Silence.
"Come on. We can"t run away, right? That"s what you were telling me today? That you"re always going to be there, hanging out in the backseat. Your smell. Your shadow. Your memory. That"s what you were trying to tell me, right? Well, I have things I want to say to you." I sit at his desk and turn on the desk lamp, which is like a spotlight in the dark. "Come on, Ty. I did what you wanted. I gave the letter to Ashley. Now do what I want, for once."
But there"s nothing. No sound. No smell. No Ty.
Which p.i.s.ses me off even more. And it"s been a ranting kind of day.
I stand up. "You"re selfish," I say into the darkness. "Do you know that? You"re the most selfish person I know. You didn"t even care, did you, about what this would do to Mom? Did you hear her saying her life is over? That"s on you. That"s on you, Ty. You"re no better than Dad is, you know. You just do whatever you feel like doing and to h.e.l.l with the rest of us, right?"
My eyes are drawn to the mirror. For a split second I think I see him, a dark shape moving, but then I realize it"s my own reflection.
I stare at the Post-it.
Sorry Mom but I was below empty.
"What, you wanted to make some kind of grand romantic statement? You wanted to demonstrate to the world how much pain you were in?" The hole starts to crack open in my sternum but I push past it. "It"s not romantic. You blew a chunk of your chest out and died in a puddle of your own blood-does that sound romantic to you? The people cleaned it up, yeah, all right, but they left a bunch of soaked b.l.o.o.d.y paper towels in the garbage outside for Mom to find when she emptied the trash the next week. Romantic, right? What an awesome statement. Oh, and your body loses control of its bowels when you die, and you s.h.i.t yourself, how f.u.c.king romantic is that? And the little girl next door, Emma, you know, she came outside when the ambulance drove up and she was there when they opened the garage door and she saw you like that. She"s six years old. Awesome statement you made there. Right this second you are worm food, and people have forgotten you, they don"t even remember you now, it"s all Patrick Murphy now, but they"ll forget him, too. They"ll move on. That"s what people do. You aren"t Jim Morrison, Ty. You don"t get to be some kind of tragic rock star who died young and everyone builds a shrine to. You get to be a stupid-a.s.s kid. The only people who will remember your "statement" are Mom and me, and that"s just because we hurt too much to forget. Yeah, other people are in pain too, dips.h.i.t. Everybody feels pain. You a.s.shole."
I tear the Post-it off the gla.s.s. The hole is an enormous chasm in my chest now, a swirling black hole, but I fight it. "I do not accept this s.h.i.tty little note."
I crumple the Post-it. I drop it. It falls from my fingers and bounces on the floor and out of sight.
My vision goes dim around the edges. I can"t breathe. Then I"m on my knees on the floor with my face pressed to the musty carpet fibers, and I see blue lights behind my eyes. Constellations of pain. But I don"t see Ty.
"Where are you?" I wheeze into the floor. "Where did you go?"
The hole pa.s.ses. I don"t know how long it takes, but suddenly it"s simply gone. I turn my face to the side and cough and lie there in the fetal position until I feel enough strength return to my body to sit up.
The first thing I do is get on my hands and knees next to the bed and search for the Post-it.
To smooth it out. To put it back. Because I can"t stay angry at him.
Instead my fingers close on something hard and sharp. I jerk back, then reach underneath the bed carefully and pull the object out.
It"s a tooth. A shark-tooth necklace, to be more precise. The necklace part consists of a row of tiny black beads on a rough string, with a single white and jagged tooth gleaming in the center. I sit up on my knees to inspect it, frowning. I bring it into the beam of light from the lamp. You don"t encounter shark teeth every day in our part of Nebraska. Or any part of Nebraska. Landlocked state, if you recall. I don"t remember this necklace. Ty wasn"t the kind of guy who wore necklaces, period.
"What is this?" I ask to the empty air.
And then I remember where I"ve seen it before.
The picture of the three amigos: Ty, Patrick, and Damian making the peace sign.
I pull Ty"s collage out from behind the door and find the picture in question. It was taken at the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha. Nebraska may not have too much in the way of snazzy tourist destinations, but we do have one of the best zoos in the country. I have always liked the gorilla exhibit, but Ty"s favorite was the sharks. It"s a huge blue tunnel where hammerheads and blacktips and grays and about ten other species of shark sweep through the water around you like they are performing a slow aquatic ballet.
Ty would sometimes stand in there watching the sharks for hours. I used to tease him about it. "Who loves sharks?" I"d asked him. "If you got tossed in there, I doubt they"d love you back. Two words: feeding frenzy."
"It"s peaceful" was all he said in his defense. "I like it."
The three amigos photo was taken just outside the entrance to the shark tunnel. They must have been on a cla.s.s field trip, because they are each wearing a fluorescent green badge. They are also each wearing a shark-tooth necklace from the gift shop. I stare at their hopeful faces. I close my hand around the shark tooth.
Ty.
Patrick.
Damian.
Three links in a chain.
15 March The first time I thought there might be something wrong with Ty, the first time it occurred to me that he might be looking at the dying-young scenario a little too fondly, was when Samantha Sullivan, a girl from our church, died of pneumonia. Samantha was a sweet girl, the type who I always remembered smiling. She had braces, but they only seemed to accentuate her smile in a good way. When she got sick, n.o.body thought she would die. People we know don"t die of pneumonia, not in this day and age, not 14-year-old violin players. She was in the hospital for a few days and scheduled to be discharged on a Monday.
On Sunday morning she developed a blood clot in her lung. On Sunday afternoon part of the clot broke free and traveled to her brain.
And then she was dead.
Samantha hadn"t been super popular. She was quiet. She had a small group of close friends, like me. She didn"t like to call attention to herself. But it seemed like every teenager in the city of Lincoln came to her funeral.
One of her friends made a playlist of all her favorite songs: Taylor Swift, mostly, with some Carrie Underwood and the Pistol Annies thrown in. Samantha liked country. The playlist looped all through the viewing before the funeral. Samantha"s mom bought several of those collage frames and filled them with photos: Samantha as a baby, Samantha canning tomatoes with her grandmother, Samantha on the beach of Branched Oak Lake with a line of cousins, Samantha eating ice cream with her friends, smiling her sparkly smile.
At the funeral, the people who got up to speak kept referring to Samantha"s gentle spirit and how she was a light that had gone out too soon, but how she was home now. There was no sickness that could touch her. She was safe. She had run her race. They tried to make it sound like life completely blows, so thank goodness Samantha got out of it when she did, while she was ahead, so to speak.
No tears in heaven.
I remember thinking, why? If G.o.d"s so good, why take this girl before she"s even had a chance to live?
It didn"t make sense.
It still doesn"t.
Ty took Samantha"s death hard. He spent the rest of the summer playing Taylor Swift songs over and over. He had a picture of Samantha, taken at a church potluck when they were both about 12, sitting on a lawn chair with a paper plate balanced delicately across her knees, about to dig into some potato salad. He tacked the picture up on his wall next to his bed. It"s still there.
What was weird was that he and Samantha hadn"t been particularly close. Yes, they had known each other since they were kids, and that much was upsetting in itself; nothing can remind you of your own fragile place in the universe so powerfully as someone your own age dying suddenly, here one minute, gone the next. But the level of emotion Ty showed over Samantha"s death didn"t correlate with what he"d felt for her in real life. He hated country music. He wasn"t friends with any of her friends. So why did it settle into him so deeply?
In life, Samantha had been small and una.s.suming, a person who gravitated toward the background. But in death she was a shining star. Everyone spoke well of her. Everyone cried for her. They all cared.
I"ve wondered lately if that was what started Ty"s fascination in his own death. He saw how everyone that one afternoon in the church, in the graveyard, loved Samantha Sullivan.
It was only a few weeks later that he took the Advil.
Maybe he didn"t mean to die. I mean, he took the pills practically under Mom"s nose. Who does that unless you want to get caught? To get saved? Maybe he was like everybody else. He just wanted to be loved. But then after he swallowed the pills he went down into his bedroom and went to sleep. Something must have changed in those moments after he took the Advil.
There were other factors, too. A few days after Samantha"s death a football player at UNL killed himself in the empty locker room after a game, an overdose of some kind of over-the-counter drug. It was all over the news. That same summer a meth head died in what the press called "suicide by police." He pretended he had a gun, and they shot him.
There were all kinds of places where the idea might have taken root: that scene in the Twilight series when Edward tries to kill himself when he think he"s lost Bella, because yes, that"s a perfectly reasonable response if you can"t be with the person you love: just die. Or the casual way people roll off the phrase I"m killing myself doing (fill in the blank). Or Dr. Kevorkian, or the death penalty, or the news, which is always spewing out some kind of terrible story about a crazy person with a gun and a death wish. Or Romeo and Juliet in English cla.s.s or It"s Kind of a Funny Story or a collection of poems by Sylvia Plath on Mom"s bookshelf, from her college days, where she had underlined the lines: Dying Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like h.e.l.l.
I do it so it feels real.
There"s death all around us. Everywhere we look. 1.8 people kill themselves every second.
We just don"t pay attention. Until we do.
GOING BACK TO SCHOOL ON MONDAY IS ROUGH.
Even the bus ride is unbearable. Everybody wants to stare at the-girl-whose-brother-died, who must be extra fragile now because someone else is dead. It"s how they treated me when I came back after Christmas break-like I"ve got a grief bomb strapped to my chest, liable to go off at any second. They either approach me carefully to attempt to defuse it, or they run for cover.
Plus, it"s St. Patrick"s Day, which makes the whole thing super awkward. n.o.body"s wearing green, I notice.
Fun times.
I look for Damian in the halls before cla.s.s. I can"t stop thinking about his voice when he was telling me that Patrick was dead. "He was my friend," he said. Now he"s the only one of the three amigos left standing. But I don"t spot him. Of course, he"s easy to miss when he"s trying not to be seen. Invisibility is his superpower, after all.
"If I disappeared one day, really disappeared and never came back, they wouldn"t even notice." That"s what he said to me that day in the gym.
And I said, "I see you."
That"s what I have to do. He needs me to see him.
I cyberstalked Damian a bit over the weekend, to figure out how I might best do that-be his friend-and this is what I"ve gleaned from his internet activity so far: He"s into photography, especially black-and-white candids, photos taken when the subject didn"t know there was a camera. I already knew that.
He likes to read. I already knew that, too.
What I didn"t know is that Damian likes to read everything he can get his hands on: science fiction and fantasy and horror, but also books like Marley & Me and The Kite Runner and books about Descartes and Kant and Jung. He"s really into philosophy. He describes himself as a "philosopher poet" on his various online profiles, and I don"t know if this is simply an attempt to pick up girls, but that"s the term he uses.
Philosopher.
Poet.
Which is great and all, except three days ago he posted this poem: A white bone picked clean by the carrion few who will never know the pain that I do I worry that he could be the next domino to fall. He could be trembling on the brink of Ty"s oblivion, about to step off into the abyss. I don"t know. I don"t know how to make things better for him.
But I"m going to try.
I find him at lunchtime. He"s sitting at a table in the corner of the cafeteria, all alone, glumly picking at a pile of soggy french fries.
"So," I say, sliding into a chair across from him like it"s what I do every day. "I want to talk about Heart of Darkness. I thought it was so interesting, the way Conrad explores how a person chooses between two different kinds of evil. So relevant, don"t you think?"
Thank you, CliffsNotes.
Damian"s face brightens, and he says, "I know. I think he was writing about the absurdity of it all. I mean, how can there be such a thing as insanity in a world that"s already gone insane?"
"I know!" I agree enthusiastically. "So," I add, "I was wondering if you could give me some reading recommendations now that I"m done with Conrad. I really liked that one. What else could I try?"
His eyebrows come together thoughtfully, considering what I might like.
"Have you read Kafka?" he asks after a minute.
"Kafka." I jot the name down in my notebook.
"Cla.s.sic existentialism. Start with The Metamorphosis. It"s short, but it"s brilliant."
Short is good, I think. Short is very good.
"I will check it out, literally," I say. I reach across the table and pop one of his french fries into my mouth. Damian smiles, a real, genuine smile, revealing a row of crooked teeth.
I"m so happy to see that smile.
In Honors Calculus Lab, when (after our initial ten minutes of homework) we pair up to play a blackjack tournament-winner gets cookies of their choice baked by none other than the multi-talented Miss Mahoney-Steven asks if he can challenge me in the first round.
I can"t think of a good excuse not to. At least Steven"s reaction to me is genuine. Even if it is awkward. "Okay."
I pull my desk to face his.
"Dealer or player?" he asks.
"Dealer."
He hands me the deck.
"Are you doing all right?" he asks as I shuffle.
Here we go. The bomb squad interrogation has officially begun.
"I"m fine."
"You missed school. You never miss school."
"Never say never," I joke, but he doesn"t laugh.
"I tried to call you."
"I went on an impromptu road trip with my mom."
His eyebrows furrow. "A road trip. Where?"
"Tennessee."
More furrowing. "Tennessee."
"Yes. Are you ready?"
He nods. I lay a card faceup in front of him and one facedown in front of me. A nine for him. A two for me.
I lay down one more for him. A five. Then one more for me, face up. A jack.
"What"s in Tennessee?" he asks.
I consider telling him that it"s none of his business, but I know he"s asking because he"s worried. In spite of everything, he still cares about me. I shouldn"t throw that back in his face.