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“I don’t even know your real name,” I said.
He paused, his hand resting on my stomach. “Does it matter?” he asked.
“Yes, it matters. I don’t even know who you are.”
“I don’t know your full name either,” he pointed out. “Just Elise.” He murmured into my ear, “I’ll tell you mine if you’ll tell me yours.”
I thought about this. What is a name for anyway? It’s for looking up people online. I thought about what Char would find if he searched for me. Elise Dembowski, MD. Elise Dembowski Tampa Florida school superintendent. Elise Dembowski suicide.
“Never mind,” I said. “Forget names. Just Elise is perfect.”
“Personally, I prefer DJ Elise,” he said, touching his nose to mine.
I kissed him. “DJ Elise works for me, too.”
We went back to rolling around on his bed. I grew braver, my hands exploring more and more of him: his head, his shoulders, his back.
After some time, our hands became less restless. Char rolled me over so that my back was to him, pressed against his chest, with my legs curled against his legs. I could see out his window now, to the dawn that was just begi
I thought about that. I hadn’t consciously pla
“I came here because I didn’t want to be alone anymore,” I answered him.
“That’s a good reason,” he murmured.
After a few minutes I felt his arms slacken around my waist, and I heard his breathing grow deep and regular. Char fell asleep. And then finally, mercifully, so did I.
12
The next three weeks fell into a pattern. I went to class. I did my homework. At home, Alex’s poetry castle continued to grow larger and more elaborate until eventually Steve had to move it into the sunroom so we weren’t constantly tripping over it. At school, I ate lunch with Chava and Sally, who spent most of their time, when they weren’t trying to decide who might invite Sally to the Freshman/Sophomore Summer Formal, trying to convince me that life was worth living because a beautiful future awaited me.
“Someday you’ll get your driver’s license,” Chava told me.
“Someday you’ll go to prom,” Sally told me.
“Prom is even better than the Freshman/Sophomore Summer Formal,” Chava added.
It was unclear why these predictions would make me want to stay alive, but I didn’t argue. And I learned quickly that joking about suicide with these girls got me nowhere. The day I brought in a sharp knife to cut an orange for lunch, Chava started to tremble as though I had already slashed my throat and blood was now pouring out of my mouth. One day I said something along the lines of “I have so much homework, I want to die,” and it took me the rest of lunch period to talk my friends off the ru
“I don’t want to kill myself,” I kept telling them.
But everyone else at school was saying that I did. And who do you think Chava and Sally believed, me or everyone else at school?
Actually, though they would never admit to this, I think they were secretly thrilled to be friends with someone who other people were talking about. Granted, what other people were saying about me was “If I were Elise Dembowski, I would want to off myself, too.” Nonetheless, my classmates knew who I was, which meant they practically knew who Chava and Sally were, too, which meant it was only a matter of time before my friends could ascend to their rightful places as Brooke Feldstein’s ladies-in-waiting.
It was fu
Throughout it all, as May went on, Fake Elise kept updating the online journal. Some days I was talking about various ways to die. Some days I was talking about all the reasons why I hated myself. Some days I was talking about how I wished I had Ashley Mersky’s body, or Gina McKibben’s boyfriend, or Alexandra Pleet’s parents—whatever it was that could turn me into someone other than me, someone better.
The blog wasn’t updated every single day, and I know this because I looked at it every single day.
I don’t know why.
More than once I thought about showing it to someone in power. The vice principal, maybe, though I had never interacted with Mr. Witt outside of the iPod incident last spring. And honestly, that hadn’t gone so well for me, and I didn’t have reason to believe that he would handle this problem any better.
I could have shown it to Vicky or Char, because isn’t that what friends are for? And weren’t we friends? But just thinking about doing that made me feel ashamed. It would be like saying to them, “Here. This is what everyone thinks of me. What about you? What do you think of me now?”
I thought about telling my parents, or Ms. Wu, who was so eager for me to have a personal problem so that she could solve it. But ultimately I didn’t tell anyone. I just didn’t see what good it would do. Anyway, if I showed this blog to a parent or a teacher, wouldn’t they believe that it was true, too, just like Chava and Sally did? Wouldn’t they, like Amelia, believe that this was just another one of my cries for help?
On Wednesday evening, as my father and I sat in the living room, him reading the newspaper and me working on math problems, both of us munching on our takeout Thai, the room silent except for the Doors album on the stereo, I considered just saying it. If I opened my mouth, I felt like the words would fall out: Dad, some kids at school are being mean to me.
But here’s a question for you: And then what?
I remembered sixth grade. The first year of middle school, which seemed like a very big deal. We got an arts elective. We were eleven years old now, so we were finally trusted to make decisions about our own lives.
I took my arts elective choice very, very seriously. The options were painting, theater, chorus, or reading. Reading is not actually an art; it was a remedial class. I felt bad for the kids who had to take reading. It didn’t seem fair that they weren’t allowed to learn how to paint until they were able to read at grade level.
Anyway, after much deliberation, I chose theater. I liked to play pretend, and theater class seemed like an opportunity to play pretend, only with everyone paying attention to me.
What actually happened in theater class was that we played a lot of “theater games,” like the one where you make a sound and a motion at the same time, or the one where you walk around the room at different speeds, or the one where you mirror a partner’s motions. After three weeks of this it occurred to me that maybe our teacher, Madame Chevalier, did not actually know anything about theater.
One day she had us play a game where you alliterate your first name with an adjective about you. Like Lizzie Reardon was “Likable Lizzie”—even though I would describe a dead skunk as likable before assigning that adjective to Lizzie.
Maybe I will someday discover that all Broadway actors audition for roles by playing a game where they alliterate their first names with adjectives. Maybe I will discover that Madame Chevalier was some kind of method acting genius. But I do not think that is going to happen.
Anyway, when it came to my turn, I said, “Eloquent Elise.” Which is following the rules of the game, right? But then everybody laughed at me. And called me “Eloquent Elise” for the next three days. Which you wouldn’t think would be a bad thing; I mean, eloquent is a compliment. But I could tell that no one was saying it as a compliment, and that was what confused me.