By the Time You Read This, I'll Be Dead

by Julie Anne Peters

  J_Doe012284 writes: I hate my mother. F*ing bitch.

  “I was starving the whole time. At the morning weigh-in if you hadn’t lost weight you had to run demerit distance before breakfast, then you got a smaller portion than everyone else or had to eat leftovers. A counselor would go around and say stuff like, ‘Eat up, little piglets.’ He’d snort and go, ‘Wee, wee.’”

  I hated him. I hated them all. They made me hate myself even more than I already did.

  “This other male counselor would yell at us on the way out of the mess hall, ‘You’re losers! You’re all losers.’ It was supposed to be funny, like that show The Biggest Loser.”

  But it’s not funny. Not to people who’ve been told they’re losers their whole lives and believe they will never be anything else.

  — 2 DAYS —

  On the way out of my bedroom, Chip informs me, “Your mom has to fly to Kansas City this morning, so I’ll be taking you to school.”

  I can hear Kim upstairs, packing. Chip has folded his suit jacket over the back of the chair, and now he slips it on. Black suit and white shirt. Black-and-white-striped tie. He looks sharp. He looks like he’s going to a funeral.

  “Did you finish your story?”

  I shake my head an inch to each side. Give it up, Chip.

  Kim clomps down the stairs with her suitcase. She touches my back lightly. “I’m sorry about this,” she says. “I’ll be home tomorrow. Then I think this weekend we should redecorate your room. It’s looking awfully bare in there. Your father won’t be able to pick you up after school, so I’ve arranged for you to go to the Girards’ again.”

  What? No. It took all my willpower to sit there and pretend to do homework, knowing he was close by.

  “Santana said he would prepare the den of iniquity.” Kim enters my field of vision and smiles at me. “What does he mean by that? Or do I want to know?”

  He’s joking. He’d better be.

  She clutches her rolling luggage and kisses Chip. She makes a move to kiss me, but I jerk away. She meets my eyes, then winks. “Maybe you could get some decorating ideas at Santana’s.”

  Mr. Hyatt claps his hands. “Girls, quiet down.” He breaks off his conversation with the pianist. “All eyes up here.” He pats his sternum three short clips. It’s an odd gesture, like a deaf person going me, me, me.

  Emily doesn’t talk to me. She doesn’t talk to anyone. No one talks to her.

  “Does everyone have their white shirts and black skirts for next week?” Mr. Hyatt asks.

  Next week is our concert. Needless to say, I will not be attending.

  “Can we at least wear black leggings?” JenniferJessica asks.

  “No,” Mr. Hyatt says. “Hose or bare legs. Black shoes—no boots or high heels. No open toes.”

  “Damn.” JenniferJessica always curses loud enough for everyone to hear.

  “Sister Bernard has your cummerbunds. She’ll be coming around during practice to try them on you.”

  JenniferJessica goes, “I hope you made Emily’s a double wide.” The wolf pack howls.

  Mr. Hyatt snaps, “Taylor, up here. Now!”

  Her jaw slackens. “What? I was only kidding.”

  Emily’s back is rigid. She stares straight ahead. She’s wearing the mask I know so well.

  This stab of pain pierces my heart. Who will become you? Emily.

  Not if I can help it.

  Storming to the cubbies, I pull down my book bag and open it. From inside I remove my spiral and a pen. I scribble furiously, a note to Emily.

  By the time I get back, Taylor’s been reprimanded. She’s pouting. The sister is trying on Emily’s cummerbund. Emily sucks in her stomach and Sister still has to pull tight. “It’s snug.”

  “It’s fine,” Emily says. She crumples the cummerbund in her fist.

  The sister says to me, “Okay, dear. Raise your arms.”

  First, I hand the note to Emily. I watch her lips move as she reads each word. Sister Bernard repeats, “Raise your arms, please.” My arms go up and the sister pulls my cummerbund around my waist. “And yours is too loose.”

  Emily’s smiling. In my note I wrote, “She’ll go to hell. They all will. If hell will even have them.” She flips the note over to my P.S. on back, where I added, “Elbow me if I’m singing flat.” She giggles.

  The bell rings.

  “If you’ve been fitted, you may go,” Mr. Hyatt says.

  Taylor stomps out.

  I drape my cummerbund over Emily’s shoulder. She can stitch them together, like a quilt.

  He’s waiting at the gate, not with his mother this time. With the rat. “Hey.” He waves. He’s wearing a baseball cap and he looks cool.

  He’s shaved and his face is smooth and soft looking. He has long black eyelashes, and I can’t be feeling this way.

  It’s safer with the gate between us. Then Santana swings the gate in and holds it for me, so I have no choice.

  I could run. Would he chase me? If I walk and keep on walking, I could make it home. It’d be good practice.

  “Ariel’s working, so I hope you don’t have much homework, or you can do it later. I want to show you something.” He removes his cap.

  My eyeballs pop. He’s dyed his hair jet-black with red tips. Scratching the rat’s head, he says, “You like?”

  He seems taller. And different, besides the hair. He makes me feel all jiggly inside.

  STOP FEELING. Stop caring.

  “We’ll eat real food today too.” He drops Hervé into the hat, then slings them both onto his head. “I ordered pizza.” He stands there, a rat tail between his eyes.

  I want to cry. I don’t know why. I want to be strong, like Maggie Louise. Control myself and others.

  “Are you okay? You look like you had a crap day.”

  How does a crap day look? How does it look any different from every other day?

  “Come on. I have a cure for the craps.” He takes my hand.

  With every ounce of courage inside me, I want to pull away. But I don’t. I’m weak. We’re holding hands.

  I don’t even remember leaving my spot and walking with him to his house. I’m losing consciousness. Damn the drugs. I should have stopped taking them earlier.

  “Coke float,” he says.

  We’re in his kitchen. My shoes are off and the rat is on the table, perched on its haunches, nibbling a Cheeto.

  My hand is whole, unblemished. It’s still attached to my arm. It feels contaminated, though, and I have the strongest urge to wash my hands. I can control that urge, wash them later.

  Santana’s busy at the counter. He sets a purple plastic cup in front of me, the same one he brought that day I was having a coughing jag. It’s a faded Pirates of the Caribbean cup. “Whoa.” He bends down to slurp the foam oozing over the rim.

  The doorbell rings.

  “It’s Dino Delivers.” Santana bounds out of the room.

  He drank from my cup. What if he’s contagious? Which is stupid and irrational because I’m the one who wishes she had a fatal disease. I feel bad for thinking about contamination at a time like this.

  Hervé finishes his Cheeto, then scurries over to my cup and sniffs it. He rises to his haunches again, too close. I scrape back my chair. Rats, rats, rats.

  Santana pops his head in. “Let’s eat out here. Grab the floats.”

  He’d started another one on the counter—scooped ice cream into an orange Pirates of the Caribbean plastic cup. The liter Coke bottle sits uncapped, ready to pour.

  I don’t want to touch it.

  I say to Hervé, in my mind, You heard him. Grab the floats.

  The TV comes on and I smell the pizza. Neither dehydration nor starvation is my chosen method of completion.

  I get up and go to the counter. Slowly I pour Coke over the ice cream. You have to pour slowly, dorko, to minimize foam.

  “You never told me what kind of pizza you like, so I got one cheese and one supremo grande deluxe everything on it.” He gl
ances up from the floor, where he’s kneeling and smiling into my eyes. This heat swells every pore of my skin. Two pizza boxes lay open on the coffee table, and my stomach gurgles. I’ll miss the aroma of pizza. The stringy, chewy goodness of melted mozzarella.

  I never said there wouldn’t be things I’d miss. Reading. Eating.

  The couch still has a sheet on it, but it’s the only place to sit. Besides next to him on the floor. I shuffle between the table and couch as I set down the floats.

  “Oops, hang on.” He pushes to his feet and dashes past me into the hall.

  I sit. My knees crunch the edge of the table.

  Great. I bruise easily. Hello, camp killers? I bruise easily.

  “I can’t leave Hervé running loose in the kitchen.” Santana rushes back in. “Last time he chewed through the blender cord and Ariel went berserk. God forbid she can’t grind up her avocado and lemon-grass goo in the morning.” Hervé wraps around Santana’s neck.

  I pull out a slice of everything. He shoves the box closer to me.

  “Plus, he figured out how to push open the back screen, and I don’t want him getting out. I think he’d stick around, but the foxes might find him.” Santana’s index finger circles over the everything until it zeroes in on a slice. The biggest wedge with the most sausage.

  He chomps into it and his eyes close, his long lashes curling up. “Oh, my God,” he says in a garble. “Heavenly Father, we thank you for this day, this pizza, this holy hell of a meal.”

  I smile to myself.

  We eat in silence. I chew each bite into mush, savoring the joy of pizza. It gets a little stuck in my throat. The foam has settled on my float and I drink it. It needs another dousing of Coke.

  “So, I guess you’re Catholic?” he goes.

  Do I make a face?

  “No? I thought you had to be Catholic to go to Catholic school.”

  You have to be damaged, I want to say.

  He says, “I’m a pantheist.”

  A what? I set my crust back into the box and pull another slice.

  “I don’t like crust either,” he says. “We’re a match made in heaven. You do believe in heaven?”

  I concentrate on eating—chewing, swallowing. Revealing no expression.

  “I’ll take that as a yes. What do you want to do today?” Santana reaches for another slice. “Make out? Skip the formalities?”

  My eyes shift to him.

  “Gotcha.” He points at me.

  My face flares neon red.

  He doesn’t seem to notice; he doesn’t see me bleed. He leans back against the couch, his head inches away. I love his black hair and red tips. I’ve always wanted to dye my hair, but then people would target and tease me even more.

  He says, “Pantheists—at least the naturalists among us—believe God is in all things.”

  Really? I want to debate him. God is nowhere.

  A long minute passes. The only sound is us consuming pizza. Hervé, on Santana’s shoulder, gets the discarded crusts. Santana’s head twists and he stares at my neck brace. “I was wondering . . .” He chews and swallows.

  Leave it alone, I think.

  “If you’d watch my video memoir and tell me what you think.” He lowers his half-eaten slice of pizza to the box. “It’s amateurish, I know that. The quality sucks.” He picks off a chunk of sausage and bites into it. “I’m not a filmmaker, by any stretch of the imagination. It’s not meant for prime time. More YouTube. It’s just a video record for Ariel in case—” Santana expels a slow, shallow breath.

  The air in the room compresses.

  Hervé scrabbles off Santana’s neck and jumps onto the table. He sits up, nibbling a chunk of crust. My eyes are drawn to Santana’s lump. It’s there, for sure. Was it that big before?

  He catches me looking. “I found two more,” he says. “Under my arm. I told Ariel this morning and she flipped. She’s probably beating the oncologist to a pulp as we speak.”

  His eyes are like a telescope. I look into them and I’m transported across the universe to a world I’ve never been.

  “Some of this is embarrassing.” He brushes flour and cornmeal off his hands and pulls a mini DVD out from under the coffee table. Like he planted it.

  He scoots across the carpet to the TV. I notice a splotch of blue paint on the beige rug, and my eyes lift. She’s done, or almost done. One corner of ceiling remains. I have to tilt my torso back to get a panoramic view.

  It’s . . . amazing. Soft, gentle curves of creamy white clouds. Subtle shards of blue and gray.

  I remove my neck brace so I can scan behind me, get the full effect. It’s . . . beautiful. The front curtains draw closed, cutting off my light. Santana plops down beside me and deliberately takes the neck brace from my hand.

  “Wow. This thing’s heavy,” he says, sounding shocked. “How long have you had to wear this?”

  Too long.

  “Wait.” He gets up, goes to a can of paintbrushes in the corner, and fishes out a flat pencil. He gives it to me. “You can write on this.” He hands me a Dino’s napkin, blank side up.

  I write, “Play the video.”

  “Fine. Be that way. I assume you’ll tell me when you want me to know.”

  Which will be never.

  Santana grabs the remote and moves the brace to the other side of him. If I need it, I’ll have to reach across his lap.

  “I wish you could talk, because I’d like to get your thoughts on pantheism. A basic moral belief that doing harm to oneself harms us all. That we’re all interconnected.”

  I shoot a glare at him and hold up the napkin.

  “Got it. The stuff at the beginning is boring shit. It’s really just for Ariel. We can fast-forward through a lot of it.” He hands me the remote.

  I flip it back at him.

  “God.” He snatches it up. “You are so—” His jaw clenches.

  Insufferable? I finish for him. Impenetrable?

  He thumbs the play button.

  Snow. Then static. On the screen and in my head.

  He’s sitting so close our knees accidentally knock. I don’t believe in accidents. I cram myself as close to the couch arm as I can. He smells like lime and pepperoni.

  I don’t smell. I hunch into a rock.

  “Hi.” A hand with stiff fingers shoots on to the screen. “How are you? This is me, Santana Lloyd Girard the Second.” The hand folds into a fist. “And this,” one finger points, “is the story,” two fingers, “of my life,” three fingers, “so far.” Four, five, six fingers. The sixth one is rubber. The hand withdraws slowly.

  “Lame, I know,” Santana says beside me. “I was fourteen when I started this.”

  That’s why I don’t recognize the voice. The narrator sounds like a little kid.

  “I was born on April twenty-fourth, nineteen ninety-two. A day that will live in infancy.” The picture of a scrawny baby is shot from overhead. “Hiya, Ma.” The big hand appears with fingers wiggling in a wave. Each finger has a smiley drawn on it.

  He’s right. This isn’t headed for Sundance.

  “My father, Santana Lloyd Girard the First, could not be present at the birth of his only child, since he bit the big one in a rock slide prior to the momentous occasion. The whole mind-freak element of an accident like that should’ve been a warning to my mother. My mother, Ariel Celestine Beatty Girard. Hi, Mom.” The hand waves. Beside me, Santana groans. “It gets worse.”

  “Said mother testifies that the boy Santana came into this world screaming bloody murder.” A blurry face fills the screen. “And I’ll leave the same way.” A loud screech makes my ears squinch.

  Santana lowers the volume. “This sucks big-time.”

  The camera pans over a naked baby in a birdbath. He has flowers in his wild, curly hair. Do I grin?

  “Okay, wow,” Santana mutters. He aims the remote at the TV, and a jumbled mass of photos and hands and blurry lips zoom by. A boy on a bike, then a skateboard. Is that Santana? A Hacky Sack. A dog.
<
br />   “Hold it,” Santana says and the film freezes. “You have to see Stripe.” He rewinds a bit.

  This ugly dog, like a mix between a bulldog and a Dalmatian—jowls and big brown patches—sits there with its tongue lolling out the side of its mouth. Drooling and panting.

  “Stripe,” the narrator goes. “Sit.”

  The dog stands up.

  “Stay.”

  It leaps at the camera. The picture jumps around to the sky, the bench out front, blurry grass.

  Dog again.

  “Speak.”

  The dog lifts its paw.

  I glance over at Santana. He’s got a dopey smile on his face.

  “Roll over. Play dead.”

  The dog barks its head off.

  Santana chuckles beside me. “I taught him that.”

  “Shake.”

  The dog rolls over, then back again. It stands up and shakes off.

  I reach for my cup of float and Santana beats me to it. He hands it to me. “That was my neighbor’s dog. They got him as a pup, then left him alone all day while they went to work. Ariel won’t let me have a dog because they shed. That’s her rationale, anyway. God, I want a dog so bad—”

  The camera zooms in on a bunch of papers that are spread across the carpet.

  “Here it comes.” Santana leans forward. “This is my lymphangiogram. My chest X-ray, CT scan, PET scan, and gallium scan.”

  There are charts and graphs and reports on the floor.

  “My first biopsy results.” The camera pans close.

  I squint but can’t read the type.

  “Diagnosis: Hodgkin’s disease.” Santana’s face fills the screen, teeth bared. He sings the first two bars of Beethoven’s Fifth. “Bah-bah-bah-bum. Bah-bah-bah-bum.”

  The picture goes off. Then on.

  The door to a room opens. Santana makes creaking sound effects on the film. A man in scrubs smiles for the camera, and the frame tilts. It does a one-eighty.

  “October twenty-nine, two thousand seven. Santana begins chemotherapy.” The camera pans to a woman. Is that Ariel? She looks way younger.

  Next to me, Santana breathes. His breath is warm and moist. Why does it feel like he’s breathing right on me?

  Someone else is filming now because Santana is in a chair, like a dentist’s chair, getting an IV stuck in his arm. I shudder. I hate needles.