“See you soon,” he says as I take the surfboard necklace from him.
“I hope so,” I reply shyly, and turn to leave.
I finally drag myself away and go downstairs to eat dinner and make small talk with my family. But all I’m doing in my head is replaying our conversation, over and over, and hoping I really will see him again.
“Favorite season and why.”
I think for a moment. “Hmm. Autumn, because: best colors, and it’s the only time of year when walking along with your hands in your pockets and scuffing your feet along the ground means you get to kick piles of crunchy leaves in the air. You?”
“Mine is winter, because everyone’s tans have worn off, so it’s not quite so obvious that I’m the only one who doesn’t spend all day worshipping the sun and burning their skin raw.”
I laugh. “OK, my turn. Favorite movie and why.”
Joe and I are sitting in the window seat, playing our favorite game of Getting to Know You. We’ve done this pretty much every day for the last couple of weeks. It’s become the thing my day revolves around. Go to school, get through the day, hurry home, and sit with Joe for as long as I can before Mum and Dad tell me to stop being a recluse.
“Memento. ’Cause it’s dark, creepy, and completely blows your mind from start to finish.”
“Mine has to be It’s a Wonderful Life,” I say, then I stop.
“And why?” Joe asks.
I hesitate. Then in a quiet voice, I add, “Because it reminds me that even when you think your life doesn’t feel worth living, it matters to someone else.”
Joe nods. I reach out for his hand — but I can’t take hold of it. We haven’t managed to make contact again since that first time. Mostly I don’t bother trying. Every now and then I do, but nothing happens.
There’s a question preying on my mind. It’s about Joe. About him being dead. I’ve been thinking about it every day, but I don’t know how to ask. It’s not the kind of thing you can slip into conversation. “Hey, so, favorite color, and oh, by the way, do you happen to know exactly how you died?”
But I think it. A lot. Couple of times I’ve wondered about going online, doing a bit of investigating to see what I can find out. But it feels wrong and disloyal, looking up personal stuff about him without him knowing. I can’t do it.
“Joe, do you ever wonder . . . ?” I begin.
“Wonder what?”
“Why you’re . . . how you . . . what happened . . . ?”
“How I died, you mean?”
I laugh. I can’t help it. After all my worrying, he just comes out with it. “Yeah,” I admit. “That.”
Joe shakes his head. “I don’t want to know,” he says. “I mean, I kind of do. Sometimes. But if I ever think about it, I get this . . . I don’t know how to describe it. Like a dark feeling inside me. A blackness. I don’t like it. I don’t think I want to go there.”
“Do you want me to? Like, see if I can find anything out?”
He thinks for a moment. “No. I don’t think so. What if you look it up and find out something so terrible happened to me that you can’t bear to be with me again? Or you can’t tell me ’cause it’ll upset me, and then you’re stuck on your own with knowledge you’d rather not have.”
“When you put it like that . . .”
“And what if it breaks the contact?” Joe goes on. “This — whatever it is that’s making us able to be with each other — what if as soon as you have the real, concrete facts, it breaks the spell or something?”
That’s decided it. “No,” I agree. “I’m not taking the risk. I couldn’t bear any of those things to happen.”
“I don’t want to know,” Joe says again. “I don’t need to know.”
“Me neither. I’m happy with what we’ve got. I don’t want anything to change it.”
Joe smiles, his face relaxing as he does.
“Plus . . .” he begins, but doesn’t carry on.
“Plus what?”
He shakes his head and sighs. “I dunno. I guess if you look it up and read the facts in black and white, there’s no going back.”
“And if I don’t, we can tell ourselves that maybe this isn’t as impossible as it feels, and one day we can hang out like any normal boy and girl?”
Joe smiles. “Exactly.”
I smile back. I love that I get him, that he gets me. And yeah, I love that he feels the same way I do, holds out a hope that perhaps one day we can figure out a way to be together for real — even if I was too shy to actually put it like that out loud.
“Erin! Dinner!” Mum’s voice bursts incongruously into the room from downstairs.
I get up from the window seat. “I’d better go.”
“See you later,” Joe says. “I’m not going anywhere.”
I head downstairs to join the others, only half with them. The other half is playing my conversation with Joe over and over on a loop in my head.
“Someone’s a bit happier.” Dad nudges me.
I look up. “What?”
“Leave her alone,” Mum urges gently.
“I’m just saying — it’s nice. It’s good to see you smiling a bit more often, that’s all.”
I look at them both, and at Phoebe wolfing her dinner down. The content little family unit. I can’t help wondering if they’d be quite so welcoming of my happy state if they knew what was causing it.
No point wondering, since they’re never going to find out.
“Thanks, Dad,” I say as I get back to my dinner and do my best to join in the casual chat while, on the inside, all I’m really doing is counting the minutes till I can be with Joe again.
“OK, are you ready for this one?” I ask.
Erin laughs. “How do I know if I’m ready till I know what it is?”
She’s right. She can’t know. And she probably isn’t ready. But we’ve been talking like this for over two weeks now, and I want to get deeper. I want to know what it is that’s behind her eyes — the darkness I know I’ve glimpsed but that is always hidden by a veil she won’t lift.
“Try me,” she says.
“OK.” I hesitate for a second, then jump in. “Worst memory.”
Erin stops laughing. She stares at me.
“Sorry,” I say quickly. “You don’t have to. I was just —”
“No,” she stops me. “I want to.”
She looks at her hands in her lap for a minute or two, then raises her head and nods at me. “It’s hard to pick one specific thing,” she begins. “A precise moment that I can point to and say, ‘Yes, that was it. That was the worst bit.’ It would be like watching a landslide and having to choose which rock was responsible. You know?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“I had an accident when I was eleven, and I missed the first half term of secondary school,” she goes on. She’s looking away from me. Her voice has changed; it’s as if she’s describing a distant scene that is nothing to do with her. “I wasn’t there when everyone was forming their groups of friends. That all happened without me.”
“That must have been tough.”
“Yeah. But not as tough as the five years that followed. I never found my footing, and it threw me so badly. I got really anxious. I stopped going out or talking to people or anything.”
Her words hit a nerve for me. I’ve always found it hard to make friends, too. Growing up in the shadow of a big brother who has everything — looks, talent, physique, surfing medals — it’s easy to feel you’re not worth anything much.
“Go on,” I say.
“I was hit by a car — got knocked over and busted my leg pretty badly. It took weeks to heal. By the time I started secondary school, there were no openings for best friend still available.”
“Harsh.”
“Yeah. But it wasn’t just that. The accident did more damage than just to my leg.”
“How d’you mean?”
She hesitates, looks away. Then she quickly nods, as if making up her mind to tell me. ??
?It started off as a fear of streets. I couldn’t cross a street on my own. Then it was sidewalks. Then, basically, anywhere that people were walking or cars moving. I just got anxious the whole time. Within a few months, it had completely taken over. I’d never felt anxiety before — but after the accident, I felt it more and more. It was more crippling than my shattered kneecap.”
“Erin, that sounds awful.”
She goes on, talking quickly, breathlessly. “Afterward I had to go to the hospital a lot for checkups. One of the nurses was lovely. I could talk to her, you know?”
I nod.
“I told her how sometimes I would get so anxious that I found it hard to catch my breath. My chest would pound so hard and so fast, I actually thought I was having a heart attack. She told me it was a panic attack. She showed me a technique that worked.”
“Paper bag?” I ask.
Erin looks at me, her jaw open.
I shrug. “I’ve done it, too. Every time Olly had his mates over — especially when there were girls there.”
Erin half smiles and carries on. “There was a gang of girls who liked picking on anyone who showed weakness. Made them feel cool.”
“Oh, I know the type.”
“They could see what I was like. Shy. Quiet. Nervous. I tried to hide it, but my anxiety got so bad, I sometimes found it hard to speak. Coupled with the fact that I didn’t really have proper friends to hang out with, I ended up not even trying most of the time. So they started with the names.”
“God, why are kids so cruel?” I ask.
She shakes her head, looking down at her lap. “I wish I knew. It was just stupid names at first. ‘Car Crash Katy’ was one. Then when they saw how upset I got, it was ‘Panic Alec.’ And when I wouldn’t respond, they started calling me ‘Silent Movie.’ Then one of them hit on ‘Silent But Deadly.’ They liked that one. It lasted a good few months. Then one day, I was going into school, and they were walking along behind me, humming a tune. I didn’t know what it was at first, then I realized. It was ‘The Sound of Silence,’ and I just wanted to crawl away and hide.”
She looks up at me. “Does this all sound really stupid?”
“No. It doesn’t sound stupid at all. It sounds awful. I hate the fact that this happened to you.”
“It sounds stupid to me. They were such small things, silly things, and yet it was as if they were like sticking little pins into me, needling me, getting under my skin. So subtle you could hardly say anything. It was the power of their actions, I think. They had this control over me. I had none.”
“I get it. I know what you mean.”
“Then one day, they found me in the bathroom, breathing into a paper bag. They took it off me. It wasn’t too bad at first; they just laughed at me. Then one of them hit on a name. ‘Bag Lady.’ It stuck. From that point on, all the way through school, that was my name.”
“Oh God, that’s awful.” I want to reach out to her, I want to touch her hand so badly. I know I can’t, so I just look into her sad eyes and listen as she continues.
“They ratcheted it up, bit by bit. First it was the name. Then they made up songs and phrases. ‘Bag Lady Gaga,’ ‘The Bag Lady and the Tramp.’ The more ridiculous, the better, since it gave them more opportunities to laugh at me. I came to dread their laughter. I heard it in my sleep. It was the sound track to my anxiety.”
She pauses, and I wait for her to go on. Then she takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly, and continues. “Eventually, they got bored of just words and songs, and they moved on to coming up with creative ideas for what I could do with the bag. Every day, there was a new suggestion. Then one day, one of them, Kaylie, started waving a plastic bag around. ‘Here’s a new bag for you, Bag Lady,’ she said. I can see her now, waving the bag in the air, laughing — I can still hear the laughter.”
I feel as though I know what she’s about to say. I pray I’m wrong.
“Then another one, Heather, suggested that I put it on my head and tie it tight.”
No! I can’t bear it. The thought of them saying that to her. “They knew what they were saying?” I ask.
“Oh, yes. And in case I didn’t, they spelled it out more and more clearly every day. In the end, they were practically telling me to off myself. Telling me no one cared about me.”
“Did you tell anyone? Your parents?”
Erin shakes her head. “I was ashamed. And scared, I suppose. Mum had lost her job when I was recovering from the accident because she took so much time off to look after me. I’d already done enough to ruin their lives. I didn’t want to bother them. I kept telling myself that it was my fault for being so weak and that if I could just learn to shrug them off, they’d go away and stop bothering me.”
“But you couldn’t shrug them off.”
“No. And they didn’t leave me alone. I walked into class one day, opened my desk, and inside was a plastic bag with a piece of string and a note. In capital letters, it said: ‘SPECIAL DELIVERY FOR ERIN MATTHEWS. PLACE HEAD INSIDE BAG. ATTACH STRING. TIGHTEN. DO US ALL A FAVOR.’ I looked at it for a second. Then I shut my desk and looked around the room. I thought — I should tell the teacher. I should show it to her now. Right now. I could put my hand up, call her over, tell her.”
“And did you?”
Erin shakes her head. “I couldn’t. I didn’t dare. We all know that if you tell the teachers on a bully, you get bullied even more. They just go underground for a bit, and then come back harder and harsher. But more than that, it was the shame of it. What if they were right? What if everyone did want me to do it? It was the words at the end that hit me the hardest. Do us all a favor. They spun around and around in my head for days. I couldn’t stop thinking about them. The more I thought about them, the more sense they made.”
My hands are in front of my face. As if I can hide from what’s coming. As if I can shield myself from what I know she’s about to say.
“And so I did it. I tried. Not with a bag. That seemed too complicated. I took the coward’s way. I used to get quite bad pains with my leg. Still do sometimes. The hospital prescribed strong painkillers, which I barely ever took — so I had a load of them at home. One evening, no one else was at home, and I stood looking at the bottle for about an hour. It felt like an escape. I wanted to be gone.” Her words gulp out through a sob.
“I emptied the contents of the bottle into my hand and took them in one go,” she says quietly. “Didn’t even count them. I didn’t want to hesitate long enough to do that. I just wanted it over.”
I think my heart is going to break. Without stopping to question whether it’ll work or not, I reach out to stroke her arm. My fingers make contact! I can feel her skin.
Erin looks up at me. “Joe, I can feel you,” she whispers.
I hold her eyes. “Never let anyone do that to you again, you hear me?” My voice is choked. I can barely get the words out.
“I won’t,” she replies softly.
She closes a hand over mine. For a moment, the touch of her warm fingers makes me forget the reality of our situation. I don’t care about any of it. I just care about her.
“You promise?” I ask.
She nods. “I promise.”
We sit there together, skin against skin, eyes locked on eyes, until the contact finally fades and, once again, my hands reach out for nothing but air.
Everything has changed. And everyone has noticed. Dad comments on the number of times I’m smiling. Mum stops giving me those sympathetic/sad little sideways looks that she thinks I don’t notice. Phoebe doesn’t make me want to scream with frustration at her constant chatter about all her new friends.
Even school is different. OK, maybe it’s not different. The teachers are still teaching; the other students still don’t take all that much notice of me. Thing is, I don’t care so much. Or at all. I don’t care about any of it.
Because it’s not that everything around me has changed; it’s that I’ve changed. He’s changed me. This — whatever it is — this
thing going on between us, it turns everything else into a blurry backdrop that I barely notice.
Meeting up with Joe, talking to him, sharing thoughts, ideas, jokes, stories — that’s what’s real. The rest is just what I have to put up with in between the times we’re together.
It’s a couple of days after we had that big conversation, and I’m hurrying home and heading straight for my room as usual.
“Nice day, darling?” Mum calls after me.
“Yep, great, thanks,” I reply over my shoulder as I make my way up the stairs.
Joe is waiting for me in the window seat. Every time I see him, my tummy does a little skip out of relief that he’s still here. I’m wearing the necklace he gave me under my clothes so no one can see it. Only Joe and I know it’s there. I still don’t know if it’s got anything to do with why I can see him, but I’m not going to take it off just in case. I’m not willing to take the risk.
“Good day?” I ask, squeezing onto the opposite end of the window seat and pulling my knees up. We’re like bookends.
“Busy,” he replies.
I raise an eyebrow. “Oh, yes?”
Joe puts on a serious face. “Yup. I had a hectic morning of sitting around not doing very much. Then this afternoon I did a bit of mooching around, squeezed in a spot of loafing around, achieving exactly zilch, and topped it off with an hour or two of pacing the floor, waiting for you to come home.”
He looks me right in the eye when he says the last bit, and my heart does that thing where it throws in a couple of extra beats.
“Sounds hectic,” I reply. “You must be due a rest about now.”
Joe pretends to look at a watch on his wrist. “Hmm, you’re right. I’d better get going. Can’t sit around doing nothing all day now, can I?”
I know he’s joking, but I can’t help thinking how awful it must be for him. Not only that he’s stuck here with nothing to do, but that he’s on his own for most of the time, too. Not to mention the worst part of it all: the fact that he’s dead. He still can’t remember anything about how he died, or much about his life, either.
Every day feels like borrowed time, and every conversation could be our last. And while I know that there’s nothing I can do to change it, I can’t help hoping that maybe there’s something we’ve missed. That perhaps he isn’t completely dead. I have this fantasy where the “real” Joe is lying in a bed in a hospital somewhere in a coma. Everyone thinks he’s dead; the doctors are about to turn off the machines, but something to do with this, with us — stops them. That maybe the way he feels about me, the times we spend together, they — I don’t know — wake him up or something. And then he comes back to life properly, comes and finds me, and we can be together in real life.