He was always there, and despite me being madly in love with him, I didn’t catch onto any of this.
Not Dear Diary,
Update! According to Luke and Cal, your stomach does that weird fluttery thing when you kiss someone.
I got the answer, but it wasn’t helpful in the slightest because I didn’t kiss Julie!
Ha, I wish!
But I didn’t and then I had to lie to the guys and tell them I kissed Kimmy because they wouldn’t leave me alone. They believed me right away too because Kimmy’s been passing me notes in class since the start of the year, asking if I wanted to be her boyfriend.
Cal and Luke started whistling and doing all that dumb shit when I lied. They were so excited for me, it felt good! It felt like I did something right for once, even if it was a lie.
Maybe I’ll have to keep it up? Pretend I am dating Kimmy?
She’s pretty. But I don’t get the funny stomach feeling from her and I’m starting to think you’re supposed to. Like, when I like someone, I should feel those flip-flopping things. So, no, I don’t want to kiss Kimmy or be her boyfriend.
But once again, nothing feels normal.
G.O.
Oh God, the conversation I overheard… The one that broke something inside me when I heard my Griffin had kissed someone else.
It was a lie.
The entries go on and on. He didn’t write in them every day, sometimes only once a week or just a few times a month but the contents are mostly the same.
He struggled with belonging from day one. He was trying so hard to be normal when normal is the worst word I’ve ever known.
What is normal?
Who is normal? Who’s the one setting these standards.
My heart breaks with each new entry. Tears slowly streaming down my face and when I let out a small sniffle, Griffin jerks up.
“What’s wrong? Why are you crying, Birdy?”
“Because this is sad. Because I want to strangle my brother and Luke for not seeing what you were going through. Because I don’t understand how I didn’t dig deeper.”
“Hey,” he says softly, bringing his finger to my cheek as he catches the stray tear. “I brought this onto myself. There’s no one else to blame. No one else could’ve known what was going on inside my head. I was good at pretending. At hiding. At fighting it all off.”
“Did you ever figure it out?”
“What?”
“What you were so angry at?”
“I did. But not until years later. Decades even.”
“Oh?”
“Mm-hmm. I’m sure you already solved that puzzle, but it took me coming back home a few months ago to see it.
Accept it.” My breath catches. “I wish I had the guts to figure it out sooner. Keep reading, little J,” he adds quickly, ending that conversation, and I go back, picking up the next journal.
Not all entries are sad or angry or about me.
He shares so many of the stupid, silly things the three of them did back then.
Secrets none of us knew, like that it was Luke who broke my mom’s vase.
Or Cal who chopped her flowers off because he needed them to “seal the deal” with Lexi during freshman year of high school.
But then there are entries about me. So, so many entries. And the older he got, the more extensive they get.
Griffin confides in his “Not Dear Diary” about every time he caught a glimpse of me. He complains how he wouldn’t get to see me enough when he moved on to high school, and I was still in middle school.
He even wrote about all the plants I was growing at the time. Listing each one by its name and how much it’s grown.
“I cannot believe this!”
“What?”
“You paid attention to my garden!” I say in part shock, part awe, but Griff just shrugs nonchalantly. Like it isn’t a big deal.
“I paid attention to anything you liked or didn’t. I just paid attention to you.”
This man…
This boy…
And then there’s this entry…
Not Dear Diary,
I got my first real boner.
Can you believe it? Not one from those magazines Cal brought a year ago, it felt nothing like that. No, this was a for real one. Two, actually.
We went to the beach today to celebrate the last day of summer break before school starts again. Everyone was there. But I didn’t care about everyone, not when Julie came out wearing that bikini!!!
It was tiny, at least the top was, because the small knit red triangles couldn’t contain her tits that came out of nowhere, recently.
Hey…I wasn’t complaining.
Her crazy, wild, red hair was pulled up into a messy bun on top, leaving her neck open and the skirt she was wearing wasn’t any better.
It was so short and I could see her ass hanging out. Maybe it wasn’t a skirt, maybe it was a part of her swimming suit, but I didn’t care. My dick didn’t care.
It was all too much.
Oh, fuck, I’m getting hard right now just thinking about it all again.
I’ve never seen anything hotter! Not in any of those magazines, or on other girls and my dick shot up so fast, I barely had time to slap a towel over him before Cal waved at her.
And then it was game over because on top of having all that access to her skin, she also smiled when she sat down next to us on the blanket.
God, she smelled so fucking good. Like cherries. Birdy always smelled like cherries and vanilla ice cream. She was so close, there wasn’t a chance in the world I could’ve held it back.
I came. Right. Freaking. There.
I must’ve looked like an idiot coughing so hard but that was all I could do to hide what just happened.
And then not five minutes later, Juile leaned in, grabbing a strawberry from the container Cal packed and bit into it right in front of my eyes. Some of the juice slipped past her lips, trailing down the valley of her tits andddddd I was hard again.
So painfully hard, I had to go to the bathroom and jerk off.
Don't ask me what else was happening at the beach today. I have no clue because I only watched her.
Thank God, Callum didn’t notice anything.
He’s been getting more and more protective over his sister, and I can’t blame him. Not when half the school—girls—hate her because they are so jealous. And the other half—boys—are salivating over her.
Nope, I can’t blame him at all.
In fact, I might be breaking some noses in the near future.
G.O.
“Oh my God,” I whisper-shout, and Griff jerks up again.