Now he looks at me like he knows me.
And I get this feeling. It’s like my head suddenly gets lighter, fills up with air. I want to talk. Jayson opens his mouth. Then he closes it. Then he opens it again.
“Hi,” he says.
It’s the saddest hi I’ve ever heard.
We hesitate, but it only lasts a moment.
Then we keep walking, away from each other.
13
It’s the weekend again, and even though I know I should be building something with the wood that’s been waiting in the backyard all week, all I want to do is lie on my bed and listen to music. I keep getting these songs in my head that I want to put on, but I have to get up to change tracks because I can’t find the remote to my stereo. After I’ve done this about twenty times, I finally decide to just look for it. It isn’t buried under the covers. It isn’t under all the clothes piled on top of my chest of drawers, or sitting on top of my CDs or my desk. I get down on the carpet to look under my bed. I stick my arm under and feel around, find a couple mismatched socks, a progress report from school that I hid from my parents last year, and something I don’t recognize—hard and flat and dusty. I pull it out, thinking maybe it’s a yearbook from elementary school, and then I see it and my heart stops. Worn pages, bird painted on the blue cover in Wite-Out.
Ingrid’s journal.
For some reason, I feel afraid. It’s like I’m split down the middle and one half of me wants to open it more than I’ve ever wanted to do anything. The other half is so scared. I can’t stop shaking.
Did it get kicked under the bed one night by accident?
Did she hide it?
She carried it with her everywhere. I know this sounds stupid, but I felt kind of jealous of it. Whenever I had to figure something out or vent, I would just call her up, so I couldn’t understand why she needed to have this book that was so private. But here it is, in my hands, and I’m holding it like it’s some alive thing.
I stare at it in my hands forever, just feeling its weight, looking at the place where one Wite-Out wing is starting to flake off. Then, once my hands are steadied, I open to the first page. It’s a drawing of her face—yellow hair; blue eyes; small, crooked smile. She’s looking straight ahead. Birds fly across the background. She drew them blurry, to show movement, and across the top she wrote, Me on a Sunday Morning.
I turn the page.
As I read, I can hear Ingrid’s voice, hushed and fast, like she’s telling me secrets.
I shut the book.
My room is so quiet and empty it hurts.
I know I should want to keep reading but I can’t. It’s too much. I put her journal in my chest of drawers, not in the top drawer where everyone puts things they want to hide, but buried in clothes all the way at the back of a drawer near the bottom. But after a few minutes I move it. That place doesn’t seem right. So I put it on a shelf in the walk-in closet I painted purple a couple summers ago. I slide a shoe box full of photo negatives in front of it.
I stand in the doorway of my closet and look in at the shelf. I almost expect to see the shoe box rising and falling with the journal’s breath. But it’s just a journal. It isn’t alive. Something is wrong with me.
An hour later I reach up and touch it to make sure it’s still there.
After lunch I move it again. This time, I put it back under my bed, because that’s where it’s been for the past three months. I try to do homework. I try to watch TV. But all I can think about is Ingrid’s journal, in my room, and if it’s still there, and what if someone finds it, and why I don’t want to read it, and how I know I need to.
The next morning, already dressed, shoes tied, hair pulled back in my perpetual ponytail, I stand in front of the closet again. I want to walk out the door but I can’t. I don’t mean I can’t like I don’t want to. I mean, I can’t, like something is physically making it impossible for me to leave my room without it. So I crouch over my backpack and find an inside zipper pocket. The pocket’s pretty small, so I don’t know if it will work, but I take Ingrid’s journal from the shelf and try to fit it in, and it turns out to be perfect. It rests there, hidden.
I close my backpack and heave it over one shoulder, then the other. The journal makes it so much heavier, but the weight feels good.
14
On Mr. Robertson’s stereo, John Lennon and Paul McCartney are singing the word love over and over. He lowers the volume to let the song fade out, pushes the sleeves of his worn-in beige sweater up to his elbows.
“When I was a kid, my parents used to play ‘All You Need Is Love’ on our record player almost every night,” he says, perched on his desk, looking out at us. “At the time I thought it was just something to dance around to. I memorized the lyrics before I even considered what they meant. It was just fun to sing along.” He reaches for a stack of papers next to him, and walks in between the rows of desks, handing the papers out to us. “But if you look here at the lyrics, you’ll see that it has many elements of a poem.”
He sets my copy on my table and I look at his wedding band and the little hairs below his knuckles. I wonder what his wife is like, and if they dance around their house at night listening to the Beat les or other old bands. I try to imagine their house, how they have it decorated, and I think they probably have lots of plants, and real paintings on the wall painted by people they’re friends with.
“Caitlin.” Mr. Robertson smiles at me, interrupts my thoughts. “Show us one poetic element in this song.”