By the Time You Read This, I'll Be Dead (6 page)

“Aha!” He points. “I knew it.”

He’s insufferable. I learned that word from Maggie Louise.

Kim pulls up.

“Yo. Yo, mama.” He shoots to his feet before me. He waves at her as he extends a hand to help me up. But I can’t. His touch will contaminate me.

I drop my book into my bag and, rushing by him, scurry to the curb.

“Hello, Mrs. R,” he says as he opens the door for me. He’s beaten me to the car. “How was your day?”

He’s in my way. Please, read my mind now. Go away.

Kim says, “Long.”

“What sort of work do you do?” he asks.

Move. Okay?

She answers, “I’m an auditor.”

“Oh wow. That sounds fascinating. I’m a numbers man myself.”

Mom meets my eyes. The panic on my face must clue her in.

“Would you mind?” she says to him. “Daelyn has an appointment.”

“Oh.” He steps back, right into me. Clenching my arm to keep his balance and/or steady me, he says, “Sorry.” My skin burns. He smells like hair gel and boy and this blue-white heat streaks through my body.

He steps away, and I feel a panic attack coming on. An object slips into my hand. The edges are pointy sharp, but instinctively my fingers curl around them.

“Nice talking to you, D.” He waits to ease the car door shut behind me. Flicking a stiff thumb at Kim, he makes a clicking noise in his cheek and says, “Catch you later, calculator.”

It makes Kim laugh.

“He’s cute,” she says as we drive off. “What’s his name again?”

I take a deep breath, then crank up the radio to drown out the static.

I try to throw the note into the trash can, but it sticks to my clammy palm. I fling my book bag onto the rocking chair and shake the note off onto my desk.

If I open the note, it means I care. I can’t care. Not now. I’m on this path, this mission. The only power I have in my life.

Perched on the edge of my bed, I stare at the note. Forget it. I move to the other side of the bed and gaze out the window. A guy is tossing a Frisbee to his dog who’s leaping up to snag it. He motions to the dog, like, higher? The dog barks. Higher? He’s teasing him.

I hate teasing. That dog should bite that man.

“Hey, Daelyn. You want my brownie?” This girl in elementary school taunted me. Mean girl. They’re always mean. I got up to take the brownie and she threw it to her friend across the cafeteria. “Go get it, bloater. Fetch.”

I almost did. I wanted that brownie. The only time I felt happy was when I was eating. Food was my BFF.

The dog retrieves the Frisbee.

I twist my torso to look at my desk. At my computer. The note beside it.

I close my eyes and black out the day. The exhaustion of living through it, surviving. Reaching up, I rip the Velcro tape on my neck brace to loosen it. From the front, I remove the hard plastic tube, then lie back on the bed, the brace dangling from my hand. It clunks on the floor.

The relief to be free of bondage is incredible. I should go without the brace and collapse my trachea again. Destroy it the way I did when I . . . failed.

Unfortunately I start to cough. Kim runs in. “Are you okay?” She must’ve been lurking outside the door.

I hold up a hand. Kim jerks me upright and the phlegm clears from my throat. She runs out for a glass of water.

I want to tell her, Please, Kim. Stop trying to save me. You couldn’t then; you can’t now.

When we first moved to this condo six months ago, and even before that while I was recuperating, I used to keep track of who came to check on me and when. I’d note the time. Dad, 9:15. Mom, 11:56. Dad, 4:32. Mom, 8:01. They never came together. Occasionally one of them would linger at the door.

During those times they’d stand there watching me watching them, I’d pray, Please. Put a pillow to my face. Clench a hand around my throat. Stab me. Shoot me. Put me out of everyone’s misery.

Why did you give birth to such a loser? Why didn’t you admit I was hopeless and fat and stop trying to make me fit in? This world wasn’t meant for me. I was born too soon, or too late. Too defective.

I wish I could tell my parents, “If you want to help me, help me die.”

I wonder, Are they required to fill out a 24-hour suicide watch form? Is The Defect at home? Check. Is It alive? Check.

Why did they bother with the corrective surgery on my throat anyway? Waste of money. They threw away, or hid from me, everything with sharp edges, or breakable. Picture frames. Pottery. Did they think they could suicide-proof this place?

I want to tell them, “Chip, Kim, there is no way to suicide-proof a person.”

I key in the Final Forum, “My 2nd grade teacher told my parents I was hypersensitive. That I cried over nothing.”

Nothing. You call it nothing when people make fun of you all the time? When you are always the target? You call it nothing when people
touch
you? My veins throb in my neck and I clench my jaw.

I key faster, “No one wanted to sit by me. They said I smelled. This kid plugged his nose every time he passed by me. He’d say real loud, ‘P.U. Did you fart?’ I wanted to fart in his face.”

I pause over the keyboard. How stupid. I remember that like it’s yesterday. All the mean things people did to me, said to me. They’ve built up.

What time is it? Late. It’s pitch black in my room and silent.

Kim and Chip are sound asleep—I hope.

“A while later,” I continue to key, “we came back from gym and my face was red from doing gymnastics. I was overweight. Needless to say, gym was not my best subject. Everyone sat down and there was this loud farting sound. People laughed and pointed at me. That boy had put a whoopee cushion on my seat.”

Their laughter echoes in my ears, still. I have to cover them to mute the volume.

A minute later, I open my eyes and read what I’ve written. It seems trivial. Even funny, to some people. But back then, in second grade, it was like a defining moment in my life.

J_Doe111091 responded:
My teacher used to play pranks on me. Like he’d lock me in the art closet after school. Then he molested me.

He, or she, should’ve put that in
Sexual Assault
.

I remember my teacher was laughing at me too about the whoopee cushion. Big joke. I felt myself shrinking and fading away. I wanted to eat. I wanted to die. All year long boys made farting sounds with their hands in their armpits. Girls called me THE BIG FAT FARTING PIG.

J_Doe092892 writes:
I quit school halfway through 8th grade. I couldn’t take the shit. It was either kill everyone or kill myself.

I couldn’t quit. My parents wouldn’t let me.

I’m still back there, dying inside.

* * *

If I prop up two pillows I can lie down in bed without my brace. I wish I had a laptop. My head can turn without too much trauma if I’m at a forty-five-degree angle. I see the wedge of paper. It can sit there for the rest of my life.

15 days. Occupy my mind. How many hours is that? I break down the equation in my head:

15 days X 24 hours in a day = ?

15 is the sum of 10 and 5.

10 X 24 = 240

5 X 20 = 100

5 X 4 = 20

240 + 100 + 20 = 360

360 is the circumference of a circle. I will have come full circle.

In how many minutes? 360 X 60 minutes. Too many to calculate in my head. More than a few. My focus wanes and my eyes flicker over it. I’m not opening the note.

Self-control. He got that right.

I gaze up at the ceiling. Through it. Past Kim and Chip’s room on the second floor into the sky, space, heaven, hell. Who says hell is down? It could be up. It could be next door to heaven. Hell could be a subset of heaven, like a ghetto in the middle of a glass city.

How long will it take for me to get to where I’m going? It will be instantaneous, I hope. Do you actually walk through the light? Of course you don’t walk, because you’re no longer a physical presence. Do you feel it, though? Do you know you’ve passed to the other side? On TV you do.

I’ve never been afraid of the dark. I’m more afraid of the day, of people. I love the night. The solitude. Well, I don’t love it. I don’t feel love. I hate people, so I hope when I get there it isn’t crowded. I hope the light is a momentary phenomenon and the other side is completely black.

And silent.

My throat feels like it’s closing, so I roll over onto my side. Secret note from Hervé. I’m so sure.

It worries me that Chip might see what I write in the Final Forum. I didn’t tell Chip or Kim what was happening at school. Not the later stuff, after the closet incident. I don’t want to go there yet.

They had to hear my incessant plea: “I don’t want to go to school. Please don’t make me.” Day after day.

Year after year. “Please don’t make me go.”

“You have to go,” Kim would say. “It’s a new school. Make a new start.”

“Sticks and stones,” from Chip. Words will only kill you.

I gave up pleading with them. I just gave up.

I return to the desk and delete my entries from the forum.

I’m not going to open that damn note. Or that closet door.

— 14 DAYS —

I don’t sleep. All night long I’m wide awake, thinking, Secrets, secrets, secrets. There are secrets in my past no one needs to know. Secrets in my present that might kill Kim and Chip. I don’t want to take my secrets with me when I go. When I pass through the light, I want to be free of everything and everyone.

Through-the-Light.

I’m addicted.

Welcome, J_Doe071894. You have 14 days left. Will you be prepared? Yes
No

I touch
Yes
.

It’s dim in my room; the sun isn’t up. There’s no stirring overhead and no one’s come to check on me for an hour. Maybe, finally, they’re trusting me to make it through the night.

The sad truth is, they should never trust me.

I need to know how secure I am online. In the menu I find the privacy policy and read it all the way through.

Through-the-Light collects no personal information about its members. Your activities, while monitored by system administrators, are transparent to networks and central servers. Our patented Enigma encryption software completely cloaks access, usage, and online transactions. URL crawls to and from Through-the-Light are undetectable even for authorized users.

Really? It seems too good to be true. I don’t trust it. I don’t trust anyone.

Another line catches my eye.
Once you delete your account, you can never reenter
Through-the-Light
.

One chance. No turning back.

My stomach churns. This is my final opportunity to get it right.

I check the DOD list. Only three names. Wait. It’s populating as I watch. Four, five, six. People must live in different time zones or something. Eight, nine. Live and die.

Secrets. I can’t take them with me. If I do, when I go, when I arrive at my final destination, I’ll be . . . impure. I have no choice but to trust that they’re safe here.

I touch
Final Forum
.

Bullied.

I key, “I wasn’t the only fat kid in school. There were others. They got bullied too. This one kid, a fifth grader, brought a knife to school and had a wack attack, just yelling and threatening people. It happened on the playground at lunch. He got expelled. I heard rumors that he moved, then killed himself.”

J_Doe050881 writes:
You try to take on the tormentors. But there are always more where they came from.

Exactly. So your only other choice is to take out the tormented.

This other girl was a cutter, I remember. She was in my reading class. I could see the scabs on her arms. At ten, she was already cutting.

At ten, I was planning my death.

An alarm clock buzzes upstairs and I power down. The sun’s up. A new day is beginning. Or ending, depending on where you are.

Already I’m exhausted. I rest my forehead on the desk, but it stretches the back of my neck and that hurts. I turn my head. There’s the note.

Secret note from Hervé. He’d said, “Did you get it?” Before he forced this note on me.

I get up and retrieve my book bag from the rocking chair. I open the front pocket where he’d slipped
Desire in the Mist
. What did Hervé leave in it, a rat turd?

Inside the front cover, printed in blue ink, is one word:
hervehotsu
.

What is that? Portuguese? Hervehotsu. Stupid. It’s like a screen name.

A screen name. HerveHotsU.

I throw the book in the trash.

The shower goes on upstairs and footsteps creak in the hall. Watching. Always watching. I snatch the note and take it with me to the bathroom.

On the toilet, I dig out the flaps and unfold the wedge of note. In black pen, like calligraphy, elegant letters centered on the page:

IM me

The last time I got baited into IMing, people wrote nasty, hurtful messages.

I won’t set myself up again.

I tear the note to bits and flush it.

School is school. I dreamwalk down the halls. I pass the time wishing I was gone. We get our tests back in econ and I got a D-. A red scrawl under the grade reads:
See me after class
.

For what? Confession? Why did Kim and Chip pick a Catholic school? I don’t even believe in God.

My test is snatched off my desk. This girl sitting next to me covers my paper with her arm and does something. Writes on it. When the teacher isn’t looking, she slides the test back onto my desk.

She’d extended the legs of the
D
to make it look like an
A
.
A-
.

She’s smiling.

At me.

Why?

The bell rings and I’m the first one out the door. I hustle to the restroom. In a stall, I rip the test into shreds and cram them into the used tampons container.

Don’t touch me.

He’s there after school sitting on the bench with his arms resting across the back. My stomach flips. STOP.

Why? Why are people making contact NOW?

I retreat into the building, into the bowels of hell.

He needs to go. They all do. They need to know I’m not doing this with them.