Liv, Forever (13 page)

She was so obviously annoyed with him that it was clear she thought he was sane. So I suspected he’d be okay and get out of there soon enough. He’d had experience with this, after all.

Luckily, the door to Skellenger was propped open. I entered and found a swarm of police officers interviewing students in the common room. Abigail’s door was closed, so I stopped to listen to what Sloan, Abigail’s best friend, was saying.

“She just seemed really depressed. She had no friends. She didn’t fit in. She was clearly, you know, struggling.”

“I never even
spoke
to you! What are you talking about?” I snapped.

They let her go as another officer knocked on Abigail’s door. After a long pause, Abigail shambled out, looking a mess, like she’d been crying. While the officers walked her across the common room, she exchanged a surreptitious glance and nod with Sloan.

“Wait! Didn’t you guys see that?! She’s covering for her!” Obviously there was no point, but it made me feel better to speak.

Abigail sat down for her interview and proceeded to give a tearful, Academy Award–worthy speech that detailed our nascent friendship, my desperation (which she continually tried to counsel), and her heartbreak over my loss. When pressed, she confessed that, yes, I had given warning signs. “I’ll live the rest of my life regretting that I didn’t pick up on them and do something.” At that point she began sobbing so hard they had to help her back to her room.

I watched with a strange mix of horror, amusement, and disbelief. She was so convincing
I
practically believed her. It wasn’t until her door closed that I realized I’d meant to follow her. Instead, I was stuck in the common room.

Another officer, a woman, appeared in the hallway, carrying my most recent sketchbook. “I think you guys need to see this.”

She opened it up to my most recent drawing—an angel, falling—and underneath it read,
I cannot take it anymore. Goodbye.

I had made the sketch, but I hadn’t written those words.

“A suicide note,” the main guy said.

“Another Wicky suicide.” She raised her eyebrows.

“It’s been a while. What, ten years, maybe?”

The other guy nodded. “Give or take.”

“No!” I screamed. “I didn’t write that! Look at the other pages! It’s not my handwriting!”

The female officer closed the book. I rushed over and tried to grab it. I could feel the cover, but I couldn’t move it. I tried to harness all my energy. But this time the tips of my fingers went right through it, and I fell backward,
fingertips searing. I had to stop doing that. The agony wasn’t worth it.

From the floor, I watched as they labeled the book, wrapped it in plastic, and whisked it away.

I WENT TO GABE’S
dorm, unsure of what to do next. I followed a lacrosse player through the main entrance and waited outside his room until he returned. I began to understand why that dead girl used the word “lingering.” That’s what it felt like, hanging around in a place where you no longer belonged, if you ever belonged at all. As I lingered, I heard the chatter about me. The “strange” girl, the “dirty” girl, the “weirdo” Astor was “slumming with,” his “charity case.” That last one stung only because I had wondered that myself. Of all the girls at Wickham Hall, why would he pick me? Was he just trying to make a point and defy his parents, or did he really like me? I had wondered all that constantly. But whenever I saw him, all that paranoid chatter evaporated. Nobody was that good a faker. Well, except maybe Abigail.

I also learned a new Wicky term no one had shared with me yet: “Scolly,” for scholarship student. How original. Apparently everyone knew exactly who was on scholarship. We were the minority, the lower class—the 1 percent. Pretty ironic because in the rest of the world—the
real
world—we were the 99 percent. But everyone knows, majority or not, it’s the real-world 1 percent that rules. Here at Wickham Hall and everywhere else.

Gabe finally came along and opened his door. I slipped in with him and followed him to his bed, where he collapsed, head slumped over the side.

“I’m here. Just so you know, before you do something weird or embarrassing.”

“Figured.” His voice was monotone.

“Are you okay?”

“They gave me some electroshock. And some medicine.”

“Oh no!” I was desperate. I felt my lifeline swinging out of my grasp.

Then he cackled. “Just kidding. I mean, they gave me something, but I didn’t take it.” He pulled two pills from his pocket and tossed them in the garbage.

“Don’t do that,” I snapped.

“Oh, come on. This is the first time I’ve been able to joke about this … whatever it is I have, whatever’s wrong with me. Consider it progress.”

“Well, we have work to do. Abigail lied to the cops, told them I was suicidal and I’d told her so. And she doctored my journal.”

“No shit,” he said, with a touch of awe.

“Don’t be
impressed.
”

He looked up, toward the sound of my voice. “I truly didn’t think she had it in her. What about Astor? What’d he say?”

I didn’t want to send Gabe off on a tangent, so I ignored the question. “You need to go to Headmaster Thorton about Abigail. Now!”

“They think I’m crazy!” he shouted back. “They gave me fifty milligrams of Olanzapine, not messing around. They won’t listen to me.”

“Well, you have to.”

His shoulders sagged, and he sighed. “I know.”

THE NEXT MORNING—AT
least I think it was the next morning, but it’s hard to say because time is as fractured as a Cubist painting when you’re lingering—Wickham Hall held a morning Chapel in my memory. Of course I went. Who would give up the chance to attend her own memorial? But I was unsure what to expect. How could this school possibly eulogize me? I’d only been here six weeks. I hardly knew anyone. It wasn’t exactly going to be the kind of cryfest one likes to imagine. I entered the silent, somber building, intending to wander through, find Abigail, do some research. But I didn’t get past Malcolm.

Malcolm sat toward the back, away from everyone. Word had spread of our blooming romance. Several Third Formers kept glancing at him, whispering. Abigail and Kent approached together, Kent’s perma-smile tastefully subdued. They gave Malcolm big hugs and invited him to sit with them. But he wanted to be by himself. He was a faded being, slumped over in the hard pew. It would’ve made a beautiful painting—a Vermeer or Velasquez—but it was unbearable to see in person.

As the dreary organ music began, Ms. Benson entered and swept over to Malcolm. She didn’t say a word but wrapped her tiny arms around him, enclosing him in her kaftan. I saw his chest heave from behind. I desperately wanted to tell him I was still there; I was okay. But I wasn’t okay. And I couldn’t tell him anything.

I wasn’t really listening or paying attention to the
service. In fact, I didn’t even realize it was my actual
funeral.
It only hit me when Headmaster Thorton mentioned my casket. I moved up to the front to see it, placed right at the pulpit. Closed, thank God. And there were my parents! They’d come all this way. They sat front row and center. My mother looked like a ghost herself—dark hollow eyes, pale skin. My father was even more stoic than usual, but my mother’s body shook with silent sobs. They looked so small and out of place.

Being in front of everyone, I was instinctively uncomfortable, insecure. I had to remind myself I was invisible. No one could see me. No one.

While the minister, whom I’d never laid eyes on, extolled on the goodness of my heart, my joy for living, my artistic spirit, I turned to take in the crowd. Most of the kids looked squirmy and bored. I couldn’t blame them. Only Malcolm looked devastated.

When the service was over, my parents walked with the pallbearers, dour grown-ups I’d never seen before. Were they from the school? Or perhaps at Wickham Hall they got pallbearers for hire. The casket was loaded into a hearse, and my parents started to get into the limousine. Suddenly I realized I might never see them again. I hadn’t thought about that. There had been too many other things to think about. I wasn’t ready to never see them again. I hadn’t even said goodbye. On instinct, I jumped into the limousine with them.

As I sat into the car, I heard a girl’s voice shriek, “Don’t go!” But before I could see who it was, that man in the black suit—the very man who’d driven me to Wickham Hall—slammed the door behind us.

My best friend in the fifth grade had told me she sometimes cried herself to sleep thinking about how sad her parents would be if she died. I’d always wanted to say I cried myself to sleep thinking about how
not
sad my parents would be if I died. But I never told her. I’d never told anybody those feelings, because they were too true. Or so I’d believed. Now I saw my parents were far sadder than I ever would have imagined. My mother lost it when the door closed. She yelled to no one in particular, “I knew she shouldn’t have come to this place with you rich people!” My father put his arm around her shoulder, silently nodding in agreement, fighting back tears. I thought they’d wanted to get rid of me. Maybe I had meant more to them than I knew. Maybe our disconnection had all been my fault. Maybe they had loved me all along.

And suddenly, for the first time, I was overwhelmed by the sadness of my own death. There were no tears, but I wept, feeling my parents’ pain. Feeling Malcolm’s pain. And most of all, regretting I’d never let myself love them or
anyone.
I’d spent all those years feeling sorry for myself, feeling unloved, when really it was my fault—at least partly. How stupid. What a waste.

I started to feel weak and unusual, foggy almost. I fought to compose myself. Maybe ghosts weren’t supposed to cry. Obviously I needed to learn about what I could and couldn’t do now. I needed to start paying attention so I could figure out this new world. But then I looked down and saw my limbs were fading away. Rapidly. As we got closer to the school’s gate, parts of me actually started to disappear. Evaporate. Even my mind felt weak, as if I were alive but
short on oxygen. And I realized what that girl had been trying to tell me: I was bound to Wickham Hall. I
had
to get out of that car.

I started to bang on the windows, palms searing, and scream, “Stop! Now!” My mother’s sobbing increased, as if she could feel me. I reached at the door handle with all my strength, and my hand just went through it, stinging. I searched through my dwindling mind for an idea. Parts of my body had crossed through objects. I
had
to be able to push my entire body through the door. It was my only hope. Positioning myself against the far side of the limousine, I steeled my nerves and threw myself at the car door with
all
my strength.

It felt as if my body were being ripped apart by a hot poker, cell by cell. It was intense and excruciating but mercifully brief. And when I emerged from the whirl of motion and noise and pain, I was outside, soaring through the air. I tumbled onto the ground, my entire body stinging. But I was free, and I was whole. Well, as whole as I could be, given my condition. I watched as the limousine, and then the hearse, pulled through the gates of Wickham Hall and turned onto the country road, saying goodbye—probably forever—to my parents and to my body.

IT’S HARD TO KNOW
exactly how long I sat and recovered from the pain. I watched surges of students bustle to and from classes on the horizon. Again and again, like sped-up time-lapse photography. It might’ve been hours.

I was jolted from the blur of time when someone crossed
through me. He approached silently from behind. I didn’t have a clue he was coming until he’d already walked through me. As I got up and walked toward the lake, I realized something: it hadn’t hurt. When I’d thrown myself out of the limousine—and when I’d crossed with other people—it’d been unbearable. But when this random Third Former crossed through me unexpectedly it hadn’t hurt at all. Clearly my body had a whole new set of rules. If only I could make sense of them.