By the Time You Read This, I'll Be Dead (14 page)

“Santana never said why you can’t talk. Did you tell me and I forgot?”

“Like I could get a word in edgewise over your incessant babble,” he says.

Ariel deadpans me. “I suggest you dump him now. Unless you want a lifetime of his sassy mouth.”

“And it’ll be a lifetime. Give me a blob of that brownie poop.” Santana holds up his plate. “Please.”

You dump friends or boyfriends. Santana is neither. I don’t know what he is.

While Ariel’s back is turned, Santana finger gags. The lunch she made, the quinoa stew—she pronounced it “keen-wa”—was bland. It was the texture of gooey rice, and unfortunately, I found I could swallow it a few mushy kernels at a time. And fat-free, sugar-free, cocoa-free brownies would only be edible laced with arsenic.

“Were you born mute?” Ariel sets the plate in front of Santana and slides another glop of brownie goop off the spatula onto my plate. “Or were you in an accident?”

“Don’t be rude, Ariel,” Santana says.

“I’m not rude. I’m interested.”

“Maybe it’s none of your business. Maybe you should practice the fine art of butt-out-ski.”

I choke down a laugh. Butt-out-ski?

Santana does a double take. “Was that a—”

“Oh, shit!” Ariel shoots out of her chair. “I need to get to work.” She begins to gather plates and glasses from the table, but Santana grabs them and says, “Go. We’ll clean up.”

You will, I think.

Ariel hustles past the table and I want to leap up and latch on to her, beg her to stay. She skids to a stop. Twirling around, she comes back and kisses Santana’s head. Pressing his cheek to her stomach, she says, “He’s a pain in the ass, but I love him like a son.”

Santana rolls his eyes.

“Nice to meet you, Daelyn.” She smiles at me. “It’s about time Santana had a girlfriend.”

I choke, literally, and Santana annihilates Ariel with a glare.

Ariel pats my back until I catch my breath. Please, I silently plead with her. Don’t go.

“Behave yourselves,” she calls over her shoulder. “Or don’t.” Her laughter spills down the hall.

Santana covers his face. Then he peeks through his fingers at me and goes, “I never told her we were . . . you know.”

I scrape back my chair. He gets up too and says, “You see the problem. Right?” His eyes shift to gaze down the hall after Ariel. He says in a flat voice, “I’m all she’s got and if I don’t make it this time . . .”

You’ll pass through the light.

A ribbon of guilt twists my stomach. I’m all Kim and Chip have too. But the difference is, they’ll be better off without me.

I think Santana’s right, though, that Ariel needs him.

My parents will be sad for a while, and may even blame themselves, the way they do now. Eventually they’ll come to peace with my decision. I hope they’ll realize I’m finally at peace.

Santana looks at me and says, “So, what do you want to do?” He wiggles his eyebrows.

I get up, praying he won’t attack from the rear, and hurry to the entryway, grab my book bag, and clench it to my chest. He follows as far as the stairway.

I walk past him back to the kitchen, sit in a chair, and remove my econ spiral and textbook.

Santana hovers in the threshold.

I open the notebook and write,
i have homework
. I hold it up for him to see.

He exhales a long breath. Then leaves me alone.

— 3 DAYS —

Today is a teacher in-service, and Chip draws the short straw. “Do you want to go to a movie?” he asks me at breakfast. “Or take a drive? It’s nice enough to go to the zoo.”

I get up and find a notepad and pen. “I have a lot of homework. And my story for English is due this week,” I write.

Chip says, “Are you going to let me read the story?”

I throw him two bones: a smile and a nod. Both lies.

As he’s reading the newspaper, I tongue my pills. I’ll flush them on the way to my room, the way I’ve done so many times before.

Two questions are waiting for me online. Did I miss yesterday’s question?

Who becomes you?

What choice do you have?

It’s not a question of choice.

I read the two questions again. This fear takes hold, like whoever is asking the questions has inside knowledge of me. What I’m thinking, feeling. Don’t think. Do. Act.

Who becomes you?
No one. No one should become me. When
I die, I don’t want my body or soul inhabited. I wouldn’t wish me on anyone.

I key, “No one.”

Answer accepted.

What choice do you have?

I key, “Do we have a choice?”

Answer not accepted.

Okay, I was just checking to see if anyone was there.

What choice do you have?

I think about my choice. Either outcome is bleak. If I stay and live through high school, go to college, get a job, what will ever change? This blackness inside will never go away. I don’t make friends; I’ll always be alone. If I go, at least there’s hope of peace. Chance of a new and better life on the other side.

I key, “None. Not for me.”

Accepted.

I think about Santana and what choice he has. It makes me sad, so I stop thinking.

I open the Final Forum and read my last entry. It’s long. Boring, though five J_Doe’s have replied. Not replied, exactly. One picked up on the camp theme. J_Doe012654 wrote:
Bullies are everywhere. At school, home, work, camp. You can’t get away from them.

Wrong, I think. You can.

J_Doe011663 wrote:
I congratulate everyone here on their courage.

Courage? I’ve never felt courageous in my whole entire life.

I open a new notepad and key, “Fat camp. Part 2.

“I got singled out. I don’t know why. Why do people always target me? Is it because I’m short and they figure I can’t fight back? They’re right, I can’t, but it’s not because I’m vertically challenged.”

That sounds pretentious. I delete “vertically challenged” and key, “small.” I think, Invisible.

“I’m scared, okay? I’ve always been scared. Every day of my life I wake up terrified. I wonder who will make it their mission to hunt me down today. I can’t WAIT to be rid of that feeling.”

J_Doe033083 writes:
I have everything I need to kill myself. I have the plan, the place, the time, and the fury. I take medication that doesn’t work. I know what it means to be happy, but I don’t seem to want to be happy. Sigmund Freud had a theory that inside of everyone exists a “suicide impulse,” which means we all desire to return to the state of perfect stillness that we experienced before birth. Do you hear the truth in that?

Yeah, I hear the truth. But this is
my
truth.

“I wasn’t the only one not losing weight fast enough, but they made me an example. . . .

“Like, if we were doing jumping jacks, my lead counselor would yell, ‘163! Step out!’ The counselors thought it would be funny or motivating to call us by our weights. ‘163!’ he shouted. ‘Or 165 with muscle mass, ha-ha.’ I had to come up and flop around in front of everyone. ‘Higher!” he yelled. ‘Spread those thunder thighs. Clap your hands over your head. Now count.’

“I could barely breathe and he makes me count out loud. ‘Count!’ he screamed.

“15. 16. 59. 69. I’d lose my place and he’d make me start over. Everybody else got to stop at 100, but not me. I was in so much pain and my chest hurt and my boobs hurt from bouncing up and down. People were bent over trying to catch their breath and a couple of kids had to sit down, but the counselors would yank them up and make them start running. Or doing the StairMaster. I saw one girl counselor yell at this kid until she made him throw up he was crying so hard.”

J_Doe012284 writes:
I hate my mother. F*ing bitch.

“I was starving the whole time. At the morning weigh-in if you hadn’t lost weight you had to run demerit distance before breakfast, then you got a smaller portion than everyone else or had to eat leftovers. A counselor would go around and say stuff like, ‘Eat up, little piglets.’ He’d snort and go, ‘Wee, wee.’”

I hated him. I hated them all. They made me hate myself even more than I already did.

“This other male counselor would yell at us on the way out of the mess hall, ‘You’re losers! You’re all losers.’ It was supposed to be funny, like that show
The Biggest Loser.
”

But it’s not funny. Not to people who’ve been told they’re losers their whole lives and believe they will never be anything else.

— 2 DAYS —

On the way out of my bedroom, Chip informs me, “Your mom has
to fly to Kansas City this morning, so I’ll be taking you to school.”

I can hear Kim upstairs, packing. Chip has folded his suit jacket over the back of the chair, and now he slips it on. Black suit and white shirt. Black-and-white-striped tie. He looks sharp. He looks like he’s going to a funeral.

“Did you finish your story?”

I shake my head an inch to each side. Give it up, Chip.

Kim clomps down the stairs with her suitcase. She touches my back lightly. “I’m sorry about this,” she says. “I’ll be home tomorrow. Then I think this weekend we should redecorate your room. It’s looking awfully bare in there. Your father won’t be able to pick you up after school, so I’ve arranged for you to go to the Girards’ again.”

What? No. It took all my willpower to sit there and pretend to do homework, knowing he was close by.

“Santana said he would prepare the den of iniquity.” Kim enters my field of vision and smiles at me. “What does he mean by that? Or do I want to know?”

He’s joking. He’d better be.

She clutches her rolling luggage and kisses Chip. She makes a move to kiss me, but I jerk away. She meets my eyes, then winks. “Maybe you could get some decorating ideas at Santana’s.”

Mr. Hyatt claps his hands. “Girls, quiet down.” He breaks off his conversation with the pianist. “All eyes up here.” He pats his sternum three short clips. It’s an odd gesture, like a deaf person going me, me, me.

Emily doesn’t talk to me. She doesn’t talk to anyone. No one talks to her.

“Does everyone have their white shirts and black skirts for next week?” Mr. Hyatt asks.

Next week is our concert. Needless to say, I will not be attending.

“Can we at least wear black leggings?” JenniferJessica asks.

“No,” Mr. Hyatt says. “Hose or bare legs. Black shoes—no boots or high heels. No open toes.”

“Damn.” JenniferJessica always curses loud enough for everyone to hear.

“Sister Bernard has your cummerbunds. She’ll be coming around during practice to try them on you.”

JenniferJessica goes, “I hope you made Emily’s a double wide.” The wolf pack howls.

Mr. Hyatt snaps, “Taylor, up here. Now!”

Her jaw slackens. “What? I was only kidding.”

Emily’s back is rigid. She stares straight ahead. She’s wearing the mask I know so well.

This stab of pain pierces my heart.
Who will become you?
Emily.

Not if I can help it.

Storming to the cubbies, I pull down my book bag and open it. From inside I remove my spiral and a pen. I scribble furiously, a note to Emily.

By the time I get back, Taylor’s been reprimanded. She’s pouting. The sister is trying on Emily’s cummerbund. Emily sucks in her stomach and Sister still has to pull tight. “It’s snug.”

“It’s fine,” Emily says. She crumples the cummerbund in her fist.

The sister says to me, “Okay, dear. Raise your arms.”

First, I hand the note to Emily. I watch her lips move as she reads each word. Sister Bernard repeats, “Raise your arms, please.” My arms go up and the sister pulls my cummerbund around my waist. “And yours is too loose.”

Emily’s smiling. In my note I wrote, “She’ll go to hell. They all will. If hell will even have them.” She flips the note over to my P.S. on back, where I added, “Elbow me if I’m singing flat.” She giggles.

The bell rings.

“If you’ve been fitted, you may go,” Mr. Hyatt says.

Taylor stomps out.

I drape my cummerbund over Emily’s shoulder. She can stitch them together, like a quilt.

He’s waiting at the gate, not with his mother this time. With the rat. “Hey.” He waves. He’s wearing a baseball cap and he looks cool.

He’s shaved and his face is smooth and soft looking. He has long black eyelashes, and I can’t be feeling this way.

It’s safer with the gate between us. Then Santana swings the gate in and holds it for me, so I have no choice.

I could run. Would he chase me? If I walk and keep on walking, I could make it home. It’d be good practice.

“Ariel’s working, so I hope you don’t have much homework, or you can do it later. I want to show you something.” He removes his cap.

My eyeballs pop. He’s dyed his hair jet-black with red tips. Scratching the rat’s head, he says, “You like?”

He seems taller. And different, besides the hair. He makes me feel all jiggly inside.

STOP FEELING. Stop caring.

“We’ll eat real food today too.” He drops Hervé into the hat, then slings them both onto his head. “I ordered pizza.” He stands there, a rat tail between his eyes.

I want to cry. I don’t know why. I want to be strong, like Maggie Louise. Control myself and others.

“Are you okay? You look like you had a crap day.”

How does a crap day look? How does it look any different from every other day?

“Come on. I have a cure for the craps.” He takes my hand.

With every ounce of courage inside me, I want to pull away. But I don’t. I’m weak. We’re holding hands.

I don’t even remember leaving my spot and walking with him to his house. I’m losing consciousness. Damn the drugs. I should have stopped taking them earlier.

“Coke float,” he says.

We’re in his kitchen. My shoes are off and the rat is on the table, perched on its haunches, nibbling a Cheeto.

My hand is whole, unblemished. It’s still attached to my arm. It feels contaminated, though, and I have the strongest urge to wash my hands. I can control that urge, wash them later.

Santana’s busy at the counter. He sets a purple plastic cup in front of me, the same one he brought that day I was having a coughing jag. It’s a faded
Pirates of the Caribbean
cup. “Whoa.” He bends down to slurp the foam oozing over the rim.

The doorbell rings.

“It’s Dino Delivers.” Santana bounds out of the room.

He drank from my cup. What if he’s contagious? Which is stupid and irrational because I’m the one who wishes she had a fatal disease. I feel bad for thinking about contamination at a time like this.

Hervé finishes his Cheeto, then scurries over to my cup and sniffs it. He rises to his haunches again, too close. I scrape back my chair. Rats, rats, rats.

Santana pops his head in. “Let’s eat out here. Grab the floats.”

He’d started another one on the counter—scooped ice cream into an orange
Pirates of the Caribbean
plastic cup. The liter Coke bottle sits uncapped, ready to pour.

I don’t want to touch it.

I say to Hervé, in my mind, You heard him. Grab the floats.

The TV comes on and I smell the pizza. Neither dehydration nor starvation is my chosen method of completion.

I get up and go to the counter. Slowly I pour Coke over the ice cream. You have to pour slowly, dorko, to minimize foam.

“You never told me what kind of pizza you like, so I got one cheese and one supremo grande deluxe everything on it.” He glances up from the floor, where he’s kneeling and smiling into my eyes. This heat swells every pore of my skin. Two pizza boxes lay open on the coffee table, and my stomach gurgles. I’ll miss the aroma of pizza. The stringy, chewy goodness of melted mozzarella.

I never said there wouldn’t be things I’d miss. Reading. Eating.

The couch still has a sheet on it, but it’s the only place to sit. Besides next to him on the floor. I shuffle between the table and couch as I set down the floats.

“Oops, hang on.” He pushes to his feet and dashes past me into the hall.

I sit. My knees crunch the edge of the table.

Great. I bruise easily. Hello, camp killers? I bruise easily.

“I can’t leave Hervé running loose in the kitchen.” Santana rushes back in. “Last time he chewed through the blender cord and Ariel went berserk. God forbid she can’t grind up her avocado and lemon-grass goo in the morning.” Hervé wraps around Santana’s neck.

I pull out a slice of everything. He shoves the box closer to me.

“Plus, he figured out how to push open the back screen, and I don’t want him getting out. I think he’d stick around, but the foxes might find him.” Santana’s index finger circles over the everything until it zeroes in on a slice. The biggest wedge with the most sausage.

He chomps into it and his eyes close, his long lashes curling up. “Oh, my God,” he says in a garble. “Heavenly Father, we thank you for this day, this pizza, this holy hell of a meal.”

I smile to myself.

We eat in silence. I chew each bite into mush, savoring the joy of pizza. It gets a little stuck in my throat. The foam has settled on my float and I drink it. It needs another dousing of Coke.

“So, I guess you’re Catholic?” he goes.

Do I make a face?

“No? I thought you had to be Catholic to go to Catholic school.”

You have to be damaged, I want to say.

He says, “I’m a pantheist.”

A what? I set my crust back into the box and pull another slice.

“I don’t like crust either,” he says. “We’re a match made in heaven. You do believe in heaven?”

I concentrate on eating—chewing, swallowing. Revealing no expression.

“I’ll take that as a yes. What do you want to do today?” Santana reaches for another slice. “Make out? Skip the formalities?”

My eyes shift to him.

“Gotcha.” He points at me.

My face flares neon red.

He doesn’t seem to notice; he doesn’t see me bleed. He leans back against the couch, his head inches away. I love his black hair and red tips. I’ve always wanted to dye my hair, but then people would target and tease me even more.

He says, “Pantheists—at least the naturalists among us—believe God is in all things.”

Really? I want to debate him. God is nowhere.

A long minute passes. The only sound is us consuming pizza. Hervé, on Santana’s shoulder, gets the discarded crusts. Santana’s head twists and he stares at my neck brace. “I was wondering . . .” He chews and swallows.

Leave it alone, I think.

“If you’d watch my video memoir and tell me what you think.” He lowers his half-eaten slice of pizza to the box. “It’s amateurish, I know that. The quality sucks.” He picks off a chunk of sausage and bites into it. “I’m not a filmmaker, by any stretch of the imagination. It’s not meant for prime time. More YouTube. It’s just a video record for Ariel in case—” Santana expels a slow, shallow breath.

The air in the room compresses.

Hervé scrabbles off Santana’s neck and jumps onto the table. He sits up, nibbling a chunk of crust. My eyes are drawn to Santana’s lump. It’s there, for sure. Was it that big before?

He catches me looking. “I found two more,” he says. “Under my arm. I told Ariel this morning and she flipped. She’s probably beating the oncologist to a pulp as we speak.”

His eyes are like a telescope. I look into them and I’m transported across the universe to a world I’ve never been.

“Some of this is embarrassing.” He brushes flour and cornmeal off his hands and pulls a mini DVD out from under the coffee table. Like he planted it.

He scoots across the carpet to the TV. I notice a splotch of blue paint on the beige rug, and my eyes lift. She’s done, or almost done. One corner of ceiling remains. I have to tilt my torso back to get a panoramic view.

It’s . . . amazing. Soft, gentle curves of creamy white clouds. Subtle shards of blue and gray.

I remove my neck brace so I can scan behind me, get the full effect. It’s . . . beautiful. The front curtains draw closed, cutting off my light. Santana plops down beside me and deliberately takes the neck brace from my hand.