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Alex made mewing noises and crumpled to the side, like the safari hunters had successfully stabbed her. She fell onto my feet, which seemed maybe like progress, since earlier she wouldn’t even let me touch her. I thought about how fu
“And this one”—Mom put her arm around me and squeezed—“is about to be the disc jockey at the best party this town has ever seen.”
“Mom!” I hissed. I wriggled out of her embrace.
On the floor, Alex also hissed. The murdered lion had somehow turned into a snake.
“She gets easily embarrassed,” Mom told Char. “Teenagers.”
If I had one of Alex’s imaginary hunting sticks in hand, I would not have hesitated to ram it into my mother’s mouth at that moment.
“Sounds like a big night,” Char replied. He looked me straight in the eye, as he had so many times before, and I wanted to throw my arms around him just about as much as I wanted to punch him in the stomach. “Good luck.”
I unstuck my tongue from the roof of my mouth. “Thank you,” I said.
A bell dinged. “Pizza’s up,” Char said. He reached behind him and handed the box to my mother. “Have a nice night, folks.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” I said as we turned to go. “I will.”
Together, the Myers household walked out of there: the founders of BOO OIL, a teenage DJ, and two mountain snakes, slithering all the way out the door.
19
When my phone rang a couple hours later, I knew who it was. I knew because this was one of the only phone numbers programmed into my cell phone, which my parents had kindly given back to me at school this morning. After what had happened last night, they said they wanted to know that they could reach me.
“Hello, Amelia,” I answered.
“Elise?” she said, her voice tentative, gentle, hopeful.
And just the way she said my name sent me back, back almost ten months. I looked over to the corner of my room, like I expected to see a ghost of myself still there, back pressed up against the wall, left arm cradled up to her chest, right hand holding the phone that co
“Elise?”
“Hi, Amelia.”
“What’s going on?”
“I cut myself.”
“Oh, no! Are you okay?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are your parents there? What happened?”
“I cut myself. Three times.”
“You poor thing. How?”
“With an X-Acto knife.”
“Wait. What? Elise, what did you say?”
“My dad really likes to cut out articles from the newspaper. You know, to give to people when he thinks they’d be interested. Well, mostly just me. I don’t think he cuts out stories for anyone else.”
“Elise, is your dad there with you? Is anyone there?”
“No, it’s just that’s why he has an X-Acto knife. For the newspaper.”
“Are you bleeding?”
“Yes, but it doesn’t actually hurt that much. It’s weird; it doesn’t hurt as much as I thought it would. When I was six years old I got mad at my mom and slammed the door, only somehow I slammed the door on my fingers. There was blood everywhere that time. It hurt a lot more than this. It was an accident, though.”
“Elise, I’m going to call 911, okay?”
“You don’t have to do that. I think it’ll be fine.”
“No, I want to do it, okay? I want to help. Can I put you on hold so I can call 911?”
“You want to help me?”
“Yeah, I do. Of course I do. Can I put you on hold for just one second?”
“Great. Since you want to help me so much: do you see me, Amelia?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Do you see me! I’ve gone to school with you every day since sixth grade. Do you understand me? Do you understand why I did this to myself? Do you see?”
“Sure, Elise, of course. Let me—”
“Then can you please explain it to me?”
“I’m calling 911 now. Help will be there soon. It will be okay.”
“But can’t you just talk to me?”
Nothing. Just silence. And then, sirens.
“Elise, are you there?” Amelia asked, her voice in my ear jolting me back to present day.
“I’m here,” I said.
“Great! Look, I’m calling to apologize about Marissa. I only found out this afternoon that she’s the one who was writing that whole blog about you, and I feel awful about it. Just awful. I shouldn’t have accused you of saying mean things about me online, because of course it wasn’t you at all, but I thought it was.
“And I shouldn’t have ever told Marissa that you called me that time in September when … well, you know. It wasn’t any of my business, I know that. I promise I only told a few people: my parents, Marissa, one or two of my other best friends. I want you to know I wasn’t spreading it all over school that you … you know, hurt yourself. I was just so panicked after you called me, and I didn’t know what to do, so I talked it through with a few close friends. I wasn’t trying to spread rumors about you or anything.”
“Amelia,” I said, “it’s fine.”
“I really am sorry about the way Marissa treated you, though,” she said. “I had no idea she was like that.”
Amelia, it occurred to me then, was not very good at reading a crowd.
“I just feel like this whole thing is my fault,” she went on. “Is there anything I can do to make it up to you?”
I thought of all the responses I would have rattled off had she asked me this same question just a couple months ago. Let me sit with you at lunch. Invite me to hang out with you on weekends. Text me sometimes. Listen to this mix I made for you. Have di
But Amelia is nice. That’s all. That doesn’t make her my friend, that doesn’t make her special, and that doesn’t make her anything I want her to be. It has nothing to do with me. She’s just nice.
So I said, “Amelia, don’t worry about it. It isn’t your fault.”
“I just … when I called 911 that time … I was trying to help. And I feel like it totally backfired, you know?”
“You did the right thing, calling an ambulance,” I told her. “You didn’t know how serious it was; you weren’t there with me.” I thought about how I would have responded if someone had called me in the way that I called Amelia. How scared would I have felt? How responsible? “I would have done the same thing if I were in your position.”
“Honestly?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. “I would have. It’s okay, Amelia. I’m not mad at you.”
After Amelia and I hung up, I sat on my bed for a moment, my phone cupped in my hand. There was still one other person that I needed to talk to. So I lifted the phone again, and I dialed Vicky’s number.
She answered after one ring. “Where the hell have you been?”
“Grounded,” I said.
“Grounded,” Vicky repeated.
“Yeah, I … It’s a long story. I did something mean to my sister, so my mom took away my phone.”
“You could have e-mailed or something,” Vicky pointed out. “You could have found some way to let me know you were all right.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“The last time I saw you, you basically told me that you’re suicidal because nobody likes you. The next thing I knew, you’d disappeared, Pippa and Char were making out, and you weren’t talking to me for a week. I’ve been freaking out, Elise. Harry has been freaking out. And he never freaks out.”
“I’m not suicidal,” I said. I held my arm out in front of me and twisted it back and forth. Palm up. Palm down. Now you look fractured. Now you look whole.