Chapter 2: Notebook Thing
"Dear Diary," Jaina looked at the perfect swirls that spelled out two words she never thought she'd write, and then crossed them out. "Dear Journal," she began again. Again, two slashes went through the words.
"Notebook Thing," she wrote this time, thinking,'It'll have to do for now.'
"I don't want to be writing in you, but Dr. Cavery said that it was important to the 'healing process'. I think he just owns stock in the Mead notebook paper company…"
Jaina sighed and looked out the window of the covered speed boat. She was on her way back to Coruscant after spending the last two weeks of school and practically the whole summer on the island of Mon Calamari at Peaceful Shores, a rehabilitation center and psych hospital that was cleverly and well disguised as a super exclusive club, spa and resort. Dr. Cavery had "taken on" her "case" as though it was some difficult court trial; of course, for the amount of pain and suffering she had put the doctors, security, and counselors through, it was probably worse.
But what had they expected? That she would just sit quietly and do what she was told? They still couldn't figure out how she had managed to "escape" all those different times. Jaina had scoffed at that. She and her brothers had been dodging Secret Service since they could walk, hell maybe even crawl, and they thought a couple of cameras and some fat old guards would hold her? She rolled her eyes, 'Please.'
She turned back to the spiral notebook that lay open on her lap. She hated to be actually doing something the idiotic doctor had told her to do, but truth be told, he had managed to help her get off her dependency on X, painkillers and speed. If there was one thing Jaina Solo hated it was being dependent on anyone or anything. She picked up her pen to write again.
"I don't really know what to write. How lame does that sound? Dr. Cavery said I should start by writing about 'who I am' and 'my family history'. But hey, it's not like I can stoop any lower; I mean, I am writing in a…diary… after all.
"Who I am… my family history…? Here's both in a nut shell… I'm the daughter of heroes… and I hate it; I'm the niece of heroes… and I hate it; hell, I'm even the goddaughter of a hero… and, that's right, I hate it! Not that I hate them, my mother not included, but how can a girl be normal when her entire life is surrounded by hero worship? When I told Dr. Cavery about my totally abnormal family, he was all, 'so that's why you're a junkie?' Okay, maybe those weren't his exact words, but it was what he meant, and no matter what I did last year, that is NOT who I am.
"But he doesn't get it; 'who I am' is nothing. I don't exist; I don't know if I ever existed. I'm not trying to be all 'pity Jaina Solo because she was ignored by her mother all her life'; that's not it at all. The real Jaina Solo just never existed. I went from being raised by my dad's 'business partner'-slash-best friend and our family's butler to being on the cover of every frikking magazine in the world like I was some sort of celebrity. No one ever let me figure out who I am and what I want, and then when I act out on it, they're all like 'where did we go wrong?' Uh, that'd be about the time when you blew up the Death Star, just FYI, Mom and Dad, about the time you became heroes in the eyes of the entire world. Well, they're not heroes, not to me.
"I'll write more later… maybe.
"Solo out."
Jaina looked down at what she'd written and could not believe that she had already taken up an entire page. She knew that she would never admit it to anyone, not her brother, not Tenel Ka, but as she had scratched down her inner most thought onto the flimsy piece of paper, she actually felt relieved. She's screamed these things at the top of her lungs before, but never coherently, never for anything but to be angry, not to just get it out in the open.
She closed the notebook and capped the pen, leaned back and closed her eyes; she wanted to be home, as stifling as it could be, and the boat was simply not going fast enough.