Page 114 of Barefoot Dreams
The entries go on and on. He didn’t write in them every day, sometimes only once a week or just a few times a month but the contents are mostly the same.
He struggled with belonging from day one. He was trying so hard to be normal when normal is the worst word I’ve ever known.
What is normal?
Who is normal? Who’s the one setting these standards.
My heart breaks with each new entry. Tears slowly streaming down my face and when I let out a small sniffle, Griffin jerks up.
“What’s wrong? Why are you crying, Birdy?”
“Because this is sad. Because I want to strangle my brother and Luke for not seeing what you were going through. Because I don’t understand how I didn’t dig deeper.”
“Hey,” he says softly, bringing his finger to my cheek as he catches the stray tear. “I brought this onto myself. There’s no one else to blame. No one else could’ve known what was going on inside my head. I was good at pretending. At hiding. At fighting it all off.”
“Did you ever figure it out?”
“What?”
“What you were so angry at?”
“I did. But not until years later. Decades even.”
“Oh?”
“Mm-hmm. I’m sure you already solved that puzzle, but it took me coming back home a few months ago to see it. Accept it.” My breath catches. “I wish I had the guts to figure it out sooner. Keep reading, little J,” he adds quickly, ending that conversation, and I go back, picking up the next journal.
Not all entries are sad or angry or about me. He shares so many of the stupid, silly things the three of them did back then. Secrets none of us knew, like that it was Luke who broke my mom’s vase. Or Cal who chopped her flowers off because he needed them to “seal the deal” with Lexi during freshman year of high school.
But then thereareentries about me. So, so many entries. And the older he got, the more extensive they get.
Griffin confides in his “Not Dear Diary” about every time he caught a glimpse of me. He complains how he wouldn’t get to see me enough when he moved on to high school, and I was still in middle school.
He even wrote about all the plants I was growing at the time. Listing each one by its name and how much it’s grown.
“I cannot believe this!”
“What?”
“You paid attention to my garden!” I say in part shock, part awe, but Griff just shrugs nonchalantly. Like it isn’t a big deal.
“I paid attention to anything you liked or didn’t. I just paid attention to you.”
This man…
This boy…
And then there’s this entry…
Not Dear Diary,
I got my first real boner.
Can you believe it? Not one from those magazines Cal brought a year ago, it felt nothing like that. No, this was a for real one. Two, actually.
We went to the beach today to celebrate the last day of summer break before school starts again. Everyone was there. But I didn’t care about everyone, not when Julie came out wearing that bikini!!!
It was tiny, at least the top was, because the small knit red triangles couldn’t contain her tits that came out of nowhere, recently.
