Alicia Atkins

Only lift the board when no one else is home.

2.

Only read in natural light or by candlelight.

No electricity can touch the pages.

3.

Tell no one about the diary.

4.

Always put it back just the way you found it that first day.

His name was Bertrand, and he killed people.

Maybe I should have been embarrassed by how much I loved the way he wrote.

His facility with words sometimes made me forget the sense of them.

He used long words I vaguely knew but often had to look up.

5.

Make an inventory of unfamiliar terms, and look them up after the diary is replaced, and only then...

I increased my own vocabulary in imitation of him, thrilling when my teachers noticed my elevated prowess with the language, shamed when I received a piece back and couldn't remember what a particularly juicy term meant.

Soon, I had Bertrand's killings to add to my catalogue of Bundy's crimes.

Janie, in a frosty January.

Jill, left by the banks of a river in another state.

Anwar, beaten to death just because, outside a roadhouse under a full moon.

The diary was in second person, something I'd never seen done before.