“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.
“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 beginning to break. “Elise?” he said sleepily. “What did you come here for?”
I thought about that. I hadn’t consciously planned to come here at all, but it wasn’t an accident either. Yet what had I expected to happen? Had I thought Char would erase my fake online diary, and erase the memories of everyone who had read it, too? Had I thought I would pour out all my secrets to him and he would grant me absolution? He wasn’t a priest or a psychiatrist or a magician. He was just a boy.
“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 running-to-the-guidance-counselor ledge.
“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 funny: When I called Amelia, it was because I wanted attention. And now I was getting it. But this wasn’t the attention I had wanted.
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.