Hello, I Dislike You Intensely. Have a Nice Day.

I did the right thing. I did the right thing. I did the right thing.

Instead of play practice this afternoon, Ms. Greenwood took us all to a cafe. It was really nice. There was a terrace out front and we all sat there with our coffee and tea and pastries. The light glinted off car windows as they passed by, illuminating faces in profile. I thought, Today has actually been good. Ignorance can be so paralyzingly wonderful sometimes. (Note that this was all before Alex's letter.)

Maynard sat down next to me. "Hey, Dani," she said. "Mind if I sit here?" This threw me so off guard I had no idea what to say for a second. Honestly, I can't remember ever having someone I barely know ask to sit next to me.

"Yeah," I said. "Of course."

"Thanks."

"Do you ever give money to homeless people?" I asked her suddenly. I don't know what made me say that. I had a brief vision of her getting back up and leaving me for someone actually normal, but it was interrupted when she said, "Yeah. A lot of the time." She looked to the street and then continued, "I know I probably shouldn't because some of them only use it for drugs and some of them aren't even homeless people to begin with, but some of them really do need it. And you can never tell for sure."

"That's true," I said. "My mom always buys food and stuff for them. And sometimes she talks to them if she has the time. They look at her like she's Jesus." I fiddled with the ends of my hair. "Yeah, it's one of the reasons I still have faith in the world."

"That's so nice," she said. "I knew a homeless guy once. He showed me some graffiti people did on the side of an abandoned factory. It was a topographical map of the world, and it almost took up the whole wall."

"That's amazing."

"It was."

I'm scared. I want to be her friend, but I don't want to at all. I just can't get left behind again.

I still have Alex's entries from the empty wall. They're still here, in this notebook, between the last page and the back cover. I know it's not smart and I know it'll end terribly, but I'm going to read them. It'll be like saying goodbye, almost. And saying goodbye is closure. And closure is good. Closure is smart. So here I go, being smart.

[Entry One]
Dear Diary,
My name is Alex Hatfield, and three score and eighteen years ago, it was sixty-two years before I would be born. I am not very interesting, being your average adolescent malcontent with no purpose or direction in life. Rather, I'm simply here to take up space and breathe in oxygen that would be better off breathed by people like you. Like a protist.

I knew a protist once. I named it Rutherford B. Hayes, because it was very distinguishing and if you're a protist, you fare much better with very distinguishing names than with names that aren't so distinguishing. For example, if you happen to spy a protist-eater lurking about, you can yell out, "No! Don't eat Rutherford B. Hayes!" and the protist-eater will shudder at a name of such magnitude and hurriedly go about exiting the scene.

If I ever see a protist again, I'll probably name it John Dorian Turk Salinger. Because my favorite book is The Catcher in the Rye, and my favorite show is Scrubs.

This letter will now self-destruct. Bye.

[Entry Two]
Dear Diary,
I don't know why everyone was getting all bent out of shape over Ms. Tischler making us put our entries in public places. It's exactly the sort of thing teachers enjoy doing, except maybe a little bit on the extreme side. But anyway, guerilla art is really cool. I've tried doing it a bunch of times, but I only end up keeping everything. It's really neat stuff. Why would I want to put it out in the world where idiots will see it and laugh stupidly to their friends about how gay the person who did that must be? Who was the last person you met who really, actually cared about things, anyway?

Maybe I'm just selfish.

Does it matter? I bet you don't even care, whoever you are. I bet you're thinking about all the things you could have done with your time instead of reading this. Like memorizing phone numbers, or selling real estate, or dying your hair, or smoking a cigarette, or a thousand other things. I'm thinking about all the things I could be doing instead of writing this entry. Like throwing away old papers, or texting Delia, or baking baked things, or psychoanalyzing the various losers on various lame sitcoms. But I'm not doing any of those. I'm writing this letter. And you are reading it.

Which I think makes a reasonably eloquent ending to a mostly pointless entry. Since I, frankly, exhaust myself with such eloquence, I am going to go take a nap now.

[Entry Three]
Dear Diary,
So the fateful day arrives when I must talk about my family and friends. The topic of my family has always been a sensitive subject. I was orphaned at a painfully young, Dickensian age, and raised by a troupe of friendly circus freaks. The circus, sadly, had practiced a few too many illegal practices in the past, and was utterly disbanded in the confusion of a sudden police raid. Fortunately, a kindly elf couple discovered me, and took me home to live in their hollowed-out mushroom.

I have various friends among the wood-sprites that frolic about and take naps on the cap of the mushroom, but I must say that my best friend is a prehistoric lamprey named Percy. He's a blast. Even though he lacks a jaw.

[Entry Four]
Dear Diary,
"You're special," Dani Faetherit said to me today after a long, tiring, bizarre, subversive, and highly competitive sort of psychological game.

What she doesn't realize is that she's the special one.

And that is all I have for today.

[Entry Five]
Dear Diary,
Here, as per your request, is quantity one (1) genuine, organically grown, lovingly nurtured, carefully preserved, mint condition CHILDHOOD MEMORY. Please sign on the dotted line, and enjoy. Thank you for using FedEx.

I was six. My father was gone again. He was gone a lot, sometimes for a whole week at a time. What I would find out later was that he was getting sick of us, me and my mom; he was the type of person who always needed something new - new flavors, new colors, more stupid and outrageous bets. The world was too pathetic and small for him.

I was a loner as a kid, except I wanted to fit in. It was just that I could never figure it out. So while the neighborhood kids played kickball one afternoon, I climbed onto the roof of our house by way of a tree in the neighbor's yard. I wanted to stay there forever. No one could make me come down because my dad was never home, and my mom spent almost half her life in the bathtub, reading a book and drinking tea. I thought she was a mermaid. She did look like a mermaid, with her wide eyes and long eyelashes and pale hair in waves down to her waist.

And the shocking thing was, I stayed up there for almost three entire days. How no one else noticed me, I'll never know. I brought along peanut butter sandwiches and pretzel sticks and apple juice. I took a pad of paper with me to scribble in or make paper airplanes from. When I needed to go to the bathroom, I used the gutter. The whole thing was almost like a protest.

When almost three days had gone by, I didn't feel like staying on the roof anymore. I didn't want to go back down the way I came so I banged and stomped around on the roof shingles until my mother heard and grabbed my arms through an upstairs window. She swung me down through a few feet of empty air, and back in through the window. How we both didn't die from the stunt, I'll never know.

But I see my almost three days on the roof of my childhood home as the greatest singular achievement of my life.

[Entry Six]
Dear Diary,
Dani ditched English today. I had the feeling it was something to do with me, but I was probably being selfish again. I tried telling her after class that I'd found the entries she'd written for English, but I just couldn't do it. I said her name, and couldn't go farther. She turned around and said, "What?" I noticed the way her hair swished as she turned, it was just like in the movies, and somehow that hurt. I realized how dumb I had to be looking just standing there, so I said, "Never mind." She didn't ask further. She walked away then, and suddenly I felt like I needed to follow her. Dani turned around again, annoyed, and asked what it was this time. Random words spilled out of my mouth, I knew I sounded like an idiot, but she suddenly looked nervous and mentioned something about play sign-ups. I watched her as she signed up for the play and for a moment I wanted to sign up for the play too, but instead I went home.

[Entry Seven]
Dear Diary,
I went to the park with Delia today. We laid in the spot we'd found once that belonged only to us, watching the clouds. The child in her wanted to find shapes in them. I loved the child in her. We laughed, and I loved how her laugh felt on my skin, like a knitted scarf you've had since you were little. Our talk went from clouds to concerts, past and upcoming. Everything was predictable and solid and nice. I realized how lucky I am to have her, but something was making me drift just a little bit away, I didn't know what.

Delia got bored with lying on the grass and wanted to go to the mall near here, so we did. She was standing in line at the food court when I saw Dani, and suddenly I realized what had been making me drift. I felt six again, small and shivering with the restlessness inside me. Hungry for an adventure.

Starving.

It wasn't like I didn't know her, because I did know her. I read all the entries she'd left, the entries she'd felt for sure no one would find. I loved her strength, her weakness, her mind like a Surrealist landscape. She glowed and flashed in the night. Delia was steady and warm and healing. I was sputtering and crackling and burning out. But I went to her. And I said what I felt. And then I ran back, but not before I had one last look at her face - she looked like a first-time skydiver newly dropped from an airplane.

Dear Alex,
If you make me fall in love with you again, you're dead. As a matter of fact, you died a long time ago.