Lessons from a Dead Girl

Leah Greene is dead.

Before my mother even answers the ringing telephone downstairs, I know.

“Hello?” I hear my mother say politely. “Yes? Yes, this is Laine’s mother.”

There is a long, quiet pause.

“Yes? A party? Drinking? Oh … well —”

Another pause.

“Leah Greene? What? Oh, my God! Are you sure? How?”

As I listen to her panicked voice, I feel the tiny bricks that have walled away certain memories continue to crumble. I squeeze my eyes shut and cover my ears. But the sound of my mother’s cries downstairs pushes against the wall and loosens the mortar. All I see behind my eyelids is Leah. Leah with her red-glossed lips. Leah standing above me. Leah telling our secret to a crowded room of strangers and my only friends in the world. Leah walking away, leaving me in the rubble of my ruined life.

I hate you! I wish you were dead!

I had screamed the words inside my head, as if I were seven and not seventeen. Somehow, I think she must have heard me.

Through my bedroom window, the sky is clear blue and the sun shines a warm spot on my bed, already taken by my cat, Jack. He calmly cleans his belly, his back paw bent behind his head. As he licks, I see a flash of him dressed in baby-doll clothes. Leah is holding him under his front legs and making him dance. And I see me, laughing, even though I want her to stop.

Jack closes his eyes when he finishes licking and settles his head against my foot through the covers. The fur around his eyes looks gray, and his coat is full of dandruff where he can’t reach anymore.

“Good kitty,” I whisper, rubbing his head through the covers with my toe. He purrs back.

My bedroom door is open. I watch it, waiting for my mother to appear.

Her steps are slow and heavy on the stairs, as if she’s carrying something large inside her. She hesitates in the doorway, looking in at me safe in my bed.

“Something’s happened,” she says, carefully stepping into my room. Her voice is quiet. I don’t move. The cat shifts and starts licking again.

My mother sits on the bed next to me and touches my shoulder. “There was an accident,” she says.

I turn my head away from her.

She moves closer and tries again. “There was a”— she pauses —“a terrible accident.”

She doesn’t tell me what kind of accident. Maybe she doesn’t want me to know the details. But it’s too late for that.

Her hand presses hard against my shoulder. “Lainey?”

I should be crying or asking what happened. I should look more surprised. But all I feel is this overwhelming sense of guilt and fear, and they’re fighting each other inside my chest.

It can’t be true. But it is. It’s over. And it’s my fault.

My mother waits for me to reply, but I stay silent. I look away from her and wait for her to go.

When she finally gets up to leave, she asks if I’ll be OK. I nod and roll over.

She goes back downstairs and gets on the phone again. She talks in a low, nervous voice.
Terrible accident. Terrible. Terrible.

The thoughts in my head echo her words.
It’s over. Over.

Each time she says Leah’s name, I get pulled back there, to the time when Leah and I were still best friends. The feelings come rushing into my chest. I try to shake my head. Swallow. Push them back down. Strengthen the mortar and rebuild my wall. But I see us anyway. One scene after another. Leah, always the leader, teaching me the complicated rules about trust and secrets and what it means to be her best friend. There were so many hard lessons. But what good are they now? What good are lessons from a dead girl?

Leah and I are in the fifth grade. We’re at recess when Leah motions me to the far side of the playground, where the boys usually play kickball, only this day it’s too muddy even for them. I look around to make sure it’s really me she’s pointing to.

“Come on, Lainey!” she calls. Until this moment, we’ve only been “outside of school” friends, if you could call it that. Our sisters are friends, so they’re convinced we should be, too. Every so often they try to get us to spend time together. But whenever Leah comes over or I go to her house, I can tell she wishes I was more like my sister, Christi. Or more like herself.

Christi pretends not to notice the obvious reasons Leah and I don’t become close, but you would have to be blind not to see them. Leah is popular and I’m not. Leah is also beautiful.
Everyone
wants to be Leah’s best friend. But me? Most people don’t even know who I am. Christi doesn’t get that people like Leah don’t want to be friends with people like me.

“Lai-ney,” Leah sings to me from across the playground. She gestures at me with her hand again.

I run to her obediently. Who wouldn’t want to be seen hanging out with Leah Greene? She’s smart, so the teachers love her. She’s beautiful, so the boys love her. Even the boys who still say they don’t like girls. And because all the boys and all the teachers love her, all the girls want to be her friend — and learn how to be just like her.

As we trudge along toward the field, our shoes sink into the mud and make a slurping sound with each step. The teacher on recess duty calls to us to stay out of the mud. Leah sings back in her sweet voice, “We wi-ill!” But we’re already well into it. I keep following her until we’re far enough out to be alone, even though we’re in the open.

“I have a secret,” she tells me, grinning. She pulls a marker in the shape of a mouse out of her jacket pocket. The cap is the mouse’s head, and when she pulls it off, there’s a marker tip inside. She gives me the head to hold in one hand and takes my other hand in hers, turning it over palm up. Then I watch, amazed, as she carefully writes
L.G. + L.M. = F.F.
along the crease in my hand that she says is my lifeline. When she’s done, she writes the same thing on her own palm.

“There,” she says, smiling as if she’s won a game. “Know what it means?”

I think I do, but I shake my head
no
anyway.
Us? F.F.?
I try not to smile too eagerly.

“Leah Greene plus Laine McCarthy equals Friends Forever,” she says. Her lips part to show her white teeth as she grins at me.

My whole body smiles at her soft words. They don’t make any sense, but at the moment I don’t want to think about that.

Leah takes my hand again and pushes our palms together just as the bell rings. I look around to make sure no one sees us holding hands, but Leah doesn’t seem to care. Her hand is warm and dry, and I feel a strange, thrilling tingle shoot right up my arm when we touch, as if she has magic inside.

Friends forever.
But why?

“Don’t show anyone,” she says as we race side by side to the students already lined up to go inside. Some of the girls eye us curiously.

I squeeze my hand shut and hold our secret in it. Any time I start to wonder why on earth Leah Greene wants to be my best friend, I tell myself not to think about it.

All that day, each time we see each other, we wave our closed fists and grin. I feel so deliriously happy, I think my lips will crack from smiling so hard. I sneak peeks at the purple letters on my hand to remind myself it isn’t a dream. I feel taller. Better than the girls around me. I feel a difference in how I walk. How I answer Mrs. Faughnan’s questions. I’m not no one anymore. I’m friends with Leah Greene. Friends forever.

F.F. with Leah Greene means I sit next to her at the popular table at lunch. It means I get invited to birthday parties. I have friends, even if they are second friends, the way you have second cousins. They’re distant and it’s not quite clear how you are connected, but the connection means you’re invited to all the big events out of obligation, even if they don’t speak to you or acknowledge that you’re there.

Just before school gets out that year, Leah pulls me from our group during recess and leads me out to the field again, just like she did that first time she declared our friendship. She pulls a marker out of her coat pocket. This one is red. It’s the thick kind my mom uses to make sale posters at the antique store my parents run.

Leah carefully holds my hand still while she writes
F.F.
on my palm. Then she writes the same on hers and presses our hands together, just like the first time. Like before, my hand tingles when she touches me. I smile when I feel it, that magic spark between us. I check her face to see if she felt something, too. She smiles back at me.

“It’s permanent,” she says, putting the marker in her pocket. “Like us.”

We grin at each other so our teeth show. My insides dance.

Some other girls come over and plead with us to come play Leah’s version of tag, which involves the girls chasing the boys until the last boy gets caught and has to pick a girl to kiss. I’ve never been picked. The girls smile at Leah but seem to sneer at me when she isn’t looking, as if they know I hate this game and why. No boy would ever kiss me.

Last year, someone left a note on my desk that said,
Are you a boy or a girl?
I put it in my pocket and waited to reread it when I got home. Alone in my room, I carefully unfolded the note, trying to touch it as little as possible. It was written in messy pencil on yellow lined paper. I stared at the words and cried.

Christi walked in on me and made me show her the note. I tried to crumple it up in my fist, but she pried it out of my fingers.

“People are jerks,” she told me. “Ignore them.” Then she took the note and threw it in the woodstove.

Leah gives me her special half-smile before running away from us. Her long hair whips back and dances behind her, and we all run to keep up.

After school, my mother picks us up in our old, beat-up minivan. Leah’s mom asked my mom to take Leah for the afternoon so she could bring Brooke to a doctor’s appointment. Christi is at piano lessons, so when we get home, it’s just Leah and me.

We race up the stairs side by side, but when we get to the top, Leah pushes past me and runs down the hall to my room. I chase after her, and we leap onto my bed so the headboard thuds against the wall.

“Let’s play in the doll closet,” Leah says.

The doll closet is a crouch-in closet in the upstairs bathroom that Christi and I share. It has a child-size table and chairs to sit at and a wooden play stove and refrigerator my father made for us when we were little. It also has lots of our old dolls and stuffed animals and the plastic cups and plates we used to play with for pretend tea.