The moths that circled Cali’s room heard that a lot.
Cali closed her mouth. She tried to smile, but it felt like a grimace, so she just nodded again and hoped it was enough. Mercifully, her mother left the bowl of soup and a cup of water and waddled out of the bedroom, into the hall, back down the protesting stairs, the pill bottles rattling in her pocket. Cali shut her door as far as she was allowed and jammed her fingers down into her throat, probing the soft flesh until she located the chalky lumps. She’d read about this somewhere, too—maybe on the same encyclopedic site where she’d read about the poor gypsy moths. How to hide the pills behind the bend in her tongue, how to act mellow and even-keeled, to fake the intended results as if she’d been taking them all along.
Good girl.
She listened outside the door again. No one was there. She forced the damp pills through the tiny tear in her mattress into the hole with the others, a hidden cache tucked behind the handle they sewed on to help you flip it when one side started to sag.
Attention-seeking behavior. That’s what Doctor Berg had called this kind of thing after she’d been at the center for a month. Not a real attempt, he’d told her parents in their first family session, some kind of tough love, let’s-all-face-the-facts-here-shall-we bullshit that was supposed to get Cali to admit her mistakes—because that’s what they were, after all—and kick off the delicate recovery process. Cali had carved a ditch in the worn leather couch with her fingernail and nodded at his wise counsel. Her parents frowned and cocked their heads, watching her cautiously from behind the red rims of their eyes as if she were a poor, dumb animal.
The thing was, Cali wasn’t dumb. She knew you were supposed to cut the long way if you really meant it, to follow the lifeline on your palm, press the blade in at the base of the wrist and slice down hard and deep toward the elbow. She’d gone crossways, though, hoping it would hurt less but still get the job done.
It didn’t. And it didn’t.
Now, again, she traced her silver souvenir with her moth-stained fingers.
Cali sucked at dying, too.
It was the note, see. That’s where the whole problem started.
Dear Everyone I Know,
By the time you read this, I’ll be . . .
It had occurred to Cali sometime last month, not long before she was released for good behavior and unexpected mental-health progress, that maybe Doctor Berg and her parents and everyone else would realize she’d meant it if she’d left a note. She’d skipped some of those vital steps last time. Skipped the note, skipped the part where you gave away your prized possessions while expressing a string of fatalistic thoughts to those around you. She hadn’t known those were requirements, benchmarks, the things that separated the attention seekers from the real pros.
But now she knew. The living thought they deserved some sort of reasonable explanation for this very unreasonable action by the dead, and they needed to check off, in retrospect, all the warning signs they should’ve recognized.
So this time Cali had a book of Sylvia Plath poems her roommate at the center had given her and a list of the few nice things she still owned: her iPod with wireless speakers (wires were dangerous), some of her art supplies, the gift certificate to Macy’s her aunt had sent to celebrate her return home. Next to each, she’d designated its new rightful owner.
The funny thing about the gift card was that she hated almost everything in Macy’s, and she hated almost everything in her aunt, and it would probably take her an entire decade to cash the card in, one pair of nonoffensive socks or rubber-backed clip-on earrings at a time. And the funny thing about the poems was that reading them didn’t make her feel morbid at all. They made her feel understood, less alone. Those words got her; they marched in and grabbed her and held on. But you couldn’t walk through life with a book in front of your nose at every breath and turn, words tucked under your arm like the warm touch of a best friend, and whoever found the poems would jump to the right kinds of conclusions, and they’d see the note and the makeshift will and they’d nod somberly and say they should’ve known, they should’ve seen the signs. But at least they’d finally understand she wasn’t screwing around, and maybe they would tell Doctor Berg, too, when they called for the medical files or whatever they were supposed to do in that kind of situation.
Tonight was the night, and after her mother had left the soup and probed her mouth and looked at her once more with those sorrowful eyes, Cali was ready to sit down and write the all-important note.
There were no sharp things left in her bedroom. If her father could’ve sanded the corners of the walls into harmless curves, he would’ve, but ultimately they concluded, over family dinner one night, that if Cali wanted to hurt herself using the corners of her walls, she couldn’t possibly do it in silence. They’d be able to intervene. Still, her dangerous books were all paperbacks now, her dangerous glasses had been fitted with kid-friendly plastic lenses, her dangerous colored pencils had been confiscated. Cali had to settle for a new box of crayons, presented to her on her first night back home with a stack of soft, white stationery on which Cali had already written her list of valuable items. The crayons made Cali smile yet again, and she thought she should add those to the list as well. They were the most extravagant box of Crayolas she’d ever owned. She’d begged her mother for the ninety-six-color pack every year for a decade, back when things like crayons mattered. But her mother always said forty-eight was more than enough for any scenario a girl growing up in the great state of Maine might encounter.
Cali pulled a fresh sheet of stationery from her desk drawer and explored the color palette in the yellow-and-green box before her. Her fingers passed over the reds, which she felt were melodramatic and would detract from her message, and the blues, which were too overtly symbolic. Black was typical and uninspired and she hated the way it looked on her cloud-colored paper. She finally settled on a pink-orange one called Mango Tango and gripped the crayon between cold fingers, thinking. She didn’t want to address the letter to her parents directly, even though they’d undoubtedly be the ones to find it. Her. It.
To Whom It
May Concern . . .
Cali inspected the script, fat and slanty. Like the baby’s attempt at writing his own name. She thought about his pudgy little hand holding on to a spoon or a crayon like this, drawing lopsided circles and stars with too many points. A weak pulse tingled at the bottom of her heart, a pressure, a squeeze she almost recognized, like a memory you didn’t know whether you’d actually experienced or only seen in a photo. But it disappeared quickly and she underlined her words on the page twice, off to a good start.
The wind shifted and pressed itself against Cali’s bedroom window. The black pines in the backyard swayed, their branches forced apart, then mashed together, and just inside the screen, a spider scurried across the sill. An orb weaver, Cali realized. She’d read about them somewhere, read that some of them didn’t even make webs, despite their names. They didn’t need anything so elaborate, that particular kind; they simply dangled a sticky substance from their front legs and enticed the unsuspecting little moths to approach. The moths got ensnared and the spider casually reeled them in, closer and closer. Then, predator devoured prey.
Cali appreciated that. Nature protected some, eliminated others, and left the rest to fend for themselves. Beautiful and terrible at once.
The spider explored a corner of the sill, and Cali thought this one was likely the kind that made webs, the kind that ate their own silky strands every twenty-four hours. They’d evolved from the Jurassic period, Cali remembered. A hundred and forty million years of doing the same thing every day: making a web, destroying it, making another, destroying it. The creature’s bulbous body was orange and black like a tiger’s, and now that Cali’d spotted it, she couldn’t unsee it. The spider paced back to the other corner. The thing was trapped; she’d probably starve. Cali should do something, she thought. Open the window and the screen, maybe. Show her the way out.