Last Summer
Page 6
Arrivederci! Au revoir!
Your friend, Rosie
November 17, 2011
Dear Diary,
Thanksgiving is next week. Every time the holidays come around I think about how it would be nice to have a big family. You see those commercials on TV with everyone gathered around a big table, kids and grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins, and everyone’s laughing and joking and teasing each other and it all looks like a lot of fun, people pretending to fight over the last crescent roll. (I love crescent rolls!)
I’m not complaining. I love my mom and dad. I just wish we had more family. I don’t know why Mom didn’t have more kids after me. I’ve never asked and I don’t think I should, at least not until I’m older. Maybe someday she’ll tell me on her own. Maybe she and Dad just didn’t want any more children. But if that’s the case, I wonder why.
My dad’s brother and his wife live outside of Boston, but Dad and Uncle Rob aren’t close and now that Uncle Rob and Aunt Jean have a baby—my cousin Alison, who I’ve never even seen!—they don’t want to come to Maine, especially in the bad weather. At least, that’s what Mom says. I guess I can understand that. Who wants to get caught on the road in a snowstorm? (Dad keeps all sorts of stuff in our car in case of an emergency in winter, stuff like blankets and flashlights and bottled water.)
I also wish I had a dog. I really want one but Mom says I’m too young for the responsibility of a pet (I am NOT too young! I’m fourteen!). Dad never had a pet, not even a goldfish, growing up so he just doesn’t understand why a dog is so important to me. Sigh. When I’m an adult and living on my own I’ll have three dogs and three cats and maybe a ferret. Unless cats eat ferrets, in which case I guess I won’t be getting a ferret! I’ll get all my animals from a shelter, of course. Just thinking about those poor animals in those cages, waiting to be adopted, breaks my heart. When those commercials come on TV, showing all those poor abused animals and asking for support for shelters, I have to close my eyes and put my hands over my ears. A few months ago Mom and I gathered up some old but clean towels (it was my idea after I saw an appeal in the paper) and took them to a shelter in South Portland. The shelter uses the towels as beds for the animals in their cages. Mom went inside with the towels while I waited in the car. I just knew I would start to cry if I went in with her and couldn’t leave with a dog.
We got our history papers back today. Ms. Moore told me that I got the only A in the class. The only one I told about the A—aside from my parents!—was Meg because we always share our grades and stuff. She got a B+, which is also pretty good. She usually does way better than me in math class, even though I study like mad. I guess math just isn’t my strong point. She’s the only person I know who’s actually looking forward to learning calculus! I’m trying to figure out a way to avoid it.
This is kind of weird. Meg told me that Ginny Doherty (a girl in her advanced math class) told her that Michael Perkins thinks I’m pretty. I don’t believe it. Michael Perkins is really cute and besides, he’s a sophomore. He could go out with any sophomore girl he wanted to, and lots of them are way prettier than I am. Like Mackenzie Egan, though I don’t know if she already has a boyfriend. I’ve never seen her with a boy. I hope word doesn’t get around about Michael Perkins thinking I’m pretty, because it has to be a lie. He’s never even looked at me! I wouldn’t want anyone to think I’m being stuck-up because a boy supposedly likes me.
Anyway, it was a pretty good week. I hope I get an A on the next history paper, too. I would hate to slip back a grade, or even half a grade. Ms. Moore would be disappointed, not to mention Mom and Dad. And me! One of my father’s favorite expressions is “There’s no excuse for laziness.” I guess he’s right.
About Thanksgiving again. I was hoping that Meg and her family would be coming here for dinner, but Meg told me they have to go up to Norridgewock for the day to see her father’s older sister who is really sick. Meg’s only met her aunt Linda once or twice but her mom thinks going to visit is the right thing to do because even though Mr. and Mrs. Giroux are divorced, they’re still in some way family. And besides, this might be the last time they get to see Aunt Linda. She’s got some aggressive cancer, which is very sad, especially because she’s only around fifty. (Meg says that’s old but it’s not. I think the idea of older people frightens her in some way.) Meg’s not happy about going, but unless she pretends to be sick on Thanksgiving morning, she’s going to have to go. Besides, Mrs. Giroux is way too smart to fall for a lie!
So that means it’s just Mom, Dad, and me for Thanksgiving. They don’t have any close friends they could invite, and neither do I, other than Meg, of course, so ... I wonder why Mom and Dad don’t have other good friends. They’re nice and smart and all and they each know lots of people through their businesses. But even the women in Mom’s book club aren’t really her friends. Two of them are clients and one woman she knows from back in Boston, though she says they weren’t close. They took a class together once at the MFA, that’s all.
I know why I don’t have other good friends. Meg is the only friend I need.
You know what I just thought about? I wonder if Mom had a best friend growing up like I have Meg. She’s never told me about anyone. Maybe I should ask her. But if something bad happened between them she might not want to talk about it, so maybe I won’t say anything.
Oh, well. On Thanksgiving we’ll watch the parade on TV, the big one from New York, and Mom will make her famous apple pie and those mashed turnips I love and we’ll have a nice time. Dad’s not so into the turnips, but he’ll eat some for Mom’s sake. And he’ll have two pieces of pie! He has such a sweet tooth, just like Meg. Mom doesn’t know this but I know that he keeps a box of Count Chocula in his office! He hides it in the bottom drawer of his desk. It’s fun to have a little secret with Dad.
I have to go and do my homework now. Mr. Wall, our science teacher, gave us an extra-credit assignment that I’m going to finish before the weekend. Meg thinks I’m crazy to voluntarily take on more work, but Mom and Dad are glad about it (they say any extra work might help me get into a good college) and I really don’t mind. I probably don’t do enough extracurricular stuff, though. Maybe I should be worried about that. But I really don’t like sports. Maybe I should check out ways I could volunteer. There’s some sort of nursing home in Wells. Maybe I could volunteer there. I like older people. I wish I had grandparents. The only problem is that Mom or Dad would have to drive me to the nursing home and back, and I don’t want to cause trouble for them. I’ll have to think about it.
But first—homework! See you soon.
Your friend, Rosie
7
Rosie went out into the backyard carrying a small basket of laundry to hang on the line her dad had strung up between the patio and a large oak tree in the middle of the yard. She went about clipping a pair of her mom’s linen shorts to the line, unaware that Meg had come to stand at the fence that separated her backyard from the Pattersons’.
“Hi,” Meg called out, startling Rosie into almost dropping a pair of her own clean, damp jeans onto the concrete patio. She finished attaching the pants to the laundry line and slowly turned around. She wasn’t sure why she had. She did not return the greeting. She was determined not to talk to Meg. Besides, there was nothing she wanted to say.
“It’s nice out today, isn’t it?” Meg went on. “Not like yesterday. I thought it would never stop raining.” She laughed then, a nervous kind of laugh.
Rosie turned back to her task. There was one final item to hang.
“I mean, we were afraid the basement would flood. But it didn’t, so that was good.”
Still, Rosie said nothing.
“Rosie, please talk to me.”
Rosie whipped around, clutching a damp T-shirt in her fist. “I don’t have to talk to you,” she blurted, surprising herself by replying.
“I know you don’t have to.” Meg’s voice quavered. “I just thought that, I don’t know, you might want to.
”
“Why?” Rosie demanded.
Meg fidgeted with a thin braided bracelet around her left wrist. “Because ... Because I said I was sorry and I meant it. I still mean it.”
Rosie stood looking at her friend—her former friend—and could think of nothing else to say unless it was that the shirt Meg was wearing was a pretty color, like vibrant pink azaleas. But of course, she couldn’t tell her that. Meg had totally messed things up for the two of them. Frustrated, confused, and a little bit angry, she quickly clipped the T-shirt to the laundry line, picked up the empty basket, and without a backwards glance went inside the house.
Rosie tramped down to the basement to return the laundry basket to its home on the shelf above the washing machine. And then she leaned against the machine, suddenly feeling too tired to climb back up to the first floor. Or maybe “tired” wasn’t the right word. Maybe “confused” or “dispirited” was a more accurate way to describe what she was feeling.
Meg had apologized to her a few weeks ago and she had told Meg that she accepted her apology. But did that mean she had actually forgiven her? Maybe accepting an apology and forgiving a person weren’t the same thing. If they were the same thing, then maybe she had lied to Meg. Maybe her “Okay, I accept your apology” had been just an automatic reply, the words she assumed everyone had wanted to hear. If that was the case, then those words hadn’t solved anything and certainly hadn’t healed any wounds.
Rosie put her hands over her eyes. Why was she the one who was supposed to make everything all right again? She wasn’t the one who had broken a solemn promise to her best friend. She was the one who had been betrayed and humiliated in front of her classmates. It wasn’t her responsibility to wave the magic wand so that everything could go back to the way it used to be.
Rosie dropped her hands to her side. Still, she couldn’t help but admit to herself that part of her missed Meg. But every time she thought about the friendship she had lost—which was a lot of times—she tried ruthlessly to push the memories away. She couldn’t help but feel that missing the friendship of the person who had betrayed her only proved that she was a loser. Her own weakness embarrassed her. She hadn’t even admitted these feelings to Dr. Lowe.
Only months ago she could have written her thoughts in her diary and that would have helped her figure things out, but she had abandoned the diary just after Meg’s betrayal. Somehow it had stopped feeling like a safe and private space. If Meg could tell her deep dark secret to those girls, who was to say she or someone else couldn’t find her diary and expose all her thoughts to the world? Even if her thoughts weren’t so unusual, they were still hers and hers alone. That meant something.
Her therapist, Dr. Lowe, had been urging her to start her diary again. She said that “free-form journaling” was supposed to help you name your anger. It was supposed to help you come to understand that anger and channel it somewhere else or whatever. But something was holding Rosie back from taking that step. Her old diaries, including the last one with the entries about Mackenzie’s campaign to torture her and the final entry about Meg’s betrayal, were now kept out of sight in a plastic storage box under her bed. Sometimes, in particularly bad moments, Rosie thought she should burn the diaries in the living room fireplace or shred all the pages and dump them off the cliffs on Marginal Way. It would be as if the dairies had never existed. But she never acted on those impulses. Besides, to dump the torn pages in the ocean would be littering, and she could get in trouble with the police. Or maybe a wild bird or a fish would accidentally eat some of the pieces of paper and choke. That would be horrible. She could never live with knowing she had hurt an innocent animal.
Rosie touched the scars on her left arm through the sleeve of her cotton blouse, then abruptly pulled her hand away. She didn’t like to feel the scars, but sometimes she couldn’t resist the urge to affirm that they were still there. It was upsetting and it was another thing she had yet to talk to Dr. Lowe about. With a sigh, she pushed off the washing machine and went back upstairs and into the kitchen. Her mother was there, at the sink, washing out the vegetable bin.
“Do you want something to eat?” her mother asked.
“No,” Rosie said, wondering why she hadn’t just gone straight to her room. “Thanks.”
“You didn’t have much of a breakfast.”
Rosie bit back an impatient remark. “I’m fine,” she said.
Minutes of silence followed as Jane finished scrubbing the plastic bin and then reached for a paper towel with which to dry it.
“I saw you talking to Meg out back,” she said when she had returned the clean bin to the fridge.
Rosie tensed but said nothing in reply.
Jane leaned against the sink and looked carefully at her daughter. “What did she say to you?”
“Nothing.”
“She had to have said something.”
Rosie sighed. Since when, she wondered, had her mother become so annoying? “Fine. She said they were worried about their basement flooding yesterday.”
“That’s it?” Jane asked.
“And she said that her apology was sincere.”
“What did you say to her?”
“Nothing.” Rosie took a dish towel from a drawer by the sink and started to dry the few already dry plates in the drainer.
“Do you believe that Meg is truly sorry?” Jane asked. Rosie shrugged. She wasn’t sure how to answer that question.
“You know, Rosie, you don’t have to forgive Meg, but you might feel better if you did.”
Rosie turned to face her mother. “How would I feel better?” she demanded.
“Well,” Jane replied, “you would feel better in lots of ways. For one, studies have shown that when a person forgives someone who did something hurtful to them, her blood pressure goes down and she feels less anxious and more empowered.”
“So?” Since when, Rosie thought, had her mother started talking like a textbook?
“So,” Jane said, “it’s a health issue, for one, physical and emotional. I’m sure Dr. Lowe can tell you more about it.”
Rosie tossed the dish towel onto the kitchen table. “Are you sticking up for Meg?” she cried. “Next you’re going to tell me I have to invite Mackenzie Egan over for dinner! Or ask Courtney Parker to stay overnight!”
“No, no, Rosie,” her mother protested, “please. I’m not sticking up for Meg and I’m not suggesting you have anything to do with Mackenzie Egan and her clique. I’m not. All I’m suggesting is that you think about forgiving Meg. You don’t have to be her friend again. Just—forgive her.”
Rosie didn’t say anything for some moments. “Do I have to see Dr. Lowe every week?” she asked finally. The question was a bit of a test. Rosie wasn’t entirely sure why she had asked it. She wanted to see Dr. Lowe every week.
“Yes,” Jane said firmly. “Your father and I think it’s a good idea. You like her, right?”
“She’s okay.” Rosie was lying. Dr. Lowe was more than just okay. But for some weird reason she didn’t want her mother to know that. She wanted Dr. Lowe to be entirely her own.
“Do you feel she’s helping you understand things?” Jane asked.
“Yeah,” Rosie said. “I guess. Yes.”
“Good.”
Rosie looked closely at her mother. “You look like you want to say something else,” she said.
Jane shrugged. “Just that, you know, I think we should understand that Mackenzie Egan must be a very sad person. Only people who feel bad about themselves feel the need to hurt other people.”
“How do you know what Mackenzie feels?” Rosie shot back. “Did you read that in one of your books, about bullies feeling bad about themselves? Maybe she thinks she’s so great that she has the right to make other people feel awful and left out.”
“I don’t think that’s likely,” Jane said calmly. “Look, Rosie, whatever the truth is about Mackenzie, she’s not the one I care about. I care about you and I want you to be happy again.”
“Wait, Rosie. It’s such a nice day out, especially after all that rain yesterday. Maybe we could take a drive to the beach. Or maybe we could—”
“No thanks,” she said, already out of the kitchen. Once in her bedroom, Rosie shut and locked the door. She knew her mother meant well but lately, Rosie just wished her mother would stop trying so hard to make everything all right again. She knew her mother felt guilty for not having known what was happening to her. She had confessed as much. She had told Rosie that she more than anyone was to blame for driving Rosie to despair. Fine. Let her feel guilty if she wants to. Now, Rosie thought, she should just leave me alone.
And all that talk about forgiveness! No one could force her to be friends again with Meg. No one could force her to forgive. Dr. Lowe had told her that forgiveness was something she didn’t owe to anybody other than herself. And that was a confusing enough idea to deal with right now, why she should need to forgive herself.
Rosie lay down on the neatly made bed and folded her hands over her stomach. She always made her bed, even on Saturdays and Sundays. She supposed she enjoyed the ritual of pulling the sheets tight and smoothing the comforter. Unlike Meg. Mrs. Giroux said that to get Meg to make her bed was like pulling teeth. Clearly, it was something unpleasant. But maybe Meg didn’t like to make her bed because she was such a violent sleeper. In the morning the covers were in a giant swirl half-hanging off the mattress. Rosie, on the other hand, barely moved all night. Her father used to say she looked like an Egyptian mummy while she slept, completely still and limbs ordered. Meg would sometimes wind up with her head at the foot of her bed and her feet up on the headboard. Rosie had seen it.