What to Say Next

by Julie Buxbaum

  “Darling, we don’t know what you’re talking about,” Justin says, and Jessica laughs, maybe at his condescending darling. I want to smack them both across the face. Hard.

  “Come on. I know you guys stole his notebook.” My tone shifts again. Back to anger. I consider standing up one more time.

  “Seriously, chillax, Kit,” Abby says. “It’s so not a big deal. We’re not saying you’re not pretty.”

  “I’m going to Principal Hoch.” I barely even register Abby and her hybrid word and yet another unsolicited comment on my appearance. For a while there, when Justin and Jessica were hooking up, everyone called them Justica and I would think, every single time, I can’t wait to go to college. “I’ll tell her I saw you take it.”

  I look to Violet and Annie for backup here, though I’m not sure if I’ll get it. They are not exactly on #teamdavid.

  “Why would you do that?” Justin asks me. “We’re your friends.” He sounds both surprised and hurt. Like he’d never expect me to turn on him like that. I think back to what David said, about how the coincidence of landing in the same school at the same time wasn’t enough for him to fit in here. Did Justin used to be my friend? I mean, for real? He came to my father’s funeral, told me he was sorry afterward, just like everyone else, and then he and Gabriel hung around the parking lot for a little bit, doing their headlock-and-tripping-each-other thing. I have sat with them more times than I can count in this very booth, gossiping and watching YouTube videos on each other’s phones. But do we know each other at all? Have we ever had a real conversation? I don’t think so.

  No one except David has asked me what I think about God, or an afterlife, whether I place my trust in science or religion. No one except David knows about the accident playing each night on my ceiling. I trusted him enough to tell him about my mother’s betrayal. It would never occur to me to be honest with Gabriel and Justin, to lift that muzzle of self-consciousness and share. To let them see me cry.

  No, we are not friends. We are placeholders. But I was not as strong as David. I couldn’t go it alone. I probably still can’t.

  “Because it’s cruel. Because he is a good person. Because,” I say.

  “I wouldn’t risk it, guys. If you get caught that could really hurt your college applications,” Violet says, and stands up, as if to join me in my protest. I notice she’s untucked her shirt, which makes me ache.

  “Kit’s right. Take it down, and if you don’t, I’m going to tell on you guys too,” Annie says, and I see she’s wearing a fitted denim jumpsuit over a tie-dyed peasant blouse and big seventies disco ball earrings. She looks ridiculous and so much like herself that I want to hug her. Now we are three strong. “That was his private journal, or whatever. Posting it wasn’t cool.”

  “It was just a joke,” Justin says.

  “Now,” I demand, and point to the computer.

  “Seriously? It can’t wait till I get home? It’s not like taking it down does anything. Everyone’s seen it already.”

  “Now,” I say again, and for once I actually sound tough. Maybe it’s because I know Violet and Annie have my back. That my squad hasn’t totally dissolved. Justin moves his fingers over the keyboard and poof, just like that, the link is disabled. Too bad he’s right. It doesn’t really matter. The harm has already been done, and no doubt there are a zillion screenshots everywhere. Nothing ever really gets deleted from the Internet. “And give me the notebook.”

  Again, to my surprise, he does. It has a plain blue cover and a spiral edge and the name David Drucker written in small block print at the bottom. Charmingly retro, like something a fourth grader would carry. I’m tempted to flick it open and look at his drawings.

  I love how he made my neck look like something worth looking at.

  “Honestly, Kit, I can’t believe you’d pick shithead over us,” Justin says, leaning over for a high five from Gabriel.

  “Oh man, that was classic,” Gabriel says. “Classic.”

  —

  A few minutes later, I’m standing outside with Violet and Annie.

  “Thanks for defending me back there,” I say, staring at my feet. “You guys are the best.”

  “Yeah, well, Gabe asked Willow to the prom. So screw him,” Annie says, and though she makes it sound like no big deal, I know it is.

  “I’m sorry. That sucks.” I wish I were more surprised by this information. I wish we could all see each other more clearly.

  “David’s right: He really does have a clown mouth,” Violet says, bumping her elbow against Annie’s. “You don’t really want to go to the prom with a guy who looks like the Joker.”

  Annie doesn’t laugh. Just blinks a few times to suck back the water in her eyes.

  “You don’t want to go to prom with a jerk,” I say. “What he and Justin did was really wrong.”

  “Yeah, maybe. Still, there’s some weird shit in that notebook,” Annie says, fiddling with her giant earrings. “Be careful around that guy, Kit.”

  “Come on, out of context everyone’s journal is weird,” I say, not sure why I feel the need to defend David, even to Violet and Annie. He’s not mine to defend. “But I didn’t read the whole thing. Just enough to get the gist.”

  “Really?” Violet asks, her eyebrow cocked in surprise.

  “It just didn’t seem right.”

  “You should,” Annie says. I shrug. Before everything with my dad, I didn’t really understand the need for privacy, for the desire to be free of other people’s questions. Now I do.

  “What’s the Accident Project?” Violet asks, in a voice that’s soft, tentative. Almost a lullaby. Like she’s asking something easy. Like what’s my favorite food or television show or if she can borrow my Spanish notes. “Is that why you keep skipping classes and didn’t go to the newspaper meeting? Because you are working on that?”

  “What?”

  “The Accident Project. What. Is. It?” Annie asks, with none of Violet’s gentleness. “We have almost all the same classes, so I know it’s not for school. What are you doing with David?”

  “That’s…that’s, um, in there?” I ask, wondering how much David has written down. Did he expose me to all of Mapleview? I try to remember how I’ve even framed the question for him. I want to know the exact last second my dad’s accident could have been avoided. When the brakes needed to have been pressed. If the whole thing could have been stopped in the first place. I want to make mathematical sense out of the inexplicable. Now it just sounds insane.

  “Like I said, you should read it. See who you’re ditching us for,” Annie says. “So you’re not going to tell us? About the Accident Project.”

  “It’s nothing. Really. And I’m not ditching—” Annie shakes her head at me, gives me the palm of her hand, and before I can finish speaking she’s already halfway toward her car. I turn to Violet. “I’m not ditching you guys. It’s not like that.”

  “She’s just, you know, pissed about Gabe,” Violet says. “And we miss you.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say. This hurts, I want to say. Even just standing here talking to you. It all hurts more than you could possibly imagine. I want to show her my watch, how time barely moves forward. How I don’t much care for this version of me either. I stay quiet.

  “Do you really like him? David, I mean,” Violet asks, and her voice is hopeful, as if my liking him will excuse everything else, like the fact that I no longer want to hang out with her and Annie. I don’t deserve her forgiveness or her understanding. If things were the other way around, if Violet suddenly ditched me for some random guy without much of an explanation, I’d have no sympathy.

  “I don’t know. He’s really easy to talk to,” I say. “I like being around him.”

  What I don’t say: I can tell him things that I can’t tell anyone else. Like about my dad and my mom. Maybe one day about me. He weighs information honestly.

  What I don’t say: He moves time forward.

  Violet nods, but she looks sad.

 
; “You used to like being around us too.”

  —

  It’s bad enough that I get a guilt trip from Violet and Annie, but then a few minutes later, as I sit in my car and garner up the courage to put the keys in the ignition and head home, I get a text from my mom. Awesome.

  Mom: I know I’m not your favorite person right now, and my timing isn’t great, but I really don’t think you should hang out with David Drucker anymore.

  Me: ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

  Mom: Saw that “Guide to Mapleview” link. Annie’s mom sent it to me.

  Me: How dare you. THAT WAS HIS PRIVATE JOURNAL.

  Mom: I’m just worried about you. That’s all.

  Me: Leave me alone.

  Mom: Sweetheart, what’s “the Accident Project”?

  Me: Screw you.

  Pi doesn’t work. Neither does the periodic table. I try simple counting, and I make it all the way to three hundred thousand, but I cannot let any of it go. My notebook is in the public domain. Kit must have read the whole thing by now. Even positing the assumptions that (1) she didn’t see the link until after four p.m., which allots thirty-five minutes for a pit stop on her way home from our meeting and 2) that she reads at a painstakingly slow rate, a page every five minutes, which I realize makes no sense given her high PSAT scores, she would have made it all the way to the end at least an hour ago. Which means that it’s all over: us sitting together at lunch, the Accident Project, me being in any zone. The Venn diagram of our relationship has un-Venned.

  I consider texting her, but I am too scared to turn on my phone. As soon as I got home it started buzzing from numbers I don’t recognize.

  u little shithead. I’m gonna kill u.

  How dare u say my gf looks like a miss piggy? Next time I c u, u r fn dead.

  die retard.

  weirdo turd. ur the pizzaface.

  wtf is WRONG WITH YOU?

  do us all a favor and DIE.

  That’s a recurring motif in the texts and also in the online comments. My classmates’ desire for me to die. Which seems disproportional to the crime, as it is obvious that I was not the one who published my diary. How can people be angry for things I never expected or wanted them to see? It’s illogical. Like prosecuting someone for a thought crime.

  And they want me dead. For real. Like, for my heart to stop beating, for my mother to lose a son and Miney to lose a brother, for me to no longer exist, at least in my current form. All that just because I filled a notebook with simple observations to help me remember people’s names and who to trust and how to survive in this confusing world called high school. Joe Mangino, the captain of the football team, looks nothing like a Joe, but he does look a lot like a ferret and used to squeeze my nipples when he passed me in the hallways at school. Was it so wrong of me to write that down? To make a note to myself that when I saw a rodentlike meathead, I should get out of the way? Purple nurples hurt.

  I’m assuming that the threats to kill me are not literal. Miney used to threaten me all the time when we were little and I don’t believe she ever meant it. But I see no other way to interpret the desire for me to be dead. Maybe they do not want to do it by their own hands and actually murder me, which could risk them getting caught and going to jail, not to mention force them to cross certain universally agreed-upon moral boundaries, but certainly they want the same end result. For me to no longer be living.

  do us all a favor and DIE.

  Kill urself u piece of shit.

  No, it gets even more specific. They don’t just want me dead, they want me to commit suicide. Apparently the best way I can contribute to this world is by leaving it.

  My hands are flapping again. Tears are running down my face. I am losing control. Slipping into a vertiginous vortex. I used to think loneliness was being stuck with only the one voice in your head. I was wrong. Loneliness is hearing everyone else’s voices too, except they are stuck on repeat: Die, die, die.

  —

  A knock on my door. Then it opens. I don’t bother looking up. Not sure I could even if I wanted to. I know it’s Miney by the one-knuckled sound and the smell that follows. Her new sandalwood perfume and dirty hair.

  “It’s down,” she says. “The link. It’s down. I thought you’d want to know.”

  I don’t say anything. Continue to rock, head to knees, my hands tucked in, so the flapping makes me swing forward and back. My mom must have gone to Principal Hoch after all. Too bad it’s too late. Everyone who matters has seen it, and I’m sure it’s cached on at least a hundred hard drives.

  Kit will never talk to me again.

  Miney asks if she can rub my back. I shake my head no. Once. Hard. I can’t quite make out words yet. Orange. The world is orange, like the blazing center of a cartoon sun. Or a volcano.

  No touching. Just oblivion. Give the people what they want, as the expression goes.

  “Okay. I love you, you know. This will be okay. I promise, Little D,” she says, but it comes out all garbled. Instead there is orange, and a sound like roaring. Not soothing like the ocean, but loud. Deafening. Annihilating. “I know this feels like the end of the world, and I’ve been there, believe me, I’ve been there. But you will be okay.”

  But in order to be okay, I need to be here. And I’m not. I’m floating away. The balloon inside my head is getting smaller and smaller until it disappears altogether into the blue sky.

  —

  I don’t go to school for the next three days. I stay in my room and fill the time with my flapping and with pi. I sleep too. Long, dark sleep that is neither restorative nor dream-filled. It is as close to dead as I can get without dying.

  Miney and my mom take turns checking on me, and sometimes they sit on my bed. A safe two and a half feet away so we don’t touch. But they rock with me, their rhythm matching mine, and I like it. The almost-company. A tiny reminder that I am not alone. Not completely.

  On what must be Tuesday afternoon, one day in, Trey knocks on the door. I do not stop rocking. I do not lift my head. There will be no guitar lesson today.

  “I’m here for you, buddy. Whenever you’re ready,” Trey says, but I am not ready.

  Later I hear Trey and Miney in the hall. I try to pay attention, as if listening to their words and translating them into sentences I understand will help bring me back.

  “You’ve done good work with him,” Miney says, and I get stuck on that word, work. “He’ll be okay.”

  “You think?” Trey asks. “I don’t know. That was…scary. Has this happened before? This bad?”

  “Not really. Not like this.”

  “I thought we were making progress.” I think about guitar riffs. Latch my brain onto the sequence of notes Trey taught me last week.

  “You were. He’s been doing great. He made a friend. He’s been cracking jokes. He seemed to be really connecting…until now,” Miney says, and then their words get softer. I can’t tell if it’s because they are moving farther down the hall or if it’s my brain closing back in.

  —

  This will end soon, I realize much later. I feel the despair seeping away. That’s not true. The despair—that horrifying realization that I am not just disliked but hated, and that I have managed to lose the only friend I’ve ever had—that feeling is not going anywhere. Still, I decide it’s time to come back, and I feel my mind hardening around its edges, putting its tray tables and seats upright in preparation for landing.

  I swing my legs over the side of the bed and stand. I’m dizzy with hunger and greedily suck up the smoothie my mom has left on my desk. I shower, and when I go to wash my hair I am shocked by how little there is. I had forgotten about my makeover. Afterward, when I open my closet and see that my mother must have gotten rid of my old shirts and khakis, I fight back the panic. I reach for my new clothes. If normal people can handle buttons and creases and hoods, so can I.

  When I walk downstairs, Miney and my mom are chatting quietly in the kitchen. My mom offers to make me my favorite sandwich or hea
t up chicken soup, as if I’ve been laid up with the flu. Miney’s hair is back to its normal color, and she is not wearing pajamas. It occurs to me that this is the first time I’ve seen her dressed since she’s been home. Something deep inside of me sighs at this realization, loosens up an invisible knot.

  “I’m going to school today,” I announce, too loud, I think. This is the first time I have spoken in three days, and I’m out of practice. I am going to school and if anyone asks me to die, I will say, No, thank you, and keep walking. Or maybe I won’t say anything at all. Either way, Gabriel and Justin are the ones who should be suffering, not me. I did nothing wrong.

  “Not right now,” my mom says, laying out an elaborate assortment of food in front of me, each item on a separate plate, just how I like it.

  “I’m not scared,” I say.

  “It’s not that, Little D. It’s evening. School’s closed,” Miney says, and she reaches over and touches my shoulder. She might be testing me. I don’t flinch.

  I look out the window and see that the sky has turned dark and blue. A bruise. I want the world to be green again. Like Kit’s eyes.

  “Eat,” my mother says. “And then we’ll figure out what to do next.”

  Her we sounds nice—not like the we of What are we going to do with you? This we implies that I am not alone, that we are all on Team David. I imagine us as a ragtag group of do-gooders on the side of the underdog and the wronged. Team David, in my imagination, looks a lot like the Bad News Bears.

  “Okay,” I say, and then I dig in, making my way clockwise from plate to plate. After a little while I look up, and my mother and sister are still here, sitting and watching me eat.

  “Welcome home,” my mother says, her voice thick with surprise, like I had gone away to a place she thought I might never come back from.

  —

  Later, Miney and I take a walk around the block. We bundle up in our winter coats and scarves and gloves, like we used to when we were little and my mother would send us out to play in the snow. I used to hate being forced outside and away from my books, into the wet and the cold. I remember the stinging flesh in the gap between my sleeve and my glove, how that one inch of exposed skin ruined everything. I never understood how Miney could keep on building snowmen and making snow angels with cold wrists.