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And I answered, honestly, “Sometimes.”
So they kept me in the hospital for a couple days on suicide watch. Eventually I was allowed to go home, but my parents didn’t want me to go back to school right away. They wanted to keep an eye on me. I didn’t argue, because I didn’t want to go back to school either. I just went to therapy and downloaded new music. It was a fine life, but after a week or two of that, my parents decided that I was ready to go back into the world. I don’t know what made them think that. As far as I’m concerned, I have never been ready to go into the world.
I returned to school having been through so much, but somehow school was exactly the same. It still smelled like cleaning supplies and meat loaf. My locker still jammed when I tried to open it. Lizzie still criticized me when I walked past her. No one asked where I had been, because no one had noticed that I was gone. All I really wanted was attention, but I didn’t even get that.
Amelia was right. Who knew enough of that story to write it? I knew, Amelia knew, my parents knew. Some doctors and the school guidance counselor. But that was it. Even my little brother and sister only knew that I had been sick for a while, and then I got better.
By the time school ended for the day and, thank God, the week, I had become overwhelmed with the feeling that maybe I really had written that journal. Yes, those were someone else’s words, someone else’s story of me. But it was so close to true that it almost didn’t feel like a fiction. If everyone else believed that this was me, did it matter if it was true or not?
At night my dad and I ordered in Chinese food and watched an action movie on the living room couch together. If I seemed quieter than usual, he didn’t comment. He was quiet, too, which was fine by me. I didn’t want to talk to him. I didn’t want to talk to anyone.
After my father went to bed, I went to my room. I brushed my teeth and washed my face and tried to fall asleep. This should have been easy, since I had gotten so little sleep the night before. But it wasn’t. I lay in bed and watched the changing pattern of lights on my ceiling as cars drove by. Why is it always like this? my brain kept repeating. Why are you always like this?
I got up, opened my laptop, and went back to Elise Dembowski’s online journal. I didn’t want to. I did it anyway.
May 7: i know that some people don’t like the things that i write in this diary, but to them i say SHUT UP! this is MY diary, so i can say how i really feel. if you don’t like it, don’t read it. xoxo elise dembowski
As I sat alone at my desk in the dark, I thought about suicide. Sometimes I did that, thought about suicide, though not in an active way—it was more like pulling a lucky stone out of your back pocket. It was a comforting thing to have with you, so you could rub your fingers over it, reassure yourself that it was there if you needed it. I didn’t want to try to kill myself, didn’t want the blood and the hysterical parents and the guilt, any of it. But sometimes I liked the idea of simply not having to be here anymore, not having to deal with my life. As if death could be just an extended vacation.
But now what I thought about suicide was this: If I died tonight, everyone would believe this journal was true.
Like Amelia, Chava, and Sally, everyone would forever believe that I had written that diary. Everyone would believe they knew how I “really felt.” And how dare they?
When I thought about suicide, I thought about Start. I thought about Char and Vicky and Pippa and Mel, and I thought about all the songs I had left to discover and all the songs I had left to play.
I closed out of the Elise Dembowski diary, revealing Flash Tommy’s photo of me on the window below it. Tonight the Internet seemed filled with versions of me, like a fun house filled with mirrors. Some of them made me look prettier, and some of them made me look uglier, and some of them chopped me right in half, but none of them were right.
I changed out of my pajamas, put on my sneakers, grabbed my iPod, and slipped out of the house. I pla
But songs and songs went by, and two miles, then three, and I never grew tired. Whenever I blinked, what I saw behind closed eyes was that diary Web page, a searing orange. I couldn’t go to sleep. I would walk until morning.
After a while, I looked around me at the darkened apartment complexes and I realized: I knew where I was. I had been here before.
I was just a few blocks from where Char lived.
And it hit me that this was where I had been walking all night long.
I found Char’s apartment in a courtyard surrounded by buildings that all looked the same. I leaned my head back to look up at the windows. They were all dark. I pressed my finger to Char’s buzzer, and I held it there for a long moment.
Silence.
A couple minutes went by, and I was just about to walk away when the door opened.
“Elise?” Char said, rubbing his eyes. His hair was sticking up in all directions, and he was wearing nothing but an old New Order T-shirt and a pair of boxer shorts. Even his feet were bare. It was all I could do to keep from throwing my arms around him and burying my face in his chest.
“What are you doing here?” Char asked, his voice confused. “It’s four in the morning.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Is everything okay?”
I shrugged.
“Do you want to come in?” He opened the door wider, and I stepped inside.
I followed him upstairs and down the hall to his apartment, which clearly hadn’t been cleaned since the last time I was here. His DJ setup still rested on boxes in the middle of the room, and the window beside his bed was open, letting in the fresh spring air.
“So what’s going on?” he asked as he locked the door behind us.
I found my voice enough to say, “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Okay.” Char rubbed the back of his head. “That’s okay. We won’t talk.”
He leaned forward and kissed me. I kissed him back this time, and his mouth was warm and soft. It felt like he was breathing life into every part of my body. I pressed my lips harder against his, and I felt his hands on my lower back, pulling me toward him.
I didn’t even notice that he was walking me backward until my legs hit his bed, and I collapsed onto it, pulling him on top of me, our mouths never separating. I didn’t know what to do with any part of myself, so I tried to mimic his movements as he ran his hands from my shoulders, down my sides, all the way to my thighs, before coming back up again.
“One sec,” he whispered to me. He stood up, and I readjusted myself on his bed while he went over to his laptop. I stared at the giant GIRLFRIEND IN A COMA poster on the wall opposite me. It seemed almost like a threat, which was creepy, but then I reminded myself that I wasn’t Char’s girlfriend, and that made me feel better.
After a few clicks on the keyboard, a song began to play from Char’s speakers. It was my Cure song, “A Letter to Elise.”
“You like this one, right?” Char asked.
“Yes,” I whispered back.
Before getting back into bed, Char pulled off his T-shirt, and when he lay down beside me again, I could feel the heat radiating from his body. He had a small tattoo of a record player a few inches below his collarbone. I brushed my fingers across it, scared to touch his naked torso anywhere else. I’d never touched anyone’s tattoo before. It just felt like skin.
Char kept his word: we didn’t talk. The only sounds were the music, and his breathing, and my breathing. He took off my shirt and my bra, and when I began to shiver, he pulled me closer to him, covering my body with his own. Time passed, but I lost track of it. Neither of us spoke at all until Char was pulling my jeans down my legs, and then it was me who broke the silence.