Dear Diary, Undated
I spent the afternoon with Dr. Jacoby at his office. He wanted to see me and go over what I had said to him on my tapes. He wanted to hear more about James Hurley and the fact that I had mentioned going sober because of him. I told him James was someone I had known for a long time, although not so well. I told him I had fallen in love with his purity and the idea that if I was strong enough I could let James take me out of this darkness. I told him that it was a secret relationship only because I had wanted it that way. Donna knows. But the three of us are friends at school so I know she won't tell Bobby.
I told Dr. Jacoby how hard it had been for me lately with everything getting so close, and how I finally felt certain that James was my last chance for light.
I feel like a fake, I told him, even though I was Homecoming Queen. I had such a story behind my smile in the photos and at the football game as well. I still felt the hands and the mouths of the men I had been with hours before the photo was taken. I told him I had worn the same panties just in case BOB came. I told him it felt like the school and the town and the world were mocking me by voting me Homecoming Queen. . . . How could they not see how I was being swallowed up by pain? How dare they make me a spectacle like that and ask me to smile again and again and again!
At the game Bobby was the hero he wanted to be, but from the stands I could hardly make him out on the field. Everything seemed far away and muted, as if the blood rushing through my head hushed all the sounds except for my heartbeat and my breathing, which seemed labored, erratic.
I told him I had been having awful nightmares. All of them about the woods, the paths, the tree, footprints, the sounds of an owl. . . . I felt death in these dreams and I also felt lust. Lust like I had known when it was fresh to me and it wasn't tired and worn-out and bettered only by violence.
I did have one dream, the worst, about water. In the dream I was standing at the water's edge and the sky was very very dark but reflected on the surface of the water was the sky filled with white clouds and a deep blue color. I remember thinking in the dream that if I dove in and swam far enough, I might come up in another world that was not filled with so much badness . . . so much hatred. When I did dive in, I remember swimming half the length of the lake . . . I think it was a lake - only to be pulled down by a hand as it grabbed my wrist and took me deeper and deeper and deeper. I told him I thought that hand was BOB'S.
I told Dr. Jacoby that the last time I had seen Leo and Jacques had not been very nice. We had all been fooling around, and they had tied me up in this chair, but I started to get this feeling of claustrophobia . . . restriction. I started to panic and hyperventilate and I tried to explain what was happening but it was difficult to speak and no one realized I was being serious. I started to get very lighthearted and there were flashes of light in my eyes and I was finally able to scream out for them to stop. This was not all right . . . I was not all right. We had been playing one of the games we play a lot where I am trapped in a cabin far far away from any help and that I am a virgin and they are men who have been sent from a strange and erotic place to take my virginity and to punish me for resisting them. And so Leo heard me say this was not all right, but he thought it was part of the game and he said, "Oh, is the little virgin scared?" It went on like that and I started rocking the chair back and forth and I guess Leo was really into it, as was Jacques, and Leo got a little crazy and he hit me, hard . . . too hard. My ears rang. I began to cry. It wasn't until then that Jacques said, "Wait a minute, she's not okay." They untied me and I ran home without saying a word.
Leo's slap had left an ugly bruise on my cheek. I had to tell my parents that this horrible black and blue mark came from when I was carrying a dinner tray from Harold's apartment.
I told Dr. Jacoby I missed Donna and I wished that she and Ronnette would like each other. I wish that we could all be friends so I wouldn't have to hide anything from anyone.
I told him about how I had gone to Harold's last week, really fucked up and how scared I made him by coming on to him pretty heavy. And then, basically because he could not leave his house, forced him to have sex with me.
I told Dr. Jacoby that I cried for hours afterward because I felt so horrible. It took Harold almost an hour to talk to me because I had made him scared, even in his own home, his only refuge. And then I told Dr. Jacoby that half the time I hated it and the rest of the time it made me feel strong and hot between the legs.
On the way out of Harold's, Mrs. Tremond's grandson, Pierre, saw me and came up to me and pulled a gold coin out of my ear and walked away.
I told him that BOB was getting very very close and that I was trying as hard as I could to write about him to find out what he was, who he was, before he could get to me. I had been writing so much about him in my diary in poems and dreams and each time I did it I would see him at my window or feel him coming closer, but I wasn't sure if it was paranoia. . . . I just wanted to be normal. I just want to be like everybody else. I don't like having to be careful of who to talk to because someone might hate me if they knew the truth about me, about how dirty I am. And how somehow, I don't remember it, but, somehow everyday I asked to be treated this way. It always happens, so it must be something I don't realize I say, or something I think. I told him how I went to my safety deposit box and how I saw the drug money there and I had a fantasy about taking it and running away forever. But I didn't deserve that. I deserved to stay here. I had done something wrong. My heart hurt so badly, but I knew I had to stay.
I took the responses from my ad in Fleshworld home with me and stayed up all night putting pictures of me and my panties into envelopes . . . and how I had to keep getting higher and higher on coke so I wouldn't break down and cry and I didn't want anyone to hear my cries because they didn't matter to them anyway. They never have.
