Diary One: Dawn, Sunny, Maggie, Amalia, and Ducky Read online

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  Diary One

  Dawn, Sunny, Maggie, Amalia, and Ducky

  Five-in-One California Diaries

  Ann M. Martin

  Contents

  Dawn: Diary One

  Saturday 9/27

  Sunday 9/28

  Monday 9/29

  Tuesday 9/30

  Wednesday 10/1

  Thursday 10/2

  Friday 10/3

  Saturday 10/4

  Sunday 10/5

  Monday 10/6

  Tuesday 10/7

  Wednesday 10/8

  Thursday 10/9

  Sunny: Diary One

  Monday 10/20, 12:15 A.M.

  Tuesday 10/21, 1:06 A.M.

  Wednesday Morning 10/22

  Wednesday 10/22, 12:09 P.M.

  Wednesday Afternoon

  Wednesday Night

  Thursday Afternoon 10/23

  Thursday Night

  Later Thursday Night

  Friday 10/24, 10:00 A.M.

  Friday 8:31 A.M.

  Friday 10:17 A.M.

  Friday 1:17 P.M.

  Friday 8:17 P.M.

  Saturday 10/25, 10:34 A.M.

  Saturday 10/25, 9:27 P.M.

  Saturday 10:49 P.M.

  Sunday 10/26, 10:05 A.M.

  Sunday 11:53 A.M.

  Sunday 2:07 P.M.

  Monday 10/27, 3 P.M.

  Monday 9:45 P.M.

  Tuesday 10/28, 9:30 A.M.

  Tuesday 2:35 P.M.

  Wednesday 11/5, 10:04 A.M.

  Wednesday 3:45 P.M.

  Wednesday Night

  Wednesday Night

  Thursday 2:15 A.M.

  Thursday 11/6

  Maggie: Diary One

  Sunday 11/9

  Monday 11/10

  Tuesday 11/11

  Wednesday 11/12

  Thursday morning 11/13

  Friday morning 11/14

  Friday 11/14

  Saturday 11/15

  Sunday 11/16

  Monday 11/17

  Tuesday 11/18

  Wednesday 11/19

  11/20

  Friday 11/21

  Saturday 11/22

  Sunday 11/23

  Monday 11/24

  Tuesday 11/25

  Wednesday 11/26

  Friday 11/28

  Sunday 11/30

  Monday 12/1

  Tuesday 12/2

  Amalia: Diary One

  Saturday 12/20

  Sunday 12/21

  Monday 12/22

  Tuesday 12/23

  Wednesday 12/24

  Thursday 12/25

  Friday 12/26

  Saturday 12/27

  Sunday 12/28

  Thursday 1/1

  Friday 1/2

  Saturday 1/3

  Sunday 1/4

  Tuesday 1/6

  Wednesday 1/7

  Thursday 1/8

  Friday 1/9

  Saturday 1/10

  Sunday 1/11

  Monday 1/12

  Saturday 1/17

  Sunday 1/18

  Ducky: Diary One

  Feb. 12

  During Homeroom, F the 13

  Feb. 14, Sat. Morning

  Sur La Plage

  Feb. 15

  Epilogue

  In Which Ducky McCrae

  Sometimes You Wish

  A Passage of Several Days

  Saturday at Venice Beach

  In the Kitchen

  The Great McCrae

  The Morning After

  It Is Two A.M.

  2:15Still.

  2:23

  A Personal History by Ann M. Martin

  Dawn: Diary One

  California Diaries

  Ann M. Martin

  Contents

  Friday 9/26

  Saturday 9/27

  Sunday 9/28

  Monday 9/29

  Tuesday 9/30

  Wednesday 10/1

  Thursday 10/2

  Friday 10/3

  Saturday 10/4

  Sunday 10/5

  Monday 10/6

  Tuesday 10/7

  Wednesday 10/8

  Thursday 10/9

  For Laura

  Friday afternoon 9/26

  Well, here I am, starting another new journal. This is my second since school began, and it isn’t even October yet. It turns out that this is an appropriate day to start a new journal, since I feel like one part of my life has ended (way too abruptly), and a new and very scary one has suddenly begun. But the new, scary part didn’t start until the end of school, so I’ll get to that in a minute. I want to back up first and record yesterday, which was when everything really began. It started off normally. There was no sign of what was to come—no dark skies or weird violin music.

  I woke up thinking about friends—my friends, and friends in general. Sometimes I just don’t understand friends. Like, why do they have to change all the time? Something is going on with every single one of my good friends, and I don’t like any of it. They’re probably writing about me right now in their journals. They’re saying that Dawn Schafer should just settle down and not get so distracted by school. Well, I can’t help getting distracted. I mean, just this morning, for instance, I was thinking about what I don’t like about eighth grade. It’s really been bothering me. Okay, so Vista is divided into those three main buildings. The biggest one is the high school building for grades nine, ten, eleven, and twelve. The middle-sized one is for preschool through grade four, and the smallest one is mine, the middle school building, for grades five through eight. Well, my building is soooo crowded this year. Suddenly there isn’t enough space for us all. There are about a thousand kids in each class, and there aren’t even enough rooms for us. My math class is held in the gym—on Tuesdays and Fridays. On the other days it’s held in the back of the auditorium, while an English class meets in the front. It’s a mess and I hate it. No wonder I’m distracted by school. I can’t concentrate or settle down.

  See? Just thinking about school made me get off track. I was talking about my friends, then … poof.

  Maybe—maybe—what was announced today will be for the better. But I’m not holding my breath.

  Anyway… back to yesterday morning.

  As always, I walked to Vista with Sunny and Maggie. I left crabby Jeff behind, glad he was going to walk to school with his dorky friends. First I went next door and stood outside Sunny’s house. In the old days I used to barge up the walk to her front door and ring the bell. Sometimes I’d even go inside without ringing. I knew Sunny and her parents would just be eating their breakfast. Now I never know what to do. Or at any rate, I don’t know what to do during those times Mrs. Winslow is home from the hospital. Like, if I ring the bell will I wake her up? Do they want me to come in or do they need as much private family time as they can get?

  I was standing at the bottom of the front stoop, feeling like a jerk, when the door burst open and Sunny barreled outside.

  “Okay, let’s go,” she said.

  I noticed she was holding a bag of granola. “Didn’t you eat breakfast?” I asked her. “You can eat first. We don’t have to rush.”

  “That’s okay. I’ll eat on the way to school. Mom’s having a horrible morning. She’s on chemo again and the drugs are making her sick.”

  At first I didn’t say anything. I was thinking that if my mom were really sick, I’d want to stay at home with her. Or at least not f
lee the house early in order to get away from her. Then I realized maybe that wasn’t true. I mean, how do I know how I would react if Mom had lung cancer? Maybe I would do just what Sunny has been doing lately.

  Sunny was practically running down the sidewalk.

  “Hey, wait!” I called. “Slow down.”

  Sunny slowed down. A little.

  We turned a corner. I always feel the exact same way when I reach the end of our street and make that left onto Palm Boulevard. Like I’ve stepped onto a movie set or something. Maybe it’s because Palm is the unofficial divider of my middle-class neighborhood and Maggie’s definitely-not-middle-class neighborhood. All those swimming pools and tennis courts. I feel uncomfortable. Like I shouldn’t even be looking down those streets.

  Yikes. My hand is getting tired. More later.

  Friday, later on, 9/26

  Vista may seem like a big mess to me right now, but there are some things I like about it very much. The journal idea is one of the best things about Vista. I bet most of the students are like me and would keep journals even if the teachers didn’t require it. At least they would keep them by the time they left Vista’s elementary building and moved into the middle school building. It seems to me that just around that time, around fifth and sixth grade, everything begins to happen. Suddenly life gets so complicated. I suppose that life always gets more complicated. I mean, the older you are, the more complicated it is. In kindergarten, for example, what do you have to worry about except whether your friend will share her crayons with you. It seems like such a big deal at the time. Then by third grade you have to worry about whether William Barton is going to kiss you on the playground, and it’s enough to make you fake a stomachache so you can stay home from school. But you have no idea what’s coming, what you’ll be up against when you’re ten, twelve, thirteen. For me, things heated up until they spun out of control when I was twelve. That was the year Mom and Dad got divorced, and Mom moved Jeff and me all the way across the country to Connecticut. We had to say good-bye to California, to Vista, to everyone and everything. I thought my heart would break when I had to say good-bye to Sunny. I truly didn’t know how to say good-bye to my best friend. Then Connecticut turned out to be cool, figuratively and literally. I made friends, Mom got remarried, and I acquired a stepfather and a stepsister, who already happened to be my Connecticut best friend. Then Jeff decided to move back to California, then I did too, and then Dad married Carol. Not exactly in that order. The point is that there was a lot (a very huge IMMENSE lot) going on in my life, and through it all I kept my journals. All right, I admit I didn’t write in them quite as much when I went to Stoneybrook Middle School, where journal-keeping was not required (like it is at Vista, starting in kindergarten, when you can barely write, and continuing until the day you graduate from twelfth grade). I know why the teachers make us keep these journals, apart from the fact that this activity is a healthy habit, a creative outlet, good writing practice, and all that. The teachers never say so, but (since they were all kids themselves once) I bet they remember what it’s like to be consumed by feelings and to need an outlet for them. Or maybe that’s not a kid thing. Maybe it’s just a human thing. Anyway, when I start to feel eaten up, or even when I’m just feeling chatty, which is pretty often, I like to turn to my current journal. (This one is # 22.)

  Friday evening 9/26

  Maggie was waiting for Sunny and me on her corner. I thought she looked like she’d been crying. But all she said when she saw us was, “Hi, you guys. How’s your mother, Sunny?”

  “Don’t ask.”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  Sunny looked at Maggie. Then she looked at her a bit harder. “No, I’m sorry,” she said gently. “What’s wrong, Maggie?”

  “Nothing.” But Maggie was definitely trying not to cry.

  “Is it your mom again?” asked Sunny.

  “Or your dad?” I suggested.

  “Not really. I just, um … I needed more time to study for our math quiz. I didn’t plan very well, I guess. I don’t think I can get an A on the quiz now.”

  I don’t know if that’s really what was wrong. It might have been. Maggie’s awfully hard on herself when it comes to school. Actually when it comes to just about anything. Miss Perfection. She used to be rebellious and do things like dye her hair green, which I kind of admired. Now she’s made this turnaround, and she tries to control everything. And excel at everything.

  Sunny and I let the subject drop.

  “How’s Curtis?” Sunny finally asked. She was smiling.

  The mention of Curtis made Maggie smile too. “Good!” she replied. “Mom didn’t really like having to go out and get a prescription for amoxicillin for a kitten, but it was worth it. I had to pay her back. I don’t care, though. His paw healed up.”

  “Are your parents going to let you keep him?”

  “No, but it doesn’t matter. I just want to fix him up, then find a good home for him.”

  We turned off of Palm, walked two more blocks, turned again, and there was Vista.

  “You know, it even looks more crowded,” I said. “Doesn’t it?”

  The front lawn was crawling with kids.

  “It’s morning,” said Sunny, already impatient with me. “Of course it’s crowded. Everyone’s arriving. All the buses just got here.”

  “But it’s more crowded than usual,” I replied.

  “She’s right,” said Maggie. “Well, a lot of kids do switch to Vista in seventh or eighth grade so they can go to the high school, since it’s so good.”

  “Why’d they let so many in this year?” I grumbled.

  “Hi! Hi, guys!” we heard someone call then.

  It was Jill, of course. She was hopping off of her bus and running across the lawn toward us.

  “Oh, please. What is she wearing?” Sunny said under her breath.

  “She must have found her first-grade things,” Maggie whispered. “I wonder how she got them to fit.”

  Jill was wearing a sweatshirt with a huge pink unicorn on the front. The unicorn’s horn (why aren’t unicorns called unihorns?) was sparkly gold, and the unicorn was standing on a powder blue cloud that was made of some puffy material. On Jill’s feet were pink sneakers, and on the toe of each sneaker was a pony with an actual tail hanging over the side of the shoe.

  “Hi,” we called back to Jill.

  No one said anything about Jill’s shirt or shoes, which I thought was commendable of us. Then I realized that Jill wanted us to comment. And so her face fell when Sunny looked beyond her and said, “Well, I guess we have to go in.”

  I glanced at my watch. “Yeah. The bell is going to ring any minute. Come on, you guys.”

  Later Friday evening 9/26

  My friends thought I found school distracting before, but that was nothing. Yesterday was out of control. Maggie and Jill and Sunny and I walked across the lawn, through the main entrance, outside again into the courtyard, and then into the middle school building. Really, I felt like our building was just oozing kids. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see them seeping out of windows or through cracks around doors like mold or bacteria.

  In my homeroom we were short two chairs, so Brent and Max sat on a windowsill. It turned out that the chairs had been taken by the teacher next door who suddenly had two new kids in her class.

  “What is going on?” I whispered to Tray Farmer, who sits next to me and knows everything. (Well, he has an answer for everything, anyway. I think he makes some stuff up, but it always sounds good.)

  “It’s the current surge in eighth-grade enrollment,” he replied, and I noticed that little tic by his left eye.

  “I guess, but why?”

  “Vista is an excellent private school, Dawn,” he said. “Progressive yet demanding. Challenging yet accepting of a student’s special needs and/or gifts.”

  I looked around to see where Tray was hiding the Vista brochure. It must have been there somewhere.

  “An atmosphere of—”


  “I know, I know.” I cut him off. “I mean, why are there so many more eighth-graders this year?”

  This was one question for which Tray had no answer. At least not a quick one. His face was still screwed into a frown when the bell rang and homeroom began.

  Out in the hallway after homeroom, I squeezed my way through the halls. I am not exaggerating when I say “squeezed.” At one point I really did have to ooze between two bunches of kids in order to go past them. I felt like toothpaste in a tube. At the end of the hall, I caught sight of Sunny. She saw me. But we couldn’t reach each other, so she just raised her fist in the air and called out, “Rulers!”

  “Rulers!” I shouted back.

  Sunny and Maggie and Jill and I have waited for years to be able to do that. As eighth-graders we are the Rulers of the middle school building. It’s a nice position to be in. I wonder why the seniors don’t bother to call themselves Rulers of the high school. Oh, well. I’d intended to enjoy my status this year. I’d earned it.

  Saturday morning 9/27

  Okay, so I ran out of steam last night and never got around to writing about what happened in school. Or maybe I was afraid to write about it—as if putting the words on paper would make it seem even more real (and horrible). But there’s no point in delaying any longer. So here goes.

  At the very end of school on Thursday, Mr. Dean’s voice came over the loudspeaker, and he said, “Attention, all eighth-graders. Please report to the main auditorium tomorrow morning at 9:30 for an assembly with the students in grades nine through twelve. Thank you for your time.” (He’s always formal like that.)

  An assembly for us eighth-graders with the high school kids? We never do things with the high school kids. And why just the eighth-graders? Why not the rest of the middle-schoolers? That was weird.

  Well, guess what. What happened at the assembly was beyond weird. It was unbelievable. And scary. At 9:30 all us eighth-graders were excused from our classes, and we left the middle school building and walked to the auditorium. I met Sunny, Maggie, and Jill at the entrance to the auditorium. Sunny and Maggie and I tried hard to look like we weren’t actually with Jill, since she was wearing this sweatshirt with huge crayons painted on the front. You could tell she thought it was cute, but really. Anyway, the four of us walked into the auditorium, and suddenly I felt the way I did at my very first assembly at Vista. I was a kindergartner then, and the assembly was for all the kids in the lower grades, so there I was with the fourth-graders. They looked like giants to me, and I felt like a pea.