Deirdre Sharp said, “I think it’s a great idea, Emma.”
“What do you guys mean by helping each other out? Or being honest? I mean, is there some way to say what we’re going for?” Coltrane asked.
Logan answered, “So, uh, back to Claire?”
“What about Claire?” Blythe asked, her voice odd and cold.
“Maybe we should talk about her,” Logan said.
“We talk about Claire all the time,” Monica Dancat said. I don’t know her very well. She’s a runner and spends all of her time doing track, and Logan’s always saying she’s manly, whatever that means.
“Exactly,” Blythe said. “Did it ever occur to you that maybe she would have wanted privacy? That her family and close friends might want to deal with it alone, and that’s why the news teams don’t get to know every intimate detail of her life?”
“Yeah, but we don’t mean the news teams,” Logan said. “We mean us. Her friends.”
“We should talk about what happened,” Deirdre said, “if there’s going to be hope for Sauberg.” Hope is a funny word; it’s clear, like a plastic container, and turns the colors of whatever words it holds in the rest of a sentence. “Does anyone want to say what they think happened? Or why?”
“What’s there to say?” David Sarabande said. “She was high and she killed herself. What more do you want?”
“Seriously, David? If you died, you’d want us all to be like, whatever, he was high and killed himself? There’s a lot to say,” Logan argued. “Like, how about why would someone like Claire kill herself?”
“Yeah, but I wouldn’t kill myself, Logan,” David said.
“What do you mean by ‘someone like Claire’?” Blythe asked. She sounded furious.
“It’s not our job—it’s the cops’ job to figure out what happened to Claire,” someone said. Carl Muscan, I realized, which made sense. His uncle is a police officer.
“I just mean someone so much like all the rest of us,” Logan said to Blythe, backing down, her voice cooling off. “But obviously you were her best friend. I mean, why don’t we talk about Claire before? Just, like, say what we thought or knew about her—or whatever.”
Blythe said nothing.
“Claire helped me when my parents got divorced,” Amanda Boughman said. Amanda was a gum-cracking dancer who talked about herself all the time until sixth grade, when her dad, who traveled a lot on business, admitted to Amanda’s mother that he had another family in Houston, and then moved there to be with them. This was before my accident and before Claire M., so his leaving was the biggest drama our town had ever imagined. Everyone talked endlessly about whether Amanda and her mom would stay in Sauberg, and then they did. And her mom became single, and it seemed like maybe it had always been that way. The only real change, at least from the outside, was that Amanda stopped talking so much and never mentioned her family again. Until now. I was interested that she brought it up at the Mayburg place.
“How’d she help?” Logan asked wistfully.
“One thing she said was I shouldn’t think my life was over, because I would be a totally different person in two years. So if I killed myself then, I’d be killing that other person, too, and who knows, she might be super happy. Not to mention the one I was going to be in five years and ten years and fifteen years. She was like, ‘Someday, your dad leaving will seem like it happened to someone else. You won’t be her anymore.’”
“I told her that,” Blythe said. “But apparently it slipped her mind.”
I hadn’t realized until she said that how angry Blythe must be at Claire. If Logan killed herself, I’d be furious. Would Logan kill herself? And if she did, how many of us would blame ourselves? I’d blame myself. And her dad would probably finally feel bad for leaving her and Lo’s mom.
“But the thing is, I wasn’t thinking about killing myself,” Amanda said.
“But anyone could kill themselves if the circumstances were right,” Josh pointed out.
I thought about Claire’s parents, wondered if they wanted to kill themselves now that she had. Maybe there’d be a domino effect and now everyone in our town would want to die. Mr. M. had cried so wildly at Claire’s memorial that he had to be carried out, and Logan said that after Claire’s death, Mrs. M. had become like a statue, that her eyes had gone completely blank. I thought of my eyes, and the awful white word blank. Sometimes we ran into Mrs. M. at the grocery store, and once she was at the Bridge Café when Leah and I were there, and Leah said she looked like a zombie. Which makes sense. She’s probably just drugged out of her mind, like I was after the accident. There are certain things we’re not meant to be alive for, never mind being awake, like losing your kid—or your eyes.
I hoped that Josh was wrong, that it wasn’t just circumstances that dictate whether we die on purpose or not. Because if it’s that random, then how can we go on with our lives? Is there some amount of misery we’d each need to push us off the sand into Lake Brainch at night? I didn’t ask. I just sat there, with churning black water in my mind, wishing terribly for Leah.
“I don’t know about that, Josh,” Monica Dancat said. “I think you have to be mentally ill to kill yourself.”
“Yeah,” Amanda said. “I mean, I kind of feel like, I don’t know, no one I know would make that choice. I mean, I get that that’s what it was, but I can’t stop thinking something must have happened. I mean, every man I saw all summer, I thought . . .”
“What?” Carl said. “They said right away there was no foul play.” Apparently there’s so much meat in his head that he isn’t able to consider anything but the hard fact of what actually happened. Or maybe he just doesn’t want to.
“Why every man?” David Sarabande asked. “Women never kill anyone?”
“No, of course. I didn’t mean that. I just . . .” Amanda said. I was disappointed that she apologized, even though I probably would have, too.
Josh Winterberg interrupted. “Did you guys know that if you’re afraid of heights, it’s not about falling, it’s about jumping? It’s like, you don’t know who you’re going to be in five seconds, so who knows if that person will be crazy enough to jump?”
Then Elizabeth Tallentine said, “I don’t want to be the one to . . . you know . . . but wasn’t Claire kind of . . .”
“Kind of what?” Blythe asked.
“I just mean, didn’t she have a kind of drug problem?” Elizabeth asked, super politely.
“Define problem,” Blythe said, and some people, including Logan, laughed. I didn’t think she had meant to be funny, and I didn’t laugh.
“Speaking of drug problems, who wants a drink?” David Sarabande asked. I heard something metal, a cap, maybe a bottle being unscrewed, or a flask. David Sarabande is the type to have a flask. He used to play football last year, but then he got kicked off the team because his grades weren’t good enough, and as soon as that happened, he was like, “At least now I can be a total slacker and a drunk,” because when you’re on the team you can’t drink.
I could hear people gulping from what turned out not to be a flask but a giant bottle of whiskey, which Logan passed to me after taking a swig. I didn’t really want any, but I didn’t want to be a blind virgin prohibitionist either, so I took a huge, proving-myself sip, a way bigger one than I meant to, and it burned a hideous path from my mouth to my stomach. I came up coughing like I had dived into the bottle. Someone laughed, but I couldn’t tell who.
“Take it easy, Emma! Save some for us!” David shouted.
I tried to laugh, to show I was a good sport.
“So Claire was popping pills,” David said then. “She was a wild hot mess; we all knew that.”
“Like you knew shit about her,” Blythe said.
“What kind of pills are we talking about?” Carl Muscan asked. “I mean, was it like weed? Bath salts? Crack? Or her mom’s meds?”
I was interested that Carl could divide drugs up into categories. Most people in Sauberg talked about drugs like they were all identical, and if you smoked a puff of weed you would die instantly, or lose your mind to a crippling pot addiction. My parents always made a point of telling us which drugs were legitimately terrible, because they thought it would help us survive. They came at it from different angles—my mom as a hippie artist who absolutely snorted everything in sight when she was young and thought we’d probably try ourselves and wanted to help us sort so we could do our drug-gobbling “safely,” and my dad as himself, a teetotaling, fact-lover extraordinaire.
“Everything they said she was on was all painkillers,” Blythe’s friend Dima said. I was surprised she had joined in.
Maybe Blythe was, too, because she asked, “Why are we talking about this again?”
“Where was she getting them? Who was her dealer?” Monica Dancat asked.
“Her dealer? Get a grip,” Blythe said. “Hey, Emma, can I ask you something?” I tuned in sharply to Blythe’s voice.
“Sure, of course.”
“Why do you wear sunglasses even at night?”
I hated the question. I didn’t want the attention of the meeting to shift toward me, and I felt like Blythe was making a point about me being a hypocrite, because why was I talking about the truth if I didn’t want to admit anything about myself? I got that, but I was hardly going to admit that I wear them because I know my left eye is too gross for anyone to see ever again, even though I’ve never even seen it myself. And I don’t want everyone else to be in on the secret of how disgusting I look.
“I have to wear them all the time to protect my eyes,” I said.
“Oh, okay,” she said, and I could tell she sensed it wasn’t true. I had a jolt of longing to tell the truth, to say I was afraid I might look like a monster, and have everyone encourage me to take the glasses off, show my face. They would all rush to tell me I was beautiful anyway, still fall-in-lovable. Maybe. Then they would carry me out on their shoulders while Zach proposed.
I waited out the awkward pause.
“Sorry,” she finally said. “Just curious.”
“That’s okay.” I folded my hands on my lap, wanting to end the meeting now, to be anywhere, anyone else.
“Can I ask something, too?” Josh asked. “If it’s not rude, I mean? Is this place, like, not as creepy for you because the dark’s, like, what you’re used to? Or . . . I mean, sorry if that’s . . .”
I felt angry and claustrophobic, which was what Blythe had wanted, I thought. We had gathered to discuss Claire, and I wanted to get back to the real conversation. But I got that it would be hypocritical and unfriendly to refuse to answer a small question that wasn’t even mean. So I recited my stock answer, the one I made up for Jenna that time in the bath: “It’s . . . whatever. For me, the dark is like swimming. Like shades of blue, cool and kind of relaxing.”
The truth is, when I first woke up from the accident and realized I couldn’t see, it was so soul-wrecking that I wanted to climb straight out of my body and run, shrieking, away from my own life. The feeling of that moment comes back to me sometimes, especially when people ask me about my eyes or my glasses, or the accident itself. But obviously that’s not Josh Winterberg’s—or anyone else’s—business.
What if I had told the truth myself at the Mayburg place that night? I asked you guys to meet here so I could say that after Claire I can’t stop wondering why I didn’t and don’t kill myself. Is it because I have hope? And if so, of what? What color of hope? The fake plastic pink one, that I’ll see again? The milder, blue hope that my situation will change, get better, be something other than what it is? If it stays like this, will I stay alive? I don’t know who I’d have to be to ask my own worst questions out loud, but I’m not her.
The voices began to blend for me, until I couldn’t really tell who was talking. I felt like I was melting into sleep. At some point we were all like, yeah, let’s meet again here in a few weeks, maybe during the day next time. No one argued with that idea, obviously.
“One more thing about Claire M.?” Elizabeth Tallentine said as we were about to leave. I tuned back in.
“Yeah?” Zach asked.
“I think she was a very secretive person.”
Logan said, “Apparently,” under her breath. She’s never liked Elizabeth.
“Whatever,” Blythe said, so quietly I’m pretty sure I’m the only one who heard it.
Walking out into the woods together, we were all quiet. Logan was on my right, holding my hand again. It was midnight. Zach, Trey, Josh, and Coltrane were behind us, and Spark was just ahead. No one spoke. We staggered ourselves, walking back in the trees, rather than along the road, and then ducking whenever a car went by. It was the first time I’d ever been intentionally bad, if you don’t count smoking Sarah’s cigarette, or skipping piano and gym a few times. It felt pretty good, although maybe that’s just because we didn’t get caught.
Or maybe it’s because we were hanging on to the few small honest things we’d said inside, inspired by the possibility that even though we knew well enough to stay scared, at least we weren’t going to have to stay completely powerless, too. And maybe this is a disturbing way to put it, but I took comfort from the fact that Claire had floated up. She was underwater long enough to fill her lungs, and maybe she had hoped to sink out of sight forever, to be vanished and irretrievable. Maybe Elizabeth was right that Claire had been secretive, and maybe she had wanted to keep her whole story secret. But her body rose to the surface like truth.
-8-
Just before Thanksgiving break, someone put a skateboard in front of my locker. Whoever did it apparently thought it would be funny if I stepped onto it and—what? Went flying headfirst into the bank of lockers? Slipped like a cartoon character on a banana peel? Cracked my skull against the floor or a wall?
What happened instead was that Logan (and everyone else) saw it there and Logan threw it in the trash chute that goes from the third floor to the inaccessible garbage dump in the basement. So everyone got to imagine me slipping and falling without it actually happening. And Logan got the unsavory task of telling me that it was there, and the heroic one of throwing it out. In other words, the humiliation happened, but not the actual killing myself in the hallway. Small mercies.
Some people are absolute assholes, but I already knew that, and I worked to remember that it didn’t have that much to do with me. But it made me miss Briarly, where no one would have done that. There are lots of stupid things about Lake Main. Including whoever tried to kill me, and the idiotic announcement they made, definitely Claire-related, that for the rest of the year we would be focusing on our own “life histories.” Ugh! All the teachers are frothing with delight about a “new curriculum that connects subjects in an organic way,” and since the only thing connecting our subjects is that we’re the victims of them, now we have to do “memoir work” in our classes: family history, history of our town, literature of childhood.
The art teacher, Mrs. Fincter, has pretty much made it clear that I’m a tragic special-needs invalid. So until now, she’s been letting me do an “independent study” and leaving me totally alone, which I love. But now I have to make something that “represents my life.” I tried to talk her into letting me use a collage I’ve been working on, but she said that was just an exercise, and I have to make a piece of “representative art” for this assignment, and it should “work well for me,” the idea being that I can make something you feel instead of see. It has to use more than one kind of material. My mom is going to die of excitement when I tell her, and I know this is mean, but it makes me not want to tell her. Of course I’m not a complete monster, so I’m not going to tell her about the skateboard, either. I don’t want to make her happy or sad.
In Mr. Hawes’s history class, we had to do horribly embarrassing presentations. Basically, we had to pick a p
iece of history that was meaningful to us in a personal way and tie our own story to the story of someone who lived before us. And then stand up and yammer away about the connection, in front of a roomful of people who can see me but who I can’t see. Which I hate, even when I’m the one who makes myself do it, like at the Mayburg place.
Anyway. Coltrane Winslow blew everyone’s minds, or at least mine, by doing this presentation on Langston Hughes, even though I didn’t think he was the type to read poetry because he’s so law school. He ended by reading a poem about America, and saying how this was all of our Americas. Zach did his on a radical antiwar group in the 1970s, because apparently his parents were hippies before they became Republican bankers. Trey Brighton did the Rolling Stones, even though he had no way to tie them to his life, and Logan did Susan B. Anthony and the suffragettes because her mom gets to vote or whatever. I went right after this guy Jason Kane, whose presentation was this totally parallel-universe thing about the history of UFOs, which he tied to his “memoir” portion by saying that there was “no possible explanation” for what he and his dad saw one night over their house, and that they had no choice but to join the thousands of believers who aren’t believed by anyone else, and how that’s a lonely place, but they know for certain that UFOs exist.
I made a point of not laughing with everyone else, not only because I was in a mounting frenzy about my turn, but also because Jason Kane is batshit crazy, and isn’t that bad enough? I mean, should he really also have to endure people making fun of him all the time?
I walked up the narrow aisle between desks, and a hum of oohing and aahing about Spark rose in place of the tittering over Jason Kane. I found Mr. Hawes’s lectern, set my white cane down, took out my notes, and turned to face the class. Spark sat at my feet. Ms. Mabel had offered to come and help, and I had turned her down, not wanting to stand in front of the class with a babysitter. But now I regretted it.
“So, um, I’m going to tell you a little bit about the origins of the organization called Lighthouse for the Blind,” I said, very fast. “There are Lighthouses for the Blind in more than thirty of the fifty states of America. The first Lighthouse for the Blind came into being because two sisters from New York, Winifred and Edith Holt, traveled to Italy and saw a group of blind kids listening to a concert. And, um, they were amazed by how much the kids were enjoying the music.”
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