Bronx Girl’s Diary Tells of Boys, School, Friends--and Gunshots : Books: Latoya Hunter, 14, writes of some ordinary adolescent matters, but also reveals a bleak and violent world around her.

Latoya Hunter is just 14 years old, but recently the mail brought a packet of letters from teen-agers in Brooklyn, many of them girls seeking advice about boys and their parents.

“As I was reading it, I couldn’t believe it,” said Latoya, whose face still has the softness of childhood. “I mean, I’m going through those problems now and they think I am an expert.”

They think she is an expert because they know her deepest thoughts, expressed in a diary she kept during her first year in junior high school.

“The Diary of Latoya Hunter,” published last year, is about the stuff of young girls’ lives--school, friendships, boys, television, the urge for independence and conflicts with her mother.

But the slim volume, which runs 131 pages, goes deeper. It is also about being a black, immigrant girl growing up in the Bronx.

Latoya wrote in her diary about the gray, treeless streets of her neighborhood, the deadly violence around her, teen-age pregnancy, the poverty of caring and learning at her school and her homesickness for Jamaica.

It’s the ordinariness of her pre-adolescent world against this troubled background that draws the reader into her diary. Latoya rhapsodizes about her passion for junk food and TV, and, then, in painfully clear prose, writes about the gunshots that killed a store clerk who sold her candy.

“Today gunshots echo in my head,” Latoya wrote on Jan. 9, 1991.

“They are the same gunshots that killed an innocent human being right across from my house last night. They are the same gunshots that have scarred me, I think, forever.”

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Latoya’s world has expanded beyond its old Bronx borders because of a devoted teacher, a chance newspaper article and her gift for writing.

“I think it was mostly luck,” Latoya says.

But then she adds, “I think, like, I am a good spokesperson for people around my age, for kids who feel that they don’t count in anything, that they’re being held back from being who they really want to be by outside things, like parents and friends and the kind of environment you live in.”

A 1990 newspaper article about the graduation of Latoya’s sixth-grade class said her English teacher wrote “The world is waiting for Latoya!” on her report card. An editor at a publishing company saw the story and was inspired.

He contacted the teacher to ask if Latoya would be interested in keeping a diary her first year in junior high. Latoya was offered a $5,000 advance and will receive $25,000 for the paperback rights.

Her first entries began “Dear Diary,” then she decided to personalize her journal because, “You’ve become like a best friend to me.” She named it Janice Page, after her best friend in Jamaica.

“I like guys,” Latoya wrote. “There, I said it. It’s easy to say to you, but my mother would give me a real hard time if she heard me say that. She believes a normal 12-year-old should only obey her parents, go to school, learn her lessons, and come home everyday and listen to her parents some more.”

She recounts her first relationship with a boy (they didn’t go out, they just opened their hearts over the telephone), her brother’s wedding (she was a bridesmaid in blue), the birth of her unmarried sister’s boy, and a much-anticipated trip to Jamaica that left her deeply disappointed.

Her conclusion: “With understanding I think I will achieve anything I want.”

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On a cold and windy afternoon, Latoya, dressed in jeans and gold hoop earrings, was back in her old Bronx neighborhood, giving a reporter a tour. She harbors no nostalgia for it.

“It really makes you feel down to walk around and see the things around you,” she wrote. “The only colors I see are brown and gray--dull colors. Maybe there are others but the dull ones are the ones I see. Maybe if the streets were cleaner, and I would see colors like red and yellow, my surroundings would be more appealing. . . . “

Until she was 8, Latoya was reared by relatives in Jamaica while her parents were in the New York area struggling to make a new life for themselves. Latoya’s old house, where she lived with her family on the second floor, has a chain-link fence in front and flowers in the planters that, she says, make it look better than it did when she lived there.

“It was the ugliest house on the whole block,” she says. “And I never liked to bring anybody over.”

Relatives live in the ground-floor apartment. Eager to see a newborn cousin, Latoya drops by for a visit. A stale smell fills the dark, sparsely furnished rooms.

Today, her mother, Linneth, works evenings as a nurse’s aide; her father, Linton, works overnight as a security guard. And Latoya now lives in a well-kept apartment in a blue house on a tree-lined street in Mount Vernon, a city just north of the Bronx.

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The book’s sales started out slowly, but the media response has been overwhelming. Latoya has been interviewed by reporters, appeared on television talk shows and news programs--including one that airs in Japan--and met the Jamaican prime minister.

Two movie companies are bidding for the rights to the book, said Richard Marek, her editor at Crowne Publishing Inc.

But Latoya says wistfully that her parents have never talked to her directly about the diary’s contents, although she believes both have read it.

“If I do an interview or something, they say, ‘I’m proud of you’ and stuff, but they never really said that to me about the book, like, you know, ‘You did a good job and I’m proud of you.’ ”

She’s a sophomore in high school, having skipped a grade in school. Ithaca College and Columbia University have already approached her, she said.

She wants to study psychology and also be a writer. She also said that after she has had a job for a year, she wants to have a baby.

Sitting at her dining room table, she fidgets with a pendant necklace belonging to her mother. She is shy, soft-spoken, but articulate. “It’s like everybody’s dream to be in America. And now that I am here, I just don’t want to waste the opportunities I have.”

But as doors open to worlds she never dreamed existed, there is a loss of innocence to which she is still adjusting. In her diary, she wrote: “I’ve never come across discrimination against me for being black.”

Now she has.

A few weeks ago, when she went to the Manhattan office of a national women’s magazine to be interviewed about her book, the woman at the front desk asked “if I was there to deliver anything.”

“She could have said, like, ‘Could I help you?’ or something,” Latoya reflects. “ . . . I guess they didn’t expect someone like me to be there.”