Hyacinth Girls (15 page)

And if you're really the way she says I wouldn't even like you, and you wouldn't like me either so I guess we're both lucky you're dead
.

 

All My Interactions with Robyn Doblak, #10

For Rebecca/From Callie

After Dallas spread it around, everyone started calling Robyn Bullets, and when I tried to IM her at night, she wouldn't answer back. I couldn't apologize because I couldn't get through to her, and I couldn't catch her eye in class because she wouldn't look at anyone.

Rebecca, you always said you were proud of me and you thought I was a good person, and I know I didn't deserve it, but I thought one day I'd change. I'd stop making the worst decisions and do something amazing and then I could finally be proud of myself. I'd be as good as everyone hoped.

I knew what a good person would do when they started barking at Robyn. When they stuck pencils under their shirts and rubbed the tips, yelling, “Bullets! Bullets!” A good person wouldn't sit there, with a sick smile on her face—she would stand up and start shouting. She would smash someone in the head. I knew if I really cared, I would go over there and change things. I would help protect Robyn and become her shell. But I didn't do anything, I just sat there, a mess of feelings. I didn't want anything to do with her and I still missed her all the time. I left notes in her locker. I tried texting. I watched her hurrying through the halls, hunched up in her puffy coat. On the outside I was this mega-bitch, but on the inside my heart was pounding, and I wondered what would happen if I suddenly reversed.

It happened in art class last April. Robyn wasn't wearing her coat.

“Bullets,” Ella called. “Ooh, your bullets are so hard!”

Miss Dimmock was out in the hall, yelling at Adam Liebowitz, and she'd closed the door behind her, leaving Robyn unprotected. We were painting masks that day. We each had a papier-mâché face to work on, and Miss Dimmock had opened all the windows because the fumes were so strong. When Ella called out to her, Robyn pretended she couldn't hear. Robyn's hair covered up her face and she drooped over her mask. “Bullets,” I heard again, and my paintbrush wobbled. “Bullets,” Ella said, and my lips pulled back.

“Why are you such a bitch?”

Ella stiffened. “Excuse me?”

I pushed back my chair and my legs suddenly shook. Could I really leave Ella? She'd been my best friend for so long, but my heart was pounding furiously and it told me to stand up.

“Fuck you,” Ella said, as I took the first step.

I started stumbling forward, eyes on Robyn, as I moved across the room, unsure of what I was doing. My pulse was cranking because I knew there was no going back. If I sat down with Robyn, everyone would know. I would lose Dallas and Ella and all my friends and all my secrets. I'd be a fish caught on a hook that I'd swallowed myself. I didn't care. I took another step closer.

Robyn was still painting, head low down. She wore a white shirt and she curled her arm around like a fence. She hadn't even noticed me with all the commotion. I stopped in front of her table while everyone watched.

“Robyn,” I said softly. She didn't look up. She'd been painting black whiskers and she held her paintbrush still.

Two guys shouted something and I glared back at them. I needed to get a chair. I would need someplace to sit. But Robyn still hadn't seen me. Maybe she didn't know. “Robyn,” I said louder, and then the hairs on my arms stood up.

Her eyes were cold and wet, and her mouth was sort of open. I could see some of her teeth as her lips moved. Then my face was burning and my insides were exploding and I felt the bullet hit me and start tearing me apart. Total odium. I saw it on her face. She would love me never again. It couldn't hurt any worse. I'd left my friends for nothing, and how could I go back? I was a million miles from earth, cold and dead and empty. I was dropping out of a plane and there was nowhere to go but down. My hand was floating up and then I saw what it was holding. A bottle of paint. I'd been using it on my mask.

“Bullets!” I said. It was a bright blood red.

We didn't have much time. It was already beginning. In just over forty-eight hours a girl would try to take her own life. She had been ridiculed by her classmates, oppressed by grief and loss, and as I walked up the stairs to our house, she had already made her decision. Her story wouldn't end like Autumn Sanger's, with a funeral packed with tearstained mourners. And the point she was trying to make would quickly become warped by the press. I couldn't yet imagine the vengeful plans of this heartbroken teenager, but if I'd had even the tiniest glimpse, I would have run up the stairs three at a time.

Callie was lying in bed, one arm thrown over her face. And more than anger or guilt, I felt waves of pity. You think you know someone. You take this for granted. You can't imagine that the things you've said will cause them pain or insecurity. I'd told her stories about Joyce: how she saved me, her courage and goodness. True stories, but there was another side to them, too. How could Callie ever live up to the glorified heroics of her dead mother? She couldn't, she'd suffered, and the image I'd projected wasn't even true.

Callie lifted her arm from her face, and I showed her her own letter. Then I told her what I'd done, reading her messages in the car. She
didn't start screaming or trashing her room, swearing about breaches of privacy. She lay silent and still, like an escaped convict in a field of corn.

“Is this how you see yourself? Did you really think we regret you?”

Her face crumpled. Tears filled her eyes.

“I will never regret you; that could never happen. But your mother wasn't perfect, and I don't expect you to be.”

I was handing her tissues, and Callie was sniffling and rubbing her eyes, wiping her face against her arms, swaying slightly. “I need to hear you say it. Did you throw the paint on Robyn?”

She nodded, yes, and I remembered what Cerise had told me:
Callie humiliates her every day
. This was about more than just paint. This was about a girl who'd been bullied, branded a weird liar, accused of throwing paint on herself, and forced out of school. Callie had made her feel worthless, and I had enabled her.
Bully
, Mrs. Jameson said, but what had caused it? How could you pinpoint a definite reason and be absolutely certain? Our town, my parenting, her peers, the loss of her parents? Society? Or something else that existed deep inside her? A compulsion that lay in all of us, none of us innocent, everyone capable of hurting, even destroying, someone else.

“If that had been you, how do you think you'd feel?”

“I'd feel hopeless,” Callie said slowly. “Like my whole life was ruined.” Then she continued, unprompted, with an impressive stream of empathy. “I'd feel like everyone hated me and nothing was ever good.” She was blinking and crumpling up tissues, and I let her for a while. I thought she needed to understand the anguish Robyn must've felt. “I'd feel humiliated. I'd want to die,” she snorted.

“Would you deserve it?”

“No.” Callie sucked the tears off her lips and her regret struck me as genuine. She'd lied and fooled me before, but this felt honest-to-God real. Motherly or not, my instincts were right. Her distress was sincere
and I'm glad I didn't doubt her. At that moment, I wanted to hug her, reassure her that she wasn't a bully. Promise this was just one mistake and we were going to fix it. But was that even true? Could it be undone so easily? And what about the witnesses? Had Callie forced them all to lie?

“That wasn't me,” she said. “My friends asked them.”

We were both responsible now. I remembered Callie's tearstained face on the day Mrs. Jameson called me. I'd been so relieved she wasn't a bully. I accepted every word out of her mouth. I'd repeated her friends' stories willingly to anyone who would listen. I argued with Mrs. Jameson. I focused on the ink and the paint. My stomach lurched as I remembered someone else. The student witness: Lucinda Berry. She'd changed her story the day after Callie guessed it was her. I was about to press Callie further, prying out every last misdeed. But Callie was tipping her pink face upward, and then she told me that they had been friends.

“Me and Robyn.”

I stared at her, slack-jawed.

“Nobody knew,” she whispered. “We used to IM, but then she blocked me.”

“You wrote messages to
Robyn
?”

She said that she had. I waited to see if she'd blush or hesitate, stumbling over her story—giving away the lie. But what if it was true? Robyn had known where Joyce's grave was. She'd come to our home to leave this message for Callie. What if Robyn had been leaving these notes because there really was something between them? A ripped-up friendship. A reason to care.

“I'm going to need to see those messages,” I said. “Everything you guys wrote. And I want to hear the whole story, good and bad.”

“It's all mixed up in my head,” Callie said. “I don't think I can say it out loud.”

“So write it down for me. Start from the beginning.”

All that weekend, I tried to reach Cerise. The messages that I left must've sounded more and more desperate. “I just want to help. I'm sorry that Callie contributed to this. We both want to make sure that Robyn's okay.” It would be a disaster if Robyn hurt herself. I knew it would be absolutely devastating: a girl's future obliterated without thought or cause. A family destroyed, a life wasted. All because of a betrayal between two friends. It wasn't that I couldn't understand it. It was a thousand times worse when a friend hurt you, when the person who claimed to love you suddenly lied and treated you like garbage. Without her, you lost your bearings. You lost your trust in everything. It was all shadows and departures, final moments, final breaths. I wanted to grab hold of Robyn and explain how this wouldn't go on forever. She'd make new friends, her pain would lessen, and she'd find herself again. I left rambling messages for Cerise, but she didn't call me back.

Robyn's safety was one thing, but I was also concerned about Callie. If Robyn succeeded, Callie would be burdened with a crushing guilt. The things you did in childhood weren't supposed to affect you for the rest of your life. A few thoughtless moments of cruelty weren't meant to permanently change who you were. Robyn had been Callie's friend, and Callie had hurt her, but she couldn't have imagined that things would end up like this. With Robyn's life on the line, and her own future at risk.

On Saturday, Callie hung around the house in a coconut-scented fog, eating cereal out of the box, printing out her messages from Robyn. She seemed chastened and newly aware of what was at stake. Her head drooped slightly as she handed me the first two pages. I looked at the title, “All My Interactions with Robyn Doblak.” Then I read about how Callie had met Robyn while waiting to see the school social worker. Robyn had started crying, and Callie had wiped her tears. For just a second, my
bullshit detector went off. Would Callie really wipe a stranger's tears? It sounded a lot like the stories I'd told her about Joyce. But after reading their first set of IMs, my doubts started lifting. Here were two kids in the same boat. They'd both lost a parent. And Callie couldn't have faked IMs from last December.

Callie's orange flip-flops slapped across the floor as she moved from her bedroom to the kitchen. No music came out of her room. She didn't ask to turn on the TV. “I'm still putting them all in order,” she said. “Has her mom answered yet?”

I shook my head. I could only hope that Cerise was taking my warnings seriously. Either she was driving Robyn to the hospital right now or she was deleting all of my messages.

“Maybe we should go over there,” Callie said.

“That's probably not a good idea.”

“But I have to tell her I'm sorry. I want to see her before it's too late.”

We drove through the historic district of Pembury, past the old Victorian homes where there were candlelit tours every December around Christmas. The roads were narrow and winding as we headed out past the red farmhouses that had been given million-dollar renovations, past the singular herd of cows that grazed in the field. I slowed as we crossed the small bridge over Flint Street.

Robyn's house was a white ranch on the outskirts of town. Yellow leaves had fallen across the yard. We walked up to the front step and I pressed the doorbell. Callie chewed her thumbnail and stuck close to my side, bumping into my hip, shuffling her feet anxiously. We waited for the door to open, but it remained firmly shut. The Doblaks' curtains were closed. I couldn't hear anyone moving around inside.

“They're not home.” Callie frowned and pulled a handful of hair across her mouth.

I banged on the door with my knuckle. “Cerise?” I called. “Robyn?”

I dialed her number again as we stood on the step. “Cerise,” I said when her voice message clicked on. “Callie wants to apologize to Robyn. She's admitted what happened. We want to make sure Robyn's okay.”

Callie hugged herself as I spoke, then she shivered like she was cold.

“Have you called the police?” Danny asked. I could hear cars in the background. He'd answered his phone while he was working outside at the cemetery.

“They said they'd send a patrol to her house, but I know she's not home. We were just over there. I don't think they took me seriously.”

“Well, I checked your friend's grave. She hasn't been back here.”

I started telling Danny about Callie and Robyn's friendship. I'd read their first five interactions, and had watched nervously as their bond grew. But Callie had lied to Robyn. She'd made up a story that never happened, claiming Joyce's nickname as her own: Evil McFrenzy. Callie said she was tired of being pitied so she had covered herself in ketchup, ran around our Christmas tree, worshipping the devil. The whole point of the story was changed. Callie wasn't saving anyone. She'd rewritten the entire thing just to make herself sound wild. But then, maybe I didn't get it. I supposed she was helping herself. And Robyn, too; she was empathizing with her. Robyn believed her, of course. Why wouldn't she? She wished she was Evil, too, and their kinship had grown from that. I knew how girls wanted to be the same, to relate over similar feelings. To bitch about the way that nobody understood them. Was it good they could come together in this imaginary online world, creating versions of
themselves as they wished they could be? It seemed to help Robyn—at least at first. She'd been depressed over Christmas and Callie's story had cheered her. Then when she started talking about suicide, Callie turned into her counselor. She'd told Robyn to watch some cartoons and get out of bed. I was proud when her encouragement worked, but then I remembered what must've come later. Callie had helped her and then hurt her. She'd attacked her friend. We needed to do something. What could I do?

Danny cleared his throat. “Do you want me to come to the bridge with you?”

I had thought he would never ask.

How could you stop a fourteen-year-old girl from jumping off a bridge? On Sunday night, Danny met me in a restaurant parking lot not far from the bridge over Flint Street. He'd brought flashlights and a Thermos of coffee. He was wearing a short jacket and the sleeves were frayed. Callie had asked if she could come, but I'd decided against it. I didn't want her seeing anything traumatic.

Danny followed me in his truck to the bridge, parking behind me on the side of the road. We arrived after midnight, and the air was cool as we walked up to the bridge. There was a paved walkway on one side, and I followed close behind him. A single car drove past, slapping us with wind, throwing up grit. It didn't stop. Danny's baseball cap was gone and his messy brown curls smelled like smoke. He leaned close, handing me the Thermos. In the center of the bridge, we stopped and looked down. We were at least thirty feet up. There were no real barriers that would stop a kid from jumping. Down below, cars periodically rushed past in both directions. Their headlights bleached out the dark, but we couldn't see everything, and I worried for a moment that Robyn was already in
the road. She could've changed her plans or lied in her message. She might intend to run into traffic while we watched from above.

“How are we going to stop her?”

“You go on one side, and I'll take the other,” Danny said.

“And if we see her, what, shout to the other?”

“Yeah. And try and keep her calm.”

“I don't know how big she is. I'm not sure if I'll be able to grab her.”

“Just call me and I'll come running.”

I took a swig of the hot, bitter coffee. Then Danny did the same, wiping his mouth with one hand. He must've felt me staring because he suddenly leaned closer. The sky was starless, and his breath came out in a small white cloud. “You feel responsible?” he asked.

“Yeah. Callie hurt her.”

“No matter what happens, you shouldn't blame yourself.”

He swooped down suddenly, and then his lips were on mine. Just for a second. It was over that fast. I hadn't been kissed in years—mouths were something I viewed clinically. Teeth, gums, biofilm. But Danny's mouth was hot—a little acidic. His nose touched mine, his lips tickled. Then he pulled away and turned to walk to the far side of the bridge.

Danny flashed his light to signal to me that things were okay on his end, and I signaled back, still touching my lips with one hand. I felt a strange calm come over me as I moved my flashlight along my side of the bridge, illuminating a moving shadow, a whistling branch. It felt like time was emptying out, or maybe it stood still for just a moment. The moving silver arm of the clock paused and then started ticking again.
Do you know where your children are? Do you know
who
they are? Do you know what they're capable of? Is there still time to save them?
I rubbed my arms and kept alert, waiting for Robyn to appear. I realized I hadn't even considered what I wanted to say. I'd never met Robyn, and she wouldn't
know who I was. I would have to explain quickly. I was Callie's guardian. I had come to apologize. I was apologizing for Callie. I was apologizing for the paint. Then I would tell her that I understood. I knew how it felt to be alone and desperate—to feel betrayed by a friend. It could make you a little crazy.