Melanie's Diary

Robyn Jacobs cannot find anything. The prize-winning highway safety speech she is supposed to deliver in front of the whole school on Thursday has vanished, and when she finally tracks down her father, Dale Jacobs, in his study, he produces it from his own desk - along with the book report she and Jessie Morales wrote together and nearly left behind. Dale has warned her about this before. He suggests the trick he uses at the newspaper: brightly colored folders, one subject to a color, so that even a scattered mind has something to look for. Robyn likes the idea. The only folders left in the house belong to her sister.

Melanie Jacobs does not want to hand them over. She has two, she needs them, and she will not say why. Robyn pushes past her, digs the black and red folders out of the top drawer, and then notices the sheet of notepaper Melanie is trying to hide. A tickle fight, a snatch, and Robyn is reading aloud from her sister's private diary - a boy at school, a proposal of marriage, an unfortunate observation about peanut butter breath. Melanie shouts for her mother. Robyn leaves laughing, advising Melanie to buy a real diary with a lock and key.

Worse follows. At the ice cream shop, Robyn repeats the whole thing to Eugene Meltsner and Jessie, who find it less funny than she does, and Melanie walks in just in time to hear her secret being handed around. She runs out in tears, and it is her father who catches her in the street and walks her home. Later that evening Ann Jacobs comes upstairs expecting to comfort her, only to find Melanie calm, forgiving, and generous. Robyn is marched in to apologize and gives it grudgingly, then a little better. Melanie tells everyone it is all right. When the door closes, she says what she really means: getting mad does not help, but getting even will.

The next morning the book report is gone from the black folder. Robyn and Jessie tear the locker apart and come up empty, and Jessie, whose grade is also on the line, is not gentle about it. Then Eugene takes Robyn aside, embarrassed and painfully polite, to answer a love letter he has received - signed with her name, written in something very like her handwriting, full of devotion and creative spelling. Robyn goes red and insists she never wrote it. Somebody, she realizes, is playing a joke on her, and she cannot imagine who or why.

That night she stays up rewriting the report and rehearsing her speech, tucking it carefully into the red folder. Melanie stops by, offers a mild suggestion that Robyn memorize the speech, and is sent away. In the morning Robyn arrives at the assembly exhausted, with only part of the report finished. Jessie glances into the red folder and starts to say something, but there is no time. Robyn steps up to the microphone, opens the folder, and begins reading her book report on Huckleberry Finn to the entire school. Her speech is nowhere. She is still protesting that it was in the red folder when she is asked to step down.

Afterward Robyn turns down Jessie's offer of a milkshake and walks around town alone, and by evening she is sitting on the old swing set in the cold. Melanie comes out to fetch her in. What Robyn wants to talk about is not the humiliation itself but the thought that arrived in the middle of it - that this is exactly how Melanie must have felt. She apologizes again, and this time she means it, and she has brought a present to prove it: a real diary, with a lock and a key.

Melanie takes one look at it and feels genuinely, physically sick. Upstairs, in a tangle of somebodies and somebody elses, she works her way around to telling her mother the truth. She only wanted to teach Robyn a lesson. She only wanted her to know how it felt. She did not know Robyn would be sorry, and she certainly did not know Robyn would buy her a diary. Ann tells her she already knew it was wrong, that God has reminded her of it, and that keeping quiet will not make the sickness go away. So Melanie knocks on her sister's door with the new diary in her hands, and asks Robyn to read it. There is something inside she needs to know. Then she hands over the key.