I try to keep my face calm and still.
“Leave him alone.” My voice is firm. I am in charge. “Jeremiah has been through hell. You tried to fuck his girlfriend. You’ve already done enough.”
Ryan looks down at the note again. I feel adrenaline buzzing hot and fast through my veins now. “Okay,” he says. He is is quiet, defeated. He will do what I tell him.
Fuck guilt, I like this.
Ryan twists his lips. “Well, that’s that, then, I guess.” He hesitates, then hands the letter back to me. But he won’t meet my gaze. And it only takes me a split second to realize why: there are tears in his eyes. And I then understand something—he actually cared about her. Maybe even more than he’d admit to himself. Maybe even loved her. It seems so obvious now.
“Yup, that’s it,” I say.
“I . . . ,” he starts. Good ol’ Meatface.
I shake my head.
“Good-bye,” I say.
“Junie . . . Wait . . .” He is begging. I look back at his face one last time.
And as I walk away, it occurs to me that those tears in his eyes? I think some of them are for me.
It takes me almost the full rest of the day to find Jeremiah. I’ve trained my eyes to search for his giant sloping back, his big square head. I spot him at the end of the hallway, moving slowly. This part is going to be the hardest of all.
“Jeremiah!” I call out.
He looks so, so tired.
“How are you doing?” I say. I feel a pinching in my heart. He doesn’t answer, just shakes his head. It’s hard to imagine I ever suspected him of anything other than loving someone for whom he was no match, a girl he could never really have. I see him so clearly now, in that kind of pain that makes the entire world feel unreal. The pain I was in until just yesterday, before it shifted to amazement, to pure joy, to shining possibility. I have a flash of wishing that I could tell him the truth, that I could relieve him the way I’ve been relieved. But, of course, that’s impossible.
I take the letter out of my pocket. I need to get this over with. “It’s a suicide note,” I say. “She sent this to me before she died. I just got it.”
I hold it out. He takes the paper with his right hand, keeps the burned one in his pocket. I can’t watch his face as he reads.
When he is done, he folds the letter back up and holds it out to me. I don’t even glance at the page. I’ve already memorized Delia’s words, the words Ashling wrote for her. “I do her handwriting better than she does now,” Ashling said with a grin. “I can do anyone’s.”
I’m sorry it needed to be this way, Junie. Please don’t feel guilty, there’s nothing anyone could have done. I love you and I was lucky to know you, and that is what I’ll take with me. Please find Jeremiah and tell him I love him and I know how much he loved me. And please tell him good-bye.
Jeremiah is staring at me. I take the letter. All around us, students are walking to class.
“I was definitely wrong,” he says. His voice is thick and scratchy, like he hasn’t used it in a while. “About a bunch of things. I’ve been thinking pretty much nonstop, doing nothing but thinking, thinking, thinking.” He is speeding up now. “I can’t sleep so I’m up all night thinking. And I’m finally figuring some things out. Like, for example, this: if you were really her friend, you never would have stopped being her friend.” He looks me straight in the eye. It’s like he’s waiting for me to argue, but I don’t. He keeps going. “She talked about you like you guys were still so close, you know? For the longest time I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t met you, why she never wanted to introduce me to this supposed best friend of hers. And then I realized it’s because you weren’t really her friend at all.”
I didn’t think there was anything he could say that would hurt me, but this does. She forgave me. I have to remember that. And it’s for her that I’m doing this.
“I’m trying to be her friend now,” I say. I keep my voice soft and low. “And that means honoring her memory and accepting the truth of what happened. And not looking for a mystery where there isn’t one.”
He looks at me, nodding, For a moment I think we’re having an understanding. But then his eyes flash. “So, did you write this letter yourself, or did he help you?” He tips his head to the side.
“What are you talking about?”
“You think I don’t know a person can fake another person’s handwriting?” Jeremiah shakes his head. “Jesus, June. You’re working so hard to cover up for him, huh.”
My stomach clenches. “For who?” I say.
“Oh come on. Ryan, obviously.”
I feel suddenly sick and groundless.
“I’m not. He didn’t do anything.” My voice sounds weak. And even though it is the truth, somehow to me now, the words don’t sound right.
Jeremiah takes his hand out of his pocket and points to the bandaged burn that he has no idea I know about. “Well, someone did. And I know how much it hurt when they did it.”
I should leave it alone, but I can’t. “What happened to your hand?”
“I lit it on fire,” he says, without a change in tone or expression. “After I found out how she died. I wanted to feel how it felt for her. And guess what? It hurts a whole fucking lot.” He smiles, then. He looks unhinged.
And I am suddenly understanding something—all along I was right to be wary of him, just not for the reasons I thought. He is riding on the power of his pain, channeling his grief into something dangerous. And it’s only getting worse.
Jeremiah is not smiling anymore. “I’m going to find who made her hurt like this. And if it was your boyfriend—sorry, your ex”—he pauses—“he’ll get what’s coming.”
And with that, Jeremiah turns and walks away.
“Stop! Ryan didn’t do anything,” I call after him. “Delia did this to herself, it’s horrible but it’s true . . .” He is far down the hall, he is not looking back. I am dizzy and breathless. Everything is spiraling out of control. And I have absolutely no idea what to do to stop it.
Chapter 36
An hour later school is done, and I am still shaky and sick and no closer to having an answer than I was before. I am walking toward the parking lot, turning it all over and over in my mind. Delia asked me to fix this. She told me what to do, but I couldn’t and I didn’t. I fucked it up. And I don’t know how to unfuck it.
“Aw, c’mon, it can’t be that bad?” I look up. Sebastian is standing in the parking lot, ten feet away. “It’s not like someone died or something, right?” He isn’t smiling, because he is never smiling, but his tone is teasing. This is a joke, I guess. “I’ve been sent to retrieve you.” He motions to the car behind him.
“I have a car,” I say.
Sebastian shrugs. “She told me to come and get you, so here I am. I don’t know why.”
She. Delia.
I look at him, at the curves and angles of his face, at his big shoulders, his hands. He doesn’t know why he’s been sent to retrieve me, but I think that I do. And despite everything, I smile.
Delia is doing what she’s always done, starting back when I got my first kiss all those years ago down by the water. She’s giving me Sebastian as a present. I know your type better than you do, J. I can hear her voice in my head. Only, the thing is, I don’t think Sebastian is givable, at least not to me.
“So that’s him, then, huh.” He is staring at someone behind me now. He motions with his chin.
I turn. Ryan, watching me as he walks by.
“Delia showed you?”
“No, but it’s obvious from the way he’s looking at us. You give him that black eye?” I can’t tell if he’s kidding.
I shake my head.
When he sees me looking, Ryan starts to bring his hand up to wave.
I turn away.
“Handsome fellow,” Sebastian says, no
dding. “The bones in his face are very . . . well arranged.”
“HA,” I say. “Yeah, I always thought the same thing, hope the punching didn’t ruin that.”
Sebastian gives me a very serious nod, but then his face splits into an actual smile. It’s luminous there for less than a second and then it’s gone.
“You think he’s jealous?” Sebastian is still watching Ryan, who is still watching us.
I shake my head. “Doubt it.”
Sebastian steps forward. “Should we make him?” He has this confusing look on his face, different than I’ve ever seen before: challenging, mischievous, a little bit mean. And suddenly all at once, so swiftly I don’t even realize it’s happening until it is, he’s wrapping his arm around my waist, pulling me in close. I can feel the muscles of his chest against my chest, the hardness of his stomach against my own. I don’t understand what is happening at all. But he is leaning in, as though he’s about to kiss me. Closer and closer, our lips are almost touching. I remember her breath, her lips. I can feel his breath against my cheek and my heart pounding. “I hate people like that,” he says into my mouth. “Liars, people who fuck with people’s hearts.” He looks over my shoulder, then lets me go. “We should get going.”
I step back, stumble, almost fall. But somehow my legs manage to hold me up. “Right,” I say. And for a moment I’ve forgotten everything else—all the rest of life, the crazy things that have happened and may still be happening, how terribly I have fucked things up with Jeremiah and how hard it is going to be to fix it. All I am aware of is the feeling of Sebastian’s hands still on me, like where he touched me is on fire now and has acquired a pulse of its own.
“It’s unlocked,” he says.
In the car now. Sebastian reaches out, clicks the radio on, and flips through channels. Turns it off. He takes a breath. “Sorry your boyfriend turned out to be an ass,” he says. “Sucks when someone reveals themselves to be totally different than you thought.”
I shrug. “Yeah,” I say. “Maybe I didn’t actually know him at all, I’m realizing now.”
Sebastian pauses. “Did he know you?” There’s something in his voice that makes me stop, makes my heart speed up. He isn’t asking just to talk, he’s really asking. Like he actually cares what the answer is.
“No, I guess not. I was . . . never really honest with him about a lot of things.” I’m thinking about my life, about my mom, about how I felt about Delia, all of it.
“What did you guys talk about?” Sebastian asks.
I shake my head. “These bunnies, mostly.” I turn toward Sebastian, who is raising his eyebrows. “There was this rabbit live stream thing we liked to watch. We made up lives for these two rabbits and . . . at the time it seemed kind of fun, and it was fun. But it wasn’t in addition to other stuff, it was instead.”
“To avoid talking about anything that was really going on?”
“Maybe, I don’t know. Whenever real life things came up, family questions and that stuff, I kind of glossed over the hard parts. His life is . . . not like mine is.” It’s strange to suddenly be talking like this with a stranger.
Sebastian nods like he understands perfectly. “So you chicken-McNuggeted him,” he says.
I turn toward him. Bare trees zip by outside the window. “I have no idea what that means.”
“I made it up,” he says. He is smirking ever so slightly. “It’s when you give someone the totally fakey processed version of a thing to make it easier to swallow. So your brother joined a cult and he’s not allowed to talk to outsiders? You say, ‘My brother and I aren’t really in touch right now.’ Your drug addict dad didn’t pay the rent again and you’re getting kicked out of your apartment? ‘Yeah, we’re thinking of moving somewhere a little more convenient.’ A thirty-year-old gang member was trying to rape your twelve-year-old sister and so you killed him and then . . . Well, you get the idea.”
I feel myself nodding. I remember what I said to Ryan about my mom. Yeah, we’re not that close, we kind of both do our own thing. “I told myself I was doing it for both of us, not to sully him with drama or depressing stuff. But maybe it was partly selfish—I got to pretend I was someone different. It felt good to be.”
“Getting to pick who you are . . . ,” Sebastian says. “It’s a lucky thing.” He’s watching me out of the corner of his eye.
I think about Ryan, about how even when he thought he was being deep, he was mostly saying things he’d heard other places. Everything he knew was from books and movies. His life was too easy. Until Delia “died,” we’d never really even had a serious discussion. And the few times I did say anything about my family situation, I got the weird feeling he liked that it was dark, felt like it gave him an edge to have a girlfriend like that. But he never even knew how to ask the right questions, and I barely told him anything at all.
“Anyway,” Sebastian says. He presses his lips together. His tone changes. “So, how did everything go, what you had to do at school, I mean. Talking to everyone.” He is speaking slowly, deliberately.
I don’t want to answer, but there’s no hiding this, it’s too important. So I tell him about Jeremiah, his accusation, the crazy look in his eyes, all of it.
“And I don’t think he’s going to stop,” I say. “He’s going to keep digging, keep poking around.” Everything I’ve been trying to forget is back.
I turn toward him. Sebastian’s face registers no emotion at all. “Don’t worry,” he says. His voice is calm and even. “There are always . . . glitches.”
Always. “You’ve done this before.” My fear has made me brave. “How many times?”
Sebastian takes a breath, then pauses like he’s not sure if he’s going to speak or not. Opens his mouth. Closes it. Opens it again. “Three.”
And I understand what I think he’s telling me—Delia isn’t the only one of them who died and came back. One for Ashling, one for Evan, one for himself. Three.
“All of you . . . ,” I start. They had lives before this one. They had other lives and they left them behind.
“Stop,” Sebastian says. And then, more quietly, almost to himself. “It isn’t safe.”
“I would never tell anyone,” I say. “I promise.”
But Sebastian just shakes his head. I lean back and watch the trees out the window, head swirling with questions I can’t ask. A few minutes later we pull up to the house.
Chapter 37
Delia
Right away I know something is wrong. Even before I can see her, I feel it in my gut, that hot sick canary-in-a-coal-mine feeling deep down where I carry that blackness. I’m watching from the window as they pull up. When she gets out, she moves fast and shaky, like a terrified little animal. At first I think it has to do with Sebastian, tall and lean with his hands in his pockets. I think, Boy, if you hurt her, I will chop you down like a goddamn tree. But when she gets close enough, I can smell it, the sour fear radiating off her sweet skin. I realize what she is scared of is me.
This makes me sick.
She comes inside, says she needs to tell me something bad, bites her lip, covers her quivering little mouth. And then a story about Jeremiah comes tumbling out. “I messed up,” she says. “I couldn’t convince him. I am so sorry. I don’t know what he’ll do now.”
And then I just want to laugh. Laugh at Jeremiah, his big dumb face. He is a fucking kitten in a bulldog body. He was nothing but a warm thing to hold on to for a while in the winter. A toy. Hearing about the burned hand, the passionate vow to right the wrongs that have been done to me. I almost feel something for him, almost, but not quite. He is benign, sweet, harmless, but even the harmless can cause harm. Bumping around dumbly in the dark, knocking things over, making big mistakes. And he upset my Junie.
“It’s too bad we can’t let him go to town on Ryan, huh?” I say. “Or Ryan go to town on him. Cancel each other out.”
&n
bsp; June looks at me, her sweet mouth open.
“I’m kidding,” I say. And she looks at me like she’s not so sure. Smart girl.
Thoughts pop-pop-pop fire through my brain. I have a thousand thoughts, a million thoughts, one entire billion thoughts in the time it takes between when I let my face fall and when I open my mouth and say, “Don’t worry, Junie. I promise we will figure it out.” But we? Please, I’m done already. I see that she is starting to relax. She knows I will take care of it. Take care of her. Good.
I keep my face calm. But the truth is . . . now I’m the fucking scared one.
Because it’s time. I need something. I need it so badly. And if she won’t do this, nothing that has to happen will. You in, J ? She said she was. I know she is. But I need to be sure.
So I open my mouth and I ask her.
Chapter 38
June
I said yes.
I will always say yes.
From now on, no matter what she asks, YES. That’s my answer.
How could it be anything else?
Besides, he deserves it, and worse.
I take a final breath and hold it. Then I push the bell. I hear it ringing through the door, and then it stops. For a moment, there’s no sound at all. “William doesn’t do surgeries on Tuesdays,” Delia said. “And my mom went to stay with her sister for a while. He’ll be there. Alone.” His car is in the driveway. Maybe he’s asleep. Maybe he’s not coming.
And then I hear a voice.
“Hold on!”
5 . . . 4 . . . 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . . This is happening.
The door swings open, and there’s William, big and barrel-chested in a dark red button-down shirt. His lips are thick and dry, colorless. Delia once told me lots of people found him handsome. His patients are always trying to bang him, she’d said. Their cancer probably makes them insane.
Suicide Notes from Beautiful Girls Page 15
