Burning Intrigue

Many…… years ago; well, a long time ago to be exact; I was taking aerobics classes three times a week after school. They were a lot of fun except for the fact that my two supposedly best friends quit after just three weeks. Of course, they were much thinner than me so it didn’t matter to them, but I needed the structure to help me get back to being skinny. Like most young girls, I hated the way my body looked.

My dad said I was crazy that I wasn’t fat at all. What did he know? I was 13 years old and already weighed 114 lbs.! I was determined to get back down to 100 lbs. My mom was a little bit more understanding, although she said I was more eccentric than crazy. Okay, so maybe there were a few times….a lot of times that I made her roll her eyes, shake her head and walk away from me, but that didn’t mean those things weren’t important to me. Or at least I thought so at the time. Let me put it this way: “If I had a daughter that age now and she came to me with the same things I presented my mother with, I’d have her seeing a psychiatrist”.

Most of the girls in the aerobics class were nice but there was one girl, Marla Barrows, who thought she was better than everyone else and had no problem saying so right to your face. Her attitude was a result of coming from a super-rich family even though on many days her mother warned her to act civilized and not to put herself above others. Needless to say, the rest of the girls in the class hated her. I say most because there were a couple girls who practically kissed Marla’s fanny so she would like them. Naturally, the only thing Marla liked was having those two bimbos running errands for her or picking up after her. It was sickening to watch.

Then one day, a miracle happened. After class, we all changed up in the locker room as usual and, as usual, the two bimbos were cleaning up after Marla. Marla and one of the girls left the room and the other one grabbed Marla’s canvas bag and when she did, a book fell out. She was in such a hurry to catch up to the others that she didn’t notice it on the floor.

I looked around and to my surprise, I was the last one in the room so I nonchalantly walked over and picked the book up and slid it into my gym bag and left. If you would have seen me, you would have thought I had struck gold. I was bubbling so much inside that I was practically running home. I couldn’t wait to get there.  I also looked very suspicious because I kept looking back over my shoulder to see if I were being followed.

Normally, when I reached home, I would plunk myself down on a kitchen chair or one of the chairs in the living room and tell my mother all about my day at school and the aerobics class. This particular day however, I flew up the stairs as though I had rockets on my sneakers. Thankfully my mom didn’t call me back downstairs to ask me her thousand and one questions about my day.  I was free and clear to examine the book.

Inside my room, I locked the door, tossed the gym bag onto the easy chair in the corner and threw myself crosswise on the bed. I took a deep breath and slowly opened the cover. When I got to the second sentence I gasped and kicked my legs up and down in jubilation. I clamped my hand over my mouth to muffle my giggling. I couldn’t believe my luck. In my hands I held Marla’s secret diary. This was the treasure of all treasures. In today’s world, this would be equal to having nuclear weapons.

When I finally finished celebrating my find, I continued reading. I have to be honest in saying that most of the stuff in the book was dribble and nonsense and Marla whining about everything she could. It was disgraceful even to me at the time because Marla admitted that she used her whining and cry-baby act to get what she wanted.

I rolled onto my back and continued reading even though I was getting bored. Then I turned a page and the words were written in dark capital letters. It caught my interest and I paid more attention to what I was reading. My patience paid off because Marla was complaining that her parents had punished her for being lazy and dirty.

I sat up and continued reading. Seems that Marla wasn’t such the uppity- up she presented to be. Marla had a dark secret and had gotten caught in it. According to her diary, she had a nasty habit of changing her underwear and throwing the dirty ones under the bed and leaving them there. She then went on to say that her mother had snooped around her room spying on her and that her mother claimed she had brought some clean clothes up to Marla’s bedroom and dropped a sock on the floor. When she stooped to pick it up she caught a whiff of something unpleasant under the bed so she got down on her knees and that’s when she found all the dirty underwear. The rest of the diary was pretty much like the first part…..boring.

When I went to school the next day, I approached Marla and said, “Your crony dropped this in the locker room yesterday”, and held out the diary. Marla’s horror-stricken eyes widened like two saucers.

  “I found it on the floor and not knowing who it belonged to, I opened it. When I did, it flipped to the pages with the dark capital letters. I wanted to make sure you got it back.” I smiled, handed it to her and walked away.

   Chelle Munroe©

   October 14, 2013