It was 3 A.M., and Millie hadn't been asleep yet.

Sitting in the middle of a swirl of blankets on her bed, she stared bleary-eyed at the pages of her mother's diary in her lap. She'd started with the first one, when her mom was fifteen. It was the age that Millie's mom, Lola, had first discovered that she was the next bearer of the curse.

I can't believe this. I don't UNDERSTAND. Drew keeps saying he's sorry, but what is he sorry for? We knew this would happen. There are only 2 of us, and I'm the girl. Obviously, I'm meant to die, just like my fucking mother.

I'm not going to be like them. I'm not going to be selfish. I'm not going to die.

A sick, heavy feeling settled over Millie as she paged through the diary. Her mom was bitter, angry, depressed: she was just like Millie. It made her stomach sour and curdle, reading her mother's familiar words.

She'd never bothered with the diary before. She'd never wanted to remember her mom like this. She wanted to remember soothing words, hands on her cheeks, and lullabies about the beautiful ocean. She wanted to remember her mom as her mom, not as a woman that was cursed to die and hadn't been able to save herself, or the love of her life.

And, anyway, Millie had always figured that she'd either beat the curse (which had always been a long-shot) or she'd die, inevitably. She'd never considered that she'd be taking someone down with her, though, and Sam being in the car the other night...

He was fine, for now. But Millie feared what would happen to him now that the curse had apparently sprung to life without warning. She was worried that it was different this time, not born out of love, but something entirely different. She was worried that she'd set something off she wasn't supposed to.

Reading about her mom's anger with the curse wasn't nearly as bad about reading where her mother fell in love with her father.

It was like watching a tragic movie from end to beginning, knowing that the two lovers would meet a terrible end, but not being able to look away.

I don't love him, that's for sure. He's so weird and happy. Who can be that happy, so much of the time? If I'm being honest, I kind of want to slap that smile off his face. If he wants to be that excited about life, he should take it somewhere else, to a girl that isn't supposed to die when she falls in love.

I keep trying to make him go away, but he doesn't listen. It's like he literally can't hear me telling him to GET LOST. I'd never admit this, to anyone or to Drew or even to Kyle, but I think I'm... Happy? At least when Kyle is around.

Millie didn't think anymore parallels could be drawn from her life to her mothers. It was almost eerie, but Millie figured "eerie" was on par with the rest of her life.

And then there was all the reading about how people treated her mom.

I was in the grocery store the other day with Drew and Mrs. D asked me to not get so close to her kids. I don't get it. Why do normal people even believe in this stuff? And what does it matter if I'M cursed? I could see that Mrs. D's daughter (she's dating Bobby White, I think) was horrified, but when I passed her, she took a step back and almost knocked over all the grape jelly jars.

If her deduction skills were right, Millie figured that this entry was about Sam's mom and grandma, which was kind of horrifying in many different ways. Millie had seen the current Mrs. White, Sam's mom, step away from Millie and her sisters countless times.

Then, of course, there were the pointless entries that Millie couldn't help but read. She even stored some of the information away in her head: the little tidbits about Drew as a kid, being as Millie's mother described "irritatingly protective" and further in the diaries, stuff about Millie's sisters.

Clea tried to set Daphne on fire today. I knew I shouldn't have let them help Kyle with the grill, but I was busy helping Angel with a project. Millie cried the whole night, and I'm pretty sure I haven't slept in a week.

She knew it was pointless. She was surrounded by her mother's writing, and she was wasting time, reading about a precocious Clea and a smart Angel and a smart-alecky Daphne and a sobbing Millie. But she didn't know what to do.
To be honest, Millie wasn't entirely sure what she was even looking for. So far, she'd waded through a year of her mom's bitter entries about not wanting to die or falling love, which quickly morphed into laments about Kyle, Millie's father, who was seemingly irresistible.

Millie did have to hand it to her mom; she resisted for a long time. It was almost two months before Lola even let Kyle into her house, and even then, from what Millie was reading, it seemed that it had been a mostly awkward encounter where Millie's mom avoided his gaze and Millie's dad tried to woo her into a date. Quickly enough, it changed from feelings of irritation to pure, definite love.

Millie almost felt like she was there, watching it all unfold.

Kyle said it today. I love you. So easy. We both know why I didn't say anything back, but I know he's waiting. He doesn't care about the curse. I still do.

So, basically, she had nothing but unusable, although interesting, information.

What did Millie think she'd find, though? A sudden proclamation along the lines of: OMG GUESS WHAT DAUGHTER OF MINE THAT IS PROBABLY READING THIS IN THE FUTURE, BECAUSE I'M DEAD, I FOUND A WAY TO BREAK THE CURSE!!! PULL UP A SEAT AND LISTEN UP!!!

If Millie's mom or dad had been able to find a way to break the curse, she figured they would've used it, obviously.

By the third diary, Millie was starting to feel like she might vomit.

Her mom and dad were nauseatingly in love, and there was nothing that would stop it: no natural disaster, no curse that could get in the way of how they felt.

It was about halfway through the third diary that Millie's mom put in one single sentence entry that made Millie's blood turn to ice.

I'm pregnant.

And that, she thought, had to be the beginning of her curse, right? She checked the dates and realized that it was almost exactly eight months before Angel was born. Her mom was nineteen, in love with a boy she was probably going to kill and pregnant, with absolutely no knowledge of how to stop the seemingly inevitable.

Still, Millie checked every entry. She even skimmed the short ones, with small declarations of irritation about Drew denting her car or Kyle bringing her roses and their aunt, Patrice, grounding Lola for "no damn reason." It had been four days since she'd gotten her hands on the diaries and it wasn't until the sixth one that things started going places.

It wasn't much, just two sentences near the very end of the diary, but it was something.

Kyle was right about Miss Tully. This curse is more than we thought.

Hands shaking, Millie fumbled for the second diary, flipping through the pages like they were on fire. Finally, she found what she thought her mom was probably talking about, sandwiched between two long entries depicting all the awful torturous ways her aunt Patrice was ruining her life.

Kyle keeps telling me to talk to Miss Tully about all this...but she's insanely creepy. What does he think she's going to be able to tell me? More stuff about a curse I already know about? I shouldn't have even told him. He keeps pestering me, saying that she has to know something that could help me. But I don't trust her, and don't want to go anywhere near her. He's convinced that the curse is not what we think, but he hasn't had to live with this, like my family.

Millie knew who Miss Tully was: the creepy (her mom was correct) hermit-lady who lived in a holed up shack on top of Melrose Hill, overlooking the entire town. She rarely ever came to town, since she had her own garden and didn't even have electricity, but the few times she did venture past the hill, Millie avoided her like the plague.

Sure, Millie knew it was ironic. She was the town's cursed girl, and she was avoiding the lady that was a supposed witch. It was just that Millie knew that because of the curse, there had to be more than just one type of magic out there (someone had to have put the curse on her family in the first place) and she wanted to stay very, very far away from any more people that could further ruin her life. Drew had already told her that Miss Tully would be of no help, because she was a hedge witch, not a real witch.

Still, her mom's entry had to mean something, right? Her dad had thought that something was different about the curse, which made Millie wonder. If something had been different then, maybe it wasn't what they had thought?

But why would Miss Tully know anything? The lady was ancient, but she wasn't real magic, and hadn't been around long enough to have been the one to curse Millie's family. In fact, Miss Tully's familial line hadn't even shown up in town until Miss Tully's mom, and the curse had been enacted long before then.

Millie sat up. It didn't matter why her mom thought Miss Tully might something, but it did matter that she was so sure the old witch knew something.

And this, Millie thought, was a lot more than what she'd had before.

Now, all she had to do was get Miss Tully to talk to her.

Piece of cake...despite the fact the lady hadn't spoken to anyone in at least a year.