Jennifer's Diary - Anne Fine [4]
Just as proudly, I pointed to the first line of my story.
“No! Not pink! Never pink!”
Jennifer snatched her diary and read through what I’d written. She was so cross again, she wouldn’t speak to me the whole afternoon. And I think she only came to my party because her mother made her.
She wore blue.
Chapter Six
I WANTED THE diary so much.
“Please!” I begged Jennifer. “It’s wasted on someone like you. You hardly use it. Please give it to me.”
“What will you give me for it?”
I lifted up my desk lid.
“Nothing,” I said sadly. “There’s nothing in here anyone would want.”
Jennifer shrugged.
“I’ll just keep it for now, then.”
“But you don’t write anything in it!”
“That’s because nothing happens.”
“No, it’s not.”
She let me fill in the empty pages, though. The back ones she hadn’t used. So on the January 2nd page, I wrote a horror story about a trumpet that could call freshly dead people out of their graves.
On the January 3rd page, I made a list of all my Unspoken Fears, in code. (Mind your own business.)
Two pages later, I wrote a poem called Stamping on Granny’s Daisies.
She wanted it back then, so I let her have it. But she couldn’t think of anything to write.
On the January 6th page, I put down my Private Worries in strict alphabetical order. (Mind your own business again.)
On the blank page of January 8th, I started on a list of Secret Hopes. But there was only one. (That Jennifer would give me the diary.) So I gave up, and started another ghost tale.
And it was as well I hadn’t used up the space, because the story got so complicated, it went on through blank pages January 9th and 10th. And even then I had to finish it in tiny writing, so as not to get tangled in “Help! Help!” on the 11th.
On the January 12th page, I wrote a letter begging for the diary.
Dear, sweet and lovely Jennifer,
All of my life, I have longed for a diary like this one to write all my ideas and thoughts in. It’s kind of you to lend it when I ask. But borrowing’s not like having. This diary and I were made for one another. We shouldn’t be parted for a single hour.
And I kept on, for the whole page, with Jennifer pretending she wasn’t reading it over my shoulder.
“What now?” I asked her. “I’ve run out of room until tomorrow.”
“Maybe I’ll use up tomorrow’s page myself.”
“I doubt it.”
“I might,” she snapped.
I didn’t want to argue. (I was still hoping she would give it to me.) So I went back and filled in all her old half-used days.
I stared at her January 1st (It was quite cold today.) and then picked up my pen.
But not cold enough to stop noble and kind lolanthe taking soup to the poor. From my window, I watched her pick her way over snow and ice to old Mrs Morris’s hovel. Inside that rude hut lie sixteen shivering children, all half-starved. If it weren’t for dear lolanthe –
Miss Hardie interrupted me in mid-flow.
“lolanthe! Come up to my desk, please. I want a little word with you.”
You couldn’t really call what she had with me ‘a little word’. It was more like a giant great lecture, all about ‘pushing my luck’, and ‘going too far’, and ‘the point at which imagination shades into simple rudeness’.
I had to say sorry about a million times, and then stick clean white paper over most of my Time Travel story and write in something else over the top. It took a lot of time, so it wasn’t till the next day that I got round to filling in Jennifer’s mostly-empty January 4th (Mum and I went to the shops.)
Mum and I went to the shops.
“Quick!” she said. “Stuff this up your pinny, Jennifer, and I’ll hide this in my bag.”
“Mother!” I said. “You mustn’t shoplift! It’s quite wrong!”
Her face cracked into an evil scowl.
“I’m not your mother!” she cried. “It’s time you knew, Jennifer. There was a mix-up at the hospital when you were born. This high-born lady and myself were sharing a room. The cots lay side by side. And in the middle of the night –
I broke off. I had to. Jennifer was stabbing me with her pen.
“Stop it!” she ordered. “Stop it!”
Normally, I’d have argued. But I’d been in such trouble already