December 8, 2008
A girl’s got to do what a girl’s got to do.
“If you’re looking for your planner-slash-journal, you won’t find it here, sister dear,” Matt, Rachelle’s older brother, told her in what was supposed to be a girly voice but turned out to be a high-pitched, annoyed tone. Matt’s room was currently in a mess, thanks to his beloved sister. Her room, he clearly suspected, could only look worse.
He leaned on the door frame and crossed his arms. “Honestly, why would you think I’d be interested in your diary?”
“It’s not a diary! And you hid my journal last year!” Rachelle accused her brother while still rummaging through her brother's bookshelves.
He gave her a look that told her to prove it. “Granted, I’d be happy to read all your girly secrets just so I could tell them to the whole world.” He smiled mischievously, made a pirouette, and raised his arms as if making a grand announcement.
“Ladies and gentlemen! Come one, come all! Lend me your ears and get ready to hear the reigning queen of St. James Academy, Rachelle Harlow’s deepest secrets!” his voice boomed followed by loud laughter that was meant to irritate his sister.
Rachelle reacted to that with a snort of disgust.
He would have preferred a different reaction—like a banshee scream—but since he didn’t get that, he sobered and pretended to think. “Hmmm. Now, that would be a good marketing strategy for Quarter To Five. We'd get more gigs with your secrets as bait. Maybe I should ask Nick. What do you think?” He started laughing again.
“Oh, shut up. Just tell me where you put it, will you?” She stood up, hands on her hips. She was in her pajamas but her stance made her look like a CEO chastising a lowly rank-and-file. She was tall compared to other girls—five feet eight inches—but her brother was the same height as Nick so it was kind of hard to stare him down. But at least she was doing her best to stare him up.
She wasn’t able to do it longer than a few seconds though. She knew that if Matt really hid her journal, she would never find it again. Unless of course, some supreme being would miraculously change her brother’s mind. “God! Sometimes, I really hate you!” she gritted out, and looked outside the window to try to analyze her situation.
“No, God. She doesn’t mean that,” Matt said happily.
Rachelle abruptly turned back to her brother. “I was talking to you, butthead!”
“Really, sis. If I have your journal, you’d have all your friends calling you already asking if the rumors in Facebook and Twitter are true,” he told her sister without an ounce of humor. “Although,” he started grinning. “I probably wouldn’t have posted anything tonight. I have to read everything first and choose the juiciest piece of gossip. At most, I’d have it circling the Web by midn—hey! Watch it!” something that closely resembled his old bedside alarm clock flew and barely missed his left ear.
A muscle ticked near Matt’s jaw which made Rachelle think that she may have gone too far when she threw that alarm clock.
“You. Shouldn’t. Have. Done. That,” Matt said in a voice menacingly soft, advancing towards her with every word he just said.
She dropped her arms on her sides and exhaled. Maybe her brother really didn’t have her journal, after all. “Look, Matt. I’m sorry. It’s just that sometimes you make it so hard for me to recognize when you’re joking and when you’re not,” she paused for a few seconds. “I shouldn’t have thrown that bedside clock.”
“Yeah, you shouldn’t have,” Matt replied. “It was my favorite alarm clock.”
Rachelle looked at her brother with disbelief. “Honestly, Matt.”
“What? It is my favorite,” he said looking at her like she was dumb.
At that moment, their mother, Vivian, arrived and found Matt’s room in a mess. “Whatever it is, I expect this room clean tomorrow,” she said, looking at her son.
“It was Rachelle’s fault, mom,” Matt said defensively.
His mother shot one of her eyebrows up then turned towards Rachelle. “Yours, too. And both of you should go to sleep. You have school tomorrow.”
“My classes don’t start ‘til nine,” Matt said.
“It doesn’t matter. And watch your grades. I love that you’re in Kinston but I’ll murder you if you lose that scholarship,” Vivian replied with only a hint of irritation then turned her back to go to the master’s bedroom. Her black hair, green eyes and tall figure oftentimes made her seem unapproachable but her kind smile always countered people’s first impression of her. She worked as Human Resources Manager at Châteaud'Isabelle, Heartlake’s most prestigious five-star hotel located at the country’s Leisure district. Her husband worked overseas but their situation never made Vivian want to hire a household help. She believed that her children, being twenty and eighteen respectively, were old enough to help her with the house chores.
“Hmph. How lucky. Must be great to be out in university. Whyever did St. James prescribe a seven o’clock homeroom class for high school?” Rachelle grumbled while on her way out of her brother’s room.
“Hey, Rach,” Matt said stopping her sister in her tracks. “I really don’t have your diary. If anything, you must have left it in your locker. Or maybe, you dropped it while you were out with Nick this afternoon.”
She sighed. “I have my name and address in it. I hope if someone picked it up, he or she would be kind enough to return it.” And, I wish that person wouldn’t read any further than the name and address.
He turned to face his bookshelves. “You just have to pray that that someone isn’t a person who sees you as an enemy. You know, an ex-boyfriend’s current girlfriend, a second-tier model who won’t get the spotlight as long as you’re there,” Matt shrugged. “Or maybe an ex-boyfriend. Now that would be a good way for revenge. Spilling your secrets. Ha!” he finished while rearranging his things.
“Whatever. Besides, I was never cruel to any of my exes. If anything, I remained friends with most of them,” Rachelle said with confidence.
“I guess.” Matt went on to fix his room and Rachelle decided to leave before her brother realized that she was the one who should be tidying the mess she created.
When she reached her room, she tried to check her things again while putting everything back to their proper places just in case she just missed her journal. Unfortunately, it was still nowhere to be found. She just hoped that someone would give it back to her tomorrow. Or maybe even Tuesday.
She’d started using a journal when she won one in a raffle at a local bookstore. She wasn’t much of a writer so what she did was use it as a calendar for her plans, and scribbled notes and thoughts once in a while. Sometimes, she’d ended up writing an entire page, but most of the time, a sentence was all she ever wrote. She would never call them diaries because she believed that diaries were supposed to be detailed accounts, more than a few sentences per entry.
Not many people knew about her journals. Mostly, her playgirl image made everyone think that she was nothing more than a pretty face and a voluptuous body. This suited her just fine. With her job as a model, she couldn’t afford to have a lot of people knowing too much about her. That way, there was less room for rumors. Not that she didn’t have friends, though. She had lots. But only a few knew the real Rachelle Harlow. And only these people were aware of just how much she valued those notebooks she had collected throughout the years.
Now if only she could get the lost one back. She went to sleep thinking of the contents of that missing brown notebook.
*****
St. James Academy was one of the three major educational systems in Heartlake City. It was located in the country’s Leisure District and was considered the most diverse when it came to students and the system itself. Its façade took on a combination of modern and classical architecture. Just like the other two, it offered education from pre-school to college. It was also considered the middle ground.
The more elite and harder-to-reach institution was the much modernized Kinston University. This one was located at the Financial District and would only accept either students whose parents were so wealthy and influential that they might as well be the next generation of business tycoons and political dynasties, or scholars who passed the entrance exams which could only be achieved by about one-fifth of the country’s student population. Either way, students here were always considered special.
The school at the other end of the line was Heartlake State University, the country’s first educational system. It was sponsored by the national government and teaches about 75% of the country’s students. Although the buildings were quite old, it was considered the Cultural District’s main tourist attraction. Its extensions included museums and galleries as well as the country’s largest basilica in the east and the largest mosque in the west.
Grace Enriquez lived in the Cultural District mostly because her father was the curator in Heartlake State Museum and her younger twin brothers attended middle school in Heartlake State University. To go to St. James, she would either ride the bus exclusively for the use of students or the Loop Express, the traditional-looking-but-was-actually-a-modernized-passenger train, which was mostly available for the use of tourists. Today, she chose the bus despite the fact that it was slower and she had no choice but to stand. These buses, like the Loop, followed an almost circular route that passed on all major parts of Heartlake. The train took about an hour to complete the entire loop, an hour and a half for the bus.
Last night was probably the worst night of her life. She just lost her part-time job as a waitress, the guy she thought she’d finally go on a date with had started dating another girl without even telling her that he was no longer interested, and her mom met a car accident while she was in the Philippines doing a documentary for Heartlake National Broadcasting Station. Her father was currently on his way to the Philippines hoping against hope that her mother did not suffer any major injuries. The call they received had only informed them of the accident and the name of the hospital where her mother was currently confined. If her father hadn’t called her cell phone to tell her he was ready to leave for the Philippines, she would have stayed at Central Park until she could no longer cry. How could everything bad happen in one day?
And then, just as she was about leave, she found this brown notebook near the foot of the bench she was sitting on. She picked it up and decided to bring it to the lost and found office but it was closed for the day. She kept it then and went home, said goodbye to her father and sent her brothers to sleep. For the next few days, she was going to be the oldest in the family and she really couldn’t afford to be depressed. Just as she was about to sleep, her eyes found the brown notebook peeking out of her bag. Out of natural curiosity, she got out of her bed, took it and opened the notebook somewhere in the middle. She came face-to-face with a page-long journal entry:
It has to be tonight. It wouldn’t be easier if I postpone it anyway. I have to tell him I want out. Jake was a great boyfriend but—
Grace hastily closed the notebook, realizing it was a diary. The owner might not know, but she was never the kind of person to dig up secrets that no one wanted to tell her. If they wanted to keep the information to themselves, that was fine with her. She opened the diary again, this time on the first page.
“Okay, I wonder if I know the owner of this diary?” she said, flipping through the second page. And there she found it. “Rachelle Harlow,” she said, surprised. “She keeps a diary? Now that’s new,” she put her right thumb and forefinger under her chin in a thoughtful manner.
“So that Jake she mentioned could only be Jake Clifford. That was her eighth? No, wait. Ninth. Ninth ex-boyfriend. I wonder what happe—Hell!” She closed the diary again and tossed it on her nightstand. Didn’t she just say that she was not a sneaky busybody? She lied down on the bed and told herself that today’s events must be exhausting her. She decided it would save more time and effort if she just returned the diary to Rachelle herself. The offices, after all, liked involving paper works even with a situation as simple as this.
And so here she was, standing in the crowded bus, feeling slightly apprehensive about the upcoming meeting with the notorious St. James Queen. Rachelle was overly popular and although they attended the same school and were both high school seniors, there was a huge possibility that Rachelle had never even heard of her.
What if she thought I stole this diary? Or worse. What if she decided I’m planning some sort of scheme because I’m envious of her fame? Grace shook her head. No. One look at me and she would never think of me as someone who’s devious enough to plot a scheme against her. Uggghh. Maybe I should just bring this to lost and found? Yes. That would be a good idea. She puckered her lips. Unless of course, it falls on the wrong hands and that person ends up putting the contents in online forums which would totally embarrass Rachelle Harlow and in turn affect the reputation of Nick Cleveland and I really can’t allow that to happen because I know that Nick is not a bad person. She frowned then sighed, Oh hell, maybe I really should just give this to Rachelle personally.
“St. James students, out of the bus now,” the conductor said in his booming voice, which all bus conductors seemed to have. “Next stop, Kinston.”
“We already know that, old man!” Some students shouted. The last thing she heard before the door closed was the conductor’s voice telling the students to learn how to respect their elders.
Okay. I’ll see her after class hours. And that’s final.