Christopher's Diary: Echoes of Dollanganger

“I just did.”

“You didn’t brag about it. All you did was admit to having done it and admitted it to me after what you read. That’s not what I mean.”

“Yes, that’s true. I mean, I’ve done that, the spying, but I didn’t have the kind of thoughts afterward that he had.”

“I’ll say this much. When it came to his being interested in girls, he didn’t have much choice at that moment. That’s all I think it means, Kane.”

“I suppose. Yeah, I guess Christopher and I are not so different, even at this point in the diary,” he said, holding it again. “I mean, he’s not turning into a child monster or anything, the way some of those stupid stories depict him.”

“Oh, no, definitely not. There’s so much about him to admire. You’ve made understanding it all easier. I mean, the way you read it, our being up here and trying to understand what being shut up meant to them, even that wig.” I started to smile.

“Maybe next time we’re up here, you should wrap a scarf around your head.” At first, I thought he might be kidding, but he didn’t smile.

“I still have my hair, Kane.”

“But if you want to feel what she feels . . . it’s just a suggestion.”

I nodded but wondered whether we were taking this too far now. The expression on Kane’s face was so different, especially while he was still wearing the wig. Maybe my own imagination was going wild, too, because I thought he even sounde

d different, and not just when he read the diary. Every time we entered the attic now, he lost that casual, carefree posture for which he was so well known. There was an intensity about him when we were up here. He didn’t shrug anything off or give me that wry smile, the way he often did at school or when we were with others our age. When he gazed at me now, he looked like he was gazing at someone who was suffering as much inside as he was or, maybe more accurately, as much as Christopher had.

Why wasn’t I happy about all this? Wasn’t it our intention to feel and appreciate what Christopher and Cathy had endured, to use the diary as a doorway to the past and discover what really happened and who they really were? It was working. His ideas made it all more authentic. Why be upset about that?

I had put on my mother’s nightgown for the scene we read. It wasn’t a big leap to wrap a scarf around my head. “Okay. I’ll see.”

He smiled, looked at the diary, and then stood and handed it to me. “Maybe we should think about getting something to eat. The movie starts early.”

“Well, I’m not going out without a shower and changing,” I said.

“Shower? Sounds good to me.”

“Just a shower,” I said firmly, and he laughed.

We restored the attic to the way it had been and went down to my room. I could see what he had on his mind. The thought brought back that rush of excitement I had when I demonstrated my fantasy in the attic. Every part of me tingled in anticipation. How much longer could we be this intimate with each other without “crossing the Rio Grande”? I would be a liar if I said I didn’t want it to happen.

Whenever my girlfriends and I had serious conversations about this, a few questions were inevitable. Who among us would admit to being afraid of it, and not solely because we might become pregnant? There were obviously ways to avoid that. Who among us thought we should be as casual about it as any boy? Who among us thought she shouldn’t do it unless she was really in love with the boy or expected to marry him?

As we grew older, we stopped asking one another these questions. We waited for one of us to admit she had done it. We all joked about it. Most of us believed Suzette had lost her virginity before she was a junior, much less a senior. I thought she enjoyed everyone believing that. Now she was the one teasing everyone else. She didn’t tease me as much. I knew it was because my mother had died. Somehow she believed it would be unfair, perhaps because I had no one at home to run to and confess or ask the important questions.

If there was any reluctance to believe it about me or tease me about it before, it was dying a quick death now that I was “hot and heavy” with Kane in the eyes of my friends. The assumption was that no girl could go with Kane Hill more than two weeks and not have slept with him. If they only knew, I thought, and then I wondered why it was important for them to know anything, really. Did it bother me or make me feel older, more sophisticated, to have them think so? I knew it would bother me if my father thought so. How much, I wondered, would it really bother him? Whatever was left of his image of me as his little girl would evaporate, but did I want to be forever a little girl?

These thoughts and growing pains were hard enough when your hormones took center stage. But to have it happening with no one to compare notes with? That had to be twice as hard. Yes, Cathy missed having friends, for sure. She missed everything girls her age were enjoying out there, but I could speak from experience. Surely she missed having a mother most of all.

Kane watched me move around my room, choosing the clothes I would wear and preparing to take my shower. When I glanced at him, I saw him pretending to be interested in one of my magazines. I smiled to myself, got down to my panties, and went into the bathroom to shower. Maybe it was just natural for a female to be a tease, I thought as I got into the shower. Moments later, I got my payback.

He got into the shower beside me as he had suggested he would. How many times had I seen a movie scene like this? I thought when he kissed me. The warm water cascaded over our heads and bodies. I turned my face into it, thinking that it was a baptism of some sort. It was the first time I was totally naked with a boy who was totally naked. I don’t think I was more than eleven when the image had occurred to me, and along with it, the waves of sensual excitement washed over me so quickly I was afraid I would drown in my own fantasies.

This was no fantasy. My nipples hardened; my legs felt weak. I leaned against him for support as he turned me toward him. His hands moved around my thighs and gently lifted me to him. I felt his excitement building and tensed up. My heart fluttered with panic, not because he was being aggressive as much as because I was quickly losing resistance.

“Kane,” I said, my voice so weak and tiny I wasn’t sure I had said it or thought it.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “When it happens, it will be a lot more comfortable for both of us.”

That made me laugh, but I was in a terrible conflict. I was happy we were under control, but I was also disappointed. It wasn’t the first time in my life when two conflicting emotions had raged inside me simultaneously, and I was sure it wouldn’t be the last. There were those two parts of me again, arguing through every pore in my body, disagreeing along every nerve, only pausing when I brought my lips closer to his. We kissed again and again, his hands gently lifting my breasts toward his lips when he lowered his head.

We kept pulling away from each other and then rushing toward each other, each time closer, tighter, more passionately, and then truly like someone who had come upon a fire. I reached for the shampoo and poured some of it over his head. He cried out when it burned his eyes. He laughed, and then he poured some over my hair.

“I’ll do it,” he said when I reached up to begin washing my hair. I turned to let him go at it. It’s not as hard as trying to shampoo out tar, I thought, when he started to wash my hair for me like a professional beautician.