The Journal

By John Mancini

A short story about somewhat misfit 8th grader, her father, a summer reading assignment to read the Diary of Anne Frank, and the events of 9/11

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Mancini
• Release date: Sep 8, 2011
• ISBN: 9781466073906

John Mancini

President of AIIM, the international association representing the content management industry. AIIM (http://www.aiim.org) helps organizations find, control, and optimize their information.

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The Journal

John Mancini

Copyright 2010 by John Mancini

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The Journal

Part One

How long have I been sleeping

how long have I been drifting alone through the night

how long have I been dreaming I could make it right

if I closed my eyes and tried with all my might

-Jackson Browne

July 16, 2001

The first thing I would like noted for the official record, your honor, is that this assignment was NOT my idea.

OK, in the spirit of at least trying to do this assignment let me start with the basics.

My name is Sarah Middleton. Up until a few weeks ago, I was an eighth grader at Herndon Middle School. Now I am a rising freshman as they say. I don't quite know what this means. What I do know is that right now I feel like I am exactly nowhere. Not in middle school anymore, but not quite in high school either.

The reason I am writing in this journal in the first place is that I have a summer reading assignment. I haven't even gone to high school yet, and they are already giving me work.

Our assignment is this. We have to read The Diary of Anne Frank. As if that wasn't bad enough. What on earth do the great English teacher gods think they are accomplishing by assigning us to read a kid's diary from 60 years ago? But to make it even worse, we are supposed to keep our own diary or journal all summer. The idea is that we are supposed to take a quote from the Anne Frank diary each night as we're reading it, and then write about it or anything else we want to write about. I guess they think that by making us pick a quote each time, that maybe by mistake we'll actually read parts of the Anne Frank thing.

They said in the assignment that the new teacher - who I haven't even met yet and is already making demands on me - is not going to actually read these journals. They said he's going to leaf through them, see if we have any quotes at the beginning of each entry, and that's it. They said they're not trying to grade anything, just get us thinking about ourselves and the world we live in.

Yeah, right. Like I believe that. There's no way I'm going to put anything personal in this thing in case anyone else gets hold of it. Here's what I might do. I got this idea from the movie, might do. I got this idea from the movie, The Shining, which was on TV the other night. I could start each page with a quote, but then write All work and no play make Jack a dull boy hundreds and thousands and millions of times just like Jack Nicholson did in the movie. And then when the English teacher looks through the journal, maybe he'll really freak out just like that skinny actress did in the movie when she found Jack Nicholson's book.

But then again, I probably won't do that. You probably don't know this, but I am a big talker. But slow to actually do the things I sometimes talk about. If only my parents could figure that out, maybe they wouldn't hassle me so much.

I guess that's enough