Adaptation by Youkyung (Alice) Lee

     This is from the scene when Holden goes into his sister Phoebe’s room and reads her notebook before he wakes her up. In my story, I’m in Holden’s place and my little sister Sally is in Phoebe’s place.

I sat down on Sally’s desk and looked at the stuff on it. It was mostly all school stuff, you know, like science textbook and math paper and that sort of crap. I was just sitting there, staring at my little sister’s school works. Then I noticed this diary that I gave to her on her ninth birthday. It was one of those corny diaries for girls, with lace and all, you know, the ones that most of the girls record their phony life on. Sally was only ten now, maybe a little too young to write serious things on a diary. That’s why I gave her this diary for her birthday. Before Sally had it, the diary was only a goddamn phony diary, But Sally changed it. Sally can change many things. She’s like a goddamn magician. She switches things that are so phony that you can puke at the sight of it, into these brilliant works of art. Things aren’t phony anymore when Sally uses them. Just like this diary, you know. On the front cover, Sally wrote something so fascinating that it made me smile like madly. This is what old Sally had on it:

Sally Wingchelle Charmaine Josephina Lee’s Diary

     That killed me. I have absolutely no idea where she got those names from. Sally doesn’t have a middle name. None of my family member has middle name. Old Sally didn’t like that, though. She wanted middle names. Not just a middle name, middle names. That’s what she wanted. Every time I see her she’s got new middle names for herself. She makes up her name with all the names she likes. She sometimes makes up a name you never heard of. She It really kills me.

     I opened the diary and read the first page. It had on it:

The Names of My Children

My first daughter: Sophie

My first son: Seth

My second daughter: Shirley

My second son: Samuel

Old Sally. She was only a ten year old and she was already naming her children. She’s actually quite obsessed about names, you know. She loved naming things. I bet her diary had a name too, like Anne Frank’s diary. It might sound corny, naming the diary and all that business, but it wasn’t. It really wasn’t. Nothing’s corny if Sally’s the one doing it. That’s because she does things with all her heart. I mean, she does what she does, you know like naming the diary and her children and stuff, for real. She’s not faking anything. She’s not trying to look cool or sentimental or anything like all the phonies out in this world. If she wants to do something, she does it. If she doesn’t, than she doesn’t do it. She’s nothing close to being a phony. She’s the one who is real in this goddamn phony world.

I sat there on Sally’s desk and read the whole diary. Not thoroughly, though. I tried not to read it too carefully, you know. After all, it is her diary for God’s sake. It would feel goddamn awful if somebody read my diary and found out all the things about me. So I just flipped through pages not actually reading much. But just looking at her writing just killed me. Sally had this special handwriting that kills me when I see it. Her handwriting is really neat, even neater than mine. At the same time though, her writing is a bit squiggly. Neat and squiggly. It sounds like crap, but it really is. Her handwriting is just like her. I can’t really explain or anything, but if you see her handwriting, you know that it was written by Sally. It kills me, it really does.

Sally rolled to the side on her bed. I decided to wake her up. I couldn’t really sit on her desk till the morning comes, you know. So I sat on her bed and shook her up.