“I don’t know. My mind just . . . went blank or something.”
“Everyone has a day like that.”
“I never did,” I said.
“So now you’re normal. Relax. You’ll do better the next time,” he insisted. He shrugged. “Isn’t that why there are erasers on pencils?”
I stopped and smiled. “That’s exactly what my father says when I complain about something I’ve done wrong.”
“My father doesn’t say it; my mother does. My father doesn’t believe in mistakes. He claims it’s not in his religion.”
“What religion is that?”
“Perfection,” he replied, then laughed and gave me a quick kiss on the lips, which at least twenty other students saw, their eyes blinking like the lenses of paparazzi cameras. And then he hurried off to beat the late bell for his class. Most of my classes were advanced placement classes now. He turned and waved and then pretended he had been grabbed and pulled into a room. I laughed. He could have entertained everyone on the Titanic.
What a mixture of emotions I was feeling. I was excited about being with him. I really did love every minute, and I loved how we were like everyone’s perfect couple, but I was feeling a little numb, confused, very tentative about myself because of the plan we had made for reading the diary together. I kept coming back to it all day, and sometimes I’d be trembling. Why was I so nervous about it? Did I really think the diary had some evil magical power because it had been buried so long in the rubble of the original Foxworth Hall? Was opening it like opening Pandora’s box? Did my father get me thinking like this by his wishing so strongly that I wouldn’t read it?
My father always had this weird attitude about the original Foxworth Hall, never really wanting to talk about it or what had happened there, even though I was related to them on my mother’s side. Maybe he didn’t want to talk about it precisely because of that. When I was younger and even now, some of my classmates wondered if I had inherited any of the Foxworth madness.
It got so even I began to wonder.
Finally, I decided I was just being stupid thinking all these weird things and pushed it all out of my mind by concentrating hard on my schoolwork.
However, as soon as the bell rang to end our final class of the day, I felt my heart begin to beat faster in anticipation of what Kane and I were going to begin doing. My girlfriends, especially Suzette, continued to tease me about being with Kane before and after school, filling up every free moment with him. I thought they were just jealous.
“Will we ever see you again?” Suzette joked.
“Will you ever answer the phone when we call?” Kyra followed.
I shut them out, their laughter falling behind me like pebbles falling from a speeding, bouncing dump truck, and hurried to meet him. He was already at the exit waiting for me. He put his arm around me quickly and turned us to the door.
“I lucked out. Not much homework tonight,” he said. “I can spend more time reading.”
“I have my usual ton.”
He opened the door, and we walked out quickly to the parking lot and his car. Practically every classmate of mine smiled licentiously at us as they passed us, some walking faster just to do that. Kane seemed oblivious to it. We had known each other a long time, even though we had just started going out together. I was still trying to understand him. Was he indifferent to most of the things that captured everyone else’s interest because he was just plain arrogant, or did he simply not care? Perhaps our experience with Christopher’s diary would peel that onion faster when it came to him.
“Don and Ryan were driving me crazy to go skeet shooting with them this afternoon,” he said after we got into the car. “I forgot I had made plans to do that.”
“You want to?” I asked, welcoming the reprieve. “We can postpone this.”
“Hell no. As you know, I’ve got reading to do, and with your father coming home late, we have a good opportunity to get into a lot of it,” he said. He started the engine and drove us to my house.
I could never imagine Kane Hill nervous about anything, but until we turned into my driveway, he talked continually, describing the most inconsequential things that had happened during the day. It was a
lmost like someone dictating Facebook or Twitter posts. His desk in math class wobbled too much. His math teacher, Mr. Brizel, broke his green chalk, the one he used to underline answers on the blackboard when he was frustrated with class responses. It was too cool in shop class because Mr. Primack left a window open too much and no one had the nerve to complain.
I was half-listening, anyway. I was thinking that I should call my father just to be sure he was going to be late for dinner and wouldn’t arrive earlier than I expected and discover us in my room reading the diary. When we entered the house, I went right to the phone in the kitchen. Kane glanced at the stairway and looked at me expectantly.
“Go on up ahead of me and start,” I said. “I have to call my father.”
He shot up the stairs, taking two at a time, and turned to my room before I even entered the kitchen.
He really was into this, I thought, but that still wasn’t making me feel confident about it now. I called my father.
“Hey, what’s up?” he asked. “Anything wrong?”
“No. Just checking to be sure you will be late for dinner.”