Amber

Chapter 18

October 22, 2014

Dear Journal,

I'm worried.

Ya, I know I'm worried all the time. But this is different because it's not about me.

I'm worried about Hannah.

She says she's quitting drama club. She was basically guaranteed to get the lead role in the fall play next month, but I guess she doesn't want it. And everyone was trying to talk her into taking it, so she just quit and stormed out.

She hasn't gone to school this week. She keeps telling Mom she's sick. But it's Hannah, who has never not wanted to go to school before even when she was sick, so my mom has no reason not to believe her.

I can imagine the phone call to the school office.

"Yes, my daughter will be staying home ill today."

"Okay, who is your daughter, Ma'am?"

"Hannah Austin."

(Silence.)

"Hello?"

"Did you say Hannah Austin?"

"I did."

"My God—the world is ending."

A few of her friends have even come up to me at school to ask if she's okay. I tell them that she's just not feeling well.

Hannah deserves a break as much as anyone. It's understandable she would get burnt out. But that's not what worries me. It would be one thing if she were complaining about how stressed she is. But she hasn't. Instead, she's been talking about other things. Weird things from out of nowhere that she's never mentioned before.

Like last night I went into her room, and she had taken down all of the posters from her walls and replaced them with these random pictures she found online of some secluded society in the mountains that lives off of the land and doesn't believe in, like, money or technology and stuff. I asked her about it, and she said she wants to disappear after high school for a while and find out what she wants out of life.

She seems so confused, and I don't know how to help her. She always planned and talked about moving to New York after high school and how one day I would come see her in a show on Broadway and she would demand that I got to sit in the front row. Last night I asked her if she still wanted to move to New York one day, and she sort of shrugged and said, "Probably too far away." It didn't make any sense though because this society she's talking about is all the way in Asia!

I thought it would be fun to skip school today and spend it with Hannah like we've done on snow days or back when our dog Skeeter died. My track record of faking sickness is not as flawless as Hannah's. It's actually super flawed. I tried to dupe my mom so many times. Hey, I had good reasons. I've had tons of traumatizing moments that justified sick days.

I once spilled an entire carton of milk on myself during lunch in middle school.

Sick day!

I once laughed so hard I literally peed my pants during homeroom.

Sick day!

A boy who liked me in fourth grade thought he would tell me that I was his crush by picking his nose and putting the booger on me.

Several sick days ...

God, no wonder I'm a crazy, journal-writing, hit-list girl now.

My mom always gave me the suspicious eyebrow raise when I asked to stay home, no matter how much I tried to raise my temperature by sleeping with my head on the heating vent. But today I think my mom sort of knew what was up and still let me stay home because she's probably as worried about Hannah as I am.

We all made breakfast together—Hannah, my mom, and me. Hannah seemed to be in a good mood until stupid Mom decided to ask her about the fall play and how rehearsals were going. I tried to warn her with a pretty obvious death-stare from behind my leaning mound of pancakes, but she still asked anyway. My mom is missing brain cells. That's the only explanation.

Hannah got upset, yelling at Mom and telling her that there were more important things in her life than "the stupid fall play" and that she wished someone would ask her about things that actually mattered to her. My mom and I stared blankly at each other once Hannah left the room. Probably because we were the two people in the world who before that moment thought we knew exactly what mattered to her.