Reading my best friend's diary was an extremely bad idea
from the Autumn 2008 issue

So Taylor Crawford and I are, like, totally best friends. And I don’t mean just like we spend a lot of time together. A lot of girls are like that but we’re way closer. We’ve been best friends since we were like babies. She’s going to be the maid of honor at my wedding, we already decided.

Or at least that was the plan until recently. After swim practice one day last week I went over to Taylor’s house for dinner. We were in her room doing our homework. I’m maybe just a tiny bit smarter than Taylor, so I usually finish my work before she does. I was looking around her room at her pictures and clothes and stuff. I do this all the time because we sometimes share clothes. She’s a tiny bit fatter than I am but we can pretty much share clothes, even if they’re a little loose on me.

Taylor was using the bathroom or talking to her parents or something and, after looking through some of her photo albums, I saw her diary in her bookshelf. I’m not one of those people who just go around randomly reading people’s diaries just for fun. I’ve—totally, I swear to God—never done that sort of thing before. But I kind of peeked at Taylor’s diary.

It had one of those Top Secret stickers on it. But I know Taylor wasn’t really serious about that. I could tell that the Top Secret sticker came with the diary. There was this lock on it too, but she left the key attached to the diary, like she didn’t even care.

I really just glanced at it but I was shocked by one thing I saw. On page eight she said that even though she thinks her boyfriend Austin was “really nice” she still thinks that Alex is “super cute.” Um, Alex is my boyfriend.

Alex and I have been going out for like three months. And I don’t want to go into too many details but let’s just say we’ve done a lot. So Alex and I are like super close. But now that I know Taylor wants my boyfriend I don’t know what to think.

I had to leave Taylor’s house so I just pretended I had a headache and walked home. And that weekend Alex and I were supposed to watch the Sex and the City movie with Austin and Taylor.

There was no way I was going to invite Katie to hang out with my boyfriend all night. So I made Alex watch Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle at home with me, which I think he kind of liked better. But I still haven’t figured out what I’m going to do with Taylor. I figure I can either spend every minute with Taylor or every waking minute with Alex. Both of these seem like kind of hard work.

Alison Pirelli lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.

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