Dear Terrorists,

Chapter 7

"Jennie!" shouted Joe through Jennie's bedroom door. "Are you coming to eat dinner or not?

Jennie refused to answer. Hunger was impossible, at least for now. She had not eaten in two days. Her eyes hurt, swelled and hot with new tears dampening the old dried ones. She lay in her bed in the fetal position clutching a pillow, motionless besides the necessary breathes keeping her alive.

"Jennie, you have to come out of there eventually, what are you waiting for? You can't stay in there for the rest of your life," he tried to persuade her.

Still, Jennie refused to reply. She remained motionless. The only movements she could offer were the occasional blink to interrupt her daze and breathing.

Joe gave up, returning upstairs.

Jennie began to sob once more. After an hour, she had sobbed herself to exhaustion.

When she awoke, she finally let go of the pillow that she had tightly clutched and screamed in to for two days.

She did not know what time it was, nor if it was day or night.

She pushed herself up into a sitting position. Her shoulders and back ached from lying in bed, as she had not used it in several days. Her sheets were moist from the combination of sweat, tears, and urine that lay with her. Her shoulders felt as if it were a thousand pounds and her neck was stiff. She felt light-headed, almost dizzy when she sat up.

She opened her mouth, but not without her chapped lips attempting to hold them shut with crusted saliva. Her mouth was as dried as it could be in a living human being. She looked around her room, her eyes also extremely heavy. She stood up and took her first steps in over forty-eight hours. She felt ultra dizzy, dehydrated. The world seemed to turn and bounce when she finally used her legs to walk to the bathroom.

She dropped her head into the sink and turned the cold-water faucet on, sticking her tongue out to taste the coldness and moisten her sticky, hot desert-mouth.

She turned the shower on cold, and dropped her urinated shorts and shirt, and stepped in to the stream of hydration in order to feel something other than depression. She hung her head beneath the torrent of lively, cold water rushing from the showerhead for several minutes.

I'm going to write my own diary, thought Jennie. I need to tell the world how I feel, but I can't tell them now. I need to tell somebody, even if that somebody is me.

Jennie dried off and returned to her bedroom. Still wrapped up in a towel, she took David's diary and ripped out the pages he had already written on.

"Dear Diary," she wrote after having written the date in the upper right hand corner.

"I know that I should have prayed for David Plessy. I know that I should have talked to him, too. I regret that. I think I always will. I didn't know him, but I could have gotten to know him. Perhaps that would have saved him and Jeremy; perhaps it wouldn't have—who knows?"

She reread what she had just written, then took a deep breathe of courage before she wrote more.

"I may not ever be able to get over this. I think it will become an inveterate memory, even when I die. I don't know if I can think of anything else for quite some time. This tragedy has taken up my entire mind and has exhausted it, as well as my body. How can I live with myself? I'm not sure I can, knowing what I know now. Nobody else knows what I know. I am the only living person in the entire world who knew what David Plessy was going to do—and I did nothing, even when I had the chance before he killed Jeremy and himself. I'm not sure if I'll ever be able to tell anyone, ever. My guilt is so heavy."

She reread her newest paragraph, then wrote more.

"So I will tell myself in this diary, David's old one, his book of lethal secrets. I will continue his legacy, but learn from it rather than continue to react to it—if that's possible for me, anyhow. I wonder how many other diaries hold similar secrets? Or I wonder how many people are afraid to share their secrets, even with a diary?"

Jennie placed the diary on her nightstand. Her stomach suddenly felt as empty as it ever had. She felt weak and dizzy. She stood up and wobbled upstairs, clutching the handrails tightly, to eat something, anything.