“Today I’m REALLY worried about death. I almost started crying. However, my new calligraphy kit is AWSOME.”

“My dollys are so fun to play with. They bend and move and pose. : )

P.S. the police think that Peterson might be guilty because there was blood all over the scene of the crime and a used condom (EW!) and a bloody soda can with hair on it.”

I wrote this when I was eleven, by which point I’d been keeping a daily journal for more than a year. The everyday practice gives these entries a ticker-tape quality. I keep laughing, looking back, to find enthusiastic descriptions of playdates (“we played that we were explorers on a canniball island,” 1/15/01) alongside a ponderous sense of loss.

1/17/01, age ten: “I want to be young again. To have an imagination. To love. To care. To hope. To not know worry. To be innocent. Katie won’t play anymore. She says it’s babyish. My own sister is drifting from me.” 1/24/01: “I don’t have any friends but the ones who cannot speak. You [the diary], Brown Bear, my stuffed animals, God.”

Molly Dektar is the author of the novelThe Ash Family,published in 2019. Her second novel,The Absolutes, is forthcoming from Mariner in 2023.