Chapter 17 Above
Above
I’m still shaking when I get home. In the foyer, I sink down and wrap my arms around Barry’s beefy neck, and I don’t let go until he starts to wriggle and whine, licking at my face.
His tongue is big enough to match the rest of him, which makes this a disgusting enough process to leave me laughing and shoving him away.
The laughter teeters on the edge of tears, but there’s a relief to that, too, and I’m finally able to pry myself up off the floor.
I pour myself an unadvisedly large glass of wine and sit at the kitchen table, Meghan’s diary and the two photographs in front of me. I don’t want to intrude, but what choice do I have? I’ve gone this far.
Part of me hopes that what I’ll find is simply evidence of what everyone has assumed: a plan to leave, the execution of it. Another part hopes for something else, and it unsettles me that it exists. How can I be hoping that something else happened to this girl? Why? Just to prove myself right?
Because maybe then you can be the one to save her, I think. It isn’t a kind thought.
I flip open the cover.
IF YOU ARE READING THIS STOP SNOOPING AND GO KILL YOURSELF, it reads in block text.
I nearly snort wine out of my nose. Not exactly the most tactful message, but I’m starting to like this girl—-and like her all the more for the ways she’s drifting from Janie in my mind.
Janie would never have been so blunt. She would have inscribed an ancient curse against spies, maybe, or jotted a passive--aggressive dig at the reader’s moral character, but direct wasn’t her deal.
I tell myself I’m only going to skim through, but I find myself reading more than I don’t.
It’s a typical teen diary, a mix of banal recitation of things done that day with attempts to capture the overwhelming emotion of adolescence.
Meghan’s efforts range from the melodramatic and poetic to the terse and understated.
None of it is exactly Shakespeare, but it’s not meant to be; it oozes angst in a way that makes me feel like I’m sixteen and brokenhearted all over again.
She writes poetry every once in a while—-blank verse, dripping with adjectives.
Black roses and blood and tears and angels with dark wings, that sort of thing.
Theresa’s characterization of the friendship isn’t exactly borne out by Meghan’s writing.
She’s writing to make herself look like the aggrieved party, of course, and it might not be accurate, but balancing the two stories, I get the sense of a girl too wounded to know how to be a friend and a friend too sheltered to spot the pain behind Meghan’s lashing out.
She berates herself for making the joke about Theresa’s mom, castigates herself for being flaky and moody.
She was trying. It just wasn’t good enough.
And the less adequate she felt, the angrier she got.
No, this girl isn’t like Janie at all.
Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe, reading Janie’s diary, I’d see things the same way—-see the pain that shaped her actions, made them understandable.
It doesn’t change the harm, though. It wouldn’t take away the years I spent with her words echoing in my head. She was deft at plucking out my flaws (and telling me of course she didn’t care) or inventing them to put me in my place. Always with a laugh.
Things change midway through the diary. The friendship with Theresa and the others has gotten strained by that point; Meghan writes about being done with them in a way that aches with loneliness.
She doesn’t talk about her father, not directly, but I see his shadow in the words as she lists her flaws and mistakes.
She keeps an inventory of the things she’s done wrong—-bad grades, forgetting to do the laundry, staying out too late.
She lists them bloodlessly in bullet points at the top of every page.
And for everything she does write, I can sense a gap—-a blank space.
There are things, I think, she did not put to paper even in this most private place. Her snippets of poetry and unskillful drawings are suggestive. There’s nothing spelled out. But I’ve worked my job long enough to know the signs. I would bet anything there was abuse. What kind, I can’t be sure.
Then comes the night she saw the witch.
Went to the stupid thing with the stupid jocks tonight because Theresa said we should go, but she ditched me as soon as we got there basically.
It was all just a bunch of assholes drinking and throwing things in a fire, so I went on a walk.
I followed a trail in the woods. It was dark, but I started to be able to see and it felt like the night wanted me there.
I felt like a wild creature. FERAL. Like I belonged to the woods and to the moon.
I don’t know how far I was walking. All of a sudden, I saw her.
The her is crossed out, replaced with Her.
She was like a ghost. A spirit. She moved gracefully among the trees. All I had was my phone flashlight, and I could barely see her. She had pale hair and her hands were dipped in blood.
She was right at the edge of the light and then she was gone. I was so scared I couldn’t even move. I swear it was Jenny
Red--Hands. She’s real.
I’m going to find her again.
After that, every entry is a spiral into an obsession.
It’s not pathological, I don’t think—-there’s a manic edge to her interest, but it feels more like artistic passion and an outlet for her anguish than some kind of delusion or compulsion.
She returns to the woods several times. She mentions the beads, and the mark on the tree.
But she doesn’t mention seeing the woman again—-Jenny, according to Meghan, but I have my doubts.
Then the entries mostly stop. There’s a gap of a week or so before another entry.
I don’t think I’m going to be writing much. The things I’ve found shouldn’t be written down. They’re too important for that.
All that’s left are a few scattered lines of poetry. I trace my fingers over the final lines—-words that have little grace or skill to them but thrum with the melancholy truth of an isolated girl.
I am voiceless, I am faceless.
I am forgotten and unwanted.
The mirror reflects an unfamiliar face.
My friends don’t know who I am.
I don’t know who I am.
I am nothing. I am no one.
My name is Stranger.