Cornered (30 page)

“God, stare much?” Holly said as she stood and shouldered her backpack. She spread her arms out and rolled her eyes dramatically, making sure as many people as possible could see and hear her. “Like what you see? I always thought you might be a lesbo.”

“I wasn't—,” I started, but she turned and walked away from me. Monica was waiting at the door, and I heard my name as Holly joined her. Then there was laughter as the two of them spilled out into the hallway, their long hair swishing against their backs in tandem.

I wanted to slink away. And honestly, I wanted Jenna. I wanted to storm to her locker and vent about everything. I wanted to call Holly names behind her back—Jenna was really great at coming up with hilarious ones, my personal favorite being Unshaven Mattressback Gorilla. I wanted my best friend there with me.

But Jenna was gone.

• • •

I thought it was a joke the first time Jenna brought up suicide. I even laughed. But then I saw the tears in her eyes—and Jenna like, never cried—and the way her hands were shaking. I pressed my lips together, my whole body growing cold. She was serious, and it felt really bad and scary.

“You shouldn't give Holly the satisfaction,” I said, but Jenna only shook her head, letting a single tear drip down her cheek. “Don't let her get to you that much. She's irrelevant.”

“It's not just her. My whole family is messed up, you know? I don't think anyone would even notice I was gone.”

“I would notice.”

“Not if you were with me.”

My eyes got wide. Was she really saying what I thought she was saying? Not just that she was sad and wanted to die, but that we should both do it? Kill myself? Over Holly? I blinked a few times, unsure what to even say to that.

After a few minutes of me saying nothing, she waved her hand dismissively. “I wasn't serious,” she said. “Just forget it.” But something about the look in her eyes told me that maybe she was more serious than she was letting on.

I guess on some level I knew that it was wrong to not say something. Jenna's life was pretty shitty. Her parents were divorced, and her mom was one of those people my mom called a “Happy Hour Drunk.” She had four drinks every night after work while she “made supper,” but she'd always be too sloshed to finish it, and Jenna would end up preparing the
whole thing herself.

Her dad remarried and was living about an hour away. Ever since he had a new baby with his new wife, he'd only come to visit Jenna and her little brother once. He always said he was “too busy with work,” but we all knew he was really too busy being someone else's dad. It's why her mom drank so much; she never really got over the divorce.

So even though I knew you're supposed to report it when one of your friends threatens suicide, I didn't do it. Partly because I didn't think she'd actually go through with it, and partly because I didn't blame her. I knew how she felt: sometimes I was as sad and hopeless and pissed off as she was. And after she brought up the possibility of doing it together, I found it creeping into my thoughts on really down days.

“Think about it,” Jenna said one night over a heaping plate of fries which sat between us on her bed. The grease spilled over onto the comforter, and she sucked some salt off of her finger. “They'll probably have to go through some special program. They'll have to admit what they did to us. The whole world will know what Holly and Monica and Sydney and all their precious prom queen populars are really like. They won't be able to charm their way out of it this time, because we'll be dead and people sit up and notice when kids end up dead.”

I chewed and swallowed. “Couldn't we get the same thing done if we just turn them in or something? I mean, we won't get to see it all go down if we're dead.”

Jenna shook her head, shoveled a fry into her mouth. “I've
tried it. I talked to my science teacher, Mr. Neeson, months ago after Monica purposely messed up my lab. Do you notice any changes?” She paused, chewed, then pointed at me with a fry. “Yeah, me neither. That's because there are no changes. Those bitches still run the school. They will always run the school.”

I thought it over. I remembered a day, not long before, when Holly tripped me in the hallway as I was walking past her locker on my way to P.E.

“Ooops,” she'd said in mock surprise. “Gosh, I didn't see you there, Chloe. Please don't tell on me.” And she and her friends had all started giggling, and it hadn't really made sense to me then. But then, after Jenna's confession, it became clear.

And it was right then—with a mouthful of mushed-up french fry and my right leg falling asleep on Jenna's comforter—that I realized it. There really was no way to beat Holly Abrams.

Maybe Jenna was right. Maybe suicide was the only way out.

• • •

Jenna was gone.

The thought was overwhelming from the moment I stepped into journalism class. Last year Jenna had been our editor, and this year it was Stuart Hampton. He was okay, nice in a quiet kind of way, and he seemed to have a really great rapport with Ms. Stepton, our new teacher. It was her first year
out of college, and she was kind of all about, “Okay, friends, let's have some silent work time,” and, “Friends? I'm hearing too much talking,” and, “This is going to be the best issue ever, friends,” like she was some sort of preschool teacher or something.

I squeezed into my chair next to Stuart and got to work writing out my interview questions for the drama coach. I had an article to do about tryouts for the fall play. I could almost hear Jenna chuckle over what a “fluff piece” it was going to be. “Spice it up, Chloe. Find a scandal in there somewhere,” she would've said. She'd always wanted the paper to be more than it was, to out the people who'd wronged her, to open up the school's eyes to reality. And there was some reality definitely missing from our planned first issue.

I worked up my nerve and leaned across the aisle to tap Stuart's shoulder with my pencil.

He looked up, annoyed. “What?”

“I have an idea,” I said, “for our first issue.”

“We've got all our assignments,” he said, turning back to whatever he was working on.

“I know,” I said. “But I really want to write this. It can be an editorial. A short column.”

He looked up again, screwed up his mouth to one side, and seemed to think it over before he sighed. “Have you talked to Ms. Stepton about it yet?”

No, of course I hadn't. I hadn't even thought of it until just then. “Yes,” I lied. “She liked it. A lot.”

“Okay,” he said, pushing his glasses up on the bridge of his nose. “What is it?”

“I think we should write a piece about Jenna,” I said. His eyes got big and hazy when I said her name, but he didn't say anything, so I went on, resisting the urge to gather a fistful of hair and twist it into my mouth. “She was the editor, you know, and she was signed up to be in this class again. I just think it's . . . wrong . . . that everybody's already forgotten about her. She didn't move away over the summer. She died.”

He licked his lips, leaned in toward me, speaking conspiratorially. “She didn't die. She committed suicide. And Ms. Stepton already told me that the administration doesn't want anyone giving it a lot of attention,” he said. “They're afraid it'll be, you know . . . contagious. They're putting some sort of special photo in the yearbook or something, but that's it. You're sure Ms. Stepton is okay with this?”

I nodded. “Totally. And Jenna wasn't contagious.” I felt defensive over the administration's decision to let her suicide slip by unnoticed. “She was just trying to make the pain stop. It . . . it was a bad idea, but it was . . . it made sense when . . . I understood how she . . .” I realized my chin was quivering as I stammered, and I was dangerously close to tears. I took a deep breath, my hands shaking around my pencil. I tried to lean back nonchalantly, my desk chair creaking beneath my weight. My face instantly flushed with embarrassment, sure that he was going to say something about me being so fat I would break the chair. But Stuart didn't appear to even hear it. Holly would
have held a freaking assembly over it. “I just think it would be a nice thing to do, to say good-bye to one of our own.”

Stuart paused for a beat, looked down at his paper and tapped his pencil eraser on the desk top a few times. He swiveled back to look at me and said, “Okay. Sure. It's a good idea. You should write it. You guys were close, right?”

“The closest,” I said.

I turned back to my reporter's notebook, but the questions I'd already written were swimming on the page. Was I really going to write about this? Admit I'd been in on Jenna's plan all along, and that I'd only backed out at the last minute? I could've been gone right now, too. My parents didn't even know. . . . Jenna's parents didn't know. Nobody knew the plan but me.

Maybe that needed to change.

I looked back down at my notebook and turned to a new page. Inside my head I was already writing, thinking of a way to say good-bye to my best friend.

About a thousand times since Jenna died, I'd wondered how I'd gone from one extreme to the other—of thinking no way would I ever kill myself over Holly—to planning a double suicide with my best friend. What was my tipping point? It had happened so suddenly, even I wasn't sure what had changed my mind.

But after hours and hours of lying on my bed, staring at the ceiling, tears pooling in my ears, I decided that my tipping point must have been the day we overheard Holly's mom at the pool.

It was early in the summer, on one of those days where the pool was pretty much the only option because even your house is oven-hot. Jenna and I went to the public pool down the street from my house, and even the pool water was lukewarm, but we didn't care. It was too hot to care.

Jenna had worn an old bikini from seventh grade because it was the only thing she had that fit, and I didn't have an extra one-piece. She pooched out over the top of it a little and her boobs kind of sagged, but she was covered up and we were going to be in water, so who cared?

And we were having fun. For once, Jenna wasn't complaining about Holly or talking about how depressing her life was. We were just goofing off in the deep end, and we felt like kids.

And then Holly's mom showed up with another neighbor and that lady's children.

My heart sank. The last person on earth I wanted to run into while in a swimsuit was Holly. It was hard enough going out in public practically naked as it was—but being practically naked in front of someone whose favorite hobby was to call you fat in front of the entire school—well that was something else entirely. But Holly wasn't with her mom, and I felt relieved. We went back to our fun and found a couple of rafts, racing each other across the length of the pool. We were laughing and being silly. We ended up on the shallow end, right where Holly's mom and her friend were laying out on a couple of poolside chaise lounges. Something about their hushed conversation got my attention.

“Someone needs to take those girls swimsuit shopping,” the friend said in a low voice. “If I were their mother, I would never let them out of the house in those. They look like sausages.”

“I know,” Holly's mom had exclaimed, and then had added, “The one in the blue used to be Holly's best friend, and Holly was always embarrassed by her.”

“Can you blame her?” her friend said. “Hanging out with a girl that looks . . .
and dresses
. . . like that would be so embarrassing.”

“Exactly. Though Holly says the girl has made her out to be this big bully. She just wouldn't let go. It was very sad to watch. Holly thinks that she had”—and here's where she lowered her voice to an even smaller whisper, though what she said seemed to bounce off the pool walls and resonate like she'd said it through a megaphone—“a crush on her. You know.”

“Oooh,” the friend said in her normal voice. “I can see that.”

“Me too.”

Just like that, the laughter had dried up in my throat, and my face burned so hot I thought it might be blistering under the sun. I slipped off my raft and into the water, where I blew out bubbles and waved my arms and sat on the bottom as long as I possibly could until my lungs burned hotter than my face.

When I came back up, I saw Jenna, and I could tell by the look on her face that she'd heard everything too. And it occurred to me, really occurred to me, that Jenna wasn't really
any worse off than I was. That I had as much of a big, fat nothing as she did, and that I would never get peace. I would forever be victim to the Hollys of the world, because even the adult version of Holly made me feel small, and all I'd been doing was swimming in my own neighborhood pool with my friend, minding my own business.

That night, I told Jenna that I was in. My tipping point.

The rest of newspaper class went by in a blur. I was so into my column and remembering the day at the pool that I barely even noticed when the bell rang. It wasn't until Ms. Stepton knocked on my desk and said, “We don't want to be tardy for our next class, friend,” that I came back to reality, sort of like breaking back through the water that day. I blinked slowly, watching students from the next class (including Monica—God, I could not get away from these people!) file in around me. I slapped my notebook shut, shoved it into my backpack, and raced toward my last class of the day. The class I hated more than any other.