By the Time You Read This, I'll Be Dead (9 page)

My teacher starts yelling. What I see in my nightmares are all the eyes on me. White eyes in black space.

Lines scroll across the monitor. J_Doe021594 has written:
My father used to lock me in the cellar on Sundays. He’d get drunk and come at me with a belt. He’d strap my back until I was bloody, then tie me up and rape me.

Terror.

I was terrorized too.

One girl from my class said, “Ew, you stink” and they all backed away from me. I was holding my hands out in front and they were filthy and reeked of urine. The next thing I know I’m in the principal’s office and she’s demanding to know why I was in the boys’ restroom. I can’t tell her because . . . I can’t. She calls my mom.
Perv perv perv perv perv perv
, all the voices jam together.

STOP.

J_Doe022786 writes:
In my middle school there’s this initiation or hazing ritual I guess you call it where the 7th graders, the sevies, get their heads dunked in dirty toilet bowls for swirlies. While someone held down my head, though, someone else yanked down my pants. He shoved a pencil up my ass. That wasn’t part of the initiation. I was a chosen sevie.

We’re all chosen here.

On that day, like all the others, Mom came to pick me up. I know she wasn’t happy about being called away from work again. I hear her exhale the exasperation.

She asks, “What happened this time, Daelyn?”

I start to cry.

The principal says, “Apparently she sneaks into the boys’ restroom.”

“No, I don’t!”

Mom looks down on me.

I sniffle and try to calm myself. “They pushed me in. They locked me in a stall.” I can’t describe the rest.
Please, Mom, don’t make me.

Mom says to the principal, “Why would she sneak into the boys’ restroom?”

The principal doesn’t reply, like the answer is obvious.

Mom hesitates for a long minute. Then she says, “I believe Daelyn. She’s never lied to me.”

I hadn’t, up to then. I’d just never told her the whole truth.

The principal asks me, “Do you know who did it? Can you identify the boys?”

That’s when the roaring starts in my ears.

“Tell me!” the principal demands. “Tell me who did it.” She’s screaming at me, like the whole thing is my fault. I have to cover my ears.

Mom squats down to be eye level with me and takes my hands away from my ears. “We can’t help you, honey, unless you tell us who it was.”

I swallow hard. In a tiny voice, I say, “I don’t remember.”

“I think you do,” the principal says accusingly.

Mom’s squeezing my shoulders, clenching my arms so tight she’s squeezing the life out of me. “Tell us, Daelyn. Tell me.”

The consequence of ratting them out . . . Not only that, but the humiliation. It was a game. Play the fat girl.

The principal says, “You’ve never reported any of this to the mediators. I don’t have one report.” She tells Mom, “We have a student mediator program to handle bullying.”

How ridiculous. You expect people to police themselves?

The principal adds, “We have a zero tolerance policy.”

Zero tolerance for the truth.

In the car on the way home, I broke down completely. Mom said, “Daelyn, for heaven’s sake. Will you stop crying? It was a silly prank. Maybe those boys tease you because secretly they like you.” She smiled at me.

I almost threw up.

Mom said, “Just forget it. It’s all over now.”

It’ll never be over.

She added, “Let’s not tell your father, okay? You know how he gets.”

I didn’t tell him. And I never told her the whole truth. What would it matter? There was nothing she could do; nothing anyone can do or will do.

An IM pops up on the screen.

herveh0tsu: Yo D. Whassup?

I power down.

— 9 DAYS —

He’s waiting for me at the gate, which he’s never done. His arms are crossed and he looks pissed.

What?

I stand behind the gate and wait. He doesn’t move or speak. Fine.

I open the gate and he has to step out of my way as I come through. He says, “If you’re not going to communicate with me, I want my laptop back.”

I don’t respond.

“Come on,” he says, steepling his hands in a plea. “Please?”

His eyes are deep, dark blue, and it startles me to a stop. I can’t notice the color of his eyes. Ducking my head, I scuttle to the bench.

He says, “My last friend from around here moved to Germany, and everyone else in my long distance learning school lives out of state. I don’t know them anyway. I’m lonely.” He’s wearing flip-flops and his toenails are painted purple. I didn’t know boys painted their nails. I didn’t know they got lonely. But it explains why he’s talking to me, at least partly.

He stands there and I take the laptop out of my bag.

“Does it work okay?” he asks. “Do you need me to come over and install anything?”

I hand it to him, but he won’t take it.

“You said you need it for ten days, so I’m keeping track. Why ten days?”

When I sigh wearily, he collapses on the ground at my feet, bending one knee to his chest and looping an arm around it.

He has facial fuzz, kind of sketchy looking. He’s cute—for a dork. Too cute for me. I clench the laptop to my chest and close up inside, like the clam I am.

“Did you get my IM?”

I don’t know why I’m trembling and my breathing is uneven. With shaky hands, I exchange the laptop for my book. I open to chapter thirteen.
Maggie Louise tapped lightly on Jean-Jacques’s door. At this hour, midnight, the manor was alive with noises of the night. The grandfather clock ticking in the parlor; a breeze off the moor clattering a loose shutter; ghosts of roomers swirling up the staircase and clashing in the hall. Maggie Louise’s senses were heightened, and when Jean-Jacques opened the door, all her desires awakened.

Maggie Louise would never allow herself to be violated.

He lets go of his leg and peers off to the side.

Look, I think. I didn’t ask you to come here. I don’t care if your feelings are hurt or you’re disappointed, or you think you can’t even attract a fat, ugly, mute girl.

I don’t care. I don’t care.

“I have Hodgkin’s lymphoma,” he says.

My breath catches. Isn’t that cancer?

“I was in remission and thought I had it beat, then right before my last follow-up, I found a lump.”

He’s making this up.

“Relapses almost always occur within the first two years. Almost. Always . . .” His voice trails away.

I’m not looking at him, even though the sun is shining on his face and glistening in his hair. His head falls back and his toes stretch up. “I’m not telling you this so you’ll feel sorry for me.”

He snags my eye and arches his eyebrows. “Unless that works.”

Everyone’s a liar. Everyone I’ve ever known. He’s lying about the cancer.

Twenty-three J_Doe’s on the DOD today. Twenty-three completers. Kim pokes her head in. “Your father’s working late, so it’ll just be us for dinner. Where’d you get that?”

I shut the lid and set the laptop aside on my bed. “Did Santana give it to you?” Yes, Kim. Because he’s in love with me. He finds me beautiful and desirable.

I’m the biggest liar of all.

I scoot off the edge of the mattress and Kim says, “You’re not wearing your brace.”

I walk to my desk and open a drawer. It’s empty. My book bag is slung over the back of the rocking chair, and I go over to it, dig around for what I need. A pen. The back of a math problem sheet I never bothered to start. I write: “Can I take a walk?” I hand it to Kim.

She reads the note. “Where?”

I set the pen on the desk and gaze into my blank monitor.

Kim looks at me, down at the note, up at me. She lowers the note to her side and goes, “I don’t suppose you want me to walk with you.”

I feel her eyes, her overarching need to reach me. I’m too far gone.

“Okay,” she says. “But I’m going to follow you.”

I check the clock on the mantel before leaving the house. Timing is everything. When and how. The route to school is mapped in my head. Right on 26th Avenue. Left on Wadsworth Boulevard. Three miles, approximately, to Alameda and the Belmar Shopping Center, then two blocks east to St. Mary’s.

It’s twenty minutes by car. What I need to know is how long it will take me on foot to get home from school.

I didn’t realize Kim meant she was going to follow me in the car.

She putters along behind, pulling into driveways or side streets every few minutes to let traffic pass. One guy honks and flips her the bird.

Flip him back, Kim.

She just takes it.

A new Walgreens is going up at the halfway point. My feet hurt. I should’ve changed out of my school loafers. Except they’re the only shoes I have now.

Kim draws up alongside me and rolls down the passenger window, “Where are you going, Daelyn?”

She doesn’t know the route by now?

“What are you doing?”

Clocking time, Kim.

You won’t know until it’s over. You won’t find me in time.

I suppose I could do it at night, drug them before they go to bed, but like I said, I don’t have access to drugs. Anyway, drugs are unpredictable. I might kill them, and that is not my intent.

No, this time they won’t even think to check on me. They’ll both be at work.

The Comfort Dental sign rises in the distance. My throat is dry and my legs ache. This is more physical exertion than my body is used to. Worthless shell of a body. I hope they cremate it.

Don’t keep the urn.

Finally I see the school. The fence around St. Mary’s Academy. A raw cough rips my vocal cords—what’s left of them.

“Hey.” His voice carries across the street. “Daelyn.” In my peripheral vision, I see him launch off a hammock on his porch and lope toward me. He seems perfectly fine. He isn’t sick. He has that stupid rat in his hand.

“Whassup?” He falls into step beside me. I’m moving again. I’m half a block from the gate.

I panic. There’s a flaw in my plan. I don’t have a watch. Time means nothing, except for now.

I whirl and frantically jab at my wrist. Santana frowns. Then he gets it, because he says, “I don’t know. I don’t wear a watch.”

Damn. DAMN.

Kim’s CR-V chugs to the curb. I rush over and lean my head in the window. Five forty-eight on the car clock. My breathing slows. I calculate: An hour and thirteen minutes. Add three minutes from the girls’ restroom by the office where I’ll wait for the all clear to leave.

I’ll have to go to first period, to make sure my attendance is recorded. Then I’ll write a note to my teacher that my throat feels swollen and I have to go to the office to call my mom.

“You don’t look so hot,” he says. “I mean, you always look hot. But you look all red and puffy.”

I hack a dry cough.

“Are you all right?”

I bend over to wheeze in a lung-filling breath.

He touches my back.

Don’t touch me!

“Daelyn?” Kim calls out the window. A door slams.

My arm is yanked backward, pulling me, my body across the street and onto the bench. He hovers over me.

I can’t catch my breath.

“You need water?” he asks.

I’m gasping.

“Here, hold Hervé.” The rat drops in my lap.

“I’ll run in and get her some water,” I hear him say. “Does she have asthma or something? Do you have an inhaler?”

Kim says, “Water. Yes. Thank you.”

There’s a rat in my lap. A silent scream claws up my chest and constricts my breathing even more. The rat leaps onto my shoulder and a
scree
sounds in my ears. Is that me? The scaly tail tickles my arm.

Kim stands there.

Take it! I want to scream. Get it off me.

“Does it bite?” she asks.

How do I know? The whiskers tickle my neck.

Kim lowers herself to the bench, keeping her distance. “Why didn’t you ask me to drive you here if you needed to come back to school?” She sounds mad.

“Did you forget some homework?” She lets out a little shriek as the rat leaps into her lap.

I’m wheezing and shaking all over. I might be dying.

“Here we go.” He gallops up with a plastic cup, which he thrusts in my face. He lifts my spazzing arm to take it. The cup is slimy, like water sloshed out and mixed with his sweaty hand.

Holding my hand, he raises the cup to my lips.

Stop touching me.

Oh, God. Liquid.

I swig the whole cup of cold water.

“Better?”

He takes his hand away and I blink yes.

“You can pet him,” he says to Kim. “In fact, here. He loves to have his belly rubbed.” Santana plucks the rat off Kim’s lap and upends him; stretches him out lengthwise in front of Kim.

I can breathe again.

“That’s okay,” Kim goes. “I don’t care to touch him.”

I smile inwardly as she flattens herself against the back of the bench.

“Awww.” Santana lifts the rat to his face and nuzzles his stomach. “The ladies are not appreciating your rockin’ rat dudeness, my man.” He loops Hervé over his head and onto his shoulders.

I’m not watching, really. I’m still feeling the soothing liquid sliding down my throat as I press the cool cup to my forehead.

Kim scoots closer and loops an arm across my shoulder. I feel the heaviness. Don’t feel. I can’t look at her because I know what I’ll see.

Helplessness, weakness, a reflection of me.

“Oh. Here.” Santana digs something out of his pocket and drops it in my lap. An energy bar. “Ariel buys these by the case.”

Kim twists her head up to Santana. “Thank you.” She stands. She appears to compose herself. “We were on our way to Dairy Queen.”

No. I know what she’s going to do.

“Would you like to join us?”

I spring to my feet and the energy bar flies. I shove the cup at Santana and head for the car.

He says, loud enough for me to hear, “Thanks, but I promised Ariel I’d wait for her. It’s my night to cook.”

Kim’s footsteps behind me. Santana’s too. “Hey, you should go to On the Border in Belmar. Ask to sit in Ariel’s section. Order the guac. While she’s making it at the table, tell her Santana says a little heavy on the cilantro, hon.” I turn and see him grin.

I don’t care who Ariel is. Ariel who?

“Rain check?” Santana says to Kim.

“Definitely.” She smiles.

I get in the car.

He licks his index finger and sticks it in the air. “Low pressure trough dropping down from the north. Cold wave expected to move in by midnight. Bundle up, ladies.”

Through the window, he hands me the energy bar. His eyes, his slight smile. I take it. Santana goes softly, “Hervé says eat more, skinnybones.”

I’m not that skinny. I’m not fat anymore, but I’m not skinny. I’ll never be skinny. I went to fat camp. We’re not going to talk about what happened there. I was
forced
to go. I still feel fat. I’ll always be fat and ugly.

I navigate to the Final Forum, to
Bullied
. I need to open the closet now and release that fear.