It did, and I thought about the day Julia told me she needed to buy a pregnancy test. She’d cried and then wiped her eyes and smiled at me. She’d said, “It’ll be okay.”
I should have said that to her. I should have said something. Done something. Anything. Instead I just sat there.
13
I thought about sitting in Julia’s bathroom, holding her hand as we waited for the results. She spun around in circles after the little stick showed everything would be fine, turning and turning with a smile on her face. We went to a party that night, and she got so high she fell in a bathtub and split her lip open. I tried to clean her up and ended up smearing blood all over her shirt.
We both pretended she wasn’t crying.
As Mom and I finished our drive home in silence, I thought about the mall again.
I’d seen Kevin there. Trailing Mom from one store to another and there he was, standing with his jerkass friends, hanging out. When he saw me, he glared, as if he’s in so much pain. No matter how much he wishes Julia was here, I wish it more.
I pretended I didn’t see him, and watched Mom fl ip through shirts I wouldn’t let her buy me.
I pretended I didn’t feel like my heart was breaking.
14
80 days
J,
Dad and I went to one of those huge offi ce supply stores this afternoon. I now have more notebooks and pens than anyone could ever need. When I was shopping with Mom we couldn’t really talk because I was constantly trying on things and telling her I didn’t want them. (Plus I think she was mentally rehearsing for the sex conversation.) With Dad there was a lot more silence to fill because it’s not like there’s a lot to talk about when it comes to notebooks.
I did learn I’m going to be a junior—I guess my final grades from last year were better than you’d said they’d be. Also, on the first day of school, I have to go in with Mom so we can meet with a guidance counselor and talk about “my future.”
15
I was looking at pens when Dad told me that, and I thought about the first day of school last year. We were at your locker, bitching about our schedules, and Kevin walked by and said, “Hi.” You smiled at him. That was how you two began.
I’d been hoping I wouldn’t be let back into school at all.
I picked up a package of pens and ignored Dad, who was still talking. I didn’t want to remember past that, the first day of school last year and your smile, but I did. I remembered the party, remembered your devastated face.
Remembered looping my arm through yours that night and saying, “Let’s go, everything will be fi ne, school’s finally over and summer’s here. Screw Kevin and his freshman skank, you can do better and you will. It’ll be okay. We just need to get out of here.”
We walked out of the party, warm night air blowing over us, and didn’t look back. I was proud of myself, you know. I really was.
“My future,” and there’s another “ ” for me to hate.
I told Dad we had to leave and sat in the car while he paid. We came home and I’ve been here, in my room, ever since.
And I—
16
I want a drink so bad. I just want that moment where all my worries melt into warmth. I want that moment where everything feels right, you know?
I don’t deserve to have that feeling.
I still want it anyway.
17
T H R E E
I’M GOING BACK to school soon. Very soon, in fact.
Tomorrow is the big day.
Tomorrow is too soon.
After I found out, after Dad told me, and after I wrote to Julia, I had to— I couldn’t stand being in my own skin.
I couldn’t stand myself.
I went up to the attic. I looked around, sat on the floor, and then got up again. Mom and Dad found me there after a while, looking for something to drink.
They made an emergency therapy appointment for me right away. I hate that I’ve become a bunch of quota-tion marks. “In Recovery.” “At Risk.”
“Murderer.”
18
Julia’s mother screamed that at me in the emergency room the night Julia died. She screamed it and screamed it and then stopped, stared at me with her face drawn tighter than I’d ever seen it. She stared at me and then whispered it.
The screaming I hadn’t even really heard—it’s how Julia’s mother always talks—but that whisper, that little cracked sound. Murderer. It hangs heavy around me. Inside me.
It is me.
Laurie didn’t seem too surprised that I ended up coming to see her a couple of days before I’m supposed to. She said it was “good” I didn’t drink, and it was still
“good” even after I pointed out that I would have if I’d found something.
“But you didn’t find anything, did you?” she said.
“I wanted to,” I said, and then she clicked her pen twice and gave me one of her “I see something you don’t” looks. I hate it when she does that. I hate her pen clicking too.
Mom drove me home after, and stayed with me because the university was closed for Labor Day. I went up to my room, and when she came to check on me she seemed surprised to find me lying on my bed, fl ipping through one of her art books.
19
I suppose given everything she and Dad were forced to realize once they had to face up to the fact that, “hey, we have a kid and she’s really messed up,” she expected to find me squatting on my bed cutting my hair with nail scissors or something.
I sort of wished I’d obliged her. Their whole trying-to-care thing is too strange.
Anyway, she did the “I care” thing, sat down next to me, and said, “I have a better book about that period.
Would you like to see it?”
“No,” I said. I was looking at the book because it was Julia’s favorite, the one she always flipped through after she came over and smoked a joint out the attic window and then bitched at me for never doing it with her. Pot never made me mellow like it did her. It just made me hungry and tired.
“Well, would you like to go somewhere?”
“No,” I said again, and she frowned and asked me if I wanted a cigarette.
I said, “What?”
“Well,” she said. “Every time your father and I visited you at—at Pinewood, you always smelled like smoke. And I know that . . . I know giving up drinking has been hard, and I don’t want you to think that your 20
father and I don’t understand that. So if you want, we could set up a little area outside, maybe near the edge of my flower garden, and you could—”
“I don’t smoke,” I said.
“Oh,” she said, and then sat there looking at me.
I stared at the book. What did Julia see in the pictures?
I wish I’d asked her. I thought about what she’d say if I had until Mom left.
I wanted Mom to say, “Why don’t you smoke?”
I wanted to tell her I used to, that Julia and I started the summer her mom threatened to send Julia to stay with her aunt because she was being more paranoid than usual.
(Just thinking about J’s imitation of her mother’s “Are you on DRUGS?” speech makes me smile.)
I wanted to tell Mom I stopped because the night I looked into Julia’s unseeing eyes I had a cigarette in my hand, that despite everything it was still between my fi ngers, the red tip sparking faintly, just waiting for me to breathe it back to life. All around us, the air smelled like burned rubber and cracked metal, and my cigarette still glowed as the world ended.
I haven’t smoked since. I learned to live with the sight and smell of them at Pinewood even though I went out of my way to avoid it, always making sure I 21
washed my clothes if they started to smell, and lather-ing my hair until my fingers were numb and smelled of nothing but cheap shampoo. And the thought of having one, of breathing in and out and watching it burn—I could never do that again. Not now. Not ever.