They found her diary underneath her bed, amongst discarded articles of clothing, wrappers and dust. I told them they had no right looking through her room when they didn’t even know if she was gone for good or not, but they didn’t listen. Her parents said they hadn’t touched the room since she’d been home last, but everyone in town knew that the parents of Emily Grey rarely told the truth. She’d always said she didn’t trust her parents with her secrets, and I guessed that’s why she decided to dump them all on me.
It was mild stuff then; cheating on tests, hooking up with boys, stealing from stores, drinking with the group of kids at our school with questionable morals. When this started happening, I had told her to tell someone who could actually help her get out of this funk. Someone unlike me, a thirteen year old smack dab in the middle of the ever dreaded “awkward stage” who was more afraid of getting bad grades than anything else. I’ve changed since then, when I realized there are scarier things in life than the wrath of your parents when you bring home a test with a nice big fat ‘F’ on the front in thick red ink. Things like the kind of stuff Emily got mixed up in later.
She hadn’t always made bad choices. When we first became friends, way back in seventh grade, she was one of those golden girls who could do no wrong. I still wonder, four years later, what made her choose me out of all the girls vying to be her closest friend. I would say best friend, but Emily Grey was not a girl who had a best friend. That would mean telling everything to them, and Emily didn’t trust anyone enough to do that.
I never knew she kept a diary. They showed it to me, told me I could have it. I only wanted to look at it for a bit though. I couldn’t bring myself to open it until I had had it for about a month and a half, and that was still pretty hard for me to do. I think that little leather-bound book, with the yellowed and ink-covered pages, was Emily’s true best friend. The only thing she could absolutely pour her heart and soul into without fear. It made me sad and happy at the same time. This book was the only thing this broken girl could trust to not judge her, yet at least she had something. I haven’t read an entry yet. I don’t think I’m ready for that. I don’t know if I ever will be.
I feel like I already have a good enough idea of what those pages hold, and that I can spare myself the gruesome details. Emily told me what I suspect is only half the story, though I know I was lucky to get even that. It was during one of those days last year where she would tell her parents she was coming to my house for a sleepover, go out and get drunk, the actually come to mine at around three in the morning and sleep off her hangover.
One night in particular, she didn’t fall asleep right away. Instead she tossed and turned until I turned on my bedside lamp, illuminating the room with a soft, warm glow. She looked up at me from her spot inside the sleeping bag on my bedroom floor, with an expression on her features that I never saw on her before or after that night. Her eyes, wiped clean of all the makeup I had grown accustomed to her wearing lately, looked haunted and empty. Her face was thin, and her skin was pale. Her voice shook when she finally spoke, a side effect of the alcohol or the mental state she was in, I’m not sure. “Eleanor?” she asked timidly, her quavering voice scaring me a bit. “Yeah?” I replied, wondering what on earth she had to tell me that she hadn’t already. Again, this was before I knew she kept secrets from everyone, me included. “I have something to tell youuuu” she said, slurring her words slightly due to the substantial amount of alcohol she had surely consumed not too long ago. “What is it, Em?” I was pretty scared of what she was going to say at this point, so my voice was shaking almost as bad as hers.
“I’ve always felt like nobody gets me. Really really gets me, ya know?” she whispered. Her eyes were closed now, but I didn’t dare turn off the light for fear that she would fall asleep and I wouldn’t hear where this was going. “That’s nonsense, Em. I get you” I insisted. “No you don’t.” I didn’t argue. We both knew it was true. I’m fairly certain no one ever really got Emily, even if she thought so. She continued. “I’ve finally found people that understand me, El, isn’t it wonderful?” I looked over to her. Her eyes were still closed, but her pained features from earlier had now assumed a look of peacefulness and innocence. I started to get worried. “Who?”
“Just a group of people I met at the bar tonight. They see the world the same way I do, and I love it.” By now, she didn’t seem drunk, but I knew she still had some alcohol in her system or else she wouldn’t be telling me this. “Huh. What did you guys do together?” I asked cautiously, trying to keep my voice even. I didn’t want to scare her into stopping. “Ya know” she said, “the usual.” I waited a few moments, knowing she would elaborate. “I even tried this new stuff they gave me. Oh and guess what” she continued, “they invited me to keep hanging out with them.”
“Are you sure you should do it?” I asked. “They seem kind of sketchy, especially if they gave you drugs…” my voice trailed off. “Who are you, my mother?” snapped Emily. She then rolled over, clutching her head, the pained expression etched onto her face once more. “Ugh thanks” she groaned. “I get a headache just thinking about my mother.” I tried to think of something to say to keep her talking, but the next thing I heard from her was snoring. Sighing, I turned the lamp off and tried to go to sleep, to no avail.
I sort of forgot about that incident for a while. Maybe not forgot, but it wasn’t my main focus. Emily had been skipping school a lot lately, and she would cancel our plans all the time. Her parents said she was out with her “wonderful friends.” Then Emily came to school one day with a brand new tattoo of some obscure symbol and no explanation. She said she had gone out for drinks the night before with her new friends, the ones that “get” her, and doesn’t really remember what happened. “Why do you say ‘out for drinks’?” I had asked her. “You’re sixteen. How old do they think you are, for God’s sake?” She said it never came up.
The police would probably want to know all of this. They asked if she had stared associating with new people recently, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell them. Especially when I saw the same symbol Emily had gotten tattooed on the inside of her forearm pressed into the leather on the front cover of the diary. Until now, I had thought that the emblem was a drunken decision, a mistake. Now I know it’s a logo. I don’t know exactly what for, but sometimes I feel like it’s better to not know what Emily was up to that last year. Is this state of not knowing better than the truth? Maybe it was a cult, or a gang, or something along those lines. But all I know for sure is that it wasn’t good. I also know for sure that Emily is gone, and the chances of her coming back are zero to none.