Cornered

by Rhoda Belleza

  Maybe Jenna was right. Maybe suicide was the only way out.

  • • •

  Jenna was gone.

  The thought was overwhelming from the moment I stepped into journalism class. Last year Jenna had been our editor, and this year it was Stuart Hampton. He was okay, nice in a quiet kind of way, and he seemed to have a really great rapport with Ms. Stepton, our new teacher. It was her first year out of college, and she was kind of all about, “Okay, friends, let’s have some silent work time,” and, “Friends? I’m hearing too much talking,” and, “This is going to be the best issue ever, friends,” like she was some sort of preschool teacher or something.

  I squeezed into my chair next to Stuart and got to work writing out my interview questions for the drama coach. I had an article to do about tryouts for the fall play. I could almost hear Jenna chuckle over what a “fluff piece” it was going to be. “Spice it up, Chloe. Find a scandal in there somewhere,” she would’ve said. She’d always wanted the paper to be more than it was, to out the people who’d wronged her, to open up the school’s eyes to reality. And there was some reality definitely missing from our planned first issue.

  I worked up my nerve and leaned across the aisle to tap Stuart’s shoulder with my pencil.

  He looked up, annoyed. “What?”

  “I have an idea,” I said, “for our first issue.”

  “We’ve got all our assignments,” he said, turning back to whatever he was working on.

  “I know,” I said. “But I really want to write this. It can be an editorial. A short column.”

  He looked up again, screwed up his mouth to one side, and seemed to think it over before he sighed. “Have you talked to Ms. Stepton about it yet?”

  No, of course I hadn’t. I hadn’t even thought of it until just then. “Yes,” I lied. “She liked it. A lot.”

  “Okay,” he said, pushing his glasses up on the bridge of his nose. “What is it?”

  “I think we should write a piece about Jenna,” I said. His eyes got big and hazy when I said her name, but he didn’t say anything, so I went on, resisting the urge to gather a fistful of hair and twist it into my mouth. “She was the editor, you know, and she was signed up to be in this class again. I just think it’s . . . wrong . . . that everybody’s already forgotten about her. She didn’t move away over the summer. She died.”

  He licked his lips, leaned in toward me, speaking conspiratorially. “She didn’t die. She committed suicide. And Ms. Stepton already told me that the administration doesn’t want anyone giving it a lot of attention,” he said. “They’re afraid it’ll be, you know . . . contagious. They’re putting some sort of special photo in the yearbook or something, but that’s it. You’re sure Ms. Stepton is okay with this?”

  I nodded. “Totally. And Jenna wasn’t contagious.” I felt defensive over the administration’s decision to let her suicide slip by unnoticed. “She was just trying to make the pain stop. It . . . it was a bad idea, but it was . . . it made sense when . . . I understood how she . . .” I realized my chin was quivering as I stammered, and I was dangerously close to tears. I took a deep breath, my hands shaking around my pencil. I tried to lean back nonchalantly, my desk chair creaking beneath my weight. My face instantly flushed with embarrassment, sure that he was going to say something about me being so fat I would break the chair. But Stuart didn’t appear to even hear it. Holly would have held a freaking assembly over it. “I just think it would be a nice thing to do, to say good-bye to one of our own.”

  Stuart paused for a beat, looked down at his paper and tapped his pencil eraser on the desk top a few times. He swiveled back to look at me and said, “Okay. Sure. It’s a good idea. You should write it. You guys were close, right?”

  “The closest,” I said.

  I turned back to my reporter’s notebook, but the questions I’d already written were swimming on the page. Was I really going to write about this? Admit I’d been in on Jenna’s plan all along, and that I’d only backed out at the last minute? I could’ve been gone right now, too. My parents didn’t even know. . . . Jenna’s parents didn’t know. Nobody knew the plan but me.

  Maybe that needed to change.

  I looked back down at my notebook and turned to a new page. Inside my head I was already writing, thinking of a way to say good-bye to my best friend.

  About a thousand times since Jenna died, I’d wondered how I’d gone from one extreme to the other—of thinking no way would I ever kill myself over Holly—to planning a double suicide with my best friend. What was my tipping point? It had happened so suddenly, even I wasn’t sure what had changed my mind.

  But after hours and hours of lying on my bed, staring at the ceiling, tears pooling in my ears, I decided that my tipping point must have been the day we overheard Holly’s mom at the pool.

  It was early in the summer, on one of those days where the pool was pretty much the only option because even your house is oven-hot. Jenna and I went to the public pool down the street from my house, and even the pool water was lukewarm, but we didn’t care. It was too hot to care.

  Jenna had worn an old bikini from seventh grade because it was the only thing she had that fit, and I didn’t have an extra one-piece. She pooched out over the top of it a little and her boobs kind of sagged, but she was covered up and we were going to be in water, so who cared?

  And we were having fun. For once, Jenna wasn’t complaining about Holly or talking about how depressing her life was. We were just goofing off in the deep end, and we felt like kids.

  And then Holly’s mom showed up with another neighbor and that lady’s children.

  My heart sank. The last person on earth I wanted to run into while in a swimsuit was Holly. It was hard enough going out in public practically naked as it was—but being practically naked in front of someone whose favorite hobby was to call you fat in front of the entire school—well that was something else entirely. But Holly wasn’t with her mom, and I felt relieved. We went back to our fun and found a couple of rafts, racing each other across the length of the pool. We were laughing and being silly. We ended up on the shallow end, right where Holly’s mom and her friend were laying out on a couple of poolside chaise lounges. Something about their hushed conversation got my attention.

  “Someone needs to take those girls swimsuit shopping,” the friend said in a low voice. “If I were their mother, I would never let them out of the house in those. They look like sausages.”

  “I know,” Holly’s mom had exclaimed, and then had added, “The one in the blue used to be Holly’s best friend, and Holly was always embarrassed by her.”

  “Can you blame her?” her friend said. “Hanging out with a girl that looks . . . and dresses . . . like that would be so embarrassing.”

  “Exactly. Though Holly says the girl has made her out to be this big bully. She just wouldn’t let go. It was very sad to watch. Holly thinks that she had”—and here’s where she lowered her voice to an even smaller whisper, though what she said seemed to bounce off the pool walls and resonate like she’d said it through a megaphone—“a crush on her. You know.”

  “Oooh,” the friend said in her normal voice. “I can see that.”

  “Me too.”

  Just like that, the laughter had dried up in my throat, and my face burned so hot I thought it might be blistering under the sun. I slipped off my raft and into the water, where I blew out bubbles and waved my arms and sat on the bottom as long as I possibly could until my lungs burned hotter than my face.

  When I came back up, I saw Jenna, and I could tell by the look on her face that she’d heard everything too. And it occurred to me, really occurred to me, that Jenna wasn’t really any worse off than I was. That I had as much of a big, fat nothing as she did, and that I would never get peace. I would forever be victim to the Hollys of the world, because even the adult version of Holly made me feel small, and all I’d been doing was swimming in my own neighborhood pool with my friend, minding my own business.
/>   That night, I told Jenna that I was in. My tipping point.

  The rest of newspaper class went by in a blur. I was so into my column and remembering the day at the pool that I barely even noticed when the bell rang. It wasn’t until Ms. Stepton knocked on my desk and said, “We don’t want to be tardy for our next class, friend,” that I came back to reality, sort of like breaking back through the water that day. I blinked slowly, watching students from the next class (including Monica—God, I could not get away from these people!) file in around me. I slapped my notebook shut, shoved it into my backpack, and raced toward my last class of the day. The class I hated more than any other.

  Team Sports.

  There was no class more demeaning for someone like me than Team Sports. I was horrible at anything athletic, I hated everything that had to do with sports, and I was not exactly “team material” in pretty much anyone’s eyes. Plus Holly and Sydney were in the class with me. It was nothing but humiliation and embarrassment. As if I needed more of that.

  As soon as I walked into the locker room, it started. I tried my best to ignore it, the way my mom told me to when the shit first started hitting the fan with Holly, but it’s hard to block out the cackles when they’re bouncing off metal locker doors and are right behind you.

  Ew, she wears granny panties.

  Too bad they don’t hide the cellulite on her thighs.

  She’s so fat her butt hangs over the bench.

  Of course I knew they were talking about me. But I refused to turn around and look to see who was saying what. I just got dressed and trudged out to the gym floor, where I sat in my squad and chewed on my hair. We listened to Coach Lake explain the rules of our unit one sport—basketball.

  Basketball. Great. Just what a short, fat nobody with no coordination loves to play against a bunch of tall skinny girls. If Jenna were here, she’d have faked a dizzy spell and would have asked Coach Lake to assign me to accompany her to the nurse’s office.

  But Jenna was gone.

  Coach blew her whistle and we all stood up, two squads heading for the far half-court and my squad heading for the other one. We were playing against Holly’s squad. Of course.

  Let it be said that I really did try. My mom once told me that if I had fun despite them, if I showed the girls who were bothering me that what they said and did didn’t even register, they would eventually go away. Girls like that are just looking for attention, Chloe, she’d said. Refuse to give it to them and they’ll leave you alone. And even though I’d been following that advice forever and it had never once worked, I kept trying, because I wanted to believe that she was right. That there was a secret to making someone like Holly stop.

  So the first time Holly tripped me and I fell face-first on the court, I laughed out loud, looking around for someone, anyone to join in and make it look like that was the best thing that had happened to me all day. Nobody did though. And then when Sydney elbowed me, hard, in the ribs, I gritted my teeth and just elbowed her back, but too softly, too timidly for her to get the point.

  And then Holly threw the pass.

  She dribbled down the court, swiveled on one foot like a freaking pro baller, and fired a chest pass right into my face. I heard a crunch and saw a flash of white light behind my eyelids as I stumbled back a few steps, my arms reeling to keep myself from falling backward. I stepped on Sydney’s foot, and she let out a wail like I’d just crushed her. Instantly, I felt blood begin dripping down over my lips. I couldn’t help myself; I started to cry, making gruff grunting noises while I cupped my hand under my chin to catch the blood.

  “Ew!” Sydney yelled, pushing me forward. “Gross!”

  Coach blew the whistle and Holly yelled out, “She dove right in front of it. It wasn’t my fault. I was just passing to my teammate.”

  “Okay, okay, this happens in basketball. No big deal.” Coach came over to me and put a hand on my shoulder. “You okay, Chloe?”

  I simply nodded. I didn’t say a word.

  “Go clean up,” Coach said, and then turned and yelled, “Tracy! Get a couple paper towels from the locker room so I can clean this up. Everybody take five, get a drink.”

  I turned and jogged toward the locker room, the rest of my squad rushing for the drinking fountain. I hated Holly. I hated her with everything I had. I hated her as much as Jenna hated her. Maybe even more. But I couldn’t make myself stand up to her. Why not? Was she really that powerful?

  No way, I heard Jenna say in my head, just as she had the night before she died. She is totally powerless and she knows it. That’s why she acts the way she does.

  But she always has the upper hand, I’d said. Everyone else loves her.

  Uh-uh, Jenna had answered. Everyone else is afraid of her. That’s why, when we leave our note behind, telling everything she did, and all that mean shit her mom said, everyone will know her game.

  They won’t care.

  Yes, they will, she’d said. Because this time we won’t just be humiliated. We’ll be dead. Everyone will see her for who she really is and will turn against her. We have to show everyone who she really is, Chloe.

  The blood was dripping through my fingers, and the tears really started to flow. I missed Jenna so much, and I was angry she went ahead and killed herself but didn’t leave behind a note like we’d planned. And not only did Holly have just as much power as she did before, but Jenna had left me behind to deal with it by myself.

  As if on cue, I heard Sydney’s voice just behind me. “Probably wouldn’t have hurt if it hit her in the gut.”

  “Yeah,” Holly’s voice responded, “but it probably would have hit all that fat and bounced right back at me and killed me.”

  And then the two giggled like they always did.

  I turned through the locker room door and ran straight for the sinks, leaning over them to let the blood and the snot and the tears just fall right into the swirling water.

  Jenna was wrong. Killing herself hadn’t taken away Holly’s power. A dead person couldn’t take power away from anyone.

  But a live one could.

  • • •

  I would never forget the night of August 21. It was steamy hot, and even the evenings felt like you were wrapped in a wet sweater. School was coming up, and the little kids were inside early, getting used to their bedtime schedules again. The streets were dark and quiet, except for the bugs, which practically owned the place in late summer.

  I walked to Jenna’s house with a backpack. Inside was a notebook, pen, bottle of cherry vodka (for nerves, Jenna had said) stolen from my parents’ cabinet, and a yearbook with bright red circles around the photos of Holly, Monica, Sydney, and about a dozen other kids who’d made us miserable. I was all fear and doubt.

  Jenna met me on the front stoop of her apartment complex, just like we’d planned. She stood when I approached, and the two of us walked to the basketball court at the bottom of the hill. We’d chosen the location weeks ago. The asphalt was cracked and the chains on the goals broken or missing. Nobody was ever there, but it was visible, and we knew eventually someone would find us. And we wanted to be found. Who wanted to rot in the woods with animals eating their face off for six months? Not us. Plus, her brother was home and so were my parents, and with only one gun and two shots to deliver, we wanted to make sure we weren’t heard after the first shot and saved before the second.

  Jenna walked right to the middle of the court and sat down. She shrugged out of her backpack and unzipped it, pulling out the one thing she was in charge of bringing—her dad’s gun. I didn’t know anything about guns; all I knew was this one was big and oily and ugly and it scared me to look at it. My fingers immediately went numb.

  “Okay, so let’s write it,” she said, laying the gun on the ground between us.

  I opened the notebook and put the tip of the pen to the first line, but my hands were shaking so bad there was no way I could write. I tried pressing harder.

  “To Whom It May Concern,” she said, and when my ha
nd still didn’t move, looked up at me. “Too formal?”

  I shook my head and scratched out the words.

  “Okay. To Whom It May Concern. If you’re reading this note, we are dead.” She paused so I could write what she’d just said. “You may think we’re on drugs or something, but we’re not,” she continued, but my hand wouldn’t move past “we are dead.” My pen stayed on the tail of the last “d” as if magnetized, and my vision blurred on the words. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  I swallowed, shook my head. All I could think of was my mom and dad reading the note. Reading those words—“we are dead”—and how they would be devastated. How they would cry. How it would ruin the rest of their lives. How shocked they’d be because they’d always been there for me to talk to, but I’d never taken them up on it.

  “What about our parents?” I said, my voice sounding just as shaky as my fingers felt. “This is going to destroy them.”

  Jenna made a pfft! noise and laughed. “Maybe yours,” she said. “Mine probably won’t even notice. They’ll probably be happy that they don’t have to deal with me anymore.”

  My tongue snaked out and snagged a strand of hair. I sucked on it and stared at the paper. I felt like I was going to throw up.

  “You said yourself that you’re totally lonely, so obviously your relationship with your parents isn’t all that great, right?” She ducked her head, looking up at me so our eyes could meet.

  I nodded, still chewing. But was it true? I was no longer so sure.

  “Listen, if you want out . . . ,” she said, trailing off.

  And it was the hardest thing I’d ever done in my whole life, but I nodded. Which is weird, when you think of it, that saying I didn’t want to die was the hardest thing I’d ever done. When had my life gotten so upside-down?

  “I don’t want you to do it, either,” I said once I found my voice. “I think we should both wait. Do something else.”

  But Jenna had closed her eyes and shook her head, like a little kid refusing to listen to her parents. “I can’t,” she said, without opening her eyes. “I can’t take it anymore, Chloe. They’re making me miserable, and I want out.”