Weekend. Your parents are out. Your little sister too — she left to stay at a friend's place for the night. The house is empty.
Well... almost. Romy is here. Romy is always here. Your sister's best friend, who has been crashing at your place for so long that she has her own guest room, her own drawer in the kitchen, her favorite mug — the one with the fox drawn on it. This weekend again, she's sleeping here. Your sister left but Romy said "I'm staying, I'm too lazy to go home" and nobody found that weird.
You know Romy keeps a diary. You've seen her write in it a hundred times — on the guest room bed, headphones screwed into her ears, tongue stuck between her teeth. She hides it under the mattress. Not very clever. But you had never snooped before.
This morning, you went into her room to look for a charger. The mattress was slightly shifted. Out of curiosity — just to see — you looked underneath.
A brown leather notebook. Thick. Worn in the places where her thumbs have rested. A small plastic padlock — broken for a long time, she probably knows it. Tired stickers on the cover: a faded strawberry, a half-peeled star, a one-eared cat. An elastic band holds the pages. It smells like vanilla and old paper.
You took it. You opened it.
You are now sitting on your bed, the diary open on your lap. Three hundred pages, maybe more. Her entire life in ink and paper. The handwriting changes throughout the pages — round and neat at the beginning, then larger, more nervous, freer.
You open to the first page.
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Page 1 — Saturday, October 3, 2020
Ok ok ok new diary!!! I only lasted two weeks with the old one lol. This time is the one, I promise.
Anyway, nothing crazy today. Lyna has been spamming me since this morning because Ismaël looked at her like THREE TIMES in science class and she doesn't know what to do with her life haha. Ysé got into another fight with her mom over a grade, it's the 3rd time this week... hang in there, babe :(
And HE ate my yogurt again. THE ONE WITH MY NAME ON IT. Written in marker. In capital letters. Like, you don't see it??? Classic. It's so him it's annoying.
There's something I noticed last night, actually. But I'm not writing that down now. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe never lol.
Tomorrow is the party at Inès'. I have NOTHING to wear. SOS.
See you tomorrow, notebook. You hide well, okay?
xoxo R
P.S. — "drivers license" by Olivia Rodrigo on repeat today. Eleven times. It gives me a knot in my stomach for no reason.
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You turn the page. Little drawings in the margins — a sun, a sleeping cat, "R" surrounded by spirals. Blue ink, fresh, clean margins.
But at the bottom of the entry, a crossed-out sentence. The ink is barely darker — written then crossed out immediately after. You tilt the diary toward the light:
when he came home yesterday he smelled like the cold from outside and I didn't know why I breathed in so hard
Crossed out with a single stroke. You run your finger over it — the indentation is deep. She pressed hard.
While flipping through, two pages stuck together. Not by accident — the glue is thin, applied with a finger. There might be something between the two. Or maybe nothing. Impossible to know without separating them.
Further on, a torn-out page. The scraps of paper remain along the binding. She destroyed something.
The diary has three hundred pages. You can continue in order, skip pages, search by date, or look at the pages she dog-eared.
On the back of the diary, a kraft envelope glued to the inside of the cover. "DO NOT OPEN" underlined three times. The tape has been peeled and restuck so many times that it barely sticks anymore. You don't open it. Not yet.
━━━ 📖 ROMY'S DIARY ━━━
📄 Next page — Page 2 📄 Skip to page ___ — go to a number 📅 Search by date — search a period 📑 Sections — choose a phase of her life 🔍 Search for a word — search for a word 📁 Objects between pages — flowers, tickets, notes 📄 Stuck pages — separate the pages 📸 Envelope at the back — hidden content 🚪 Close the diary — stop reading