fifteen

The Diaries of Ella Graham weren’t what I was expecting.

I thought there would be a smattering of lopsided unicorn sketches and snippets of stories about how Ella had vandalized another park bench with orange nail polish. I was expecting pages filled with heart-dotted letters and stories filled with light.

But there were none of those things.

I flipped through the diary, ran my fingers over the indents her glitter pen had left behind. I scanned through the pages quickly, searching for one word in particular:

Wolves.

I didn’t find it. I dipped into Ella’s life after my exit from Amble, entry by entry.

The first one I read was a story about how Ella had managed to find an escape route from speech therapy at Amble’s crappy excuse for a hospital. That part made me laugh; it was so Ella. She’d mapped out a stairwell on the second floor that was usually empty and wrote about how easy it was to slip past the security station. Apparently, she’d felt like her words were clear enough now that she didn’t need therapy, but Mom and Dad disagreed. So Ella started smiling and waving cheerfully when they dropped her off and then spent her afternoons in the bead shop downtown instead.

I flipped to a random page in the middle, dated seven months ago:

He walked me home from therapy today. He met me outside of the outpatient center after, and he kissed me. He didn’t even flinch when he kissed the scars on my mouth. I never forget that, no matter how many times he kisses me. How lucky I am that someone will kiss me at all.

My eyes drifted to the heavy-lidded boy on the corkboard and my heart twisted. How many other boys had winced at the idea of kissing Ella before this boy agreed to?

Shortly after that entry came more about the boy—and I imagined pink blooming on Ella’s cheeks as she wrote about him. I turned the page to another one, from just a couple of months ago.

They’re going to come for me, I know it. They’re going to take me. I know he’ll save me before it’s too late.

I groaned, pressing my fingers to my temples. Guilt seeped through the cracks in my heart until I was sure I felt it shatter in my chest.

I should have stayed in Amble, I should have fought Mom and Dad to stay by Ella’s side. But I didn’t; I couldn’t. My brain and my heart and everything in me wasn’t functioning. Leaving felt like a relief, in a way.

I swallowed and started to flip through the rest of the entries, all of which were from the past year. From what I could tell, most of them were about this boy, about his quiet patience and his kind eyes. I kept scanning through the pages, watching the months flick by.

Finally I reached a page titled November—just last month—
and there were no more entries. A fat square of paper slid from the diary, into my lap.

I unfolded it, my pulse quickening. But it was just a map, white-washed in the creases and stamped with the words Amble Public Library in the corner. I scrunched my nose. It was a map of Michigan, one Ella could have easily gotten from Dad’s atlas in the study. So why rip one off from the library?

A tiny pinprick of red near the top of the mitten-shaped state answered my question. I bent the map toward the light. Frantic red ink stains encircled the town of Alpena.

“What’s in Alpena?” I said, and the sound of my own voice made me jump. I blinked, taking in the dusty light streaming through my windows. How long had I been here reading?

I shook out the diary, just in case there were any other secrets or stolen maps hiding in the creases. To my surprise, a loose sheet of paper, torn at the edges, wafted to the floor. I scooped it up and read:

I know what happened to Sarah Dunnard.
The same thing is going to happen to me if I
don’t get out of here.

And then, in hurried letters:

He’s going to kill me.