Phoenix Rising Read Free

paper if she didn’t want it to be read? She was always writing something; poems or stories. Her words are all I have left. I want to know what Helen was thinking, deep inside herself.
    Sometimes when Lucas and the folks are gone, I go through the photograph albums, or I get out the projector and screen the family movies of us at home or on trips.
    The movies are weird. Not much is happening. Mom and Dad are smiling and waving, or talking to the camera even though there’s no sound. Lucas is usually scowling and straining to edge out of the frame, as if he’s been kidnapped by an alien family and doesn’t care for life on Mars. There’s Helen as a baby, with fat pink arms, and later as a Brownie, her dark bangs clipped short.
    Then there’s me, Miss Spaghetti Legs. I look like a stick figure with hair, a tangled mass of long blond curls. I’m peering out of it as if it were a thicket. Lucas used to call me Cousin It.
    Bambi says I should cut my hair. She says it makes me look like a kid.
    I liked being a kid. I hate being like this. Nothing is familiar anymore. Mom and Dad aren’t smiling. Lucas has escaped. My body’s different, getting big and fat. (Dr. Shubert says I have a distorted self-image. I’m five feet eight and weigh a hundred and ten pounds.) I’m going to a shrink. This is my last year of high school.
    Helen is gone and I’m alone.
    I want her diary to talk to me, to say: Don’t worry, Jess. I’m still your big sister and I still love you the best. You can’t see me anymore, but that doesn’t mean I’m dead. It means —
    â€œJessie? Jessie Castle?”
    â€œYes, Mrs. Smith?”
    Startled, I lift my head, realizing that I’m supposed to have been reading the textbook on my desk.
    Everyone in class is smiling at me. I’m the resident comedian. Poor Jessie, they say, she’s had it pretty tough, but it’s amazing how she’s pulled her act together.
    â€œJessie, would you please tell us what you consider to be the gravest threat to public health?”
    â€œLife,” I say promptly. “Closely followed by death.”
    Everybody laughs. Then the bell rings and we all file out.

3
    January 3
    The beginning of a brand new journal. The beginning of a brand new year. All those days and pages to fill !
    I wonder who I’m writing to when I write in here .
    When I was a kid I wrote KEEP OUT! in the front of all those little, fat diaries; the ones with a key you lose right away. Now I write ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK, which is more like saying: Come In If You Must, But Watch Your Step .
    Who is the You I’m speaking to? Me, I guess, so that later on I’ll be able to remember what I was thinking about now; and to help me figure stuff out. That’s partly it. I know what I’m thinking when I see it in print. But I must believe that someone else will read it, too; otherwise, why would I say Enter? (Years from now, when I’m a famous author, my biographer will say: “Helen Castle ate an ice-cream cone and washed her hair that day.”)
    Dream on .
    Today Ms. Tormey read “The End” to the class; my story about the world blowing up in a nuclear blast. It’s sappy but I love the last paragraph: “A quick flash and the sky was filled with orange light. It was almost like the sunset. Then it reached out its long, fiery fingers and stroked the fur of the kitten he held in his lap.”
    Nobody said a word when she was done. At times like that I can tell (dare I say it) that I’m a real writer; by the way the people listen and the way their faces change; as if the words had carried them to another, realer world inside their heads .
    I really want to be published someday. Because when you write a story it’s like talking to someone with your mind, and when somebody reads it, the two of you connect. Otherwise, it’s like talking to yourself, or throwing a ball that nobody