Chapter One

The Stone Girl

May 23, night

It is the middle of the night. My mother has vanished. Leon is here in her place. I can hear him moving around in my mother's room. I do not even want to think about him, about how it will be with just him and me here in 2B. I will have to face him in the morning. Until then, the night is mine.

I have covered Nicky's cage but I hear him pacing, the scratch of his cockatiel claws on the sandpaper perch. He is tossing seeds, and every few minutes, he utters a shriek, as if he too is alarmed by our sudden change in circumstances.

I sit at my desk and open the new diary that my mother gave me as our parting gift. I use the tiny key and pick up the purple-feathered pen. I begin to write in purple ink: "PRIVATE. The penalty for unlocking this diary without permission is Certain Death." I draw a skull and crossbones so anyone who breaks into this journal can see I am not kidding. Here I tell the truth about things. I hear Leon outside my door.

"Are you all right?" he whispers through the door. "Are you hungry? Are you thirsty?"

"I'm fine," I lie.

"I saw your light," he says.

"I sleep with the light on," I call back, another lie.

I wonder if he knows I am lying. I overheard my mother's whispered instructions before she went away --- what I eat, when I wake, how I take my keys to school, when I come home, how late I stay up . . . when I do my homework. She has told him I might have some "unusual requests" --- especially in the middle of the night. "Do you know about night terrors?" I heard my mother whisper to Leon. "Zoya had nightmares as a little child. . . ." I did not hear the rest . . . her voice trailed off. The last thing I heard her say was "I left fresh-squeezed orange juice."

"See you in the morning," he says, his voice soft.

The truth is I don't want to see Leon in the morning; I want him to vanish and my mother to reappear. I want time to go backward, and everything to be the way it was before she left.

My mother says: "Your first memory is your point of view." But I must go far back in time, through a fog, to find my past. I think of my first memory as locked up in the little plaid suitcase I carried from the orphanage when I was four. I remember the suitcase, but I cannot, in my mind, open it and see what is inside. I know my mother saved that suitcase, but I have not seen it for a long time.

I have moved my favorite photograph of my mother to my desk. Mimi. She seems to smile at me, an encouraging smile. My mother is known for her smile. She has perfect white teeth. When she smiles, her eyes crinkle; when she laughs, her eyes have a secret sparkle. She loves to laugh.

Mimi is very pretty. She doesn't think she is pretty, but she is. Her red hair has a lot of energy; it curls and swings. You cannot miss my mother. She wears bright colors ("Hey," she says, laughing, "I'm not afraid to clash!") and she loves high heels and party dresses with rhinestones and diamonds. She has a great collection of party purses with jeweled clasps. And she lets me use her lipstick and eyeliner.

Mimi helped me paint my room violet, hot pink, and green. This room is decorated exactly the way I want it to look. I think it is just right, but other people have said, "I can't believe your mother let you have those colors." She even let me buy purple frames for my eyeglasses.

My mother makes her living by designing places like store windows and setups for pictures in magazines. She is a stylist. "If I can't make it better," Mimi always says, "I can at least make it beautiful." Her favorite color combinations are hot fuchsia, lavender, and yellow. She has the opposite taste from Gramma, who likes only black.

When we moved into 2B, we didn't dare throw away Gramma's furniture, but we disguised it in what I like to think of as the Girlie Renovation --- we painted, papered, slip-covered, and draped every dark shape with a flowery print or bright color. This transformed Gramma's home into a brighter place by day or lamplight, but we could not hide everything. The clawed fangs and feet of Gramma's furnishings poke out from below our ruffled bed skirts and slipcovers, especially at night.

When I was smaller and we visited Gramma here, I would sit on the floor. I used to hide under my mother's skirt as if it were a tent. I held on to her stockinged legs, because I was sure the chairs would pounce on me. I could see through the filtered cloth of her skirt and hear Gramma's disapproval: "She is clingy, Mimi, that child is too clingy. You have to break her of these bad habits."

Excerpted from THE MIDNIGHT DIARY OF ZOYA BLUME © Copyright 2005 by Laura Shaine Cunningham. Reprinted with permission by Laura Geringer Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers rights reserved.