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Diary of Shane Collins, recovered partially burned from the fireplace of the Glass House.
Look, writing diaries is a girly thing, and I wouldn’t be doing it except Eve says I need some kind of therapy, and that if I didn’t, she’d never let me borrow the car again. That’s a pretty heavy threat. So, here it goes.
I’ve been back in Morganville three weeks now.
Still hate it.
So I’ll try to write down some stuff. Enough to get the car again, anyway.
MONDAY
Made chili. Busted Michael’s score on Halo without trying. Went out with Janice from school; she tells me Ray Kelly’s gone missing. Me and Ray, we go back to junior high, we used to hang out.
Ray tried to leave town. Janice said he got caught a couple of miles down the road, pulled over by patrols . No paperwork, no permissions, so he was yanked back in to talk to his Patron.
Nobody’s seen him since.
Man, I hate this town.
TUESDAY
[Blank]
WEDNESDAY
[Blank]
THURSDAY
Laundry. I hate laundry. Not as much as I hate everything else about this town, but hey.
FRIDAY
I was walking around town today with Eve, and I realized something that made me sick. I felt comfortable.
Truth is, Morganville gets in your blood. When I was out of town and on the run, all I did was think about this place. Home. Must have been all my parents thought about, too, because they damn sure didn’t waste much time thinking about me. Dad crawled into a bottle and turned into something I didn’t recognize. Mom .... well, Mom tried. Sometimes she’d pull herself out of whatever hell she was in long enough to give me a smile, maybe even a conversation. It never lasted, though. She always went back into the shadows, and there I was, all alone, staring at the walls, nothing but the TV for company.
I thought a lot about how I had no future. About the fire, and Alyssa dying, and how I didn’t know how to live in the world beyond Morganville. Hell, at least in Morganville, you knew the rules.
I don’t really remember a lot after the first couple of weeks on the road with Mom and Dad. Moving from one crappy town to another, never making friends, never having a life – it all blurred together. I got into a hell of a lot of trouble, the kind I was lucky to get out of alive and in one piece; I drank, I stole pills from Mom, I did anything I could think of to make it all just go away. To stop thinking about it.
It never did go away, of course. I just felt worse every time the buzz faded, and when I felt worse, I looked for fights. You can always find a fight in the kind of places we were living. You’re lucky if it doesn’t come looking for you first.
Well, growing up in Morganville had prepared me for fights – I can hold my own in a smackdown, no matter who brings it. Or even how many, usually. I caught Dad watching me once or twice. Most dads might have stepped in, done something – not him, not even when I got beat way down. He watched me the way a trainer watches a boxer, for flaws. For weaknesses. It was the only thing I’d done in years that seemed to interest him. To make him proud of me.
Sick, I know, but that only made me look for more trouble. Anything to see approval in his eyes again, even if it wasn’t really about me at all.
And then it all went from bad to full-on Hell, when Mom died.
I’ll be honest, I don’t remember the details. I know I saw blood under the closed bathroom door. I remember opening the door. I remember – I try not to remember, I guess. That’s where my mind just shuts down, except for flashes, shadows, and nightmares. I get a lot of nightmares.
From that day on, things were different. Dad was beyond dark, he was a black hole, and I was – not good. Not good at all. I’ll be honest, I thought about ending it too, like I thought Mom had ... but then I found her diary.
And I knew she hadn’t killed herself. That diary was full of pain, and anger, but it had clues in it, things that I hadn’t known. She’d been putting together memories that leaving Morganville had wiped away. She’d been remembering things – Alyssa’s death, as a start, and then spiraling out from there.
She’d remembered the vampires.
Until I read that diary, I’d forgotten all about them – about everything odd about Morganville. But it was all right there, on paper, and as soon as I saw it, all of the past came rushing back on me. All the bad in one sticky, sickening dose.
But what I hung onto was the last entry in Mom’s diary, dated the day of her death.
I’ve got to find a way to get the word out about Morganville, she wrote. I’ve got to break the news to Shane. Somehow, I have to be strong for my boy.
Mom hadn’t killed herself, no matter how it had looked. No matter what the cops had said about it.
It took me weeks to get Dad sobered up enough to make him understand that Mom had been killed. Murdered by the powers that be in Morganville, to keep her from spreading the word.
Once he understood all that – and making him believe it got me more than a few bruises -- I wasn’t a disappointment anymore. I was an asset – something he could use. It was his idea to send me back here, and I was so desperate to feel something, anything, that I bought into it wholesale.
It never really occurred to me until I got here that one mistake, just one, could kill me. I’m bait on a hook to my dad, and if I get bitten, well, too bad. I have to look out for myself now ... and I have to look out for my friends. Michael and Eve are part of my family now. And families get punished for your sins.
There’s got to be a way to make things right, get Dad his vengeance, and still keep my friends safe.
Something’s got to change.
Scariest thing? Maybe it’s going to have to be me.
Now I’m going to burn this thing, before anybody sees it. It’s my neck if they do.
Damn. There goes the car.