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When they were both alive, Jo had always thought diaries were stupid and that Nia's insistence on keeping on was stupid.
I said diaries were stupid, Jo said, throwing the orange kush ball at her sister, not that you were stupid. You always take everything so personal.
Nia didn't take everything so personal. Jo took things personal.
There was a gap in Nia's diary after January 4th 2010. A long Jo-shaped hole in the narrative, and it had taken Nia a long time to pick it up again. She couldn't remember how to write the entries and she didn't know when to start after so much had happened. In the end, she didn't say anything about Jo at all, or about the time she'd had to spend in hospital healing, or about the way her mum wouldn't leave the house or talk to strangers, or about how her dad wouldn't look her in the eyes anymore. And so her first entry had begun with it won't stop raining today and Kate says if the gym floods again we'll prob get the day off, but she's just being stupid.
Kate was being stupid. The gym only ever flooded that once, and then the roof got fixed. The rumour was that it had been birds nesting up there that had caused it.
Good Friday meant no school, but it also meant all her friends were busy with their own families. Which meant that Nia had no choice but to be with hers. Not that any of the family were together right now. Nia was sitting in the drawing room across from the closed door that still said JOSETTE on it in floral letters.
Jo's door was always closed. No one went in there. (This was a lie: Sometimes Nia went in there, but the room felt like ghosts and sorrow and she never stayed long. Once, four years ago, she'd slept in Jo's bed and had the worst nightmares of her life and woke up half frozen. She never did that again.)
"You look deep in thought."
Serena's voice was quiet - everyone always whispered in this house. Had it been like that Before? Or was the quiet a symptom of After? It was hard to remember - and Nia looked over at her mother in the doorway, pressed as she was against the frame. Serena was taller than Nia and two sizes larger - when Nia borrowed clothes they hung off her - but she always looked smaller in every way. Serena wanted to be invisible and sometimes she almost succeeded.
"No," Nia said with a shake of her head and little smile towards her mum. "Just starting a new diary."
"Ah," Serena said knowingly, coming over to sit beside her, hands clasped between her knees. She looked on the fresh leather book on the table - fir-green, grass-green, grapevine-green - and said "born green we were to this flawed garden."
Nia thought for a moment and then said, "Whitman?"
"Plath," Serena smiled, reaching out to brush Nia's hair off her face. "Now our whole task's to hack some angel-shape worth wearing from his crabbed midden where all's wrought so awry and no straight enquiring could unlock."
Nia liked the way her Serena seemed to think in poetry all the time. Sometimes she knew the poems - often she knew them - but even now there were poems she swore she'd never heard. Even when she knew them, it didn't mean she understood them. But Serena used to read them to the girls like bedtime stories when they were little, and they had demanded their favourites over and over. (Jo had always liked the Lady of Shalott but Nia had liked I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud. They both liked The Nymph′s Reply to the Shepherd and The Hunting of the Snark)
Serena had wanted to be a poetry teacher, but instead she was a mother. It was only in the last few years that Nia had come to understand what had been given up for her when Serena had decided to keep her babies at eighteen.
There was a sound somewhere in the distant reaches of the house and Serena flinched slightly. She always thought people were trying to come inside. Nia had once asked, is it because you think they'll hurt you? and Serena had said, no, it's because I think they'll see me. Nia couldn't understand the desire to be so hidden. Nia was scared of nobody seeing her, scared of being so unseen that she became nothing at all. Which was why the house was too big now without Jo in it. Too empty, too expansive, too echoing. Serena was always closing windows and Nia was always opening them.
Serena stood up slowly and said, "I'll leave you to your pages." She kissed Nia's head and then left.
Silence. Nia put her earphones in to destroy it.
From the back of the journal Nia pulled out the photo she'd slipped in their upstairs and glued it into the first page, smoothing it down with the flats of her fingers. Then with her purple pen she drew arrows from the photo so that she could label each smiling girl in it.
↬ KARIN: the prettiest one of my friends but she says she isn't. Emely secretly thinks that Karin is kinda bitchy she told me but I don't even think she is. Karin is way better at maths than me but she helped me pass last year and didn't even tell Mr Scottsburg that she'd told me the answers for our last homework assignment even when she got detention ッ
⇉ EMELY: she started spelling her name weird like that last year so idk but she also told me the biggest secret that anyone's ever told me and so she trusts me a lot and that feels important. Sometimes she gets really angry but its sort of funny angry and I don't mean to laugh because that's mean but you can't help it with Emely
⇢ BEV: idk if I even like Bev anymore after she started dating Billy because now she thinks she's pretty hot stuff. She used to be lots of fun but now I don't know if we're friends? I miss when she used to not think about boys and stuff.
⇉ SOPHIE: ILU! from Austria and she has a cool accent and sometimes when people get up in my face she can be super tough and loyal and even though she's not as pretty as Karin I think if I was ever going to go for a girl (in that way) then it would be Sophie because she's kinda all foreign and she sticks up for people really great. (not that I'm going to go lesbian but if I DID.)
⇝ HEATHER: NEEDS TO BE MORE LOUDER AND PROUDER! Really great but really shy and she doesn't need to be because she's so skinny without even trying and she doesn't look boy-skinny but nice model skinny and I'm jealous sometimes.
↝ NIA: ToTaL dOrK aLeRt never gonna have a date, never gonna have a boyfriend, lost something really important and still doesn't know how to fix that. idk.
Nia looked at what she'd written about herself and it was too maudlin and so she scribbled it out until nothing could be made out but ToTaL dOrK aLeRt. She wanted this page to remain nothing more than a record of her friends. She knew there would be pages and pages about Jo in the diary - there always was - but this page was for the living. And that included Nia.
In the kitchen, Nia found a bowl full of chocolate raspberry eggs and she unpeeled one happily, knowing they must have been left by the housekeeper. (Serena broke her 'no strangers in our house' rule for the housekeeper who came three times a week, because Serena didn't like cleaning and Michael didn't have time for it between drinking and teaching classes at the university. Still, Serena always kept away when Elsie was cleaning, as far as Nia could tell. Nia liked Elsie though. Elsie was old and nice and she had brought her easter eggs when no one else in the house would have done that.)
She sucked on one of the eggs until the raspberry burst in her mouth and considered the death of Jesus. Or the rising of Jesus? What was the Friday supposed to be for? Dying or Rising? If it was Dying then she didn't think he was all that special in that. A lot of people she knew had died. It wasn't unusual. She'd give him points for the rising: most hadn't managed that.
Nia pulled juice from the fridge and, after checking she was the only one in the room, drank from the bottle and put it back. Her earphones still sang out at her, but she hadn't been paying much attention to the songs that were playing. It was all about background noise. She considered, from her position in front of the fridge, what to do with the rest of her day.
Of course you get bored, Emely had said to her once when she'd complained, you don't even do Facebook! Emely didn't have a problem with using her time on the internet. Emely was Tumblr Famous and even some of the people at school followed her there. Mostly she posted cute pictures of herself and gifsets from Supernatural and Teen Wolf. She was always talking about what boys on what shows she thought were the cutest, but Nia didn't watch any TV shows enough to get that involved with them. She liked cooking shows, even though she wasn't really interested in cooking herself. And she liked nature documentaries sometimes, but mostly they were just in the background and she liked napping through them.
Nia used to think that when she grew up she'd be a vet, but she didn't know anymore what she wanted to do when she grew up. If she grew up. Jo didn't grow up. Jo was still 13 in all the pictures in the house, and Jo was still 13 in all the memories Nia had made. Jo would never be anything but 13, and she wouldn't get to be a vet either.
Nia felt like she was 13 sometimes, as though she'd gotten stuck when Jo had gone. Her psychologist had called her a 'very together young woman' in the paperwork she'd sneaked a look at when he was out of the room, but he'd also made her be on her anti-depressants and anti-psychotics - she didn't need the second ones anymore, just the first. Nia didn't feel together: Nia felt split and she was still waiting for that feeling to go. She was still waiting to not see Jo in the mirror.
I said diaries were stupid, Jo said, throwing the orange kush ball at her sister, not that you were stupid. You always take everything so personal.
Nia didn't take everything so personal. Jo took things personal.
There was a gap in Nia's diary after January 4th 2010. A long Jo-shaped hole in the narrative, and it had taken Nia a long time to pick it up again. She couldn't remember how to write the entries and she didn't know when to start after so much had happened. In the end, she didn't say anything about Jo at all, or about the time she'd had to spend in hospital healing, or about the way her mum wouldn't leave the house or talk to strangers, or about how her dad wouldn't look her in the eyes anymore. And so her first entry had begun with it won't stop raining today and Kate says if the gym floods again we'll prob get the day off, but she's just being stupid.
Kate was being stupid. The gym only ever flooded that once, and then the roof got fixed. The rumour was that it had been birds nesting up there that had caused it.
Good Friday meant no school, but it also meant all her friends were busy with their own families. Which meant that Nia had no choice but to be with hers. Not that any of the family were together right now. Nia was sitting in the drawing room across from the closed door that still said JOSETTE on it in floral letters.
Jo's door was always closed. No one went in there. (This was a lie: Sometimes Nia went in there, but the room felt like ghosts and sorrow and she never stayed long. Once, four years ago, she'd slept in Jo's bed and had the worst nightmares of her life and woke up half frozen. She never did that again.)
"You look deep in thought."
Serena's voice was quiet - everyone always whispered in this house. Had it been like that Before? Or was the quiet a symptom of After? It was hard to remember - and Nia looked over at her mother in the doorway, pressed as she was against the frame. Serena was taller than Nia and two sizes larger - when Nia borrowed clothes they hung off her - but she always looked smaller in every way. Serena wanted to be invisible and sometimes she almost succeeded.
"No," Nia said with a shake of her head and little smile towards her mum. "Just starting a new diary."
"Ah," Serena said knowingly, coming over to sit beside her, hands clasped between her knees. She looked on the fresh leather book on the table - fir-green, grass-green, grapevine-green - and said "born green we were to this flawed garden."
Nia thought for a moment and then said, "Whitman?"
"Plath," Serena smiled, reaching out to brush Nia's hair off her face. "Now our whole task's to hack some angel-shape worth wearing from his crabbed midden where all's wrought so awry and no straight enquiring could unlock."
Nia liked the way her Serena seemed to think in poetry all the time. Sometimes she knew the poems - often she knew them - but even now there were poems she swore she'd never heard. Even when she knew them, it didn't mean she understood them. But Serena used to read them to the girls like bedtime stories when they were little, and they had demanded their favourites over and over. (Jo had always liked the Lady of Shalott but Nia had liked I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud. They both liked The Nymph′s Reply to the Shepherd and The Hunting of the Snark)
Serena had wanted to be a poetry teacher, but instead she was a mother. It was only in the last few years that Nia had come to understand what had been given up for her when Serena had decided to keep her babies at eighteen.
There was a sound somewhere in the distant reaches of the house and Serena flinched slightly. She always thought people were trying to come inside. Nia had once asked, is it because you think they'll hurt you? and Serena had said, no, it's because I think they'll see me. Nia couldn't understand the desire to be so hidden. Nia was scared of nobody seeing her, scared of being so unseen that she became nothing at all. Which was why the house was too big now without Jo in it. Too empty, too expansive, too echoing. Serena was always closing windows and Nia was always opening them.
Serena stood up slowly and said, "I'll leave you to your pages." She kissed Nia's head and then left.
Silence. Nia put her earphones in to destroy it.
From the back of the journal Nia pulled out the photo she'd slipped in their upstairs and glued it into the first page, smoothing it down with the flats of her fingers. Then with her purple pen she drew arrows from the photo so that she could label each smiling girl in it.
↬ KARIN: the prettiest one of my friends but she says she isn't. Emely secretly thinks that Karin is kinda bitchy she told me but I don't even think she is. Karin is way better at maths than me but she helped me pass last year and didn't even tell Mr Scottsburg that she'd told me the answers for our last homework assignment even when she got detention ッ
⇉ EMELY: she started spelling her name weird like that last year so idk but she also told me the biggest secret that anyone's ever told me and so she trusts me a lot and that feels important. Sometimes she gets really angry but its sort of funny angry and I don't mean to laugh because that's mean but you can't help it with Emely
⇢ BEV: idk if I even like Bev anymore after she started dating Billy because now she thinks she's pretty hot stuff. She used to be lots of fun but now I don't know if we're friends? I miss when she used to not think about boys and stuff.
⇉ SOPHIE: ILU! from Austria and she has a cool accent and sometimes when people get up in my face she can be super tough and loyal and even though she's not as pretty as Karin I think if I was ever going to go for a girl (in that way) then it would be Sophie because she's kinda all foreign and she sticks up for people really great. (not that I'm going to go lesbian but if I DID.)
⇝ HEATHER: NEEDS TO BE MORE LOUDER AND PROUDER! Really great but really shy and she doesn't need to be because she's so skinny without even trying and she doesn't look boy-skinny but nice model skinny and I'm jealous sometimes.
↝ NIA: ToTaL dOrK aLeRt never gonna have a date, never gonna have a boyfriend, lost something really important and still doesn't know how to fix that. idk.
Nia looked at what she'd written about herself and it was too maudlin and so she scribbled it out until nothing could be made out but ToTaL dOrK aLeRt. She wanted this page to remain nothing more than a record of her friends. She knew there would be pages and pages about Jo in the diary - there always was - but this page was for the living. And that included Nia.
In the kitchen, Nia found a bowl full of chocolate raspberry eggs and she unpeeled one happily, knowing they must have been left by the housekeeper. (Serena broke her 'no strangers in our house' rule for the housekeeper who came three times a week, because Serena didn't like cleaning and Michael didn't have time for it between drinking and teaching classes at the university. Still, Serena always kept away when Elsie was cleaning, as far as Nia could tell. Nia liked Elsie though. Elsie was old and nice and she had brought her easter eggs when no one else in the house would have done that.)
She sucked on one of the eggs until the raspberry burst in her mouth and considered the death of Jesus. Or the rising of Jesus? What was the Friday supposed to be for? Dying or Rising? If it was Dying then she didn't think he was all that special in that. A lot of people she knew had died. It wasn't unusual. She'd give him points for the rising: most hadn't managed that.
Nia pulled juice from the fridge and, after checking she was the only one in the room, drank from the bottle and put it back. Her earphones still sang out at her, but she hadn't been paying much attention to the songs that were playing. It was all about background noise. She considered, from her position in front of the fridge, what to do with the rest of her day.
Of course you get bored, Emely had said to her once when she'd complained, you don't even do Facebook! Emely didn't have a problem with using her time on the internet. Emely was Tumblr Famous and even some of the people at school followed her there. Mostly she posted cute pictures of herself and gifsets from Supernatural and Teen Wolf. She was always talking about what boys on what shows she thought were the cutest, but Nia didn't watch any TV shows enough to get that involved with them. She liked cooking shows, even though she wasn't really interested in cooking herself. And she liked nature documentaries sometimes, but mostly they were just in the background and she liked napping through them.
Nia used to think that when she grew up she'd be a vet, but she didn't know anymore what she wanted to do when she grew up. If she grew up. Jo didn't grow up. Jo was still 13 in all the pictures in the house, and Jo was still 13 in all the memories Nia had made. Jo would never be anything but 13, and she wouldn't get to be a vet either.
Nia felt like she was 13 sometimes, as though she'd gotten stuck when Jo had gone. Her psychologist had called her a 'very together young woman' in the paperwork she'd sneaked a look at when he was out of the room, but he'd also made her be on her anti-depressants and anti-psychotics - she didn't need the second ones anymore, just the first. Nia didn't feel together: Nia felt split and she was still waiting for that feeling to go. She was still waiting to not see Jo in the mirror.
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