The Murder Rule(6)
LAURA
DIARY ENTRY #1
Saturday, July 9, 1994, 9:00 p.m.
It’s a weird feeling, starting a diary. I feel kind of embarrassed.
Maybe I have diary prejudice, but I feel like writing in a diary is something you do in junior high, when you first discover boys and/or masturbation and you just HAVE TO TALK ABOUT IT ALL THE
TIME!! Writing in a diary is a habit you’re supposed to grow out of.
Starting one now, at nineteen . . . I’m like the girl who brings her My Little Pony col ection to her col ege dorm.
Except now that I’ve said how uncool this is, I’m free to continue doing it, and now it’s in a cool, ironic kind of way. Right? Also no one’s going to read this and I’m going to burn it when I’m done so . . . Just, if you’re reading this at some time in the future (because, I don’t know, I’m suddenly paralyzed and therefore fail to destroy it as planned), don’t waste your time. Nothing exciting lies ahead. I’m not writing this because I’m such a great writer or because I have something important to say or something cool to talk about, but just because I’m bored and lonely and broke and this is one way to entertain myself.
Right now I’m working as a cleaner. (See? Exciting stuff.) I work at a fancy hotel near Seal Harbor (which, if you don’t know, is on Mount Desert Island, which is in Maine). The job’s fine. It could be better. I took it because I wanted to get out of Boston for the summer. It’s so depressing being there, when al my friends go home and spend their vacation time with their families, and I’m stil stuck working my shitty dead-end job. I figured, better to work a shitty dead-end job somewhere pretty. Somewhere with rich tourists who leave big tips so I can save up and maybe, maybe, get to col ege myself someday.
It’s not like I plan on working as a cleaner my entire life. I’m trying to save. I’ve saved almost three thousand dol ars, but it’s real y slow.
Every time I feel like I’m getting somewhere there’s some great disaster and everything goes to shit. Like, last year, I got kicked out of my apartment because the building wasn’t up to code or some crap, so then I had to find a new place which meant $$$ for a new deposit and everything. Good luck getting your old deposit back from a landlord of a building that’s just been condemned. Ha-ha.
It’s actual y real y nice here. The island is beautiful. Lots of walking trails and hiking and climbing and swimming. My job comes with a room (which is just as wel —rentals here are $$$$$—rich people only need apply) and I share with a girl cal ed Marta. She’s al right. Kind of. She’s crazy about some guy she left behind in her hometown and she mostly wants to just hang out in our room and play Mariah Carey on repeat and cry into her pil ow. Fun.
So. I haven’t real y made any friends here.
However . . .
I met a guy today. Not a guy guy. Not like a crush or anything. I’m not saying he wasn’t cute, because he was. It’s just that it wasn’t that kind of situation. I was working, cleaning his house, which isn’t exactly an ideal way to meet someone. Background—I’ve been making some extra cash by taking extra shifts cleaning private houses on the hotel. Most of the girls at the hotel do it. Rosa, the housekeeper, sets everything up. I don’t know if hotel management knows about it, or if they’d care if they did, but we al keep it on the downlow because that extra work is the only way any of us are going to see any real money this summer.
Anyway, today Rosa picked up me and Marta after our hotel shift and dropped us off at the job she’d set up for us. And the whole thing was kind of off from the beginning. For starters, the house was out in the middle of nowhere (most places I’ve been to up to now have been in town—awesome houses with ocean views). But today Rosa drove until we were way deep in the woods, taking a series of turns until I was completely lost. In the end she took a turn up a long gravel driveway and dropped us off in front of this house that was pretty much hidden. It was tucked back in the trees, and al we could see was stone steps leading up and glimpses of more wood and stone. It was spooky as hel and when I’m nervous I try to be funny.
“Seriously?”
“What’s the problem?” Rosa has zero time for other people’s problems. And honestly, I’m not a whiner. But I hadn’t been expecting a gloomy dump stuck in the middle of the woods.
“Come on, Rosa. It’s like a scene from a horror movie. You’l drive away and Marta and I wil go innocently into that house in our little maids’ uniforms and an hour from now we’l be running through the woods, fleeing for our lives.” (We wear little gray dresses that are cut to fit and go barely to our knees—my theory is that the ocean isn’t the only view the guests at the hotel pay for.) Rosa just rol ed her eyes at me and kicked us out of the van.
“You have four hours. Six bedrooms. No time for horror movies. And don’t bother the family.” She left us with the cleaning cart, but I don’t know how she expected us to get it up the steps. In the end we abandoned it in the driveway and took what we needed. It was a while before the door opened. A guy . . . the guy (tal , dark blond floppy hair, blue eyes) stood there. He blinked at us like he’d just woken up from an afternoon nap. He said hey and I said hey back, like he was my buddy. I don’t know why. Maybe because he looked about our age. Maybe because he was wearing ratty shorts and a gray Nirvana T-shirt that looked like it had already been washed and worn a hundred times. I knew right away he was cooler than me.