Delia looks down. For a long time she is silent, and when she looks back up at me there are tears in her eyes. “After breakfast William went upstairs. I thought for a second what an idiot he was for leaving me alone with her. So I sat down with my mom and I told her everything that had happened the night before. And when I was done, there was this moment where I actually thought she believed me. I thought I saw it in her eyes that she believed me. And maybe she did at first. I mean, she’s my mother . . .” Delia’s voice cracks, her eyes about to overflow. “She’s supposed to believe me, right? But either she didn’t, or she wouldn’t let herself. Her face changed, and she looked confused and then mad and then confused again and said, ‘Delia, why would you liiiie like that?’ ” Delia stretches out the word, making her voice breathy and high. “She said he’d told her what I’d really been up to, about the drugs, she said. He told her I was on drugs and had been acting crazy and he tried to keep me from leaving the night before, from driving. She said I couldn’t act that way anymore, or they were going to have to think seriously about sending me away. That’s what she said, like they were going to ship me off to some juvie boot camp.” Delia shakes her head slowly. “I went upstairs after that. William was in the hallway. He smiled and told me he heard I was making up stories. And I better not do it again, or I wouldn’t like what would happen, and then he paused and looked at me and said, ‘Actually, maybe you will.’ And that was it—I knew then that I had to get out.”
I am staring at her as it all sinks in. I am in a fog, in shock maybe. I don’t know what to say, how to feel now, anything. I pull her toward me and she grabs on. I feel the warmth of her through her thin shirt. She rests her cheek on my shoulder. “Oh my God,” I say. “I am so, I am . . . I wish . . .” I stop. I want to tell her that I wish that that night, instead of driving alone in the dark, she’d called me. I want to tell her that when she didn’t know where else to go I would have been there, I would have come and gotten her and taken her away. But it feels so beside the point, so selfish somehow to even mention this.
Only, when we pull apart and I look up at her and our eyes meet, I realize she is reading my mind. “I thought about calling you,” she says. “That was the very first thing that I thought to do, but then I wasn’t sure if . . .” She stops.
She doesn’t even need to finish—her words hit me like a fist in the gut. “I’m so sorry,” I say. I am useless. I am nothing. “What about the police?”
Delia shakes her head. “Where’s the evidence? And who do you think they’d believe? The well-respected surgeon or his messed-up stepdaughter? Later he said if I told anyone, he’d set me up, get me arrested for drugs somehow. He could arrange it, I know he could. He knows everyone in this town.”
“Wasn’t there anyone who could help you? What about your other friends or Jeremiah or . . .” I am desperate now, trying to change the unchangeable past. She had no one. She should have had me.
Delia shakes her head again. “Jeremiah was sweet and stupid. And my friends were . . . you saw the kind of people they are. They thought I was fun to party with. They liked how much I could drink and that I was fun and crazy. They didn’t care about me.” She looks at me. “You’re the only one who ever really did.”
And I am ashamed, so ashamed. At what I’ve done. At how I left her.
“What about them?” I say. I motion to the next room, where I can hear the quiet chatter of voices.
“Well, them too now.”
“Do they know?”
“Of course. They’re how I’m here.”
“They helped you do it . . .”
“They arranged everything.”
“Have they done this before?”
She is silent. She shrugs, but she’s smiling ever so slightly. I know what this means: they have.
I close my eyes. I want to tell her how sorry I am, how horrified I am, how I can’t believe all of this was happening while I was there, not knowing, at Ryan’s house watching him eat expensive burritos. I want to tell her how I will never forgive myself for not being there when I should have been. But the words are stuck against the lump in my throat. And instead what I say is this: “I can’t believe he’ll get away with this now.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” Delia says. And I recognize something in her expression then, and I feel a lifting inside me. The dark scared space is filling up with light. I’ve seen Delia make this face a million times, when life seemed bleak and gray. This is the expression she makes when she has a plan. “He won’t.”
Chapter 30
Delia
On the screen in front of us Dastorio has reached the castle kingdom and is about to enchant the princess with the acid-laced lollipop. This movie is basically as stupid as it sounds, but I’ve watched it twice a day, every day since I died. I don’t know why. We have laptops, the Internet. It is weird to engage with the real world now, with the world outside the one I’ve created. Maybe I don’t want to. And no one can make me.
Now I’m not paying attention to the movie anyway. Bits of information from this room are flinging themselves toward me—smells, sights, sounds: there’s the TV flashing, there’s the whoosh of the wind blowing through the trees outside, snapping branches, the smell of bodies, someone warm and familiar who wasn’t here before but now is.
We are on the couch, sitting in a row. Ashling is running her fingertips up the inside of my arm from my wrist to my elbow. We’re playing that game you play as kids when you close your eyes and try to stop the other person as close to your elbow crease as you can. “Stop,” I whisper, when she’s right there on the thin skin. She presses down against my vein, against my blood, her nails digging in. And then, like usual, she doesn’t stop. Because not stopping, that’s the game too.
I remember all those games, no point except you want human contact feverishly, desperately. You’re craving it without even knowing what you’re craving. You haven’t been fucked yet, you don’t know the taste of it, you just want someone, anyone, to touch you. It’s so hard to ask for what you need. It is so goddamn embarrassing to need the things we do. But with Ashling it has been so easy. She offers, offers, offers, and I take, take, take. There is no end to how much she’ll give and how much I can consume. If I wanted to bite pieces of her, chew them, swallow them down, she’d let me.
Sometimes in bed, stroking her skin, I’m filled with this ferocious feeling that I don’t understand. Like anger, but not quite, more hungry than hot. I want to mark her, sink my teeth into her soft perfect skin and ruin it. I’ve almost done it before in the flesh at the side of her waist. I managed to stop myself before I drew blood, but just barely.
She liked it. She wants me to be a wild animal, to tear her apart. She doesn’t know how easy it would be for me to do that. She tried to hold me afterward, wrapped her thin arms around me and pulled me to her chest. I think she thought that was about what happened with my stepfather. But I know she’s wrong about that.
Now, on the couch, pretending to care about the movie, I look over at Ashling and she smiles, this gooey, dreamy look in her eyes. I can feel June watching us. I wonder: Does she know how little this stunning creature next to me matters? How little anything else does?
Evan turns toward June. “Have you seen any of his other films?” He’s pointing to the screen. June shakes her head. “They’re good,” he says. “You might like them.” I can hear the need in his voice. He’s getting a crush on her. It’s pathetic but sweet. I feel a flicker of jealousy, but it’s only instinct.
I lean back and unfocus my eyes, let time pass.
The movie is almost over. June is uncomfortable—I can feel her discomfort inside my own body. She wonders what happens now, what happens next, who these people are. Questions float inside her sweet head. I need her not to be scared. To believe that this is okay. I need to be secure for her, even though I am terrified.
Whatever looks sturdy is actually
made of the thinnest of glass. Whatever feels solid could, at any moment, crackle, crackle, fall down to nothing. It’s so hard to live believing that, but it’s true. It’s so much better to lie to yourself, but I can’t. I know how quickly things can go away, how hard it can be to make them come back. You have to clench your jaw so tight you can barely stand it, grind sand between gritted teeth in a fire-hot mouth, then wait till it melts, spit out glass. Build it all again.
Fucking breathe, Delia.
I have to remember that I am in control. I have to stop being afraid. I am going to have to ask her for something soon. That’s the next step. But I can’t bring this up now, not yet.
The movie ends. Sebastian stands up and gets a box of cookies, which is what he always does. He eats an entire box a day, cramming them down his throat because he has a fierce vacuum of empty space inside of him, like all of us, I guess. Constantly hungry. What does he really want? He feeds himself sugar but instead of growing out, he is growing straight up toward the sky, even though he’s tall as a goddamn building already and is eighteen now, at least that’s what his ID says. But all of our IDs say different things, and none of them are true. Soon I will have one of my own. For now I have nothing. I am no one. I like this.
Evan makes mugs of hot sweet mint tea, crushing up leaves with spoonful after spoonful of honey. What I want is a drink, the sharp twist of tequila against my tongue, burning its way down. I’m not going to have a drink now. Not now and not in front of her. Ashling and I will have one later, alone in our room. She got this bottle of fancy gin. She dumps it down my throat, a shot at a time. I don’t like expensive alcohol. It’s too smooth. It’s better when it hurts a little. “Next time, get the shit stuff,” I told her. And she looked insulted. But it’s not like she paid for it.
She took it from behind the bar when we went in somewhere once to use the bathroom. Ashling steals things, things she wants and things she doesn’t. The silk scarf tied to a woman’s purse, the fancy lipstick from inside, which she throws away before ever even trying it on. Cell phones, earrings. That’s what she’s hungry for—whatever doesn’t really belong to her. Maybe why she likes me so much.
For now, only pure and cozy things are happening. And I know June likes that. But her eyes are darting around the way they do when she is nervous, scanning for signs of danger even if she isn’t aware of doing it. She’s scared so much of the time, she doesn’t even know what not being scared feels like. Seb is looking at her. She has no idea, which is funny—she notices everything else with her big round darting bunny eyes. But the one thing she’s never aware of is how often people are watching her. She thinks she’s invisible, that she slips under the radar, but she doesn’t, never has. At least not to anyone worth being noticed by. She never even realized if I wasn’t there to point it out. Ashling and Evan are talking about the movie. It’s so loud in my head now, in my heart now. I have to close my eyes, slow down everything inside my body and block out the outside to even really hear them.
June is cupping the mug in her hands, calming down. She smiles, watching them. Evan is trying hard to impress her, saying how much he likes the director’s other films, the symbolism and his use of color. Ashling is making fun of him for saying “film” instead of “movie,” and Evan is pretending to be irritated. “Movie is an antiquated term. Do you know where it even came from? A movie, because the characters are moving, like as opposed to a stillie, which is a photograph, I guess.”
And Ashling says, “Oh, is it antiquated, Evie? Is that what it is?” She pokes him in the side. And he rolls his eyes like she’s being dumb. But I know that he loves when Ashling teases him, loves when any girl does, really. We’re all starving for what we’re starving for. For Evan, that is any attention from any female at all, but especially Ashling. Here’s something: Ten months ago, before I knew them, Ashling fucked Evan, just to be nice. Even though she is gay—most definitely gay. But she’s slept with worse guys for far worse reasons. Evan was a virgin, black pit depressed, falling down a hole with no bottom. Back then he was a super nerd, too, inside (where he still is one) as well as outside (where he now passes for something else). She did it as a favor, because she felt so incredibly sorry for him and thought it would help. And it did.
Now he says she’s like a big sister to him, which is pretty pervy considering how much he obviously still wants to do her. But he only says that to try to pretend he’s not also deeply in love with her, even though we all know he is.
June is watching them and smiling, engaging tentatively, like a little bunny hopping out from under the couch. “C’mon, J,” Evan is saying. “Whose side are you on, here?”
And June looks back and forth between Ashling and Evan. “Sorry, pal,” she says. “Going to have to go with the lady on this one.” June grins. I grin too. I know she only talks like this when she’s with me.
Seb is silently observing, like he usually does. But he doesn’t have that same passive look on his face. His eyes are sliding over her skin, with interest. I’ve never seen him look at someone like this before. I’ve seen gorgeous, stunningly beautiful specimens of humanity throw themselves at him, both sexes, all sizes, everywhere he goes, and he is unfazed, just does not give a single fuck. Literally. He never fucks anyone. He also never smiles. And he isn’t smiling now. But this is the first time I’ve seen him look at anyone like this.
I think, Ah-ha. I think, There is something here . . .
And June keeps on not noticing, like always. Only when I told her did she ever understand at all. I was the one who pointed out Ryan in the very first place, watching us as we walked together to meet some guy whose name I can’t even remember who was picking us up to bring us who even knows where. Ryan was staring at us, at her, eyes following her every move. I reached out then, smacked her on the ass. “What was that for?” I cocked my head to the side where Ryan was staring still, mouth open then. “That’s what he wants to do,” I told her. I thought it would be a joke between the two of us—of course she wouldn’t like him. He was no one. A meat mannequin, a human-shaped sculpture made of ground beef. But I heard the breath catch in her throat, which surprised the shit out of me, actually. “Wait, Ryan Fiske you mean?” She was blushing ever so slightly. I thought about that moment for a long time after, because by that point in our friendship I’d thought I knew her so well that she couldn’t surprise me. But people, they always can, no matter who they are. And everything that happened after that, between us, that surprised me too.
Thinking about him now—about his smug potato face, blandly handsome even though he doesn’t deserve to be handsome at all, about what I did for the very wrong reasons, how he almost destroyed us—I feel my hands curling into fists, as though each of my hands is a drawstring bag and someone is tugging the string, tugging so tight that my nails press into my palms and it hurts. It is hard to stop. I know what to do now, how to fix this, what has to happen.
“Hey, Junie?” I say. She looks up, smiles. “Come to the kitchen with me.” And she stands quickly. How easy it is to slip back into this, the two of us against everyone. I can feel Ashling watching, jealous but trying to hide it.
“More secret chats?” Ashling says, trying to sound casual and joking. And I can feel Seb’s eyes on June, I can feel it as though her skin were my own. And for the first time, the first time maybe ever, I don’t let on that I notice.
Chapter 31
June
“I’m sorry he turned out to be such a shit,” Delia says to me in the kitchen. And when she notices the confused look on my face, she laughs one of those big round laughs that always made me feel so proud of whatever I’d done, even if all I’d done was stand there not understanding something.
“Over it already then, huh?” she says. “Poor, forgettable Meatface.”
And then I know she’s talking about Ryan, even though she hasn’t called him that since before everything happened, before he was anything to me whil
e she was still everything. She called him Meatface and the name felt right somehow at the time, before I knew him and what he was actually like, but it stuck and so that’s what we called him when the we of us was the primary thing, miles and miles ahead of the we of him and I.
Suicide Notes from Beautiful Girls Page 13
