My desk is perfect.

Everything in its place. Computer, textbooks, notebooks, dayplanner. Pens, Post-Its, highlighters. My certificate from NHS. My camera. A vase with daffodils I cut from my Logan garden. It's so perfect, orderly and clean. It's exactly how I want to be, to seem. I am not.

Dad traced his finger down the edge of the desk yesterday and asked if I was okay. He said that he's getting worried about how I've had another night terror, about how thin I'm getting. How thin I am. I smiled at him so bright, my insides winced, and I said that I am fine. I've said it so much that the words have lost their meaning and their shape. I'm fine, I'm fineimfineimfineimbreaking apart, and I don't know how to put myself together again? I don't know what to do? I don't know...I'm so lost, and I'm so scared, and I'm so empty, it's like everything that I do is falling down into a deep chasm, and I'm doing everything I can, I'm doing everything perfect, and nothing seems to...it all falls in me and down and through me, and I'm so...I don't know what to do. I don't know how to say it. I just feel like I'm screaming, but my voice has died...it's like it's ash. I taste ash when I speak. I have these nightmares, over and over, I wish...what do you do when you feel like you're already dead?

Sunny's gone; she left yesterday. I...wish I knew what to say about it, but all I am is empty. After being so close to Sunny, the selfish hurricane of her, I feel a bit ruined, like the shingles of my roof have been pulled off, windows shattered.

Ever since I yelled at her...I've felt the empty place in me that is shaped like my mother. And it's so large inside of me: it bleeds into the empty place of growing up for over a decade with a man who treated me like a china doll in a glass case and not a girl, the empty place of being denied Grandma and Grandpa, the empty place that makes it so hard to get out of bed some days that I don't even understand. On my birthday last year, Abby and Anna were showing Kristy how to pass your finger through a flame, real quick, touching fire without being burned. I stared at them in fascination for a moment, to be that cavalier about fire, and then I reached out my hand to the birthday candles they had relit and did it too. But I was staring at the fire and...I guess I forgot to move my finger because suddenly, Abby was yanking my hand back and my finger was red and scalded by the fire. And I didn't feel a thing, I just stared at my blistered skin and waited for the hurt. But all there was left was an empty place where the sorrow had been, eroding me down into a hollow canyon.

Sunny's torn it all back up again. I really don't want to talk to Dawn; she was such an apologist for so long, I just...I'm not angry with her, but I need time to try to manuever around the empty places again before I can pretend that I'm all better around her. And the Sunny stuff, the Dawn stuff...I can't eat. I am so disgusting on the inside...I can't. No one's really noticed yet, and I need to work really hard to make sure that they don't. I need to make some order in my life, I have to. I can't take people telling me what's right: they aren't me. This is what I need to get by, and everyone can just jump off a bridge if they don't like it, this is what I need. I just...do.

I'm curled up on my bed with Roo, the most adorable puppy in the world, something that Sunny treated like a broken toy. He hates Dawn's room because that room equals Sunny who equals bad memories, and not that I can blame him. Tigger doesn't like to be inside much: he hasn't, since the fire. I understand that...I don't, either. But it's left me lonely, missing his warm body beside me at night, the way I'm beginning to miss Logan at night, the memory that lingers in the empty space. Like my insides turned out. Having Roo around, it's like a salve. He balls against the concave curve of my stomach, and he doesn't tell me its too thin. He just cuddles there and doesn't move, even in the dark tuck of the night, when smoke curls in my mind and makes me tighten in fright. He stays with me, all night, and when I feel so empty that I wonder if I'm still real, there in the darkness, I can reach out and feel his breathing against my hand...and I know that I can make it to morning, at least.

Dr. Reese says that I worry too much about my friends, that I am overly concerned with their well-being so that I can ignore my own problems. It's possible. It's probable, if I have to be honest. But...how can I stop? How can I not worry about Tess getting her heart broken by this boy from Day School; Barbara working herself into the ground with her grueling training schedule; Dawn, Stacey, Abby, Loes, Jo, even my new friends, Hannah and Angie...Susan Taylor's stepmother sounds like such a mean woman, I just have such an urge to run and hug Sharon.

Even Sunny. I worry about Sunny all the time.

But Claudia...Claudia is taking up so much space in my heart. I'm so concerned: there's something wrong with her, I can feel it like I can my own body. She's so self-critical, she's so unsure, and then...she gets so calm.

She reminds me of me when I was in the worst of my illness. Not entirely, I...don't think she's as bad as I was, but...something is wrong, and whatever she is using to make it "better" isn't working. I don't think she's on drugs...I just don't know. I'd give anything for Claudia to see how brilliant and amazing she is, the way we see her. Still, if there is anything I know, it's that when you have your mind made up that you are...lacking, somehow, how incredibly blind you can be. And how incredibly alone, too.

I just don't know how to help her. I hope she knows how much I want to. Anything she needs.

I don't want anyone, anyone, to end up like me.

When I was crying to Logan during lunch the other day...I thought to myself how I couldn't understand how Sunny would run away. No: what I didn't understand was how Sunny would want to run away and not want to come back. How she can live like she does.

But I was wrong. I know how Sunny can want to run away. I wanted to do it, too, once. Not run away, though. I wanted to die. I never got far enough to decide how, if I wanted to swallow pills or sit in the garage with the car running and fall asleep on the concrete of the garage that was mine was I was a little girl. Never wake up. Or maybe I'd slit my wrists because feeling real pain in my body might distract me from how empty I was feeling. How far away and detached, like I was floating three feet above this thing called Mary Anne, this pathetic thing with her pathetic, ashed out life. The fire burned away everything, even my will. I was empty.

Nobody knows. Only Logan. And my doctors, but...I had to. I didn't mean to tell Logan, and it changed every inch of us. It's why he hovered so much...nobody really understood, how the boy who said that I didn't have to talk to him after the fire, but he wanted me to talk to somebody, like Dr. Reese, could suddenly cover me like a blanket, so worried every moment for me. Things didn't get better until I was able to live my life again: until I wanted my life again. And I couldn't want my life with Logan telling me to want it. I had to put my pieces back.

So I understand, where Sunny is coming from. Logan's wrong, she and I are similar...so I have to help her. I don't know how. I don't know what it is that she'd hiding from and what it is that she needs. I'm still learning that about myself...every day. Every minute, every day, I'm trying to understand myself, and what all of the empty parts mean.

Yesterday was Tess's birthday. Barbara had a surprise sleepover at her house, and all of our friends from SADD and their friends from the orchestra filled the living room. It's so nice, to see how much Tess has changed since eighth grade: not her body, it's the fact that she's so full of energy now, energy and confidence. Barbara jokes that Tess is our enforcer; I think there's truth in that. I think all three of us have changed a lot. I was a wimp back then, Barbara was so severely depressed for a very long time after Amelia, and Tess was the weird new girl that everyone picked on and then ignored. We've evolved from our old selves, but there is still threads that tie us back to who we were. Barbara misses Amelia horribly some days and she gets lost in that. Tess has a chip on her shoulder from when she an outcast, and she can weild it like a weapon at times. And I can still be a righteous baby when I want to be, not half as strong as I want to be.

The Hirsch mansion is four blocks away from Kristy. And as Katie drove me home, we passed by the Thomas-Brewer house, all Christmas bright and beautiful. Part of me wanted to jump out of the car and run to her front door. Apologize until my tongue went numb and make it all better again. Tell her about going to the hospital and how I'm scared to go but more scared that it won't fix me right away. Tell her I really miss my mom right now, so much I cried for her for no reason this morning when I woke up, so hard my stomach hurt? Tell her every single inch about my night with Logan and how this feels like a dream. That I'm scared that he's dated girls that are so beautiful since me...Dorianne, Corinne, Hannah Toce and Andi Gentile and so many other of the most popular and pretty girls in our class, and what will everyone think? That he's slumming with me?

Instead, I didn't say a word. Katie drove down the street, and I was silent. Yes. In a way, I'm still that girl.