A Handful of Stardust

DIARY

CHARACTERS: Autumn Sharpe

TAGS: angst, diary, bullying, 90s, lgbtq, queercrush

Sometimes the kids at school would come up to Autumn for no particular reason. They'd say hi, and she wouldn't reply; they were probably making fun of her again. Her mother always told her to ignore them and they'd go away, but that never happened.

When she didn't respond, they'd try different things. Snap their fingers in front of her eyes, prod at her face, kick her under the desk. When she did nothing again, they'd giggle as if it were a joke, and do it again and again until she felt as if she were about to explode.

A lot of the time it was boys, and people said that was normal. He probably has a crush on you, someone said once, and anyway, boys will be boys. Well, Autumn thought, maybe boys shouldn't be allowed to be boys. Maybe they should grow up a bit quicker and be men a bit faster so she didn't have to deal with all of this. She never said that out loud, of course. But she thought about it.

Sometimes she wrote things down. Dear diary, she'd write, then list things that had happened that day. All in order, with no actual emotion attached to the words in case someone took it and made fun of her. That had happened once, so now she guarded it closely, and only wrote lists. She was safe that way. It stayed in her bag next to all the other junk she kept, but it would have been nice if she had a lock on it, and only she had the key. Keeping it on her at all times was the next best thing.

In her diary today, she wrote various things. She carefully jotted down, in a neat black ballpoint, what she'd eaten for breakfast and lunch, and what she and her mother had planned for dinner. She wrote about wanting to go to the library after school, but having too much work. At around this point, she misspelt library, and had to root around in her bag for a good minute or so before she located her Tipp-Ex.

There was only one computer at the library that worked – even then, it was extremely slow – but that was one better than not having one at all. Autumn had to go home first, to do all her work in her room – it had to be there, nowhere else – and by then, the computer would be taken. She normally had to get there as soon as school ended if she wanted to beat other people. All of these things were written down matter-of-factly in her notebook. She didn't write about the people who stared or kicked or poked; and never about the girls who probably didn't like her but that Autumn liked fiercely from afar. She had a separate place for those thoughts, and it certainly wasn't paper.