Journal,

Today is May 16, 2008. It is the day before I plan to kill myself.

I hope I don’t sound too melodramatic. I’ve never kept a journal before. It seems like today is an odd place to begin, considering the circumstances, but I want someone to know my story. I want someone to know me, without judgment, before I die.

Sort of like a dying wish.

Oh, dear. This is sounding too melodramatic, isn’t it?

I guess I should start by introducing myself. My name’s Delanie Adams. I’m sixteen, and a junior in high school. I live with my mom, my dad, my little sister, and our two dogs.

It sounds almost sitcom-y, written out like that. You know, those shows from the 1950s, like “The Brady Bunch”? Where everyone is happy and smiling, and the mom always has a home-cooked meal on the table when the dad walks in from work at 6:30 every evening, and there’s always off-stage laughs from the studio audience whenever someone cracks a joke.

“Honey,” he says, “I’m home!” He puts his briefcase on the floor, hangs his hat and coat on the stand.

“Dinner’s on the table!” she calls from the kitchen.

The two kids come running over to their dad while he stands by the door, loosening his tie. “Dad,” whines the little girl, “Joey pulled on my pigtails!” The audience laughs.

“Well, I had to!” insists the little boy, before his father can get a word in. “We were playing horsie… I had to steer her somehow!” More laughter.

But my home isn’t like that at all. There’s no omniscient laughter. Everything isn’t perfect. Or happy.

For one thing, I never see my dad. He’s a lawyer, a defense attorney. The ones that defend the bad guys on those cop shows. I once asked him how he could go to work each day, knowing he was helping bad people. All he said was that I should shut the hell up if I didn’t know what I was talking about.

We live in a small town in the mountains called Julian, about an hour or two from San Diego, depending on traffic. It’s sort of touristy; snow in the winter, apple-picking in the fall. Stuff like that. There’s a little two-lane highway that winds along the mountainside, which is the way in from San Diego. It’s nice on weekends if you have lots of time to drive and don’t get car-sick, but going down the mountain in the morning, it’s almost always crowded.

That’s why I never see my dad. He works in San Diego, downtown, by the Harbor. I went to his office once, and all I did for an hour was stare out his big glass window into the Harbor, watching the yachts and sailboats go by. One time I even saw a cruise ship, and I imagined tiny people hanging off the balconies and waving their arms off at the people on the docks. Anyway, he says he doesn’t like the commute every morning from our house, so he stays with a co-worker during the week and drives home on Friday nights. Sometimes, we have dinner together. Most of the time, though, he’s busy with a case, so he grabs a plate and takes it to his office upstairs. Then my mom looks at us sternly with her watery eyes and says we need to be quiet, and tiptoe past his office when we go to bed so as to not bother him.

My mom doesn’t work. She’s stay-at-home. She doesn’t do anything, and I think it’s kind of pathetic. When I get home from school, there she is on the couch watching some crappy soap opera, sniffing and wiping at her watery eyes, taking another sip of her red wine. She’s sort of like a red-wine fiend; I don’t know how many glasses she has a day, and the top shelf of the pantry is full of her bottles. I don’t know how she can stand the stuff, either. I tried some, once, when she wasn’t looking. It tasted gross.

Oh, hang on… Lills is calling me…

Sorry about that. Lills, my sister, wanted me to see something she had drawn. Some sort of art project for school, I think. She’s only in the first grade, but she can certainly draw. The only problem she’s got is she puts happy faces on everything, and not just the people. The trees smile, and the animals smile, and the sun smiles. I think she’s the happiest kid I’ve ever met in my life. All smiles, all the time. Even in her drawings. I wonder how she does it.

Her name isn’t really Lills, of course. I think my mom was going through some sort of Greek mythology phase when she was born, so her first name’s Athena, after the Goddess of Wisdom. My dad hated the name, so he got to throw in a middle name into the works. Lilly. I didn’t really like saying Athena, either, so I called her Lills instead. It’s stuck ever since.

Poor kid. I don’t think I’d ever name someone something weird, like Delanie or Athena. I’d want them to have a normal name, like Sarah, or Emily, or Judy.

Holy crap. It’s taken me an hour to write this already. I think it might take me more than a night to tell my story, after all. It’s kind of annoying, but I really want to do this, I really do. So I think I can wait. I can wait til I’m done writing, done with my story. Then I’ll do it, once and for all.

Night then, Journal.