I Am the Wallpaper (16 page)

She nodded. “It doesn’t matter. You already know anyway.”

“Well, aren’t you Miss Clever.”

She didn’t answer.

“Tish, didn’t you ever think about what an awful thing you were doing? So much bad karma? Didn’t it occur to you how mean it was to put somebody’s diary up on the Internet? Not to mention sending out that picture. It’s all so … well, it’s unforgivable! What’s wrong with you?”

“It wasn’t me,” she said calmly.

“No? You’re just sweet and innocent, are you? Innocently reading my diary?”

She was quiet for a long time. “I don’t blame you for being mad,” she said finally. “I’d be mad if I were you. Even though they told me not to, I was still going to tell you. You just found out first.”

“Sure you were,” I said, trying to keep my voice quiet. “Okay then, so if it wasn’t you, who was it?”

“Richard, but don’t be too mad at him. He’s being used.”

And then the whole ugly story spilled out.

According to Tish, it was Billy’s idea to look through the diary. She said that the first day they played with Billy and his friends in the street, Billy had a pair of binoculars. He told them he used them to watch me from his bedroom window before I’d started being more careful to close the shades. Fortunately for me, the most he’d ever seen though my window was me in my nightshirt reading or writing. At least, that’s what he told them. That’s when Richard told Billy that he knew what I must have been writing. The diary.

“I whispered to him to shut up, but he didn’t listen,” Tish said.

“I bet you did.”

She ignored me and continued. So the next thing was that Billy told my cousins that he and his friends had started a spy club. He said that they could join, but first they needed to find the diary and bring it out to them. “I wouldn’t do it,” Tish said. “And at first, Richard wasn’t going to either, but he really wanted to be Billy’s friend.”

“So you guys just decided it was okay to search my room?”

“I told you it wasn’t me, it was Richard. But you were really mean to us, Floey, lording it over us and yelling at us to stay out of everything. You made it hard
not
to want to go through your things. Plus you went through Richard’s stuff, right?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Besides, if you were going to wave your diary around and bully us about reading it, then you should’ve found a better hiding place than your sock drawer.”

I glared at her in the darkness. “Well … go on!”

“So he brought the diary out. He wanted to be part of the gang. It’s hard for him to make friends, you know. He’s really shy. And sometimes,” she added, her voice dropping to an even lower whisper, “he can even be kind of unsociable.”

Big news flash.

The next day, Tish said, Richard tried to get Billy and his friends interested in something else, so he told them it could be fun if they started a computer game Web site together. Unfortunately, Billy liked the Web site idea, but not for computer games.

And thus,
floeysprivatelife.com
was born.

According to Tish, Richard had also made the mistake of mentioning the birthday picture to Billy. It had been in his pocket the day I’d searched his room. That gave Billy the idea of the special photo extra, so they could even make a little money.

Pretty soon, my Web site had a following. In just a few short days, not only were the boys on the street reading the daily updates, but some of their buddies in town and in other nearby towns were even in on it.

“The spy club is all Billy and his friends ever talk about now,” Tish whispered. “Everybody just goes along with whatever Billy wants, including Richard, even though I
know he feels guilty about it. I told him he’s a jerk for doing it. I’ve been staying out of it and that’s why they don’t want to play with me.”

“So this club, do they spy on anybody other than me?”

Tish shook her head. “But they don’t know that you know, and I’m not going to tell them either.”

By this time I was lying down on my bed again, staring back up at the ceiling. I wasn’t sure what to believe. If Aunt Sarah thought
I
was a bad influence, I wondered what she’d have thought of her own
son
if she knew?

“You’d be surprised how big a fan club you have,” Tish whispered solemnly. “You’re kind of a star.”

The next morning I noticed that
floeysprivatelife.com
’s audience was getting bigger. Richard had added a message board for people to write comments about the Web pages and about me. To get in, readers now needed to buy their own password (Tish gave me Richard’s, which was “enlightenment”—he planned to change them every few days) and there was a growing list of names, with messages from people in Providence, Newport, and even some from Chicago. Who were these people? Some of the messages were mean, like the one that congratulated Wen for “dodging the bullet,” or the one that called me a “hopeless airhead.” But a lot of them were nicer, like the one from the guy who hoped I came out of my depression because I had a lot to offer. There were even a bunch of really surprising postings that said I was pretty—actually, they used words
like “hot” and “built” and, my favorite, “lovely Venus.” This was all pretty scary, but in a bizarre way it was also kind of flattering. Sure, these were the comments of a bunch of perverts, but still, I began looking at myself in a new way. Suddenly I wasn’t the wallpaper anymore. I felt more like a chandelier (if you know what I mean), or maybe a fountain.

Even Lillian had never had her own Web site.

That afternoon I thought of a way to put my new publishing power to more practical use. Ma had been bugging me to cut the grass, along with a long list of other chores she wanted me to do. So this is what I wrote:

Of course, there was only a small part of me that really thought Richard’s army of little perverts might actually do my work just so they could get a picture of me sunning myself in a bikini I didn’t really own.

But the power of the Internet surprised me.

The next day turned out to be clear and beautiful. Soon after my mother left the house to play doubles with Gary, the doorbell rang. It was Billy and three of his friends.

“Hi, Floey. We’re trying to make some extra money and were wondering if you have any work you’d like us to do for you around the house.”

I smiled.

A moment later, I stood over them as one boy started up the lawn mower and the others pulled apart the pile of junk in the garage and repacked it in neat order. They dragged the rugs down the front steps and shook big clouds of dust out of them. And then there was poor Frank Sinatra. My mother hadn’t really asked me to give him a bath, but I was still mad at him for being unfaithful, so I’d added him to my list. It took two of the braver boys to hold him still. He made long, eerie ferret moans while they hosed him down and worked the shampoo into his fur. Pathetic and annoyed, he peered out at me as if he knew I was to blame.

They worked cheap. I only had to take a few dollars out of the cash my mother kept in the cookie jar. Interestingly,
Richard didn’t help his friends. In fact, he seemed uncomfortable that they were knocking themselves out for me. He cleaned his room himself (Tish did ours) and then he took a walk.

Floeysprivatelife.com
was out of his control.

Tish, who was hanging around me the whole time she wasn’t cleaning, kept looking over at me and giggling. When the boys finished up in the bathroom I was on the living room sofa and Tish was lying on the floor flipping through one of her magazines. I was starting a new book that the librarian had suggested,
Live in a Better Way: Reflections on Truth, Love and Happiness
by the Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lama says people can train their minds to be happier. Even though I liked the idea, I didn’t really get how you could actually do it.

The boys marched into the room wearing rubber gloves and big silly grins. “All done!” they said. “It’s a beautiful day. Perfect for lying out in the sun, don’t you think?”

I raised my eyes from the page only for a moment. “No, not today,” I said. “I think I’m just going to stay in and read. But I sure do appreciate your help!”

Tish had a hard time controlling herself. She pretended she was having a coughing fit and had to leave the room.

If only I had a picture of their disappointed faces. How I would have liked to upload
that
!

Over the next few days, I had that spy club running around in circles. One afternoon I wrote that I particularly like
boys who wear bike shorts. The next morning, as the crowd of boys watched me pedal past on my way to Gary’s, I noticed that two or three of them were sporting tight spandex shorts with padded behinds.

I admit it. I was enjoying my new life.

By Wednesday I was fussing more than usual in front of the mirror. I spent a long time deciding on outfits. Should I try to look slimmer in my black capris and my red and black striped blouse, or instead should I go with a plain white T-shirt and blue jean cutoffs? As long as people were watching me, I wanted to make a good impression.

Even my mother noticed.

“Are you trying to impress Wen?” she asked, stopping to watch me from the end of the hallway.

“No, Ma,” I said, blushing.

“Then who is he?”

“I just want to look my best. What’s wrong with that?” There was no way she could have understood that I was constantly in the spotlight. I didn’t want to disappoint my audience.

“Nothing. I’m just afraid if you stand in front of that mirror any longer, you’re going to wear it out.”

Having written in a diary every day since I was nine, I now found that I couldn’t go long without writing something honest. So when I noticed that the Web site completely skipped over the three days before I’d bought my new
hardcover diary, I was happy to realize that Richard didn’t know about the spiral notebook. I’d never bothered to hide it, so he never read it. Since the hardcover diary was now my place for creative writing, the spiral notebook became my place for recording my
real
thoughts.

That Wednesday night, I had a lot to write about. Just when things had seemed to be getting so much better, they suddenly took a turn for the whole lot worse.