Now You See Her (16 page)

the chance to be heard. If I can’t get heard, it would be best to go to sleep forever. I’ve been sleeping almost around the clock anyway. The teachers have been send- ing my parents reports. They told me that I was about to have a real breakthrough because they said girls usually “hit bottom” before they come up and start fighting to reclaim their lives. I have no idea what they’re talking about. I’m having enough trouble with Latin verbs. Why do I have to figure out deep truths about myself, too?

When I saw those cuts on Em’s arm, I knew that’s how she got people to hear her.

I know she meant well. But if I did that . . . I would die for sure. I was willing to take a risk, but not if I had to count on someone else to save me. Been there, done that!

The cuts on Em’s arms were . . . real. They were from a real suicide attempt that was meant to work. I know. I
saw
them. They were big, fat, ropy scars. Vertical scars. I could not imagine anyone doing that who wasn’t serious. I didn’t want that much of a disfiguring thing on me.

I mean, even if I died. What if they put me in a dress with three-quarter-length sleeves and had to try to dis- guise ugly cuts sewed up with black thread? Jesus, that’s all people would see. The cuts. Not me.

So I learned how to make the other kinds of cuts from Suzette. She had them all over her arms and legs.

Some were like homemade tattoos because she actually cut herself and then drew with ink in the cuts, which I’m surprised didn’t kill her from some kind of disgusting infection. She had cuts all over, in the shape of lightning bolts, roses, snakes, and just crosses. She was big on crosses.

“What’s that about?” I asked her one day, last week or the week before. You do lose track of time here, because every day is the same as the day before. “They’re going to lock you up someplace.”

“Duh,” Suzette said. “Like it would be the first, sec- ond, or tenth time.”

“Why do you do it?”

She clasped both her hands together by her heart and said, “To
feel
something! That’s what my shrink says. To feel the pain I won’t allow myself to feel over, um, Robbie. My little brother.” Suzette tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear, a gesture I’ve tried to do. She has amazing thick hair, but she dyes it bright red, like Bozo. “That’s not really why. I do it because it’s dramatic. It’s cool. They put me in the infirmary and treat me like I’m a movie star.”

She said she takes a whack at some part of herself about once a month. Once she took a whole handful of antidepressants. That got her a big tube up her nose and her stomach pumped. “That was not at all so cool,”

Suzette said. “I, like, want to die, but not die puking, you know?”

“You
want
to die?” I asked her.

“Oh, sure,” Suzette said. “I’m very suicidal.” She started to laugh, this little breaking-glass laugh I wish I could imitate. It sounds so amazingly weird. “Yeah, I would say I want to die.”

“For real?” I like to imagine being dead, but being

really
dead?

“Look, my little brother had his head out the window because he liked the wind to blow his hair back. The house down the road had one of those monstrous huge mailboxes in the same shape as the house itself? Like a gigantic mailbox in the shape of a fucking TUDOR HOUSE?” I knew what she was going to say, all of a sud- den, and I started to creep backward. But I ran into a wall. “It took his head off. Off! Like, one minute Robbie was sitting there and the next minute the whole wind- shield and the front seat and I were covered with blood and there was nothing anyone could do and I had tried to pull him back in because he was always doing that and how am I supposed to get over that? Ever? Huh? Even if my parents forgive me and my brother Elliott forgives me and my aunts forgive me and my cousins forgive me and the pope forgives me and Jesus forgives me.” She stopped. “Would you like to live with that? I’d like to

live, but only if they could put a needle in my brain and take out that memory.”

“I’m so sorry, Suzette!” I said, and I tried to put my hand on her arm. She jerked away as if I’d tried to throw boiling water on her.

“No one touches me, bitch,” she said. “I’m not a bitch!” I said.

“I know. It’s just what I say,” Suzette explained, and smiled. She was ultra-creepy sometimes. “Anyhow, are you a cutter?”

“No, I’m not,” I said, “but . . .” “You want to, right?”

“I think so, but not . . . so much. Not
professionally
.” “You can just drag a pen or a razor blade—”

“A razor blade!”

“Yeah, dig one out of your shaver . . . it doesn’t really hurt.”

“It’s got to totally hurt.”

“Put ice on it first,” Suzette suggested.

So that’s what I did. One night after dinner, I put ice on my arm until it was so numb it felt like a doll arm, and then I dug a little wiggly trench along the top of my forearm almost to the elbow, and I let it bleed all over the sheets and the pillowcase. I started to cry. I couldn’t believe I was the same little girl who sang her heart out in
Annie
and sat up in the tree in the backyard, hiding

from my mom so I didn’t have to go to piano lessons. I was here, just four years later, lying on these crummy stiff sheets, doing this. What a comedown. What a dis- grace. You can’t imagine. And it really did hurt—like my arm was on fire—when the ice wore off. I cried even louder then. Louder and louder, until I was sobbing like a baby. I wasn’t some pitiful head case. I was Hope Shay! The things that brought me here didn’t seem to link together anymore. I thought I’d understood how it all happened. But now I couldn’t be so sure. All I could see was myself, alone, falling down through space into dark- ness. Logan and Alyssa and Brook and my parents were just faces on the walls rushing by as I fell past them. They were all smiling, as if they were urging me on.
You go, girl!
Or maybe not. Maybe they wanted me to stop before it was too late. The blood was stopping when I looked down. It wasn’t a very deep cut. But it was a real mess. I would have passed out from fear if they hadn’t found me.

But they did. I forgot about the cameras. This place is, like, all about security. Some guard must have seen what I was doing on his monitor or something. They came for me right away. Suzette was right. They did treat you like a movie star. It was like I was a wounded soldier in battle being wheeled to the infirmary, and then a nurse sat with me for twenty-four hours, feeding me ice

cream from a spoon and giving me painkillers.

But on the third day, I ended up sitting with a big wad of gauze wrapped around my arm, in the office of this doctor who looked familiar, though I was sure I never saw her before. She looked like some kind of wildlife biologist on TV, with streaky blond hair and khaki pants.

“Hope,” she said, “in all our weekly sessions, you’ve never talked about having suicidal tendencies.”

“I just want someone to believe me. . . .” I began. “Weekly sessions?” Someone was nuts here, her or me. I was afraid to learn which. But I had a feeling I was going to anyway.

SEARCH FOR MISSING STUDENT INTENSIFIES

BY TIMOTHY KEWPRISIN AND TRACY CLARK

DETROIT, Mich. (AP)
—

The largest search for a miss- ing person in the history of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula ramped up another notch today when volunteer and National Guard pilots began flyovers of the wooded area surrounding Starwood Academy, searching for Hope Shay, the 15-year-old student who disappeared from her dormitory room late last Wednesday night.

An aspiring young actress from the Chicago suburbs, Hope was reported missing by her dorm advisor early Thurs- day when she failed to show up for breakfast or lunch.

The advisor, Lisa Zurin, 22, told police that the door to Hope’s room was open and her purse, as well as a book, was on the bed, which was neatly

made. She had apparently been studying. Despite the cold, Hope apparently took no coat or other exterior clothing, just one of the puzzling facts of this disappearance, which may be linked to a threat that the girl described to her mother some weeks ago.

A massive search—includ- ing volunteers from Michigan, Wisconsin, and northern Minnesota—resumed today when police failed to find Hope after a 12-hour search of the school grounds, 100 wooded acres outside Black Sparrow Lake. They questioned the girl’s friends, teachers, and local residents who might have seen her.

A videotape from a security camera in the lobby of the Lakeside Women’s Dormitory at Starwood revealed Hope pacing back and forth in front of the locked glass doors at 1:30 a.m. Thursday morning, as if watching for someone to arrive, according to school officials. The tape, which scans the first floor in seg- ments at 10-minute intervals,

showed an empty foyer at 1:40

a.m. In itself, said Zurin, “That wasn’t unusual behavior for Hope, because she was often up until all hours. I was always telling her that she needed more sleep.”

But police said they doubt that Hope’s departure was vol- untary, especially after revela- tions by her mother that a stranger in a truck had harassed Hope on two occasions in recent weeks as she made her way home from rehearsal.