Free Fixing Delilah by Sarah Ockler Page A

kid.”
    After dinner, I bring down the coats and boots from my bedroom closet for the use/sell/donate/trash evaluation. Cleared of everything but the cobwebs, the closet is roomy enough for me to hang up my summer jacket, my long dress, and a few of my sleep shirts that got crunched in the dresser. Even after I line up my shoes along the closet floor, there’s still a spot for my empty suitcases. I try to shove the biggest one in the back, but it slips from my hands and lands hard on the floor, kicking up one of the floorboards.
    Perfect. Hopefully Jack can fix it before Mom finds out I broke something. After the car damage last month, there’s not much room left on my tab.
    I yank the chain for the light and pull my suitcase back out. As I crouch down to replace the board, I see it—a patch of white illuminating the otherwise black hole in the floor. It’s covered in dust, but I stick my hand in to retrieve it anyway, breath shallow in my lungs.
    Here beneath the floorboards and cobwebs and spiders lies the formerly missing diary of Stephanie Delilah Hannaford.
    I pull it gently from the hole, feeling the weight of it against my fingers. It’s bound in cracked white leather, yellowed with age and etched with a single gold rose. The flimsy brass latch once locking the pages no longer holds them shut, and as I take it into my lap, the front cover falls open, loosing a cascade of crushed flowers and faded red maple leaves pressed between pieces of waxed paper. My heart pounds, unable to outrun the feeling that I was meant to find this diary, that Stephanie herself meant for me to find it, here, tonight, tucked safely under the floorboards of the bedroom closet since before her death, hidden through all of my childhood summers as I slept just five feet from its secret place.
    I open the diary to the first page. It’s covered with black letters, small and perfect. I trace the opening words until my fingers memorize their old grooves, the tiny loops of her handwriting bringing Stephanie closer to me than any passed-down story or photograph ever could.
    “Thank you,” I whisper into the dark space of the closet.
Dear Diary,
I’m sixteen today. Claire sent you to me and I know that I’m supposed to fill the pages with all of my collected wisdom, but I’m not sure how. I should feel more wise, right? More confident? Instead, eight hours into this new age, I feel neither. Am I alone in this? My sisters seem immune, as if together they are in on some secret that they just don’t want to share. Were they ever as lost or alone? As unsure? Claire is already finishing up her second year of college, and Rachel, well… we’re as close as ever, but I know that nothing lasts. She’ll be gone soon enough, too. And though I know they love me, I can’t help but feel as though they’re leaving me here unprepared, alone to deal with Mom and her moods and Dad in his all-consuming quiet, shadowed by my mother’s raging outbursts. I just don’t have the armor for it.
But hope is not as lost as this dismal letter would have you believe! When I stretch my hands and reach into the faraway place of tomorrow, there’s Casey Conroy.
Please don’t tell my sisters. He’s a bit insane, in the best kind of way. I don’t think they’d understand what I see in him—they’re much too practical!
Ah, well. Happy birthday, happy birthday, happy birthday to me.
XOXO,
Steph

    Casey Conroy—CC. There it is, in perfect black print, the name belonging to the initials carved under the bed. Now that I see it, now that my lips can form it, his full name hangs in my throat, stuck to the lump rising in the wake of reading Stephanie’s words. The letter is so usual , so unsurprising, so much like something any girl my age would write, that for a moment I forget that she’s dead. That this diary was hidden here before I was even born. That between the entry on her sixteenth birthday and the final page, so many of the stories for which I’ve been