The Last Time I Lied(54)

But there’s a hitch. After reading you, dear diary, Natalie and Allison want in on it. And I’ve decided I’m going to tell them everything. Because I can’t do this without their help. I thought I could, but that’s no longer an option.

Yes, I know I could just drop it, forget the whole thing, spend my summer, my year, the rest of my goddamned life pretending it never happened. A sane person would do that.

But here’s the thing: some wrongs are so terrible that the people responsible must be held accountable. Call it justice. Call it revenge. Call it whatever. I don’t give a fuck.

All I care about is this particular wrong. It can’t be ignored. It must be righted.

And I’m the bitch that’s going to do it.

I’m scared





19


That’s it. The rest of the pages—more than two-thirds of the diary—are blank. I flip through them anyway, just in case I’ve missed something. I haven’t. There’s nothing.

I close the diary and exhale. Reading it has left me feeling the same way I did after each of Vivian’s hallucinatory visits. Confused and light-headed, spent and frightened.

Vivian was looking for something, that much is clear. What it was—and what she eventually found—remain frustratingly out of reach. Honestly, the only thing I’m certain about is that the paper on which Vivian drew her map was torn from the journal. There’s a page missing between her entry about its new location and the one she made on the Fourth of July. I remove the map from my backpack and hold it against the ragged remnants of the missing page. It’s a match.

I reread the entire diary, studying each page, parsing every word, trying to make sense of it. Little does, least of all why Vivian, a person who rarely failed to say exactly what she was thinking and feeling, needed to keep some things secret. So I give it yet another read, this time from back to front, starting with Vivian’s unsettling final entry.

I’m scared.

That one confounds me the most. Of all the myriad emotions Vivian displayed in the short time I knew her, fear wasn’t one of them.

I flip to the previous page. That entry was made the morning of July 4, prompting two new questions: When did she write that final entry, and what was she afraid of?

I clutch the book, frustrated, aching for answers that refuse to reveal themselves. “What did you learn, Viv?” I murmur, as if she could somehow answer me.

Judging by the entry dates, I assume she buried the book sometime during the night of July 3. My guess is that she snuck out while the rest of us were asleep. Not unusual for her. She had also done it the night before.

I remember because I was still mad that she had lied to me about her swimming skills. I was especially livid about the reason she lied—because Theo had been paying too much attention to me. She saw me in his arms, whispering encouraging words as he taught me how to swim. And she couldn’t stand it. So she faked drowning just to become the center of attention again.

I ignored her the rest of that canoe trip back to camp. And the rest of the afternoon. And at dinner, where I took her advice and showed up so late I was last in line. I sat alone and picked at the dinnertime dregs—lukewarm meat loaf and mashed potatoes dried to a crust. At the campfire, I sat with girls my own age, who showed little interest in me. Afterward, I went to bed early, pretending to be asleep while the others played Two Truths and a Lie without me.

Later that night, I woke to find Vivian tiptoeing into the cabin. She tried to be sneaky about it, but the creak of the third floorboard from the door gave her away.

I sat up, bleary-eyed. Where did you go?

I had to pee, Vivian said. Or is taking a piss something else you disapprove of?

She said nothing else as she climbed up to her bunk. But in the morning, a handful of tiny flowers were sitting on my pillow, right beside my head. Forget-me-nots. Their petals were a delicate blue. In the center of each was a yellow starburst.

I later stored them in my hickory trunk, pressed inside my copy of The Lovely Bones. Although she never admitted to putting them there, I knew they were from Vivian. She had indeed given me flowers. And just as she thought, I loved her again.

I flip back to the page where Vivian had made that prediction, reading it feverishly, wondering again if my feelings had been that transparent. It’s only after I reread the passage about her own parents that I get an answer—Vivian simply knew. Because she was just like me. Neglected and lonely. Basking in whatever scraps of attention she received. It’s how she was able to foresee that a hastily picked bunch of forget-me-nots would be enough to appease me. Because it would have been enough for her, too.

More flipping. More pages. More questions.

I turn to the page with Vivian’s musings about insanity. Of all the things she had written, this one shakes me to my core. Reading it feels as though she’s speaking directly to me, as if she foresaw my slide into madness a year before it would happen.

But why did she seek out that information? And where?

I vividly remember the day she made that entry. Riding to town in the camp’s mint-green Ford, squeezed tight between Vivian and Theo at the wheel. He drove one-handed, his legs spread wide so that his thigh kept bumping against mine. Each touch made my heart feel like a tiny bird trapped in a cage, fluttering against the gilded bars. I didn’t mind at all when Vivian said she was going shopping and slipped away from us, leaving me alone with Theo.