EIGHT

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- Juliet's POV -

SHE STARED AT THE notebook. It had a rigid, cloth-bound cover which was of a pastel yellow; the pages were a gentle brown, and they were very delicate and soft; the notebook contained only a few hundred pages and nothing more.

It belonged to Marina.

She wrote about her everyday life in a few sentences and wrote all of them down in the small notebook she bought at some store. It was manufactured in the 1950s, and Marina wrote in it with her ink pen. It was her most beloved possession - a possession that a thirteen year old Juliet secretly took and tended to when the owner died.

She closed the notebook and took in a shaky sigh. She carefully smelled it, and her eyes watered. Her heart hurt. She was flooded with images of Marina, laughing, her curly short strawberry blonde hair bouncing, reflecting the sun's gentle rays. Her eyes were large and a clear, sky blue.

Tears streamed down Juliet's cheeks and she put the notebook in the drawer hastily, her hand shaking. She kept that drawer aside for saving things that really mattered to her. A train ticket from the first time she went travelling alone. Family pictures. Five or six polaroids. A candy wrapper from when a crush of hers gave it to her shyly. A high heeled shoe from her first runway show. A bunch of other stuff.

Juliet curled into herself on the floor and cried, her shoulders shaking. Memories flooded her.

Marina hugging Juliet; Marina squeezing Nathan's chubby cheeks; Marina eating an entire plate of warm cookies that Grandma Jeanette had cooked; and finally, Marina crying helplessly when she didn't have the energy to push during delivery.

Her then-boyfriend took advantage of her when she had fallen asleep at a party because he put something in her drink, and he basically raped her. Marina loved her boyfriend, but she never allowed him to go any further than a few French kisses and maybe a little more. When she found out what he did the next morning, feeling sore between the legs when she woke up next to him (he was grinning and told her she was 'a great lay' and that he knew she wouldn't have slept with him voluntarily so 'he had to do what he had to do to satisfy his needs, so it was not hard to figure out what happened), she broke up with him immediately, forced him to change schools, and destroyed his reputation. She made sure he went to jail.

And then Marina found out that she was pregnant a few weeks later. Even though Juliet was only thirteen, Marina went to her first.

"Ju?" She had whispered as she came into Juliet's dark room in the middle of the night. She had been crying.

Juliet had rubbed her eyes and switched on the lamp. "Marina?"

Marina had sat on Juliet's bed, and then hugged her. She had cried into her little sister's shoulder. When she calmed down, she sang a worried Juliet back to sleep.

The next morning, she disappeared. She had told her parents that very day, and they were so mad. They kept giving hints that Marina should abort the baby, since it was a product of rape, but Marina didn't want to give it up. She wasn't enthused how her child was conceived, but she wanted the kid. Marina had always wanted to have kids.

Marina craved to get married someday and have lots of children and a loving husband. She had said, "I don't like how I conceived this child, but I want to keep them. I can do this."

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