Boshoff smiled and clacked his cough drop around his mouth. Judging from his rumpled sweaters and stain-splotched khakis, he wasn’t the neatest person. Somehow, though, he managed to do a careful job wrapping that present. I peeled back the paper just as carefully, to find a diary with a miniature lock and key.
It had been some time since anyone thought to give me a gift, and I wasn’t sure what to say. Finally, I managed, “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
Except for the flippity-flip of my hand turning the diary’s empty pages, things were quiet. Boshoff was the teen drug and alcohol counselor for all of Baltimore County, Maryland, and rolled through towns like Dundalk on a weekly basis. Unlike his regulars, I had never puffed on a joint or tasted a drop of alcohol. Even so, I was excused from study hall once a week on the principal’s suggestion that an hour with him might be helpful, seeing as there was no budget to fund a professional who had experience dealing with my “situation.” The first time I went to his office in September, I asked Boshoff if me visiting him was like a person going to a vet to treat a burst appendix. He laughed and clacked his cough drop before using a serious voice to tell me, “I suppose most veterinarians could perform an appendectomy on a human if the situation called for it, Sylvie.”
That ruined the joke.
“I’ve come to realize in these meetings of ours,” he began now, so many weeks later, “that there are things you might not want to share with me or anyone else. But you might find it helpful to write them down in that journal, where they’ll be safe.”
I fingered the flimsy lock. With its violet cover and pink margins, the diary looked meant for some other girl, one who would fill the pages in loopy cursive with tales of kissing boys, slumber parties, cheerleading practice. Instead, my father’s voice rolled through my head: People don’t need to know what goes on inside our house, so you and Rose shouldn’t say anything to anyone—no matter who it is.
“What are you thinking?” Boshoff asked, another favorite question of his.
“I’m thinking I don’t know what I’d possibly write about in a journal,” I told him, even though I knew what he intended. But I’d spent so much time in other windowless rooms, recounting the details of that night at the church for a white-haired detective and a haggard-looking assistant district attorney, that I felt no desire to do it again.
“Well, you could at least start by writing about your day, Sylvie.”
I walk the hallways of Dundalk High School and people clear a path. No one makes eye contact or talks to me unless it is to taunt me about my parents and the thing that happened to them—the thing that almost happened to me too. . .
“You could write about what’s going on at home with your sister now that things have, well, changed for you both.”
Rose refuses to bother with grocery shopping except when Cora is scheduled to come by with her clipboard. Most nights, we eat Popsicles for dinner. Potato chips for breakfast. Mayonnaise smeared on bread in the middle of the night. . .
“Or you could just open the book and see what memories come.”
To give the illusion that I was at least considering his suggestions, I turned to the first page and gazed at it, picturing the loopy cursive of that girl: A boy kissed me in his car on Friday night for so long the windows steamed up. . . . My best friend slept over on Saturday and we watched The Breakfast Club on video. . . . I spent Sunday practicing cartwheels for cheerleading tryouts. . . .
Somewhere in the middle of her happy life, I heard Boshoff. “Sylvie, the final bell rang. Did you not hear it? You know, on account of your ear?”
My ear. I looked up from the blank page, my expression blank too. “I heard it. I was just, I don’t know, thinking about what I’d write.”
“Well, good. I’m glad it’s got you thinking. I hope you’ll give it a try.”