EIGHT

9/1/2003

Dear Diary,

Hello! You better not be reading this one, Lord Tubbington. I don't know how you got that rubber band off the cover last time.

Anyway, there was a new girl in my class today! Her name's Santana Lopez. Isn't that soooo cool? She has black hair that looks like the ink inside of my pen. She's super pretty too. Her nose is tiny and cute and her eyes are soooo dark! She's like the opposite of me. She doesn't talk very much and she makes lots of mean faces. But I don't think she's really that mean cuz she helped me with math when I didn't know the answers. She is very interesting and mysterious. I'm gonna be her best friend.

-Brittany

"Sixteen equals eight plus eight!" I cried out. I scribbled the answer in my notebook. When I looked down at my reflection in the shiny metal spirals, my blue eyes were sparkling like two little goldfish bowls. "John bought sixteen pairs of shoes. Wow, that's a lot."

The new girl made a face and stabbed me in the arm with her pencil. "That's backwards," she hissed. "It's eight plus eight equals SIXTEEN."

"Oh..." I breathed. "But I think it's better when you figure out the end before the beginning. That way you already know what's gonna happen."

She watched me as I rubbed a white mark into my loose leaf. My eraser was a hamburger. Not a real hamburger, an eraser version of a hamburger. I switched all of the numbers around and gave her a grin.

"Thanks. My name's Brittany. How about you?"

"Santana."

"That's cool! Santana," I repeated, under my breath. "Santana." I just wanted to say it one more time.

"Ms. Franklin's gonna yell at us," she chided. "Be quiet."

Her face was dark and cloudy. She was a mini thunderstorm. I felt all shaky inside, like how you felt right after lightning boomed when you weren't expecting it. I looked down at my math paper and tried to do the problems the right way, but my brain just put everything in reverse. I bit at my lip and stared until the numbers started swimming. My eyes shut, then opened again, and suddenly they were on Santana.

Her math paper was done. She was smart. She was drawing crooked circles all over the edges of it.

"This is hard," I said, making a tiny noise with my tongue.

She peered at me. Her face had stopped raining. There was some sun on her lashes, dancing down her caramel cheeks. "Here," she whispered, pulling my notebook off of my desk and into her lap. "I'll do it for you."

SIXTEEN

6/16/2011

Dear Stupid Fucking Journal,

God, it is SO super lame that YOU, a.k.a Ms. Pillsbury, are making me write all this crap down over summer break. I should have known better than to leave that voodoo doll in my locker with the pins still in it. I'm gonna go ALL Lima Heights on Rachel when she gets back from her Brokeback Mountain Performing Arts Camp. Oh, by the way, that was just- as YOU like to say- "venting." So don't think I've got an eight-inch blade hidden at the back of my locker behind my leather jacket or anything, Ms. Pillsbury. Cuz I would definitely never do anything insane like stab Rachel Berry with it!

Well, I really don't get the point of this so I'm gonna go watch TV now.

- the hottest piece of action at McKinley, a.k.a. Santana

"Santana?" Brittany asked, sidling up beside me on the couch. "Do you want Rocky Road or Mint Chocolate Chip?"

In her hands were two pints of ice cream, the generic crap that I never touched 'cuz my folks had enough money to buy Haagen Daaz.

"Whatever," I muttered, waving a palm through the air.

I kept my eyes on the TV and off of Brittany. A very fucking interesting repeat of "Teen Mom" was on and I didn't wanna miss a single second. Actually I watched this shit every week, just waiting for Quinn Fabray to pop up in a cameo, but she sadly never did. Huge MTV fail.

"I'm gonna give you one scoop of each then," I heard Brittany say, her cat slippers scurrying off into the kitchen.

"Fine," I breathed into my shirt collar.

The remote was clutched in my hand and wet. Brittany's family thought it was a capital idea to keep the air conditioner off and conserve energy during the summer, hence the variety of cheap pints of ice cream. If they were buying Haagen Daaz instead, I could have justified the thin layer of gross sweat painted between my tits.

"This is ridiculous," I moaned to myself, slipping a hand up under my bra and tugging the underwire away from my skin. "Why the hell do I keep coming over here?"

"What?" Brittany asked, her soft voice nearly echoing.

"Nothing!" I exclaimed. I rubbed my sweaty fingers along Brittany's couch cushion, staring past the TV and into the kitchen.

She had white cotton shorts on and a rainbow T-shirt. Her legs were so long that sometimes I forgot where they actually ended, my eyes lodged on her tan thighs and still heading upwards. When they hit her nose I couldn't help smiling. There was nothing bad in Brittany's face. There was a whole lot bad in mine.

"Holy hell, Brit, you're taking forever and it's hotter than Satan's poontang in here! I needs to get my cooldown on!" I shouted.

"Uh oh..."

"Oh, God, did you drop it on the floor again?" I asked, leaping off of the couch and traipsing across the carpet.

Brittany turned around to face me. On the counter were our two, customized ceramic bowls, bought back when we were on an elementary school field trip together. They both read "Brittany." Nobody made customized bowls for little girls named Santana.

"I messed up," Brittany apologized.

The ice cream cartons were empty and there was Rocky Road and Mint Chocolate Chip all over Brittany's fingers.

"All the spoons were dirty, so I had to use chopsticks," she explained. They were sitting in the sink, stabbing the drain in a peace sign. "I stuck one in and it almost broke. So I figured it would be better to use both but then I couldn't stop scooping so now we have to eat all of it," she rambled. Her cheeks blushed a faint pink.

I sighed, shaking my head. "Here," I said, taking her hands in my own. They were soft and sticky and smelled like too-sweet chocolate. "I'll do it for you."

She smiled up at me as I twisted the faucet in her direction. "Thanks," she whispered.

I kept my eyes on the running water and off of Brittany's hands, holding them and holding them away from myself at the same time. Everything was so weird now, since all of the locker speeches and the lesbian thing and all. She wouldn't touch me the same way anymore. We couldn't do all of those things that we used to, on her bed and then in mine, her moans in my ear as I kissed her neck so softly it was like I might break her.

But I was still her best friend. I couldn't not be hers.

"Okay," I said. "You're good."

Brittany looked down at my hands, lazily curled around her wrists. She pulled away and I swallowed down the sack of rocks that struck my stomach.

It was easier not to feel anything, even if it was the only thing you'd ever really felt.