Free Last Summer by Holly Chamberlin

talk to me.”
    Rosie whipped around, clutching a damp T-shirt in her fist. “I don’t have to talk to you,” she blurted, surprising herself by replying.
    “I know you don’t have to.” Meg’s voice quavered. “I just thought that, I don’t know, you might want to.”
    “Why?” Rosie demanded.
    Meg fidgeted with a thin braided bracelet around her left wrist. “Because ... Because I said I was sorry and I meant it. I still mean it.”
    Rosie stood looking at her friend—her former friend—and could think of nothing else to say unless it was that the shirt Meg was wearing was a pretty color, like vibrant pink azaleas. But of course, she couldn’t tell her that. Meg had totally messed things up for the two of them. Frustrated, confused, and a little bit angry, she quickly clipped the T-shirt to the laundry line, picked up the empty basket, and without a backwards glance went inside the house.
    Rosie tramped down to the basement to return the laundry basket to its home on the shelf above the washing machine. And then she leaned against the machine, suddenly feeling too tired to climb back up to the first floor. Or maybe “tired” wasn’t the right word. Maybe “confused” or “dispirited” was a more accurate way to describe what she was feeling.
    Meg had apologized to her a few weeks ago and she had told Meg that she accepted her apology. But did that mean she had actually forgiven her? Maybe accepting an apology and forgiving a person weren’t the same thing. If they were the same thing, then maybe she had lied to Meg. Maybe her “Okay, I accept your apology” had been just an automatic reply, the words she assumed everyone had wanted to hear. If that was the case, then those words hadn’t solved anything and certainly hadn’t healed any wounds.
    Rosie put her hands over her eyes. Why was she the one who was supposed to make everything all right again? She wasn’t the one who had broken a solemn promise to her best friend. She was the one who had been betrayed and humiliated in front of her classmates. It wasn’t her responsibility to wave the magic wand so that everything could go back to the way it used to be.
    Rosie dropped her hands to her side. Still, she couldn’t help but admit to herself that part of her missed Meg. But every time she thought about the friendship she had lost—which was a lot of times—she tried ruthlessly to push the memories away. She couldn’t help but feel that missing the friendship of the person who had betrayed her only proved that she was a loser. Her own weakness embarrassed her. She hadn’t even admitted these feelings to Dr. Lowe.
    Only months ago she could have written her thoughts in her diary and that would have helped her figure things out, but she had abandoned the diary just after Meg’s betrayal. Somehow it had stopped feeling like a safe and private space. If Meg could tell her deep dark secret to those girls, who was to say she or someone else couldn’t find her diary and expose all her thoughts to the world? Even if her thoughts weren’t so unusual, they were still hers and hers alone. That meant something.
    Her therapist, Dr. Lowe, had been urging her to start her diary again. She said that “free-form journaling” was supposed to help you name your anger. It was supposed to help you come to understand that anger and channel it somewhere else or whatever. But something was holding Rosie back from taking that step. Her old diaries, including the last one with the entries about Mackenzie’s campaign to torture her and the final entry about Meg’s betrayal, were now kept out of sight in a plastic storage box under her bed. Sometimes, in particularly bad moments, Rosie thought she should burn the diaries in the living room fireplace or shred all the pages and dump them off the cliffs on Marginal Way. It would be as if the dairies had never existed. But she never acted on those impulses. Besides, to dump the torn pages in the ocean would be