To right a life

CXXVII

With a sigh, Eleven plops down on her back on her friend's bed.

   "That bad, huh?" Max comments, raising an eyebrow.

   "But it'll pass, won't it?" Eleven looks to her friend for validation, but she just shrugs her shoulders. "Max..."

   "I don't know, El," she says honestly. "Maybe if you get it off your chest?"

   "I'm not going to tell him," she says flatly, straightening up suddenly. "No way."

   "I wasn't suggesting you do," Max huffs, rolling her eyes. "No, what I'm suggesting is that you write it down. In a journal," she clarifies.

   "I'm not very good at writing..."

   "One more reason for you to try it," the young woman urges her. "According to my psychologist, it helps to understand and rationalize what we feel. In some cases, it can help you overcome what you feel."

   "What if it just makes it worse?"

   "You can't know that without trying first, can you?" Max replies. And then she leans over to open the drawer of her bedside table: "Here; you can use this one."

   Eleven accepts it with a frown. "You're giving me your diary?"

   "Yeah, but I never wrote anything." At Eleven's exasperated look, Max shrugs again. "It's not my thing... but maybe it's yours, who knows?"

#

"Did you have fun at Max's?"

   Henry asks that question every time, so Eleven answers as she does every time: "Yes; we laughed a lot."

   "I'm glad."

   And although Eleven notices his eyes on the notebook under her arm, neither of them says anything else.

#

As she has told Max before, she is not good at writing. And that's why, pen in hand, she decides to mimic the process she's seen on television by girls her age.

   Dear diary, she begins. My name is Jane, but people call me Eleven. Max says that writing down what happens to me can help me... She hesitates, then. Help her in which way, exactly? She purses her lips and adds: It can help me feel better.

   Yes, that's it: to feel better, right?

   According to what I saw on TV, it's normal to start a diary by telling a story. So, I'm going to tell my story, and then, when I feel like I can't deal with... this thing I'm feeling, then I'll try to write about it.

   Yeah, okay. So: my name is Jane, and they call me Eleven. Max is my best friend. I live with Henry. And Henry is...

   How to define him? How to find a word that does him justice? Although she has no great literary pretensions and doesn't want to get lost in details, she also doesn't want to mention Henry just in passing—as if he wasn't the reason she's starting this diary; as if in the future someone (herself) will reproach her for her lack of sincerity while reading it.

   So, she thinks it through, and completes her sentence: Henry is... everything.