I stumble into the bathroom and start the shower.
“What are you doing?” a male voice calls. “Didn’t you shower last night?”
I don’t care. I need the sensation of water hitting my body. I need this prompt to start my day.
When I leave the bathroom, Kelsea’s father is in the hallway, glaring at me.
“Get dressed,” he says with a scowl. I hold my towel tighter around me.
Once I’ve got my clothes on, I gather my books for school. There’s a journal in Kelsea’s backpack, but I don’t have time to read it. I also don’t have time to check my email. Even though he’s in the other room, I can sense Kelsea’s father waiting.
It’s just the two of them. I access and find Kelsea’s lied to him in order to be driven to school—she said that the route had been redrawn, but really she doesn’t want to be trapped in the bus with other kids. It’s not that she’s bullied—she’s too busy bullying herself to notice. The problem is the confinement, the inability to leave.
Her father’s car isn’t much better, but at least there’s only one other person she has to deal with. Even when we’re moving, he doesn’t stop exuding impatience. I am always amazed by people who know something is wrong but still insist on ignoring it, as if that will somehow make it go away. They spare themselves the confrontation, but end up boiling in resentment anyway.
She needs your help, I want to say. But it’s not my place to say it, especially because I’m not sure he’ll react in the right way.
So Kelsea remains silent the whole drive. From her father’s response to this silence, I can imagine this is how their mornings always go.
Kelsea has email access on her phone, but I’m still worried about anything being traced, especially after my slip-up with Nathan.
So I walk the halls and go to classes, waiting for my chance. I have to push harder to get Kelsea through the day. Any time I let it, the weight of living creeps in and starts to drag her down. It would be too easy to say that I feel invisible. Instead, I feel painfully visible, and entirely ignored. People talk to her, but it feels like they are outside a house, talking through the walls. There are friends, but they are people to spend time with, not people to share time with. There’s a false beast that takes the form of instinct and harps on the pointlessness of everything that happens.
The only person who tries to engage me is Kelsea’s lab partner, Lena. We’re in physics class, and the assignment is to set up a pulley system. I’ve done this before, so it doesn’t strike me as hard. Lena, however, is surprised by Kelsea’s involvement. I realize I’ve overstepped—this is not the kind of thing Kelsea would get excited about. But Lena doesn’t let me back down. When I try to mumble apologies and step away, she insists I keep going.
“You’re good at this,” she says. “Much better than I am.”
While I arrange things, adjusting inclines and accounting for various forms of friction, Lena talks to me about a dance that’s coming up, asks me if I have any weekend plans, and tells me she might be going to DC with her parents. She seems hypersensitive to my reaction, and I’m guessing the conversation usually gets shut down long before this point. But I let her talk, let her voice counter the unspoken, insistent ones that emanate from my broken mind.
Then the period is over, and we go our separate ways. I don’t see her again for the rest of the day.
I spend lunchtime in the library at the computer. I don’t imagine anyone at lunch will miss me—but maybe that’s just what Kelsea would think. Part of growing up is making sure your sense of reality isn’t entirely grounded in your own mind; I feel Kelsea’s mind isn’t letting her get anywhere near that point, and I wonder how much of my own thoughts are getting stuck there as well.
Logging into my own email is a nice jolt to remind me that I am in fact me, not Kelsea. Even better, there is word from Rhiannon—the sight of which cheers me up, until I read what the email says.
A,
So, who are you today?
What a strange question to ask. But I guess it makes sense. If any of this makes sense.
Yesterday was a hard day. Justin’s grandmother is sick, but instead of admitting he’s upset about it, he just lashes out at the world more. I’m trying to help him, but it’s hard.
I don’t know if you want to hear this or not. I know how you feel about Justin. If you want me to keep that part of my life hidden from you, I can. But I don’t think that’s what you want.
Tell me how your day is going.
Rhiannon
I reply and tell her a little about what Kelsea is up against. Then I end with this:
I want you to be honest with me. Even if it hurts. Although I would prefer for it not to hurt.
Love,
A
Next, I switch accounts and find a reply from Nathan.
I know I haven’t made a mistake. I know what you are. And I will find out who you are. The reverend says he is working on that.
You want me to doubt myself. But I am not the only one. You will see.
Confess now, before we find you.
I stare at the screen for a minute, trying to reconcile the tone of this email with the Nathan I knew for a day. It feels like two very different people. I wonder if it’s possible that someone else has taken over Nathan’s account. I wonder who “the reverend” is.
The bell rings, marking the end of the lunch period. I return to class and the black cloud takes hold. I find it hard to concentrate on what’s being said. I find it hard to see how any of this is important. Nothing I’m being taught here will make life less painful. None of the people in this room will make life less painful. I attack my cuticles with merciless precision. It is the only sensation that feels genuine.
Kelsea’s father is not going to pick her up after school; he’s still at work. Instead, she walks home, in order to avoid the bus. I am tempted to break this pattern, but it’s been so long since she’s ridden the bus that she has no memory of which bus is hers. So I start to walk.
Again, I find myself wishing for the mundane possibility of calling Rhiannon on the phone, for filling the next empty hour with the sound of her voice.
But instead, all I am left with is Kelsea and her damaged perceptions. The walk home is a steep one, and I wonder if it’s yet another way she punishes herself. After about a half hour, with another half hour in front of me, I decide to stop at a playground I’m about to pass. The parents there give me wary looks because I am not a parent or a little kid, so I steer clear of the jungle gym, the swings, and the sandbox, and end up on the outer ring, on a seesaw that looks like it’s been banished from everything else for bad behavior.
There’s homework I could do, but Kelsea’s journal calls out to me instead. I’m a little afraid of what I’ll find inside, but mostly I’m curious. If I can’t access the things she’s felt, I will at least be able to read a partial transcript.
It’s not a journal in the traditional sense. That becomes apparent after a page or two. There are no musings about boys or girls. There are no revisited scenes of discord with her father or her teachers. There are no secrets shared or injustices vented.
Instead, there are ways to kill yourself, listed with extraordinary detail.
Knives to the heart. Knives to the arm. Belts around the neck. Plastic bags. Hard falls. Death by burning. All of them methodically researched. Examples given. Illustrations provided—rough illustrations where the test case is clearly Kelsea. Self-portraits of her own demise.
I flip to the end, past pages of dosages and special instructions. There are still blank pages at the back, but before them is a page that reads DEADLINE, followed by a date that’s only six days away.
I look through the rest of the notebook, trying to find other, failed deadlines.
But there’s only the one.
I get off the seesaw, back away from the park. Because now I feel like I am the thing the parents are afraid of, I am the reality they want to avoid. No, not just avoid—prevent
. They don’t want me anywhere near their children, and I don’t blame them. It feels as if everything I touch will turn to harm.
I don’t know what to do. There’s no threat in the present—I am in control of the body, and as long as I am in control of the body, I will not allow it to hurt itself. But I will not be in control six days from now.
I know I am not supposed to interfere. It is Kelsea’s life, not mine. It is unfair of me to do something that limits her choices, that makes up her mind for her.
My childish impulse is to wish I hadn’t opened the journal.
But I have.
I try to access any memory of Kelsea giving a cry for help. But the thing about a cry for help is that someone else needs to be around to hear it. And I am not finding a moment of that in Kelsea’s life. Her father sees what he wants to see, and she doesn’t want to dispel this fiction with fact. Her mother left years ago. Other relatives are distant. Friends all exist far outside the black cloud. Just because Lena was nice in physics class doesn’t mean she should be freighted with this, or would know what to do.
I make it back to Kelsea’s empty house, sweaty and exhausted. I turn on her computer and everything I need to know is there in her history—the sites where these plans come from, where this information can be gleaned. Right there, one click away for everyone to see. Only no one is looking.
We both need to talk to someone.
I email Rhiannon.
I really need to speak to you right now. The girl whose body I’m in wants to kill herself. This is not a joke.
I give her Kelsea’s home phone number, figuring there will be no obvious record of it, and that it can always be discounted as a wrong number.
Ten minutes later, she calls.
“Hello?” I answer.
“Is that you?” she asks.
“Yeah.” I’ve forgotten that she doesn’t know the sound of my voice. “It’s me.”
“I got your email. Wow.”
“Yeah, wow.”
“How do you know?”
I tell her briefly about Kelsea’s journal.
“That poor girl,” Rhiannon says. “What are you going to do?”
“I have no idea.”
“Don’t you have to tell someone?”
“There was no training for this, Rhiannon. I really don’t know.”
All I know is that I need her. But I’m afraid to say it. Because saying it might scare her away.
“Where are you?” she asks.
I tell her the town.
“That’s not far. I can be there in a little while. Are you alone?”
“Yeah. Her father doesn’t get home until around seven.”
“Give me the address.”
I do.
“I’ll be right there,” she says.
I don’t even need to ask. It means more that she knows.
I wonder what would happen if I straightened up Kelsea’s room. I wonder what would happen if she woke up tomorrow morning and found everything in its right place. Would it give her some unexpected calm? Would it make her understand that her life does not have to be chaos? Or would she just take one look and destroy it again? Because that’s what her chemistry, her biology would tell her to do.
The doorbell rings. I have spent the past ten minutes staring at the ink stains on the walls, hoping they will rearrange themselves into an answer, and knowing they never will.
The black cloud is so thick at this point that not even Rhiannon’s presence can send it away. I am happy to see her in the doorway, but that happiness feels more like resigned gratitude than pleasure.
She blinks, takes me in. I have forgotten that she is not used to this, that she is not expecting a new person every day. It’s one thing to acknowledge it theoretically, and quite another thing to have a thin, shaky girl standing on the other side of the precipice.
“Thank you for coming,” I say.
It’s a little after five, so we don’t have much time before Kelsea’s father comes home.
We head to Kelsea’s room. Rhiannon sees the journal sitting on Kelsea’s bed and picks it up. I watch and wait until she’s done reading.
“This is serious,” she says. “I’ve had … thoughts. But nothing like this.”
She sits down on the bed. I sit down next to her.
“You have to stop her,” she says.
“But how can I? And is that really my right? Shouldn’t she decide that for herself?”
“So, what? You just let her die? Because you didn’t want to get involved?”
I take her hand.
“We don’t know for sure that the deadline’s real. This could just be her way of getting rid of the thoughts. Putting them on paper so she doesn’t do them.”
She looks at me. “But you don’t believe that, do you? You wouldn’t have called me if you believed that.”
She looks down at our hands.
“This is weird,” she says.
“What?”
She squeezes once, then pulls her hand away. “This.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s not like the other day. I mean, it’s a different hand. You’re different.”
“But I’m not.”
“You can’t say that. Yes, you’re the same person inside. But the outside matters, too.”
“You look the same, no matter what eyes I’m seeing you through. I feel the same.”
It’s true, but it doesn’t really address what she’s saying.
“You never get involved in the people’s lives? The ones you’re inhabiting.”
I shake my head.
“You try to leave the lives the way you found them.”
“Yeah.”
“But what about Justin? What made that so different?”
“You,” I say.
Just one word, and she finally understands. Just one word, and the door to the enormity is finally unlocked.
“That makes no sense,” she says.
And the only way to show her how it makes sense, the only way to make the enormity real, is for me to lean over and kiss her. Like last time, but not at all like last time. Not our first kiss, but also our first kiss. My lips feel different against hers, our bodies fit differently. And there is also something else that surrounds us, the black cloud as well as the enormity. I am not kissing her because I want to, and I am not kissing her because I need to—I am kissing her for a reason that transcends want and need, that feels elemental to our existence, a molecular component on which our universe will be built. It is not our first kiss, but it’s the first kiss where she knows me, and that makes it more of a first kiss than the first kiss ever was.
I find myself wishing that Kelsea could feel this, too. Maybe she does. It’s not enough. It’s not a solution. But it does lessen the weight for a moment.
Rhiannon is not smiling when we pull away from each other. There is none of the giddiness of the earlier kiss.
“This is definitely weird,” she says.
“Why?”
“Because you’re a girl? Because I still have a boyfriend? Because we’re talking about someone else’s suicide?”
“In your heart, does any of that matter?” In my heart, it doesn’t.
“Yes. It does.”
“Which part?”
“All of it. When I kiss you, I’m not actually kissing you, you know. You’re inside there somewhere. But I’m kissing the outside part. And right now, although I can feel you underneath, all I’m getting is the sadness. I’m kissing her, and I want to cry.”
“That’s not what I want,” I tell her.
“I know. But that’s what there is.”
She stands up and looks around the room, searching for clues to a murder that has yet to happen.
“If she were bleeding in the street, what would you do?” she asks.
“That’s not the same situation.”
“If she were going to kill someone else?”
“I would turn her in.”
?
??So how is this different?”
“It’s her own life. Not anyone else’s.”
“But it’s still killing.”
“If she really wants to do it, there’s nothing I can do to stop it.”
Even as I say this, it feels wrong.
“Okay,” I continue, before Rhiannon can correct me. “Putting up obstacles can help. Getting other people involved can help. Getting her to the proper doctors can help.”
“Just like if she had cancer, or was bleeding in the street.”
This is what I need. It’s not enough to hear these things in my own voice. I need to hear them told to me by somebody I trust.
“So who do I tell?”
“A guidance counselor, maybe?”
I look at the clock. “School’s closed. And we only have until midnight, remember.”
“Who’s her best friend?”
I shake my head.
“Boyfriend? Girlfriend?”
“No.”
“A suicide hotline?”
“If we call one, they’d only be giving me advice, not her. We have no way of knowing if she’ll remember it tomorrow, or if it will have any effect. Believe me, I’ve thought about these options.”
“So it has to be her father. Right?”
“I think he checked out a while ago.”
“Well, you need to get him to check back in.”
She makes it sound so easy. But both of us know it’s not easy.
“What do I say?”
“You say, ‘Dad, I want to kill myself.’ Just come right out and say it.”
“And if he asks me why?”
“You tell him you don’t know why. Don’t commit to anything. She’ll have to work that out starting tomorrow.”