So this was it, then. The moment when my mother forbade me to go back to Start. I wanted to feel shocked, but instead I felt only sadness.
And now, what would I have?
Well, I would have Sally and Chava. And that was something worth having; at least, more worth having than I had known.
I would have the respect of Emily Wallace and company. I didn’t expect that they would ever honestly like me, but that was okay; I didn’t expect to like them either. But I also didn’t believe that they would offer to give me a makeover any time soon.
I would have Vicky and Harry, and maybe someday, if she could ever forgive me, Pippa, too. They weren’t nightlife friends. They were real-life friends.
I would have memories of when I was golden.
I would have less than I had two weeks ago. But more than I had in September.
“But,” Mom was saying, as she turned onto the street that Antonio’s was on.
“But,” I repeated, coming back to the present.
“I’m not going to tell you that you can’t go.”
I blinked. “You’re not?”
She scanned the street for a parking space. “More than anything else that I don’t want, I don’t want to keep you from doing something that you love so much. I can’t do it. It wouldn’t be fair.”
I felt tears pricking my eyes, but not the same sort of tears that I had cried last Thursday night, coming home from Start. “Thank you,” I whispered.
“One condition,” Mom said, finding a spot and backing into it. “Your father will need to drive you there and home.”
I rubbed my eyes to clear them. “You’re kidding, right? You think Dad actually wants to hang out in a warehouse nightclub until, like, three a.m.?”
“No,” she said. “In fact, I know for sure that he doesn’t. But he wants to know you’re safe. We both want to know that you’re safe, always. And if that means your father stays up until sunrise sometimes, then that’s what we’ll do.” I opened my mouth, but she said, “Don’t even try to argue, or you’re not going anywhere.”
“Okay,” I said in a small voice. “It’s a deal.”
She turned off the car and faced me. “I’m really disappointed in you, Elise.”
“I know.”
“Not just because of how you treated Alex. I really believe you’re in the process of making that right, even if it takes time. But because of how you treated me. If you want to do something like go for a walk in the middle of the night, or party at a nightclub, tell me. I know I’m your mother, but I’m a reasonable person. I think we can work these things out.”
I brushed my hair out of my face. “You can’t always make me safe,” I said. “Just by having a parent home with me every evening, or grounding me, or giving me a chaperone every time I want to go out past nightfall. That’s not how it works.”
There are dangers everywhere, I wanted to explain to her. On the school bus, in the cafeteria, at Start, inside of me. No parent—no one at all—can step in and vanquish every one of them.
“I know that,” Mom said. “But I want to always make you safe.”
We got out of the car and joined the rest of the family in line at Antonio’s. Neil can handle standing in line for roughly three seconds before he gets bored and starts roaming and twirling around poles. Alex quickly convinced him to play a game where they pretended to be lions who were being harpooned by hunters, so they started crawling on all fours, stepping on other customers’ feet. Steve said reasonable things like, “Champ, the floor’s pretty dirty. Do you really want to get dirt all over your hands?” while I pulled out my iPod and pretended like I had never seen these people before in my life.
At last we got to the front of the line. “What can I get for you?” asked the guy behind the counter.
I looked up. I knew that voice.
It was Char.
The guy taking our pizza order, the guy in a tucked-in white button-down shirt and an apron, the guy speaking to my mother right now, was Char.
When he saw me, his eyes widened. He opened then closed his mouth.
“Roooawr!” Alex shouted from underfoot.
“One plain pizza, please,” Mom said to Char, fumbling in her purse for her wallet. “With soy cheese.”
It had been just over a week since Char and I had last spoken, since he had told me he didn’t want to see me anymore. A week isn’t very much time. Weeks often go by where nothing much happens at all.
But so much had changed in this past week. Even Char, here in the fluorescent lights, with his tomato sauce–stained apron, did not look quite the same. And while a week ago losing him cut me to the bone, today I saw him and just felt sad. I was sad that Char was never going to be the person I hoped he would be.
But I was never going to be the person he hoped I would be either. And I was just fine with that.
“Do you take credit cards?” Mom asked.
“Sorry, we’re cash only,” he replied.
This wasn’t how I imagined things going. But imagination is so often no match for the absurdity, the randomness, the tragedy of reality.
“So what brings you all to Antonio’s today?” Char asked as he made change for my mother.
“Just celebrating our kids,” Mom answered. “That lion on the floor just had the best booth at the second-grade fair.”
Alex made mewing noises and crumpled to the side, like the safari hunters had successfully stabbed her. She fell onto my feet, which seemed maybe like progress, since earlier she wouldn’t even let me touch her. I thought about how funny it was that Alex’s cobbled-together poetry hut still counted as “the best” for my mother.
“And this one”—Mom put her arm around me and squeezed—“is about to be the disc jockey at the best party this town has ever seen.”
“Mom!” I hissed. I wriggled out of her embrace.
On the floor, Alex also hissed. The murdered lion had somehow turned into a snake.
“She gets easily embarrassed,” Mom told Char. “Teenagers.”
If I had one of Alex’s imaginary hunting sticks in hand, I would not have hesitated to ram it into my mother’s mouth at that moment.
“Sounds like a big night,” Char replied. He looked me straight in the eye, as he had so many times before, and I wanted to throw my arms around him just about as much as I wanted to punch him in the stomach. “Good luck.”
I unstuck my tongue from the roof of my mouth. “Thank you,” I said.
A bell dinged. “Pizza’s up,” Char said. He reached behind him and handed the box to my mother. “Have a nice night, folks.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” I said as we turned to go. “I will.”
Together, the Myers household walked out of there: the founders of BOO OIL, a teenage DJ, and two mountain snakes, slithering all the way out the door.
19
When my phone rang a couple hours later, I knew who it was. I knew because this was one of the only phone numbers programmed into my cell phone, which my parents had kindly given back to me at school this morning. After what had happened last night, they said they wanted to know that they could reach me.
“Hello, Amelia,” I answered.
“Elise?” she said, her voice tentative, gentle, hopeful.
And just the way she said my name sent me back, back almost ten months. I looked over to the corner of my room, like I expected to see a ghost of myself still there, back pressed up against the wall, left arm cradled up to her chest, right hand holding the phone that connected her to Amelia Kindl.
“Elise?”
“Hi, Amelia.”
“What’s going on?”
“I cut myself.”
“Oh, no! Are you okay?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are your parents there? What happened?”
“I cut myself. Three times.”
“You poor thing. How?”
“With an X-Acto knife.”
“Wait. What? Elise, what did you say?”
> “My dad really likes to cut out articles from the newspaper. You know, to give to people when he thinks they’d be interested. Well, mostly just me. I don’t think he cuts out stories for anyone else.”
“Elise, is your dad there with you? Is anyone there?”
“No, it’s just that’s why he has an X-Acto knife. For the newspaper.”
“Are you bleeding?”
“Yes, but it doesn’t actually hurt that much. It’s weird; it doesn’t hurt as much as I thought it would. When I was six years old I got mad at my mom and slammed the door, only somehow I slammed the door on my fingers. There was blood everywhere that time. It hurt a lot more than this. It was an accident, though.”
“Elise, I’m going to call 911, okay?”
“You don’t have to do that. I think it’ll be fine.”
“No, I want to do it, okay? I want to help. Can I put you on hold so I can call 911?”
“You want to help me?”
“Yeah, I do. Of course I do. Can I put you on hold for just one second?”
“Great. Since you want to help me so much: do you see me, Amelia?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Do you see me! I’ve gone to school with you every day since sixth grade. Do you understand me? Do you understand why I did this to myself? Do you see?”
“Sure, Elise, of course. Let me—”
“Then can you please explain it to me?”
“I’m calling 911 now. Help will be there soon. It will be okay.”
“But can’t you just talk to me?”
Nothing. Just silence. And then, sirens.
“Elise, are you there?” Amelia asked, her voice in my ear jolting me back to present day.
“I’m here,” I said.
“Great! Look, I’m calling to apologize about Marissa. I only found out this afternoon that she’s the one who was writing that whole blog about you, and I feel awful about it. Just awful. I shouldn’t have accused you of saying mean things about me online, because of course it wasn’t you at all, but I thought it was.
“And I shouldn’t have ever told Marissa that you called me that time in September when … well, you know. It wasn’t any of my business, I know that. I promise I only told a few people: my parents, Marissa, one or two of my other best friends. I want you to know I wasn’t spreading it all over school that you … you know, hurt yourself. I was just so panicked after you called me, and I didn’t know what to do, so I talked it through with a few close friends. I wasn’t trying to spread rumors about you or anything.”
“Amelia,” I said, “it’s fine.”
“I really am sorry about the way Marissa treated you, though,” she said. “I had no idea she was like that.”
Amelia, it occurred to me then, was not very good at reading a crowd.
“I just feel like this whole thing is my fault,” she went on. “Is there anything I can do to make it up to you?”
I thought of all the responses I would have rattled off had she asked me this same question just a couple months ago. Let me sit with you at lunch. Invite me to hang out with you on weekends. Text me sometimes. Listen to this mix I made for you. Have dinner with my family, and when that’s over, pretend to do homework in the living room with me while my sister and brother distract us, and we pretend to care, but we don’t.
But Amelia is nice. That’s all. That doesn’t make her my friend, that doesn’t make her special, and that doesn’t make her anything I want her to be. It has nothing to do with me. She’s just nice.
So I said, “Amelia, don’t worry about it. It isn’t your fault.”
“I just … when I called 911 that time … I was trying to help. And I feel like it totally backfired, you know?”
“You did the right thing, calling an ambulance,” I told her. “You didn’t know how serious it was; you weren’t there with me.” I thought about how I would have responded if someone had called me in the way that I called Amelia. How scared would I have felt? How responsible? “I would have done the same thing if I were in your position.”
“Honestly?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. “I would have. It’s okay, Amelia. I’m not mad at you.”
After Amelia and I hung up, I sat on my bed for a moment, my phone cupped in my hand. There was still one other person that I needed to talk to. So I lifted the phone again, and I dialed Vicky’s number.
She answered after one ring. “Where the hell have you been?”
“Grounded,” I said.
“Grounded,” Vicky repeated.
“Yeah, I … It’s a long story. I did something mean to my sister, so my mom took away my phone.”
“You could have e-mailed or something,” Vicky pointed out. “You could have found some way to let me know you were all right.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“The last time I saw you, you basically told me that you’re suicidal because nobody likes you. The next thing I knew, you’d disappeared, Pippa and Char were making out, and you weren’t talking to me for a week. I’ve been freaking out, Elise. Harry has been freaking out. And he never freaks out.”
“I’m not suicidal,” I said. I held my arm out in front of me and twisted it back and forth. Palm up. Palm down. Now you look fractured. Now you look whole.
“That’s not the story your arm told.”
“I did that a long time ago. Before I knew you or Harry or Mel, or Pippa or Char or Pete, or Start. I didn’t know then how good life could be. But now I know. And I would never do it again.”
“I think I can speak with some expertise on the issue of personally inflicted bodily harm,” Vicky said. “May I?”
“Go for it.”
“It’s not worth it. Sure, high school sucks sometimes. Some people will mess with you, whenever they want, and for no reason except that they can. But hurting yourself is giving those people all the power, and they don’t deserve it. Why would they deserve to have control over your life? Because they’re cool? Because they’re pretty? That’s completely illogical.”
“Where did you learn all this?” I asked her.
“Like I said. Lots and lots of therapy.” She paused. “Also, almost dying from malnutrition. It gave me a lot of clarity.”
“Thanks, Vicky.”
“Anyway,” Vicky said, “now that you’re alive, the second most important thing: Is the party still on for tonight? You’re ungrounded?”
“For about the next nine hours,” I replied.
“Okay, then I need to go find something to wear that isn’t a nightgown.” She paused. “One last question on the self-mutilation thing.”
“I don’t really feel like having this conversation, Vicky.”
“We won’t. Just one last question. What did Char have to say about it?”
I frowned, confused. “Nothing. I mean, he doesn’t know. Why would he?”
“Because you were hooking up,” Vicky said softly. “For weeks.”
I thought about that—the number of times he had pulled my shirt off of me, or grabbed my hands in his, kissed my shoulder. “I guess he never noticed?”
“No,” Vicky said. “I guess he wouldn’t.” She didn’t say anything more.
“Speaking of Char,” I said, “I ran into him at a pizza parlor this afternoon.”
“What did he say?” she asked. “Did he apologize?”
“No.”
“Did he beg you to give him another chance?”
“No.”
She sighed noisily. “He’s such a waste of a good haircut.”
“Hey,” I said. “Do you know Char’s real name?”
Vicky didn’t even pause. “Sure. It’s Michael. Michael Kirby. Why?”
“No reason,” I said. “I’ll see you tonight.”
We hung up after that. Then I opened my computer, and I googled “Michael Kirby.”
I wanted to know who Char really was. No more personas, no more images, no more pretending.
It wa
s easy—so easy that I had to wonder why I had never asked Vicky for his real name before. Within ten minutes, I had a whole picture painted of Michael Kirby.
He was nineteen years old, turning twenty next week. He’d grown up in Westerly, about forty miles from here, the middle of three kids. On the high school track team, he would occasionally, but not all that often, finish in the top five in the 400-meter. He was one of eight trombone players in his high school’s marching band. I watched a video of them playing at a county fair, but I had to watch it twice before I could tell which one of the blue-uniformed trombonists was him. Michael’s dad worked in construction and his mom worked part-time as a secretary for Russell Gold, DDS, “Where Your Smile Makes Us Smile.”
In Michael’s freshman year at state college, he’d joined the college radio station and lived in Hutton Dorm. There was a photo of him wearing pajama pants at a study break, with a caption reading, Michael’s special snack: Chex Mix! Now in his second year, he was only a part-time student; he spent the rest of the time as a server at Antonio’s Pizzeria. He maintained Antonio’s Web site, and when I clicked the “contact us” button at the bottom of the page, it opened an e-mail addressed to
[email protected] That was Char. It was all laid out for me across the Internet. It was a simple portrait of a person, like a million other people, and I felt the magic of Char float off into the air, as if I’d blown on a pile of dust.
But you know better than anyone how the Internet sees everything and nothing, all at the same time.
After I had learned all I cared to learn about Michael Kirby, I looked up my own name.
Why do you do this? Why do you want to see what other people say you are?
I suppose it’s because old habits die hard.
The first two search results were the same as always. Elise Dembowski, MD. Elise Dembowski Tampa Florida school superintendent.
But the third result was different. Elise Dembowski suicide had fallen down on the list. The third thing that came up when I typed in my own name was Elise Dembowski DJ.
I stared at my computer screen for a long moment, and I smiled. Then I closed my laptop and got ready for Start.