September 16

Yesterday I remember thinking I was the happiest person in the whole earth, in the whole galaxy, in all of God's creation. Could that only have been yesterday or was it endless light-years ago? I was thinking that the grass had never smelled grassier, the sky had never seemed so high. Now it's all smashed down upon my head and I wish I could just melt into the blaaaa-ness of the universe and cease to exist. Oh, why, why, why can't I? How can I face Sharon and Debbie and the rest of the kids? How can I? By now the word has gotten around the whole school, I know it has! Yesterday I bought this diary because I thought at last I'd have something wonderful and great and worthwhile to say, something so personal that I wouldn't be able to share it with another living person, only myself. Now like everything else in my life, it has become so much nothing.

I really don't understand how Roger could have done this to me when I have loved him for as long as I can remember and I have waited all my life for him to see me. Yesterday when he asked me out I thought I'd literally and completely die with happiness. I really did! And now the whole world is cold and gray and unfeeling and my mother is nagging me to clean up my room. How can she nag me to clean up my room when I feel like dying? Can't I even have the privacy of my own soul?

Diary, you'll have to wait until tomorrow or I'll have to go through the long lecture again about my attitude and my immaturity.

See ya.

Excerpted from GO ASK ALICE (c) Copyright 1998. Reprinted with permission by Aladdin Paperbacks, an imprint of Simon and Schuster. All rights reserved.