Hiding

by Henry Turner

  I wished I’d talked to her about the book.

  I wished I’d read it.

  I wished I’d had the nerve.

  I really bet I should have read it.

  Because I hadn’t shared anything with her.

  Well, maybe a little.

  Maybe something.

  But I felt I really didn’t deserve to look at the book anymore.

  She could keep it.

  It was hers.

  I thought she’d probably earned it.

  I was lying on my back again by now, in the dark. Just a little sunlight from the windows fell in bars across the floor. I was breathing better, sort of relaxed.

  The diary was on the floor next to me. I looked at it.

  I rolled over to the closest bureau and opened the bottom drawer. I grabbed all her lacy underwear. It felt scratchy in my hands. It was the only place I hadn’t looked, the only things I hadn’t touched.

  Now I touched them.

  I lifted them out and there was the key.

  I crawled back across the floor, opened the diary, and read it straight through.

  It wasn’t very long. I mean, just a few hundred pages, and she’d used up less than half, making entries daily if she’d felt something was important or exciting but usually just weekly, and sometimes less than that.

  She’d started it when she was a kid, around ten. That was the first part of it, what I’d call the happy part, the entries printed in big handwriting and dated in the upper corner of the page, like she was writing something for school. I admit I skipped a lot of that, because it was all pretty much the same: happy times with her mom and stuff about gymnastics competitions, with lots of exclamation points after saying how excited she was to be winning a prize or taking a trip somewhere with her parents and Jack.

  And then it got darker, I mean after she turned twelve, and there were many fewer entries, less excitement, and fewer exclamation points, too.

  It broke off completely when she was turning thirteen but started again when she was fifteen, the handwriting now small and neat, etched across the pages, sort of frantic, with a different kind of excitement, and no exclamation points at all.

  But it wasn’t just the handwriting that had changed.

  It took me an hour to read it, and when I was done, I went back to my favorite occupation of staring at the ceiling.

  I never was a kid pressured by his parents to do anything.

  I mean be anything.

  But Laura was.

  I don’t really understand parents who do that. I mean, I understand wanting your kid to be somebody important and encouraging them to be the best and all that. I mean, in one way I can see how it would be great. There’d be lots of pressure, sure, but you’d get to learn something really well, and that would make it sort of worth it, as long as your parents knew when to let up.

  As long as they knew your breaking point.

  Laura’s life had been all about gymnastics, but she never told me. It was over by the time I met her. All I ever saw her do was a couple flips in the park.

  I know I shouldn’t tell you this; I know how wrong it is to just sneak into somebody’s room and look through all their things and read their diary and everything and completely sort of expose them, but you have to know. It’s important that you know because then you’ll maybe understand.

  I guess the one thing I felt bad about was that there was very little about me. There was almost nothing about me—I mean at first—and I admit I tried to find what she’d said about me, because I very much wanted to know what she felt and whether I’d really ever meant anything to her at all.

  But she said almost nothing.

  I met a boy last night. He’s very cute. I like him. He’s different.

  Okay, that was me. And except for a few entries about places we went together, that was about it.

  It hurt my ego. I admit it. I loved her so much and she thought so little about me. It really hurt. All the early entries about me were so simple: I went to the movies with him. I went to the park with him. Last night Jack drove us to the rink; he can’t skate worth a damn.

  Of course, she could barely even say that because of everything else she said, about her mother, about her father, about gymnastics, and how she felt about herself.

  At first even she didn’t know how she felt about herself.

  It came slowly.

  My life is perfect! she had written. She was ten. Mommy made me promise her, I will be her perfect girl! She said that when she was a girl, they didn’t have what we have. She couldn’t follow her dream—her parents took it away! She said that she and Daddy give me everything. Mommy’s dream was to be in the Olympics! I can be in the Olympics if I work hard—Mommy said so. It’s my dream too!

  Laura trained all the time, during the school year, at summer camps, constantly. I did not know a human being could work so hard, and she was just a kid. She practically lived at her gym. She skipped food for days at a time to meet weight requirements. She did things that would have driven me nuts.

  I will be everything Mommy wants me to be!

  In one way I guess she did love it. In a way she was proud. I saw that in the park when she’d do the flips. She loved knowing how to do something so well.

  And there were, like, benefits.

  She’d never told me about her other friends. I think I mentioned that. Well, maybe it was because she didn’t have so many anymore.

  But she had had them. Plenty of them.

  At her gym she was part of this elite little crowd, only the best girls—only the winners—and as long as she was a winner, everything was cool.

  At school, too.

  I mean, it’s not hard to imagine how it was, because she was, of course, really pretty and rich, but even more than that, she did great in school because she wanted to be the best in everything. Jack was the best in everything. Even though they had lots of dough, he wound up getting a whole scholarship. And her dad’s example was, like, sort of incredible. Super achievers, all.

  She’d had loads of friends; at school she was like a jewel, a little athletic straight-As princess who—as long as she kept it up—could do no wrong.

  I’ve never had friends like that. When I read about how her life had been, I couldn’t understand why she’d ever wanted to know me at all. Thinking she could have ever loved me seemed crazy. Because I don’t mean she had fringe friends like I did, hanging around with Carol in an alley somewhere or crashing some rich kid’s party, like we sort of had with Biff Roberts’s. I mean friends who you go on ski trips with—and I’ve never even been skiing—or camping in upstate New York, and even trips to Europe and stuff. I mean she walked with an elite crowd. She’d been popular. And she knew all the rules: the right girls to know, the right boys to date. Everything.

  As long as she kept it up.

  I couldn’t relate to any of that. To me, being popular would be like trying to solve the most complex math problem imaginable, all the time. But she could manage it pretty well.

  Still, her mom was never satisfied. Mommy says I can be the best and I will be! I’ll try harder. She will see how hard I train! I’ll do anything to get better! I will be in the Olympics!

  Laura went to competitions, traveling all over the country with her team. Her coach and her mom designed a tough routine to display flawless maneuvers, and she practiced it over and over. At her best, she ranked in the top one hundred in the nation.

  But it didn’t seem to matter. Her mom said it only proved she wasn’t number one.

  I can’t wait to tell Dad how I did at the finals when he gets back from Europe!

  He came back with a necklace, but he didn’t give it to her. She had only come in third.

  For gifts, she had to be first.

  That was the deal. And she wanted to be first. She told herself it was all she wanted. Mommy and Daddy say gold is the only color—the only color!

  When she was fourteen she tore a thigh ligament doing a split. She spent a
month in bed. She passed her time fooling with a painting set she’d gotten from Jack, painting scenes she remembered from drives and trips she’d taken—stuff that had absolutely nothing to do with gymnastics. She was amazed by how much she enjoyed painting, and just how free she felt exploring her imagination.

  And for the first time, she was pretty upset with her mother.

  She doesn’t care that I hurt myself! She says it’s my fault. She won’t believe I’m not good enough. But I’m not good enough. Coach says I have limits. I can’t get back to where I was. I’m not sure I even want to.

  She wrote about talent and instinct and reflexes and being a natural and stuff she thought her mother couldn’t understand.

  I couldn’t understand.

  I never faced such stuff.

  I had never had to.

  She found reasons to avoid the gym, and she felt her father and Jack avoided her. She began to hate living in her house—a house she no longer thought she deserved.

  I thought back to last night, when I had stood outside that basement window; I’d imagined living in her house would mean you could breathe, that you’d actually be on display in such a house and wouldn’t ever need to hide, because your problems would be exciting. But I hadn’t understood that being on display meant facing someone else’s expectations, and Laura felt herself falling short every day.

  Mother says Jack has done so well—why can’t I? She yells all the time. “What—are you so special? Does failure make you special? You selfish monster! What gives you the right to turn your back on everything we’ve given you?”

  I understood why she liked the book so much. She must have felt it was her autobiography.

  But it didn’t give her any answers. At least no good ones.

  The box was her life. The lid was shut tight.

  She felt inescapably trapped.

  Mother says I must try out for the trials; she’ll hate me if I don’t. I can’t. Coach says I don’t have the balance. I’m not a natural. I want to do other things. . . . Nothing helps. I’m going to fail.

  She quit.

  She tried talking to her dad. But he was busy. That hurt even more than her mom’s being mean. He’s never had time for me; he just gives me things. “Do what your mother says” is all he tells me.

  When Jack was back during winter break he laughed in her face. “What are you gonna do now, Laurs? Go to loser school?”

  After she stopped doing gymnastics, her teammates didn’t want to know her anymore. They thought she was crazy. Mostly they ignored her, except for some nasty comments on social media. Those hurt too. Laura ripped up her photos. They were never my friends.

  Her life was hell.

  A hell of expectations and obligations she refused to keep up with anymore. And nothing yet to fill the gap.

  I read what she did and how she walked away from her old life, but with no idea of how to go on.

  She started hating herself.

  And then she met me.

  Oh, boy.

  I guess she was intrigued that I could be nothing and still walk around. I had no parents driving me on, no heavy friends to keep up with.

  Maybe that’s why we went out, I thought.

  I guess that was my answer I’d wanted so badly.

  I can’t say I felt very proud of it.

  I was the loser she could learn from.

  Learn how to stand people thinking she’s nothing.

  Maybe that’s what she saw in me that was more important than whether my family was rich or whether I’d been to the Bahamas. Maybe it helped her a little bit. Maybe that’s what she really liked about me and tried to talk to me about—even though I refused to talk—by bringing up the book and my house and all that crap, that I could somehow stand being a kid from the fifty-cent side and not worry about being anything else. Maybe she even envied it.

  I did worry, but she never saw it. I wouldn’t let her.

  I couldn’t really gather my thoughts at first. I just sat there looking around her bedroom.

  I’d only seen one other girl’s room before in my whole life.

  Suzie Perkins’s.

  Boy, was her room different.

  It had Suzie Perkins written all over it. I mean, it was like the Suzie Perkins explosion. I don’t think she even understood the concept of putting anything away.

  But Laura was none of that. Here, it was like everything personal had been forbidden, until whatever remained of herself had to be hidden under her bed in a box.

  I understood now why I’d thought so much about Suzie when I was in the basement. I mean, for all her problems and lack of money and pressure from her mom and all that stuff, Suzie was happy. She felt good most of the time, and even felt good about her mom, who had rules and everything, but never just dumped on her about not being perfect. Suzie never had to hide from her real self like Laura did, so she could live up to expectations. Sure, Suzie had been offended when Carol had done the squeezie thing, and maybe she didn’t know what to make of me when I didn’t kiss her, but the thing is that she could get over all that and move on to what came next. She was malleable. You know, adaptable. Healthy.

  I knew now why I hadn’t kissed Suzie. I couldn’t have stayed hidden with her. With Suzie I’d have felt everybody looking at me and knowing I was there, because that’s what Suzie was all about. She liked being seen. I don’t think she knew what hiding even was. Suzie was happy for the most part.

  Laura wasn’t.

  I knew that now.

  Her suffering was something I’d been totally blind to, because when you get right down to it, I’d only seen myself when I was with her, and only cared about how I felt and whether she loved me and wanted to go all the way, which I’m sorry to say I often did pressure her pretty hard to do sometimes. Well, actually, I pressured her almost every time we were alone, and especially those times when she wore something short that showed her bellybutton, because that would almost drive me crazy, because I’m not kidding when I say she had the sexiest bellybutton in the world.

  But good for her that she never did, I mean go all the way, because I knew now—well, I think I’d always known, but now I actually accepted it—that I didn’t deserve her.

  I’d never even tried to find out who she really was.

  Not that she gave me much of a chance. She tried to, but she didn’t really know how.

  So I couldn’t blame myself too much.

  I mean, I was a mess.

  So was she, even though I didn’t notice at the time.

  What do you get when you add one mess to another mess?

  A bigger mess—that’s simple addition.

  I couldn’t help her.

  Not then.

  She’d hidden from herself.

  Until she was totally lost.

  That’s the most dangerous kind of hiding. Everybody knows you, but you’re not really there, even for yourself.

  I’d hidden from the world all my life.

  But never from myself.

  And even the weird ways she’d treated me, sort of not letting me be around her parents too much, like she thought I was an embarrassment—maybe she was embarrassed about what I might see. She wouldn’t let me in the house and made me wait outside for twenty minutes because she was ashamed I’d see how she was treated, not because I wasn’t good enough.

  She always looked at me like she wanted to see something in me that just wasn’t there.

  It was love.

  I loved what I saw, but not what she hid from me, not what she sort of tried to tell me about when she said she loved my house or wanted to talk about the book. I couldn’t love what I couldn’t see.

  Maybe she didn’t think the real Laura could ever be loved.

  I had to know.

  There was more about me in the diary, finally.

  A whole lot.

  There were, like, twenty pages of this very fine small handwriting, like she’d become somehow suddenly obsessed with me and just scribbled like mad.<
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  It began three months ago, around the time I followed her to that funeral. She’d broken up with me the week before that.

  I didn’t understand why she got so suddenly interested—I mean reinterested.

  It really surprised me that she had all these incredible feelings about me, these sudden incredible feelings.

  She blamed herself for my never having seen her, for never opening up to me and letting me get to know her. I always pushed him away, I was so mean to him, I was so terrible, I never told him my feelings, why didn’t I tell him, I made him feel like he was nothing, what happened to him was because of me, he did it because of me, it was my fault, I did it to him, I can’t forgive myself, I can’t forgive myself, I loved him but I wouldn’t let myself feel it, I wasn’t allowed to feel it. . . .

  It went on and on. I must say she blamed her mom quite a lot.

  I was glad to learn she really loved me.

  But that wasn’t the important thing.

  There was something else.

  There was a thing I’d done that had changed my life completely and had affected her so deeply she’d decided to do it to herself.

  It was something I’d forgotten. But now it came back to me, and I sat there for, like, twenty minutes staring at the ceiling, because I suddenly knew.

  I knew exactly what had happened to me that had changed her, and even more suddenly I knew exactly the reason why I’d come into her house, the real reason. I knew it crystal clear as if I’d always known it my whole life.

  I could remember everything, too—I mean everything—and to tell you the truth, I knew exactly what was going to happen unless I did something to make sure it didn’t happen.

  And right then—at that exact second—I heard the door open downstairs and I knew it was her—it was Laura—and she’d cut school and come home early.

  And if you want to know how I knew it, it’s because it was all written down and planned out in the diary.

  But I somehow knew it anyway because I saw it all in my mind.

  I heard her coming up the downstairs hallway.

  I froze.

  I stayed there and I stared at the windows across from me and I didn’t move a muscle, because I knew now that three months ago I’d had an accident, and I had died.