We performed The Wiz two more times over the weekend, closing our run of the musical Sunday afternoon. And in the crowd on Sunday, just before the start of the second act, I saw someone I hadn’t expected would show—Nia.
I felt a wave of relief. Hopeful, even. Maybe this meant she wasn’t mad at me? Maybe she wanted to support me after all? I rocked the last half of the show, even lighter on my feet than I had been for the previous performances. But when we took our final bows, I looked toward where Nia was sitting earlier. She was already gone.
I spent Sunday night celebrating our performances with Blake, Olive, Alvin, and Lee, and though I was a little disappointed Nia wasn’t there to hang out with us, the night was still super fun. When all of it was over, I slept more soundly than I had in weeks. I felt like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders, and the buzzing high I felt from performing had eased up only slightly. I was still beaming from my acting accomplishments. And already thinking about my next big role.
I woke up with the sun on Monday, flung the covers off my body, and hopped out of bed, excited to face the day. School was closed for a teachers’ development day, so there was only one day until I’d get to face my friends and teachers and peers, ready to receive the good vibes I earned from my play performance. Maybe I could finally get that profile in the school newspaper I pitched to Ms. West! She would be assigning my profile for the school newspaper after my showstopping performances, right? I went to the bathroom to get ready for the day, brushing my teeth, still humming “Ease on Down the Road” under my breath.
I returned to my room and heard my phone vibrate. It kept vibrating, like I had several texts or emails or notifications coming in at once. Except…the vibrating didn’t stop. I went to pick up my phone and realized I had thirty notifications. Wow, the rave reviews of my performances must be in, I thought to myself. Olive had left ten of the thirty notifications:
What was she talking about? I texted her back.
I closed the text messages and hopped on my computer, pulling up my email inbox.
I had nearly fifty unread messages, the most emails I’d ever had in one day. Some names I recognized, but others were new. New fans, perhaps?
Then I read some of the subject headlines. “Girl, really?” “You’re the worst.” “How dare you.” “Two-faced.” “Mean Girl.”
What were people talking about? All of this from my performance? I clicked open one of the emails. A link to my blog had been posted at the bottom. I did a double take. I opened another one, and the same link was posted within that email, too. OMG. People knew about my blog? My secret online diary? How did these people find out? Oh my bleezus, had some hacker found my secret blog and sent it to all of Featherstone Creek?! I mean, they couldn’t even get into it—it was password protected. I had a very secret, very hard-to-crack password on it! That no one knew! Right? Right?! RIGHT??!?!!!!?!?
I opened another email, which also had the same link posted. This time I clicked on the link to my blog, just to make sure that it was still private. It better still be private, I thought to myself, because if it’s not, it would…be…ah…
The link went directly to my blog. My entire blog. Every post, every confession, accessible. There was no sign-in page, no log-in. Is. This. Really. Happening? It felt like the blood stopped pumping to my brain. Like I might just drop into my shoes and get sucked into the center of the earth. Was my blog now public? How in the world did this get released to the public? Could everyone see it now?
Could. Everyone. SEE IT. Now?
I texted Olive.
I’m dead.
“How…in the world…did you get into my private blog?” I whispered. I could barely get out the words because I was one hundred percent actually deceased.
I felt like all the oxygen had been sucked out of the room. “What are you talking about?!” I yelled out loud. I pulled up Instagram on my phone. I looked at my feed, and the most recent post was a photo of myself in my room, with a caption that read, “Come check out my new unfiltered blog! It’s full of the real tea on everyone at Featherstone Creek!” The caption included a direct link to my blog.
What. In. All. That. Is. REAL? Why the heck would I publicize my own secret blog???
There was no way I could have posted the photo. In fact, it was impossible for me to have done it, because according to the time stamp, it had been posted eighteen hours ago—when I was onstage during the school play! Someone had gotten into my Instagram account and created the post to make it look like I shared the blog myself.
Which meant, based on some of the unfiltered truths I had written in my blog…someone was trying to make me the most hated person in all of Featherstone Creek.
I clicked back to my inbox and started reading through the emails. I clicked open the one titled “Really?!?!” and saw they had linked to the entry about me admitting I didn’t like Carmen’s dancing. I opened another email, from Olive. She included a link to the blog post where I admitted Mrs. Charles’s voice sounded like nails grating against a chalkboard to me, like when she says the word “bag” but it sounds more like “beeg.” The blog posts about Lee, about Nia, about my parents, about teachers, classmates, people in town, were all public. Every nasty thing I had ever written, ever since Victoria landed me with this cursed truth-telling spell.
I slunk down in my desk chair and grabbed the sides of my desk. I felt woozy. I thought I’d fall clean out of my chair.
All my unfiltered truths that I’d specifically written down in this very super-private, password-protected place so no one would ever see them had now been exposed.
I wanted to melt into a puddle. Could I shape-shift like Victoria? Maybe Victoria would turn me into fairy dust when she showed up to comment on this disaster? Yeah, and then I could disappear into the ether and not worry about all of Featherstone Creek wanting to see me plastered with eggs or tarred and feathered or otherwise punished for talking trash about everyone behind their back. Anything would be better than living on this earth after my secret blog had been hacked.
How could this have happened?
I called Olive immediately. She picked up the phone with a curt, “Girl.”
I didn’t have an explanation. I was silent, still like a statue.
“Did you really write all of this?” she said.
I have to say something. “I mean…it’s a private diary. No one was supposed to see it! Who leaked my private blog?”
Olive let out a few noises that sounded like anger, disbelief, and distrust all at once. “It might be a private diary, but this is what you really think about people? Your best friends? About me? You said you think I let people walk all over me—is that true?”
I gulped. I couldn’t find the words to explain myself.
“You talked about all of our friends at school here. Our parents…. You go around pretending you like everyone and then you talk about them behind their back?”
I couldn’t feel my lips. My heart was beating at twice the normal rate.
“Do you think no one is perfect except for you?”
I wanted to disappear into the walls.
“This is, like, the lowest thing I’ve ever seen somebody do. Like, this hurts.”
“I’m sorry, I was…I didn’t mean what I said about you. I don’t think you’re a pushover….”
“That’s not what your blog says,” she countered. Then Olive hung up on me.
I closed my eyes and hung my head. I never wanted to hurt any of my friends, but I would especially never want to hurt Olive. She’s unbelievably kind; she couldn’t hurt a mosquito.
A thought struck me like lightning. I had to call Nia. If there was one person I dunked on the most on the blog, it was Nia. I called her petty, mean, cruel. I took all my frustrations about our friendship falling apart out on this blog, with the intention that she would never see it. But she had by this point, obviously. And at this moment—she’d have to hate me. I would hate me, too. I texted her. Twelve times. I got no response.
I flung myself back on the bed. I looked at the emails. Some of my field hockey teammates had responded to the post I made about Kenya not being able to defend the team from a sack of potatoes, or Coach Dwight favoring me over Natalie Cross for a starting position because Natalie is slower than molasses left out in the cold. One person sent me a whole email’s worth of sobbing emojis, another an email full of steam-headed angry emojis. Guess I wouldn’t be rejoining the team now—how could I play on a team full of girls who hated me?
I closed my eyes and prayed that my bed could somehow become a pool of water or dust cloud of some sort and scoop me up to take me to the next realm. Just wash me away. Far, far away.
Just when I thought this was the worst that I could feel, I started to cough. I felt dust in the air. My coughing got stronger and stronger, like a thick trail of chimney smoke surrounded me. I knew what was happening. Who, rather, was happening. Victoria. Perfect timing.
She said nothing when she came into view. I said nothing in return. Instead, tears started to stream down my face. I couldn’t keep it in anymore. I felt sorry I had said all those nasty things—but I felt especially sorry that this was all happening to me.
“Well, this is a real pickle, huh?” Victoria said, her eyebrows knotted together. “I wanted you to learn your lesson, but I didn’t want you to hurt a bunch of people in the process.”
I looked up at her, suddenly flush with rage. “Learn my lesson?!”
“June, I told you, I watched your every move. I knew you had a secret blog where you were saying things you didn’t want other people to know and using it to get around the restrictions of the spell,” she said.
I knew it. She wanted this to happen! She could have stopped me from writing my truths down, but instead she wanted me to get burned. She burned me. She…unleashed the blog on purpose.
“This is all your fault!” I yelled. “The truth-telling, the blog, the everything. It’s all your fault. If I didn’t have this spell problem, this would have never happened! You’re the one who made the blog public!”
“June, this is not my fault. I didn’t tell you to create a blog where you’d trash-talk people behind their backs. And I’m certainly not the one who made that post on your Instagram about it.”
“You said I had to tell the truth no matter what! I couldn’t say half the things that I thought out loud—people would have never spoken to me again! This stupid blog was my only option! It was supposed to be safe—from you!”
Victoria moved to stand directly in front of me, crossing her arms. “This spell was supposed to help you tell all truths—the good, the helpful, as well as the not-so-good ones. June, let’s be honest—your blog reads like the Daily Featherstone Creek Nastygram. You can’t write in a diary that people’s acting sucks and then smile in their faces the next day. June, listen, honey—of course it matters if you tell the truth—but even more so, it matters how you tell the truth! And writing all of your mean feelings in a secret blog is not the way to deal with them!”
The tears fell from my face, making the front of my shirt wet. I realized I had hurt people with my words, the exact opposite of what I wanted to do. I had never intended to hurt anyone! That’s why I held in my truths for so long. I did everything I could to get the spell lifted; I’d been so focused on telling the truth that I didn’t care how it came out. And now I felt the same way people probably felt when they saw my horrible opinions of them on the blog. Heartbroken. Betrayed. Sitting alone crying heavy, uncontrollable tears that choked my breathing and left me gasping for air, for peace. For someone’s help.
I thought about all the things I said in the blog, and wiped at my face with the back of my hand. The complaints about my mom’s food. My dad’s lack of interest in culture. Me admitting I clogged the toilet on the first day of school. Me saying Olive’s version of “Single Ladies” on the viola was corny. (I still thought she was super talented, because I can’t play that song on any instrument. Not even a paint bucket!). I insulted teachers, our principal. Lee’s parents, for leaving him behind. I said the famed hot dogs at Van’s tasted like leather. Van’s son was in the seventh grade. What if no one went to Van’s anymore and the restaurant had no customers and stopped making money and went out of business because I said I didn’t like the hot dogs? What if Van had to move and his son couldn’t go to school anymore and they became homeless, all because of me? Because of Victoria’s spell!
Wait.
I’d also written about Victoria in the blog posts.
I wrote about being put under the spell by Victoria. How was it that no one was talking about Victoria? Or the spell?
“I wrote about you on the blog, too. So now everyone’s going to know about you and what you did to me. That will get me out of this, right? People will feel bad for me and forgive me for acting the way I did!”
Victoria looked at me. “Actually, no. No one knows about me.”
I shook my head. “How is that possible?”
“See, when you’re a fairy godmother, you have special powers. And another one of my great special powers is that when people write about me or try to reveal things about me in public, I can erase them.”
Are you kidding me?
“So, what, you deleted yourself from my blog?”
Victoria put her hands to her collarbone, like she was clutching her pearls. “I had to. If I go public, I’d lose my fairy godmother accreditation. It’s like losing your passport—you can’t get back into Fairy Godmother world unless you stay secret.”
So she put me in this situation and then left me out in the world with no defense when I got myself into real trouble? She was supposed to be my ally! She supposedly put me under this spell to help me “live my best life.” I closed my eyes and rolled my eyeballs back into my skull.
“This whole thing is all your fault,” I spat.
“No, dear,” Victoria said. “I gave you a very special tool to help you learn how to be honest with people. You could have used that gift to help you let go of thinking you had to say the right things to make people happy, and learn that people can handle your opinions—when you give them in a thoughtful way—without getting mad at you or feeling bad about themselves. Instead, you didn’t tell people how you felt to their face and wrote down your thoughts in a burn book.”
I slid down the side of my bed and crumpled into a heap on the floor. Tears welled up in my eyes again and I tucked myself into a ball. I wondered if I could make like Rip Van Winkle and sleep for one hundred years and wake up when this nightmare was over.
Then, I felt a hand on my shoulder.
“Listen, June, honey. I know this situation sucks. However,” Victoria said, “I can help you get out of this.”