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Masturbation
Kicked in the head by a horse
Egotism
Nymphomania
Bad company
Novel reading (!)
Other than the horse kicking, every single woman I’ve ever met could have been declared insane back then. Which is exactly how men wanted it. It’s how they managed to keep women down. Don’t like something they’ve said? Call them crazy and ship them off to the loony bin. Don’t fuck their husbands enough? Commit them. Want to fuck them too much? Commit them. It’s sick.
And don’t you dare think things have changed much, diary. They haven’t. The Senator was ready to have me locked up after Kath died. Like it was wrong of me to mourn her. Like grief was a mental illness.
Anyway, that’s the lesson I learned today. Every woman is crazy. The ones who can’t hide it well enough are shit out of luck.
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Update: And now I’m fucked. I forgot I left you out, dear diary. Came back from the campfire to find Natalie and Allison reading you. Which doesn’t surprise me. They’ve been trying to get a peek at you all week. And now they have. I’m sure it was an eyeful. Thank God I didn’t write that Natalie’s gotten so thick in the thighs she looks like a lady wrestler or that Allison’s so pasty she might as well be an albino. That would be AWFUL if they read that about themselves, right?
And while I’m tempted to leave you open to this page so they can do exactly that, I’ve decided it’s best to hide you. You’re no longer safe here, baby.
The less they know, the better.
Update #2: Welcome to your new home, little book. Hope you don’t rot here. Drawing a map so I don’t forget where you are.
July 4,
Can’t write much. Rowing here already took half the morning. Rowing back will take even longer. F has probably noticed I’m gone. She’s got spies everywhere. I’m certain she told Casey to double-check on me each night.
But that might not matter for much longer.
Because. I. Found. It.
That clichéd missing piece that ties everything together. Everything makes sense now. I know the truth. All I need to do is expose it.
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
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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.