Unwelcome Bodies

by Jennifer Pelland

  I wish there were some way to get her to understand.

  * * * *

  September 9, 2018

  I am FURIOUS! Someone from the lunch bunch went to the press, and now the whole world knows that Kay thinks that what she did was a mistake. No one will fess up to doing it, either. There were only seven people in the room besides Kay and me. It had to have been one of them.

  Me, I think it was Celeste. When I confronted her, she said someone had probably slipped a mike into the room before the talk. She’s the only one of the seven who tried to make an excuse. It has to be her. Screw “innocent until proven guilty.” I don’t have time for friends I can’t trust.

  The whole campus is steaming mad, and the administration is launching an investigation, although there’s really nothing they can do if they find the culprit. There’s nothing in the honor code that says you can’t talk to the press about a fellow student.

  The media’s going nuts with this. On the one side are the people who feel personally slighted that Kay’s abandoned the cause she helped popularize. And then there’s the people who still don’t think that climate change is a big deal and are claiming that Kay’s on their side now.

  I understand the people who feel slighted. I just feel so sick when I think that she might not care anymore. I’m trying not to let it show, but it’s not easy. My inner fan girl feels like she’s been stabbed in the gut.

  And Kay…

  She’s been holed up in our room all day. I’ve been bringing her meals from the cafeteria, but she’s barely touching them. “Maybe I shouldn’t have started college so soon,” she told me.

  “It’ll blow over.”

  “Not soon enough.”

  Maybe this will spur her to get involved again, just so people can’t harbor the wrong ideas about where she stands. I think I’ll suggest that to her.

  Just as soon as she stops looking like someone stomped on her puppy.

  I wish she’d let me hug her.

  * * * *

  September 20, 2018

  The chemistry labs are killing me. I’d forgotten how much math was involved. But I’m not letting Kay know that. I want her to see how happy I am to be working to do my part to save the planet. If I take enough chemistry and then get the right graduate degree, I’ll be able to help build the next generation of fuel cells, or maybe help formulate a truly effective, clean-burning, ecologically-sound biofuel. We’re even working with biofuels in the lab. It’s great. I just wish I understood what we were doing with them.

  Meanwhile, another Florida key just went underwater and no one seems to care.

  This’ll probably be easier if I drop Spanish. ¡Adios, Cien años de soledad! I can always read you later.

  Things have gotten a little easier for Kay. They never did figure out who went to the press (I’m still convinced it was Celeste, and the rest of the group is too—she’s no longer welcome at our table), but the news has finally moved on to other topics. I think some drunken starlet just had her third DUI or something. It’s so nice to see important news in the headlines again. Urgh.

  Kay still isn’t eating in the cafeteria. She fills her tray with whatever’s quickest to grab and takes it up to our room. I eat with her at breakfast, sometimes at lunch, but she insists that I not spend all of my meals with her. “Just because I’m a hermit, that doesn’t mean you should be too.”

  I’ve asked her if she’s bothered that so many people seem to have the wrong impression of her.

  “Not really.”

  “Why not?”

  “The media’s always gotten me wrong. Back in HippieChix, they made me out to be some stupid tweeny party girl, which was total crap. I worked my ass off for that band and kept my grades up to honor roll levels. Who had time for parties? And then later when I…” She trailed off, staring down at her hands.

  “Made your statement?” I offered.

  “Hurt myself,” she said, very deliberately. “I know I wrote up a manifesto explaining why I was doing it, but I can’t believe they took my excuse at face value.”

  “Kay, what are you saying?”

  “That no fifteen-year-old sets herself on fire unless she secretly wants to die.”

  I reached out and grabbed her hands—lightly, so as not to hurt her—and said, “It doesn’t matter if your motives weren’t pure. All that matters is what you inspired.”

  She gently pulled her hands away and clasped them to her belly. “I inspired copycats. They all died.”

  “You inspired—”

  “People died. Because of me. I… I need to go to the library.” She grabbed her book bag and dashed out the door.

  I wish she could see that seven dead teenagers are a small price to pay for the future of our planet.

  But I suppose I can see how that would be tough to stomach.

  * * * *

  September 21, 2018

  I emailed my mother yesterday to tell her about my decision to major in chemistry. This morning, she emailed back to tell me how concerned she was about it. “I don’t understand. You hated chemistry in high school. And you loved Spanish. I understand your desire to change the world, but you don’t have to take the entire weight of it onto your shoulders. Kay’s a bad influence on you. You worshipped her band when you were twelve, and you worshiped her suicide attempt when you were fifteen. How could anyone in your situation be rational around their idol? You should seriously think about getting another roommate. I’d hate to see this ruin your college career. You didn’t work so hard to get into Wellesley just to take courses that you hate.”

  I don’t even know where to start, but one thing’s for sure. I won’t be confiding in my mother again.

  And for the record, I didn’t hate chemistry. It wasn’t my favorite subject, but there’s a big difference between “not favorite” and “hated.” Math, now that I hated.

  I’m going to check to make sure Mom can’t ask the administration to give me a new roommate, just to be safe.

  * * * *

  September 22, 2018

  A group of us went to a frat party at MIT last night so we could meet guys, which is something that’s pretty impossible to do at Wellesley, unless you want to date a professor or a cafeteria worker (I’m not interested in either). I asked Kay if she wanted to go with us, but I knew her answer before she even said it. I tried to joke it off by saying, “Well, if you’re more interested in meeting a nice girl, you’re better off spending the night here.”

  “Oh, no. That’s not it.”

  Well, at least that kills all of those HippieChix lesbian rumors.

  The party was okay. I had to explain to three clueless white boys that no, I didn’t talk this way because I was adopted by a white family, and then I had to explain to a clueless black boy that no, I didn’t talk this way because I was ashamed of my race. “We all talk this way in Maine!”

  I don’t think he believed me.

  And then Deena told someone that we were friends with Kay Myerson, and suddenly we were the center of attention.

  “She’s your roommate?”

  “Did she really say that she was sorry she’d done it?”

  “What’s her major?”

  “Can you set me up with her? I totally want to do her.”

  “What’s her problem? Is global warming beneath her now or something?”

  “Do her grafts smell?”

  “Oh, man, if I could interview her for the school paper, that would be sweet. Can you give her my email?”

  “I can’t believe she’s such a bitch.”

  The clueless black boy smiled at me and said, “You poor thing. Come on, let’s get out of here.” And I let him take me to Toscanini’s for ice cream.

  What can I say? He had a really lovely smile. His name’s Rashid, and we’ve got a date next Saturday. But I can’t help but think that he’s only dating me to get close to Kay.

  * * * *

  September 23, 2018

  Somehow, Kay forgot that today was the big ca
mpus barbecue. As soon as the scent of grilling meat drifted up the hill from Severance Green and through our open window, she ran to the bathroom and started retching.

  I closed the windows, borrowed someone’s fan, and did my best to get the smell out before Kay came back, but the damage had been done. She curled up in the center of her bed and started sobbing. I tried to comfort her, but she begged me to just leave her alone.

  I hate that she won’t let me in.

  So I went to Brinda and Elizabeth’s room next door and did a core dump all over them. They both think that I need to give Kay a good talking to once she’s calmed down. “She shouldn’t push you away like she does,” Brinda said. “That’s not what roommates do. Roommates share, and I don’t mean clothes.”

  “Well, it’s not like we chose each other,” I said. “The college randomly assigned us together.”

  “It doesn’t matter. You’re supposed to support each other, and she’s not letting you anywhere near her.”

  “If she didn’t want a roommate, I’m sure the college would have given her a single,” Elizabeth said.

  “You know what?” Brinda said. “Screw the weepy bullshit. I’m going in there right now, and I’m going to tell her—”

  And then we heard Kay scream.

  The three of us raced to my room. Kay was staring out the window in horror, gripping the window frame with scarred fingers. “It’s too late to do anything,” she whispered.

  Brinda ducked her head under Kay’s arm and said, “Oh, that’s just an effigy.”

  I looked past the two of them at the burning figure next to the dumpster and had to agree. “Kay, if your eyes were better, you’d be able to tell. It’s really not that convincing.”

  “But…the smell…”

  “The barbecue, remember?”

  Brinda snorted. “I haven’t seen one of these since I left Kashmir. I’m almost homesick. Come on, Kay. I’ll show you.”

  Kay stepped back from the window, her hands pressed tightly against her chest. “I can’t go out there.”

  Elizabeth said, “Njeri, you stay here with Kay. Brinda and I will take care of it.”

  After they’d left, I gently laid a hand on Kay’s shoulder.

  She didn’t step away.

  Out the window, Brinda and Elizabeth approached the effigy, which had drawn several onlookers already. Brinda picked a long branch up from the ground and poked the burning figure. Its torso toppled off in a distinctly non-fleshy way. She dug the stick into its innards and held up a wad of burning straw, then dumped it back into the fire, which Elizabeth put out with a fire extinguisher.

  Kay deflated under my hand, then stiffened. “That’s an effigy of me, isn’t it?”

  “I can’t tell. Probably not.”

  She shot me a clear look of disbelief, and I couldn’t blame her. I guess I was hoping the lie would help her somehow.

  She shrugged her shoulder out from under my hand, called the campus mental health center, and went over for an immediate session. When she was gone, I waved for Brinda and Elizabeth to come back up. They picked up the wooden sign reading “Light a fire under Kay Myerson!” and tossed it in the dumpster, then came upstairs. “Could she read it?” Brinda asked.

  I shook my head. “No, but she figured it out.”

  “We have to report this to the Campus Po.”

  So we did.

  Well, at least Kay finally let me support her a little, even if I blew it with a lie at the end. It almost makes me want to thank whoever set up that effigy.

  * * * *

  September 29, 2018

  I’ve already broken up with my first college boyfriend. Damn it.

  I was right. Rashid was just dating me to try to get to Kay. He kept asking if he could come visit me at Wellesley, and I kept telling him there was nothing to do here, and wouldn’t he rather see me in the city? We had one date in Cambridge (Toscis’s again), then he showed up unannounced at the dorm, and Kay said she’d take off so we could have some privacy.

  As soon as he saw that she wasn’t there, he pitched a fit. So I pitched him out the door on his ass.

  He can’t have Kay. Not if I can’t have her.

  Why won’t she be my friend?

  * * * *

  September 30, 2018

  Kay’s been walling herself off more and more. Damn it, I’m her roommate. She’s supposed to share with me. I talk to her about classes, about wishing I could find a boyfriend who was only interested in me for me, about how my mother doesn’t understand me… and she barely says a word back to me. She’s not rude or anything, just close-lipped.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” seems to mean, “I don’t want to talk about anything.”

  But as far as I can tell, she’s not opening up to anyone else either. And even though it shouldn’t, that makes me glad.

  I wonder if this is how stalkers feel?

  I just want her to like me. She means so much to me and she has no idea.

  * * * *

  October 7, 2018

  I’m about to fail chemistry.

  If I fail chemistry, I fail the future.

  God, I’m so melodramatic.

  But damn it, I feel so useless! What good is a liberal arts degree when Greenland is almost totally ice-free? How can I even think of having children if I don’t build a viable future for them? I’d get into politics if I thought I could be the first politician to actually jolt the U.S. government into action. And I don’t have the brains or the money to create a company where I can hire brilliant people to create the tools for a carbon-neutral future. Hell, musicians and actors have done some of the best awareness-raising work for the cause, but I freeze up every time I hit a stage, so that’s right out.

  Chemistry was my only way.

  God, I am such a waste of oxygen.

  Advocacy—now that’s something I could do. I’m passionate! I’m devoted! I’m even knowledgeable! Only I’m a total nobody, so who would listen to me?

  They’d listen to Kay. I could help her get the message out. We could work together. She’d just have to be the face of the movement, and I’d do everything else.

  Only every time I bring it up, she invents some need to leave the dorm and goes away.

  I don’t know what to do.

  * * * *

  October 9, 2018

  I’ve spoken to my advisor, and she says that if I drop chemistry before next Wednesday, it won’t show up on my transcript.

  When I got back to my room, I cried harder than I have in years. And for once—finally!—Kay was supportive. I tried explaining what was wrong, but she just shushed me and stroked my hair. “It’s not up to you to save the world,” she said.

  “But if we all say that—”

  “There are plenty of people fighting the good fight. Maybe your job is to send them checks when you get out of college.”

  I can’t accept that. I can’t live that way.

  How can I be more committed to the cause than a woman who once set herself on fire for it?

  * * * *

  October 10, 2018

  Kay hasn’t been going to the library. She’s been going to the Lulu Wang center to get coffee with Celeste.

  I saw the two of them sitting at a table together, talking, giggling. Hell, Kay even reached out and gave Celeste’s arm a playful shove.

  I felt like I’d been punched in the gut.

  When she came back to the room, I confronted her. “I’m pretty sure she’s the one who went to the press, you know!”

  “She was.”

  “So why—”

  “I’m glad she did it,” Kay said. “Yeah, it hurt at first, but in the long run, it’s been liberating. People are finally letting me be me instead of making me be The Cause. And she gets that. It’s great.”

  “But she… I…”

  Kay patted me on the arm—she couldn’t have been more condescending if she’d tried—and said, “It’s admirable how much you care about global warming. But I can
’t be that girl anymore. I need friends who understand that.”

  I could have been that friend. Why didn’t she let me be that friend?

  No, actually, she doesn’t need that kind of friend. She needs the kind of friend who won’t let her walk away from her brave actions, who won’t let her sacrifice be for nothing.

  Think, Kay! Think!

  * * * *

  October 11, 2018

  I’ve figured out what I have to do.

  * * * *

  November 29, 2018

  Like someone once told me, “If I’d really wanted to die, I wouldn’t have set fire to myself in the chem lab.”

  And like someone also once told me, “It hurt worse than anything you can imagine.”

  The pain was…

  Well, probably not as bad as Kay’s was.

  I didn’t use gasoline like she did, I used a biofuel—I think it was the switch grass stuff. We’d been creating various biofuels in lab that week, and I grabbed the nearest one, poured it over myself, then set off a flare and jammed it against my side to set it off. That stuff doesn’t burn nearly as hot or as fast as gasoline, which was one of the very few things I’d managed to learn in my short, doomed chemistry career.

  But it still hurt so much that it makes my eyes water just to think back on it.

  And then, of course, there was the burn treatment. It’s come a long way, or so I’ve been told, and the artificial skin really speeds up the healing process, but my god, the pain…

  I wish this artificial skin weren’t so much paler than my own. Well, at least “flesh-tone” bandages will finally match parts of me. The lab goggles protected my eyes and the skin around them, so that’s the only original color left on my face. I look like a damned raccoon. And I don’t even want to get into the patchwork that is the rest of my body. The doctors tell me they’ll eventually be able to give me darker grafts, but I think that’s crap. Touchingly, several students from Ethos have volunteered to help me put makeup over the grafts once I’m out of the hospital so they’ll match my original skin tone. And they’ve found a wig maker who makes wigs that look just like natural black hair. I feel bad that I never attended a meeting. You know, back when I was black all over.