Diary of Olly McLeod The Mind of an Olive!
I have a secret. Okay, so I have a few, and trust me, they are knock-your-socks-off HUGE.
I’m almost nine years old, and that’s still too young to have serious secrets, Thomas says.
He told me so one night while I was dreaming that we were sitting on East River Beach, getting in the last days of warm sunshine.
That’s how I talk to Thomas, now, in the Days After, I call them.
The Days After Thomas, and the Before Times With Thomas.
I don’t know if he was right, though, that I shouldn’t keep these secrets.
If only Mommy and Dad hadn’t gone away in the accident, too.
This life is too confusing, feeling that I’m living on the edge of a sea of loneliness, and this beach is the last safe place I have.
But despite being alone, or at least alone from hugs and smiles and things that made sense, I am alive in the care of yet another foster family, and I am facing new things that I have to live with going forward. I might as well talk about them.
Two secrets are problems anyone would hide, even big kids.
That’s why I bought this diary at the dollar store with my allowance and decided that it was a good compromise.
That’s my current favorite word, compromise.
Compromis in French, and tahyeob, I think, in Korean.
Something about the last translation looks wrong, but I’ll look it up in my big Korean dictionary later.
Did you know that on the internet there are whole websites that can try to teach you other languages?
Oh, this isn’t what I wanted to write about.
Secrets, first. Languages, later. My foster parents, the Parks, who I will meet after going through two more homes and be fourteen, will really want me to perfect my French and learn Korean, as I already play a few instruments.
They will be thrilled when they get me, and I greet them in their native language, and will introduce me to their friends as “our gifted daughter.” Anyway, yes, the secrets!
First, when I get older, I’m not going to be named after a smelly little fruit that I have to pick off my pizza.
People at this school are already starting to call me Olly, which is way better than Olive, but one day I’m going to be called “Oliver.” I love that name, and when I think of people calling me it, it just makes me happy inside.
Like that’s my true name, and it’s more than okay that it’s a boy’s name, too.
Isn’t it silly how things, even names, are divided up between being for girls or boys?
We are all people, right? I still don’t really understand why little Frank Moland got beat up for wearing a tutu for his audition for the school play and then keeping it on for the afternoon.
Or Katie Bass, who wants to be a pilot and never have kids, just fly around the world over and over, being told that she can’t do that by our teacher back in second grade.
I don’t fully know why Thomas said to wait on Oliver until I was grown-up and free.
He said it in such a way that I knew he was right that something bad would happen if I didn’t listen.
Thomas talked about freedom a lot sometimes, on days—or nights?
—when we would be at the beach, and I would lie down all stretched out with my toes buried in the sand and him sitting up, just talking about nothing and everything.
I think he needed this beach as much as I did, so I did nothing to upset the apple cart, as my nanny would’ve said.
I never try to walk the beach, or toss stones, or hunt for sand dollars or cool bits of driftwood.
I always stayed by Thomas’s side, in case he would just go poof and be gone if I wandered too far.
Second, unless every comic book I’d ever read has lied to me, I HAVE SUPERPOWERS.
Huh. Maybe I should have said that one first. What would J.
Jonah Jameson say? Oh, right! I was “burying the lead.” Superpowers should go first. Maybe I’ll rewrite this in like, a list? And I’ll put my superpowers at the top.
Well, I have something, anyway, and I was very sure that all the boxes were ticked for my…
whatever…to be considered superpowers. I don’t remember much from my life before I got jostled into this foster home.
But some memories will peek through at night, oozing around like syrup in my mind, and if I’m able, if I focus, the memory will appear. At least, that’s how it happens now.
I remember when I was five or so, reading under my special tree in the backyard.
I saw a man in icky hunter orange, carrying a crossbow, walk quickly out of the woods and right at me.
There was a voice that bellowed, “RUN!” So I dropped my book, and I swear I ran to the house as quick as the winds in our last hurricane.
And he chased me! But I’m young and wiry, said my nanny, and I outran him, and locked the front door behind me when I made it inside.
Mommy clucked over me but dismissed the voice by saying that it was my own mind, which knew that strangers in the woods carrying a weapon was something naturally to be afraid of and run from.
Dad called the police to report a trespasser, the crossbow, and a possible kidnapper.
I didn't mention the voice I’d heard to the nice lady police officer who came by to gently remind us that it was crossbow deer season, and that I should stay out of the woods until all the hunting seasons had closed in our county.
I didn't want to sound like a fool, and that's what Mommy had called the whole voice thing: foolishness.
But what I knew was that what I heard was real, and it wasn't just any old voice. It was Thomas, who was at a friend’s place in the village for a rare weekend away.
Anyone might agree that I was foolish, claiming to hear his voice in the woods behind our house while at the same time he was away, but he was my brother, and I knew his voice when I heard it, as surely as I know that I had run from something Very Bad.
And I knew something else, something I could never tell anyone.
The man? Once I’d calmed down, I realized that I don't think that he was there at all. Oh, sure, I’d seen him and smelled him—he smelled like armpit.
But if anyone else was in the woods that day, say, watching down like bird in a tree?
Would they have seen the man in orange? That special knowing inside me knew that the answer was No.
Only I could see him, and he had been there to find me, to dig around in my mind or maybe just frighten me, I don’t know.
Something the comics never really told me, or perhaps I didn’t like to listen, was that having superpowers could be scary.
Another secret is that I hoped that the man who took my family away for real and banged up my head by driving drunk would die.
I hoped he would die and not have anyone who he could visit because I was starting to think that not everyone got to have regular visitors.
I never visited with my parents, and they were as dead as Thomas.
Do you want to know another secret? I told Mommy that we shouldn’t go out that night, because the roads were slipperier than they looked, and people don’t always behave right on holidays.
As usual, she didn’t listen to me. But this time, it felt a little different, like she wanted to listen, but couldn’t.
When I think about visitors, my head aches, from my left temple to over my right eye.
It’s like my body is telling me not to go there, not to think about it too much, or I will pay a price.
I’m sure the Reverend Doctor Hulst would not like me wishing anyone would die.
We never went to Church, but he comes to visit me anyway.
You don’t have to look hard to see that he was a special man, and I think he is, as Anne Shirley would say, a kindred spirit.
Sorry for so long between entries. I suppose it doesn’t matter now, anyway.
I’ve had a headache every day since I fell off the climbing rope in gym and smacked my head on the polished wooden floor, and my superpowers?
I think they are going, going…gone? Maybe?
More memories, too, other than the few entries I wrote in here.
Oh! I might as well write it down before I forget.
Before the Christmas accident I’d heard my parents argue about money, about The Organization, an older teenage boy named Thomas—my brother, right?
—but that’s it. A few nights ago, the same night I fell in the gym, I dreamed of a beach.
The sea was all whitecaps, the sky was smoky grey, and there was no sign of the boy, no matter how long and loud I called for him, despite my thoughts swearing that he belonged on this beach!
For just a minute, I wondered what it would be like to walk out into that water as far as I could, and then start swimming, farther and farther away from shore, the whitecaps breaking over my head.
Would anyone rescue me? Could I drown for real in this place, which in a single night had become one of nightmares?
Why did I remember Thomas so clearly compared to everyone else, and why did all my memories seem to only visit me in dreams?
So many questions, zip on answers. I could not take this to the foster family.
They’d take me to a doctor, and what Thomas used to say popped up: they’d put me in another house or finally tuck me away in a mental health unit, lickety split, if they ever had a clue of what I was.
That I was something closer to reading their minds and seeing their memories, rather than seeing my own.
They were a good, kind family. It wasn’t their fault that they had little money, and food was sometimes scarce.
Their oldest son had a “problem,” that’s all I knew, and I remember being told by Thomas to never dig around inside someone’s head unless they give permission.
Well, like heck I would ask if I could do that.
I saw Mother Park, young and ducking out of the rain into a crowded but clean basement apartment in Seoul.
Father Park saw her while he was walking to work one day to just one of a zillion tall buildings, and she was nervous, because she had a secret, too.
She wanted to get rid of the baby in her tummy because she was barely able to feed herself.
The thought of needing to find the money to keep an infant terrified her.
She was really sick, though, and Father Park was a doctor, who fate or luck or the goddess made him her doctor.
(the foster family believes in God, but I think she’s a woman, and much more approachable).
He felt sympathy with her and instead of calling the cops, he stopped the pregnancy using medication, which was super illegal, but it healed her, and eventually, they fell in love.
She couldn’t have kids anymore, so once they moved from Seoul and got their residency in Canada, they decided to try being foster parents, and that’s where I would come in.
Their gifted daughter. My new mother and father.
I just had to be patient and wait for them.
I wonder what my mommy and dad’s love story was like. I did have a Mommy and Dad once, didn’t I?