The folder was full of screenshots. Group chats between Robin and her friends, sent to me one at a time since March by girls who thought I should know. In every one, Robin was quoting my journal. Word for word. Sometimes with a photo of the page.
My mom read the first one. Then the second. She put her hand flat on the table and did not say anything for a long time.
My dad scrolled to the end. There were twenty three of them.
Robin stopped shrugging. She said they were just jokes. She said nobody took it seriously.
My mom looked at her and said, then why did you take a picture of it?
For three years I had been called the paranoid one, and the proof had been sitting in the phones of other girls the whole time.
Nobody finished dinner. My parents sent Robin to her room and then came up to mine. My mom sat on the edge of my bed. She said she was sorry she ever called me paranoid. My dad looked at the lock I had installed on my own door, a cheap one from the hardware store, and said he would put a real one on that weekend.
He did. A good one. He gave me the only key.
Robin lost her phone for a month. But the thing that got to her was not the phone. It was the girls who had been sending me those screenshots. They stopped sitting with her at lunch. Word gets around in a small school.
About three weeks later, she knocked on my door. She had been crying.
She said when I started high school, I stopped talking to her. I closed my door. I had new friends and a journal and a whole life she was not part of anymore. She said she read it at first because she missed me, because it was the only way she knew what was going on with me. Then it became a habit. Then it became a way to feel important with her friends.
She said she knew it was awful. She said she was sorry.
I did not forgive her all at once. I am not going to pretend I did. But I did let her sit on my bed that night, and we talked for two hours, longer than we had talked in years.
My parents started something after that. Sunday nights, just the four of us, no phones, dinner and a board game. It felt corny at first. Now nobody misses it.
A few months later, Robin gave me a present for my birthday. It was a new journal, with a little brass lock on it. Inside the front cover she had written that it was mine and only mine, and she would never touch it.
She kept her word.
Last week she asked if I wanted to see something. She handed me her own diary and said I could read one page, any page I picked.
I handed it right back. I told her that was hers.
She smiled like I had given her a gift.