Diary by Chuck Palahniuk (classic fiction .txt) 📗

Still, the better she could draw, the worse her life got—until nothing in her real world was good enough. It got until she didn't belong anywhere. It got so nobody was good enough, refined enough, real enough. Not the boys in high school. Not the other girls. Nothing was as real as her imagined world. This got until she was going to student counseling and stealing money from her mom's purse to spend on dope.

So people wouldn't say she was crazy, she made her life about the art instead of the visions. Really, she just wanted the skill to record them. To make her imagined world more and more accurate. More real.

And in art school, she met a boy named Peter Wilmot. She met you, a boy from a place called Waytansea Island.

And the first time you see the island, coming from anyplace else in the entire world, you think you're dead. You're dead and gone to heaven, safe forever.

The fish's spine is Division Avenue. The fish's ribs are streets, starting with Alder, one block south of the village square. Next is Birch Street, Cedar Street, Dogwood, Elm, Fir, Gum, Hornbeam, all of them alphabetical until Oak and Poplar Streets, just before the fish's tail. There, the south end of Division Avenue turns to gravel, and then mud, then disappears into the trees of Waytansea Point.

This isn't a bad description. That's how the harbor looks when you arrive for the first time on the ferryboat from the mainland. Narrow and long, the harbor looks like the mouth of a fish, waiting to gobble you up in a story from the Bible.

You can walk the length of Division Avenue, if you've got all day. Have breakfast at the Waytansea Hotel and then walk a block south, past the church on Alder Street. Past the Wilmot house, the only house on East Birch, with sixteen acres of lawn going right down to the water. Past the Burton house on East Juniper Street. The woodlots dense with oaks, each tree twisted and tall as a moss-covered lightning bolt. The sky above Division Avenue, in summer it's green with dense, shifting layers of maple and oak and elm leaves.

You come here for the first time, and you think all your hopes and dreams have come true. Your life will end happily ever after.

The point is, for a kid who's only ever lived in a house with wheels under it, this looks like the special safe place where she'll live, loved and cared for, forever.

For a kid who used to sit on shag carpet with a box of colored pencils or crayons and draw pictures of these houses, houses she'd never seen. Just pictures of the way she imagined them with their porches and stained-glass windows. For this little girl to one day see these houses for real. These exact houses. Houses she thought she'd only ever imagined . . .

Since the first time she could draw, little Misty Marie knew the wet secrets of the septic tanks behind each house. She knew the wiring inside their walls was old, cloth-wrapped for insulation and strung through china tubes and along china posts. She could draw the inside of every front door, where every island family marked the names and height of each child.

Even from the mainland, from the ferry dock in Long Beach, across three miles of salt water, the island looks like paradise. The pines so dark green they look black, the waves breaking against the brown rocks, it's like everything she could ever want. Protected. Quiet and alone.

Nowadays, this is how the island looks to a lot of people. A lot of rich strangers.

For this kid who'd never swam in anything bigger than the trailer park pool, blinded by too much chlorine, for her to ride the ferry into Waytansea Harbor with the birds singing and the sun bouncing bright off the rows and rows of the hotel windows. For her to hear the ocean rolling into the side of the breakwater, and feel the sun so warm and the clean wind in her hair, smelling the roses in full bloom . . . the thyme and rosemary . . .

This pathetic teenager who'd never seen the ocean, she'd already painted the headlands and the cliffs that hung high above the rocks. And she'd got them perfect.

Poor little Misty Marie Kleinman.

This girl came here as a bride, and the whole island came out to greet her. Forty, fifty families, all of them smiling and waiting their turn to shake her hand. A choir of grade school kids sang. They threw rice. There was a big dinner in her honor at the hotel, and everyone toasted her with champagne.

From its hillside up above Merchant Street, the windows of the Waytansea Hotel, all six stories of them, the rows of windows and glassed-in porches, the zigzag lines of dormers in the steep roof, they were all watching her arrive. Everyone was watching her come to live in one of the big houses in the shady, tree-lined belly of the fish.

Just one look at Waytansea Island, and Misty Kleinman figured it was worth kissing off her blue-collar mom. The dog piles and shag carpet. She swore never to set foot in the old trailer park. She put her plans for being a painter on hold.

The point is, when you're a kid, even when you're a little older, maybe twenty and enrolled in art school, you don't know anything about the real world. You want to believe somebody when he says he loves you. He only wants to marry you and take you home to live in some perfect island paradise. A big stone house on East Birch Street. He says he only wants to make you happy.

And no, honestly, he won't ever torture you to death.

And poor Misty Kleinman, she told herself, it wasn't a career as an artist that she wanted. What she really wanted, all along, was the house, the