Your father says, “Use the fire-starting chimney, NOT lighter fluid.”
“I know,” you say. Then you let him tell you about the dangers of lighter fluid and how people have crisped themselves squirting it into open flames.
Then you realize that talking about cooking out has diverted them from their cross-examination mode and you say, “Well, maybe we’ll just do pizza or something.”
Relieved, your father says, heartily (and sounding disconcertingly Ted-like), “Well, that’s fine, then. That’s great.”
You get off the phone before they can think of any more questions or dispense any more advice.
You think about reassuring them that you won’t burn down the house, but you decide against it.
Smart boy, that Ducky.
Okay, okay, you haven’t written all week.
Oh, sure, you can find time to write about all the STUFF, the DIRE COMPLICATIONS, the EXTREME DIFFICULTIES of your life. Those you chronicle faithfully.
After all, that’s what your journal is about, isn’t it? Problems. Previously, mostly other people’s problems.
So is this progress? That you have spent days, weeks, hours, hand-cramping aeons worrying about and writing about a problem of your own? To the point of seeming self-centered?
Who knows?
Or maybe you prefer the problems of other people. Is that sick, or what? But you can offer other people:
Sympathy, or
Advice, or
Help.
With your own life, you realize that sympathy is nice, advice may or may not be useful depending on the source, and help?
Help is not something that necessarily fixes the problem.
In the end,
YOU ARE ON YOUR OWN.
As if you didn’t know that already.
But enough of this obsession with your problems, Christopher.
Let’s show this journal the fun side of your life.
As in: the party that will soon start.
As in: happy endings (or at least, a few pretty good moments, you hope).
Uh-oh. Big crash in the house. Better check it out.
THE STORY OF TED,
YOUR BROTHER
THE CRASH TEST DUMMY
So this is the sitcom moment that meets your eyes as you scope out what caused the minor earthquake somewhere in your house.
Your brother is entangled, in a bad way, with the vacuum cleaner.
Also a chair, some of a small rug. (which is in the vacuum cleaner nozzle), and a former vase of flowers.
The vacuum is sucking that rug. Ted is kicking at the vacuum. The cord of the vacuum is wrapped around one of the chair legs.
D: Ted, I don’t think you should be doing that with the vacuum.
T: Get this off me.
D: But how do you really feel?
T: I’m warning you, Christopher.
D: I feel your pain!
T: (unprintable expressions of frustration and vacuum rage)
So you take pity on the guy, walk over; and pull the plug.
The vacuum spits out the rug.
You unwrap Ted from its embrace.
You say, “Ted? What were you doing?”
Ted stands up and glares. Then he rocks your world. He says, “Well, since you’re having a party tonight, I thought I’d maybe clean up a little.”
You grab the chair, right it, and collapse into it.
Ted says, “What?”
You reject jokes as inappropriate. Also, you don’t want to discourage Ted. You settle for, “Okay. What happened?”
Ted shrugs. “I don’t know. I was vacuuming. Then it got the rug. So I stood on the other end of the rug to hold it down and tried to yank it out. I guess I pulled the rug out from under me. I’m not sure how the chair got knocked over. Or the flowers.”
“It could happen to anyone.” You are trying SO HARD not to laugh and it is KILLING YOU.
Ted says, “Yeah. Well, thanks for the help. I guess I’ll finish up in here and, uh, head out. You need anything for tonight?”
“Got it covered,” you assure him. “But thanks.”
“Anytime,” he says.
He waits until you leave to plug in the vacuum again. You resolve that no matter what happens, you will not go down to the family room again.
You hope Ted can’t hear you laughing in your room over the sound of the vacuum.
Maybe you should do a little cleaning too. Of course, you’ve been trying to impose order on chaos all week, so the task ahead is not too huge.
You hope.
A Midparty
Journal moment
YOU ALMOST WORE THE old bowling shirt you wore when you had that unfortunate kiss incident with Sunny.
But you decided against it. Too symbolic or something.
Sunny is not wearing a bowling shirt either. She still hasn’t found one with her name on it. She says she’s wearing something even more retro: an old gym shirt.
To which Maggie says, “Yuck.”
Sunny says, “It’s clean.”
The name embroidered over the pocket is “Elaine.”
It has snap buttons and no collar.
You like the look. Even with someone else’s name over the pocket. You tell her so.
She says, “It has shorts to go with it. But I couldn’t quite see it.”
“The skirt is better,” you agree.
Ted is upstairs with some buds, watching movies in his room. He comes out from time to time. His excuse is a trip to the refrigerator for more stomach supplies, but you realize he is also keeping an eye on the party.
Does he expect it to turn into some kind of major Ted-style blowout?
He’s in for a disappointment.
You made it very clear that you did not want your friends telling everyone about a party in a parent-free house.
You like not having your parents around when you throw a party. You do not like being responsible for what would be left of the house after word got out that you were having a party and no adults were around to spoil the fun…. Fun like puking in the plants and dancing on the tables and driving cars across the lawn and…
Gotta go.
YAWNS.
Later
SO IT WAS A good party, if you do say so yourself.
You ate junk food and played Frisbee in the backyard using a glow-in-the-dark Frisbee.
Amalia and Brendan seem to be getting along better; she no longer moves away when he puts his arm around her.
At the same time, you suspect that he’s being careful not to be too pushy.
It’s possible that once Amalia reached for Brendan’s hand for a moment.
You call a time-out from Frisbee and you go in to make pizzas (edible Frisbees, Sunny points out).
Sunny takes charge, organizing the ingredients, wrapping people in aprons made out of towels and tablecloths.
Maggie gets into rolling out the pizza dough on the kitchen table. “We’re going for the thin crust,” she tells everybody. “You can taste the flavors better that way.”
“Chef Maggie,” Dawn teases her and Maggie smiles.
Sunny puts you in charge of “Vegetables and sharp objects.” That means you have to chop up onions and peppers and even the pitted olives.
You sit across from Maggie and she talks about her mom a little. How she’s in treatment. How the doctors have high hopes. How she and Zeke visited her briefly and how different she already was. “Like she knows she has to do this,” Maggie says. “Like it’s important to her.”
“Good,” you say.
“Yeah,” Maggie says. “It is.”
Then she puts the dough in the pizza pan (you are a genius—you remembered to buy pizza pans when you bought the dough) and starts on another.
When the pizzas are done, you pizza out.
You go back outside, but only Amalia and Brendan have the energy to throw the Frisbee around.
You sprawl in the grass. Sunny is next to you. She says, “I figure we let ever
ybody have ice-cream sundaes in about half an hour.”
“At least.” Dawn, who is propped against a tree, groans. “I didn’t know I could eat so much pizza. How am I going to eat ice-cream sundaes?”
Maggie says, “With a spoon!” and cracks up like a little kid.
You hear Sunny laughing and you turn. In the half-dark, she smiles at you. You smile back and relax.
You and Sunny are still a team. A good team. In spite of all the drama of the past few weeks.
After awhile, you make ice-cream sundaes.
Dawn glances up as Sunny takes charge of that too. She smiles, relieved.
She’s glad you and Sunny are still friends.
Glad, like you, that your friendship survived this bad time.
You go outside to wave good night when everyone leaves. Sunny gives your hand a squeeze. “Not bad, Ducky. Just what we needed.”
“Ice cream, pizza, and friends,” Maggie adds.
Brendan says, “Here’s to it, especially the friends part.”
“Especially,” Maggie echoes.
“And here’s to this year and everything amazing that is going to happen,” Dawn adds.
“That too,” Amalia agrees.
And then they are gone.
You stand on the front walk until they are gone. Then you stand there some more.
You look up at the stars.
If you wished on a star, you’d wish for friends exactly like these.
You, Christopher, are one lucky Duck.
A Personal History by Ann M. Martin
I was born on August 12, 1955, in Princeton, New Jersey. I grew up there with my parents and my sister, Jane, who was born two years later. My mother was a preschool teacher and my father was an artist, a cartoonist for the New Yorker and other magazines.
When I was younger, my parents created an imaginative atmosphere for my sister and me. My dad liked circuses and carnivals and magic, and as a teenager, he had been an amateur magician. My father would often work at home, and I would stand behind his chair and watch him draw. When he wasn’t working, he enjoyed making greeting cards.
My parents were very interested in my sister’s and my artistic abilities, and our house was filled with art supplies—easels, paints, pastels, crayons, and stacks of paper. Coloring books were allowed, but only truly creative pursuits were encouraged, and I took lots of art classes.
Our house was as full of pets as it was of art supplies. We always had cats, and, except for the first two years of my life, we always had more than one. We also had fish, guinea pigs, and turtles, as well as mice and hamsters.
When I think about my childhood I think of pets and magic and painting and imaginary games with my sister. But there is another activity I remember just as clearly, and that’s reading. I loved to read. I woke up early so I could read in bed before I went to school. I went to bed early so I could read before I fell asleep. And from this love of books and reading came a love of writing.
In 1977 I graduated from Smith College in Massachusetts. I taught elementary school for a year, which is what I had wanted to do, and used children’s literature in the classroom. I loved teaching, but by the end of the school year I had decided that what I really wanted to do was work on children’s books. So I moved to New York City, entered the publishing field, and at the same time, began writing seriously. In 1983, my first book, Bummer Summer, was published.
In 1985, after the release of my first three books—Bummer Summer, Inside Out, and Stage Fright—an editor at Scholastic asked if I’d be interested in writing a series about babysitting. She had a title in mind—the Baby-Sitters Club—and she was thinking of a miniseries consisting of four books. So I created four characters: Kristy, Claudia, Stacey, and Mary Anne, and planned to write one book featuring each girl. The series was supposed to start in 1986 and end in 1987. Instead, it ended fourteen years later in 2000, with over two hundred titles and four related series, including Dawn’s spinoff, California Diaries.
Saying good-bye to the Baby-Sitters Club was sad. It had been nice not to have to let go of the characters at the end of each book. But by 2000, I had found that I wanted more time to spend working on other kinds of stories (though I did return to the series to write a prequel, titled The Summer Before, in 2010).
I felt myself drawn to the 1960s, the most important decade of my childhood. I think this interest was due in large part to the fact that my mother’s diaries came into my possession, and I spent a good deal of time reading them, especially the ones that covered the 1960s. The next thing I knew, I had written three books set in that decade. The second, A Corner of the Universe, is the most personal of all the books I’ve written. It’s loosely based on my mother’s side of the family, and in a way, it started on a summer day in 1964 when I learned that my mother’s younger brother, Stephen, who had died shortly before my parents first met, had been mentally ill. Stephen was the basis for the character of Adam in A Corner of the Universe. The book won a Newbery Honor in 2003.
The life I lead now is not terribly different from the one I led as a child, except that I no longer live in Princeton. I moved to the Catskill Mountains in New York a number of years ago. Animals are still very important to me. Influenced by the many stray cats I’ve known, and inspired by my parents, who used to do volunteer work for Princeton’s animal shelter, I became a foster caregiver for an animal rescue group in my community. I also still have cats of my own, and only recently said good-bye to my dog, Sadie, the sweetest dog ever. She was the inspiration for my book A Dog’s Life.
Although I grew up to become a writer, my interest in art never left, except that now I’m more interested in crafts, and especially in sewing and needlework. I like to knit, but I most enjoy sewing, especially making smocked or embroidered dresses. And of course, I continue to write. In 2014, the fourth Doll People book, The Doll People Set Sail, will be published, as well as Rain Reign, a novel about a girl with Asperger’s syndrome and her beloved dog, Rain.
Here I am as a newborn in the hospital in August 1955.
Me at age two at my home in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1957.
This is the house where I grew up on Dodds Lane in Princeton.
My family always had cats—and except for when I was in college, I’ve always had at least one. This is a photo of Kiki, Sweetheart, Tigger, and Fluffy from my childhood home (Kiki is a little hard to see).
Reading at bedtime with my mother (and cats Sweetheart and Honey) when I was about seven, circa 1962.
On the left is my mother’s younger brother, Stephen, with my grandfather and my uncle Rick. Stephen was mentally ill and the basis for the character of Adam in A Corner of the Universe.
Graduating from Smith College in Massachusetts in 1977.
Here I am at home in New York City in 1989, surrounded by fan mail.
This is my house in New York, around 1993. It recently celebrated its one hundredth birthday.
Wildlife plays a larger role in my life now than when I was young. I will often find deer, wild turkeys, and garden toads in my backyard. Here is a black bear investigating my hose!
My dog, Sadie, one week after I brought her home in 1998.
At home in the country in 2000 with Peanut, one of the many kittens I’ve fostered.
This is the room where I do all of my sewing and card-making.
A few of my handmade greeting cards!
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Dawn: Diary ThreeCopyright © 1999 by Ann M. Martin
Sunny: Diary ThreeCop
yright © 1999 by Ann M. Martin
Maggie: Diary ThreeCopyright © 1999 by Ann M. Martin
Amalia: Diary ThreeCopyright © 2000 by Ann M. Martin
Ducky: Diary ThreeCopyright © 2000 by Ann M. Martin
Cover design by Andrea Worthington
978-1-4804-6916-7
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
345 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
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Diary Three: Dawn, Sunny, Maggie, Amalia, and Ducky Page 31
