Remember the ever-loved game of telephone from second grade?
Where you would tell your friend something, and it would move down the line of eager little 8 year olds until the message got completely mixed up?
I wonder if I knew then what I know now about “secrets”, would I have thought of that game as a mere ploy to convince the noisy students to whisper and giggle and have fun quietly, or simply a foreshadowing of the future: involving a little bit of giggling, and a whole lot of mix-up?
•••
Somehow, amongst the human gene it is inevitable that teenage girls (and pretty much all girls in fact) have to know secrets. It doesn’t matter if they get it or not, they have to know. Why? No real reason. It’s just this compulsive necessity to gossip and be able to say (although rarely said in this day and age) “I know something you don’t know! Nanner-nanner-boo-boo!”. Honestly, the information can have no use to them, but they HAVE to know.
So when you tell someone a secret, somebody knows that there is a secret. They have to have to have to find out, and when they do, someone else has to has to has to find out. Pretty soon this secret has spread so far, that even though it accomplishes nothing to the spreader of the secret, everybody knows. Then, it is no longer a secret. But where does that leave the subject of the alleged secret?
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Cindy has a HUGE crush on Bobby. (This is totally fictional by the way.) So she acts a little different around him and his friends. When Daisy sees this, she realizes that she has to know Cindy’s secret. Pretty soon, Daisy has bugged it out of Cindy and starts telling everyone. Pretty soon, even though it’s not their business, everyone knows that Cindy likes Bobby. Including…Bobby.
•••
But the present day Cindy has a bigger secret. And it’s not something little like that. Present day Cindy has a secret that could ruin her life. And present day Cindy tells whoever my hypothetical character in this story is. And I’ll tell you right now, some secrets should be kept. But what about Daisy’s secret? Daisy and Bobby are each holding a secret from each other that the other one should know that my hypothetical character knows. But if my hypothetical character tells one of them one of the secrets, we’re all screwed. But if my hypothetical character doesn’t…bad things could happen.
Bad…things.
•••
The other day I was telling my “Daisy” that “The best secret you can keep, is that you have a secret.” If no one knows that you have a secret, then they can’t know what it is.
…But what happens when someone finds out?
And worse…What happens if they don’t?