Free Go Ask Alice by Beatrice Sparks

for phonenumbers for both Richie and Ted, but she didn’t have a listing for either one. So I guess they’ve just dropped out of sight and I’m relieved. Now everyone just thinks we ran away because we wanted to be out on our own. I think I’ll check to see if they are still registered in school, just to make sure.
    December 24
    The house is alive with fragrance. We have baked cakes and pies and cookies and candies. Gran is a wonderful cook and I know I can learn many things from her and I’m really going to try. The tree is up and the house is trimmed and Christmas is going to be even greater this year than it has been before.
    I called Chris today and she feels great. Her mom and dad and her crippled Aunt Doris who lives there are really going out of their way to be nice to her. Oh, it’s good to be home! I guess Mom was right, Chris and I used to dwell on the negative things. But not anymore!
    December 25
    Diary, today is Christmas and I am waiting for my family to wake up so that we can go empty our stockings and unwrap our presents. But first, and all by myself, I wanted to have my own special and sacred little part of this special and sacred day. I wanted to review and repent and recommit myself. No I can sing with the others, “Oh come all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant,” for I am triumphant, this time I really am!
    December 26
    The day after Christmas is usually a let down, but this year I enjoyed helping Mother and Gran clean up and put away and take out. I feel grown-up. I am no longer in the category with the children, I am one of the adults! And I love it! They have accepted me as an individual, as a personality, as an entity. I belong! I am important! I am somebody!
    Adolescents have a very rocky insecure time. Grown-ups treat them like children and yet expect them to act like adults. They give them orders like little animals, then expect them to react like mature, and always rational, self-assured persons of legal stature. It is a difficult, lost, vacillating time. Perhaps I have passed over the worst part. I certainly hope so, because I surely would not have either the strength or the fortitude to get through that number again.
    December 27
    Christmas is still in the air. That something wonderful, something special time of year, when all things good are reborn upon earth. Oh, I love it, I love it, I love it. It is as though I have never been away.
    December 28
    I was looking through the Christmas cards and saw one from Roger’s folks. How dreadful that makes me feel. Wouldn’t it have been wonderful if their family and ours could have been related? But all possibility for that is now over and I must not torture myself. Besides it was probably only puppy love stuff.
    December 29
    Mom and Dad are planning a New Year’s party for all the people connected with Dad’s department. It sounds like fun. Gran is making her terrific broccoli and chicken casserole and she is also making her yeast orange rolls. Yum! She has promised to let me help her and Chris is coming over too.
    December 30
    It’s still holiday time and I’m elated all the livelong day and night!
    December 31
    Tonight will ring in a wonderful new year for me. How humbly grateful I am to be rid of the old one. It hardly seems real! I wish I could just tear it out of my life like pages from the calendar, at least the last six months. How, oh how, could it ever have happened to me? Me, from this good and fine and upstanding, loving family! But the new year is going to be different, filled with life and promise. I wish there were some way to literally and truly and completely and permanently blot my for real nightmares out, but since there isn’t, I must poke them way back into the darkest and most inaccessible corners and crevices of my brain, where perhaps they will eventually be covered over or become lost. But enough of this chitty-chat and writiewrite, I’ve gotta go downstairs and help Mom and Gran. We’ve got a million things to