Page 20 of The Ghostwriter

May 6, 1975

I dig through my closet, tossing out shoes and dirty laundry, looking for that diary my mother bought me a couple years ago for my birthday. The one she thought I’d record all my secrets in, so that while I was at school, she could read them. As if I’d ever be that stupid.

Instead, I’d written a fake entry. Today, Margot and I bought some pot from Tommy Snyder and went into the oak grove to get high. It’s really growing on me, how happy and silly I feel. It makes it much easier to eat my mom’s terrible cooking.

Two days later, my mother had confronted me, her face blotchy from crying. “Are you getting high ?”

“Where’d you get an idea like that?” I’d asked. “From my diary? The one that’s supposed to be private?” I’d waited for understanding to dawn on her. To realize her mistake, that I’d tricked her into admitting that she snooped through my things. Then I said, “Stop trying to pry into my life, Mom.” And I’d walked away.

I figure now that a couple years have passed, my mother has forgotten about that diary.

I finally find it—wedged next to an old Malibu Barbie my mother bought me for Christmas several years ago—and open to that first entry. Taking my scissors, I roughly cut out that page. Then I write a new entry, thinking back on the conversation Margot and I just had.

***

“I heard Lydia had an abortion.”

Margot had whispered the word and I hopped off my bed, peeking out to make sure my mother hadn’t heard it. She blew her top whenever someone mentioned the word abortion , swearing up and down she would disown any child of hers who got one. Which meant me.

I closed the door and hurried back to the bed. “What?” I asked. “Where did you hear that?”

“A couple of girls were talking about it in the bathroom at school. They didn’t know I was in there.”

“That’s impossible,” I said, though the truth was, I wasn’t exactly sure how it all worked. My mother had dropped a box of sanitary napkins onto my bed when I got my period and said, Don’t get pregnant. It’ll ruin your life . Which wasn’t exactly informative.

“My mother says it only takes one time,” Margot said, shooting me a warning look, as if I ought to take heed of her mother’s wisdom. As if I were the one who needed to be careful. “What do we really know about Lydia?” she continued, picking at a chipped piece of pink nail polish. She peeled the rest of it off and dropped it in the tiny white trash can next to my desk, the appliqué daisies on the outside bright and childish compared to what we were discussing.

“I know she dated Dave Gunderson for like a second last fall. And then Pete Mayhew around the holidays. And then Vince,” I said. It seemed like a lot of guys to me, but I had only turned fourteen in March. What did I know about boyfriends?

“I meant her family,” Margot said, giving me a meaningful look. “Her mother isn’t exactly normal.”

My gaze bounced around my room, clothes hastily shoved into my closet, the sheer curtains covering my windows filtering the light, softening the pink walls I’d hoped to paint a more grown-up color this summer. I tried not to think about my own mother, how not normal she was when no one else was around. How she drank too much, then cried in her room. Some days she wouldn’t even get out of bed. But she always put on some lipstick and a bright smile whenever we had people over, as if she could paper over the cracks that everyone could see.

“I like Lydia’s mom,” I said. But the truth was, I’d only ever spoken to her once, when she came by to pick Lydia up. She’d given me her pretty smile and said, What a cute little thing you are! Which normally would have annoyed me but, coming from her, felt like a present bought just for me.

“My mom says she sleeps around,” Margot said, shaking her head in the same disapproving way her own mother did. “She called her a ‘man eater.’”

We both giggled at the phrase. “Maybe it’s not true,” I said, meaning that someone like Lydia probably knew how to not get pregnant. And yet.

Margot hesitated, as if she didn’t want to tell me the next part. “They also said it wasn’t Vince’s.”

I felt my body grow cold and I fought to keep my voice steady. To not show Margot how much that part worried me. “Did they say whose it was?” I asked, not wanting to know. But needing to understand.

“No.”

“If you had to guess,” I pressed. I glanced at the closed door, listening for sounds of my mother. Pretending to dust so she could eavesdrop, hoping to hear about my secret crushes or problems with friends.

“Maybe she got back together with Pete or Dave,” Margot suggested.

I shook my head. “Pete is dating Ginnie from the pep squad now and everyone knows she’s got him on a short leash. She even waits outside the boy’s bathroom for him to pee.” Margot snort-laughed and I continued. “Lydia doesn’t do anything except hang out here, run track, and go to school.” I looked up at her and said, “Wait. Who’s her lab partner in biology?”

Margot wrinkled her nose in disgust. “Charlie Carson and he’s a nose picker. No way.”

We fell into silence, each of us running through possibilities but coming up blank.

“Do you think Vince knows?” Margot asked.

I shook my head. Things were bad now, but they’d get a lot worse if he found out. “They fight about stuff, but I think I’d know if it was about a baby and an abortion.”

***

I sit in my room now, listening to the sounds of my family—my mother in the kitchen, making dinner; the thump of bass from Danny’s music—and reread the single sentence I’d written— I heard a rumor today. That Lydia was pregnant and now…she’s not —trying to imagine how this will play out. What this information will do to Vince, who already seems on edge.