When Logan and I broke up the first time, back in eighth grade, I forgave him, and he corrected what he was doing wrong: he had stopped listening to me. He stopped listening, and I forgot that to be listened to, you have to speak up. People not listening to what I say, though, has stayed with me. He doesn't do it anymore, he wouldn't dare, but...others do.

I've been trying to put my finger on why I haven't been eager to spend time with Carly lately. At first I thought it was because of that trust issue that was raised in our conversation, but that wasn't right: I give time to everyone, and Carly is a great, amazing, talented person, why wouldn't I want to spend time with someone like that, even if it never deepened into a friendship because of her own reservations? And then I realized it as Shoshannah made me a bowl of Cream of Wheat for breakfast: it's soft like soup but not as messy as oatmeal. I don't like oatmeal right now, it's so ragged looking, you can't keep it even as you eat it. I was smoothing the surface of the food and I looked up, it hit me that I hadn't even had to say that I was struggling, everyone knew. At some point, my voice stopped being important. Everyone can see that I've lost weight. That I'm...my food habits have picked up, that I'm counting every bite. My voice has disappeared: if I said I was fine, everyone would ignore me, wouldn't they.

Carly ignored what I said. And I'm upset. I guess I didn't realize it until just now.

( Ghosts appear and fade away. )

I don't know why I said what I said to Marty. All I want is for everyone to think I'm...I mean, I might as well have just told him that I am anorectic, I suffer from depression...that I'm suicidal, I should have just told him everything, considering what I said.

Dr. Axtell says that it could be that I wanted to show someone in this school who thinks I'm such an angel that I'm not, that I'm actually broken inside. Or maybe I wanted what would happen if I showed that side of me.

But I wonder if...if it wasn't the part in me that wanted Marty Bukowski, Marty who hits, Marty who yells, Marty who judges and is rude and base...that I wanted Marty to punish me for being so broken. That he'd mock me or...maybe a tiny part of me wanted him to tell everyone, then I'd be...and it would force me to try it again because I couldn't...

I haven't been able to eat since. And I don't want to eat today. I was able to hide it in front of Loesy last night at the Rodowskys, thanks to Jackie interrupting dinner about twelve times. Not eating lets me balance this anniversary against how I feel inside, so that I can enjoy it and still...

I told Marty what I cannot tell people, and he was...so decent, and...Loes is so sweet, and...

...and I can't eat.

Alexander kissed me yesterday, and instead of pulling away, I kissed him back, thinking about how easy it would be if I were with him instead of Logan. To be with someone who doesn't know. But then...it's like an itch that lives under my skin: I'm in love. And it's hard to be with someone when the relationship gets this deep and this serious, and with someone as popular as Logan and someone as...broken as me. It's so hard, and yet...

I love him. So I won't let go.

And if I fight for us, why can't I fight for myself.

And that's why I'm writing this on my laptop, at the hospital at Yale. I needed Dr. Axtell to call Dad to tell him that I needed this, just a day or two to have doctors helping me all day long before...I mean, I kissed Alexander back because I wanted to...

I need help. I need now, because this time, I...next time, I might not...but this time I know that I do.

All because of that kiss. I don't know if Loes will forgive me, I don't know if Alexander...I don't know a thing, except...in a way, I'm so glad for that kiss, because it's stopped me before I slid right out of myself.

Miranda's Test Results
Type 1 Perfectionism |||||||||||||||||||| 90%
Type 2 Helpfulness |||||||||||||||||||| 90%
Type 3 Image Focus |||||||||| 34%
Type 4 Hypersensitivity|||||||||||||||||||| 86%
Type 5 Detachment |||||||||||||||| 66%
Type 6 Anxiety |||||||||||||||||| 74%
Type 7 Adventurousness || 10%
Type 8 Aggressiveness |||| 14%
Type 9 Calmness |||||||||| 34%

type score type behavior motivation
1 22 I must be perfect and good to be happy.
2 22 I must be helpful and caring to be happy.
4 21 I must avoid painful feelings to be happy.


...even this test knows, doesn't it, that I'm a mess.

I flipped out on Logan yesterday; I couldn't even stop myself, I was just...I let everything go on him, every little fear. I'm slipping right now, and everybody watches us, everybody because he's Logan Bruno, Mr. Star, Mr. Football Savior, Mr. Awesome. Which isn't fair to him, that everyone treats him like that, but...all of those eyes are on him, and then they hit me. His perfect little girlfriend that makes up a perfect little couple, and...I feel like I'm starting to crack, but nobody can see. Especially him. And I know it's unfair, to push him away, to snap at him when he worries, but...

Why won't this all just go away? Why can't things just stop? Why can't everyone just leave me alone, everybody. Everybody wants something from me: Dad needs me to be his good girl. Sharon needs me to be bright and happy and social so she feels better. Dawn needs me to be healthy so she doesn't worry. All of my clubs need me. Loes needs me...and he also needs me to be this sexy thing that I am not. I thought I could be, but. I'm not. I'm failing.

When did I stop dreaming about who I wanted to become? I wanted to evolve this year. Instead, I'm starting to tread water all over again. I'm tired of always waiting to drown. I feel like I'm one bad rain away from slipping under, and...just when did everything get so complicated that I can barely keep up? But I have to. They need me to. I need me to. I'll figure something out. I will. I'm just so tired of this.

I'm starting to get tired of myself. Of being me. I just want things to be easy, just once. I need an end.

I keep trying to write something here...and then I look underneath...and see that last entry. The last one.

There shouldn't be an entry here. It should stay empty forever, I shouldn't be here to write this entry. I shouldn't be here, at my desk, at my computer, my breath fogging up the screen as I lean forward to see what I wrote. That very last entry, a sort-of cyber suicide note.

I need space, between the me that writes here...and the me that wrote that.

It's been a month since then.

It feels like a lifetime...

How do you do this. Who gets a letter, who doesn't. If I write a letter to Stacey, will Claudia feel left out? Will Abby wonder why I didn't leave something for her? Would Bee's parents mail her letter to her in Colorado? Would they all compare length? If Tess's letter is longer than Logan's, will he feel less loved? Maybe I shouldn't write letters at all. Just a note, to explain why.

No. Just a note to say that I'm so sorry.

I'm the only one whose body is made of cinder and smoke, who feels the fire every day. The anniversary of it is Sunday: my bones ache for it, forecasting its coming like as if it were rain. Dr. Reese told me before the fire, when I was just a sad and stressed thirteen year old who needed a therapist to get through the day, that I had to deal with how I felt about my mother's death, the way my father raised me, the discovery of my grandparents...even how it felt to watch my father change into this completely different, happy man at the hands of Sharon, a kind of happiness that I could never give him...that I had to deal with it all before I let it burn me out.

And then...my house burned down. Burn me out, burn me out. No wonder I'm empty.

So I need to say I'm sorry. For being the weak one, for not being good enough...for me. And that will have to be enough. And then I can be done.

I hope, when you die, you get to sleep, that there are no nightmares. That everything you lost is found again.

I hope my mother's waiting for me.

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.

In group today, our therapist Alicia spread out art supplies on the conference table, this cornucopia of creativity. I hesitated, of course, because I'm not Claudia. I'm not...much of anything when it comes to art. I can knit, though, and I asked Alicia if I could knit something instead. She studied me for a while and then reached to the table and grabbed a digital Nikon camera and gently set it in my hands.

She told us that we talk so much about our bodies, how we feel about our skin and all that roils underneath it to make us see ourselves the way we do. A warped, sick way that...destroys us. So, we were going to use these art materials to represent how we see ourselves in more than words.

Here I was, still stinging from what Ashley said on the boards. I talked to Logan about it...I told him that a part of me wondered if she was right. Or if maybe that's how everyone sees me back at SHS: still meek and weak and a nice and quiet shadow of someone else. He said that I'm clearly not the same. I am stronger. It's partly why he thinks that the two of us feel so right together now, because I'm more sure of myself and what I want...and saying what I want as opposed to hoping that someone would magically know what was in my head, so that I wouldn't impose or be a bother. I have a spine.

I just...forget about it sometimes.

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