Suicide Notes From Beautiful Girls (6 page)

Chapter 12

The pit in my stomach
is enormous; it could swallow up my room, the house, the whole entire world.

I
abandoned Delia, and now she is dead.

A gut punch of sadness hits me, so intense I can barely breathe. I open my closet. I reach in toward the back and feel for the picture. I pull it out and sink down onto my bed.

The frame is glittery pink with two enamel teddy bears on top, holding a heart between them. Delia gave it to me the summer after sixth grade. It was a joke but also not a joke. The photo is of the two of us peeking out from under these ridiculous floppy sun hats that Delia had bought for us. There I am—blond hair, forgettable face—and next to me is Delia, her dark curly hair taking up half the picture, olive skin, big strong nose, fierce chin. Her huge mouth opened in the world’s biggest smile. Delia always insisted she was kind of crazy-looking.
“Not pretty,” she would say. “Sexy.” But she was half wrong, because when she smiled like that, she was the most beautiful person you had ever seen.

When we stopped being friends, I kept telling myself it was only for now, a temporary thing. One day it would all go back to normal. I was always so sure of that.

Finally, finally the tears begin to fall. We will never have the chance to make up. I will never have the chance to apologize. I will never have the chance to tell her anything ever again. She is really truly gone.

I put the frame on my lap and take the phone out of my pocket. I call voice mail so I can hear her voice, hear the last words she’ll ever say to me.

“Hey, J, it’s me, your old pal . . .”

I had so many chances to fix things between us. So many chances that I didn’t take. Whatever was going on in her life, if I had been there,
I would have kept her safe.

“Hey, D,” I whisper over her voice. I need to say these words, even though she can’t hear me. “I know we haven’t talked in a while, and that a bunch of crap happened, but I really miss you.” My chest is so tight, my heart might burst.

“There’s something I need to tell you,” she finishes inside the phone.

The tears are still coming, an impossible amount of them. I keep talking. “And I’m so, so sorry about everything that happened, I should have . . .”

And then I stop, because here is the weirdest thing: The message is over, but somehow it isn’t—there are still sounds coming through my phone. There’s a scuffling, and then Delia again. Only, this time, she isn’t talking to my voice mail, but to someone in the background. “I’m going to tell,” Delia says. There is a teasing lilt to her voice, but underneath there’s something darker. “I’m going to tell what you did.”

I press my ear to the speaker. There’s another voice, male, shouting. I can’t make out the words, but I can hear the tone: anger. Fierce and frightening. I hold my breath, and my body fills with ice. And then the message clicks off.

Adrenaline courses through my veins. I’m not crying anymore. What I think I just heard . . . this is not possible. I cannot have heard it.

I start the message again, and again there is Delia’s voice. The scuffling. Delia:
I’m going to tell. I’m going to tell what you did
. And then the voice in the background, that male voice, that anger.

The blood is pounding in my ears. There is no mistake. That person in the background, I know who it is.

It’s Ryan.

My hands are shaking. I can barely breathe. I check the time. It’s after one a.m. Ryan will be sleeping.

The phone rings four times and goes to voice mail. I hang up and call again. It rings and rings.

Finally, he answers.

“Mmm’lo?” I imagine his face pressed against his pillow, one bare leg kicked out from under the comforter, because that’s the way he always sleeps. I imagine him with Delia, yelling the day before she died.

“I need to talk to you.” My voice sounds strange, barely like me at all.

“Are you okay? What time is it?” I imagine him sitting up in bed now, scratching his chest. I imagine his slow, sleepy heart starting to pound. “Did something happen?”

Yes,
I think.
Something very, very bad.
But what I say is, “Can you meet me?” Because I know I need to do this face-to-face.

He hesitates for only a fraction of a second. I imagine him thinking how late it is, how early he needs to get up for swim practice. “Of course,” he says, like I knew he would. Because a thing I know about Ryan is that he always does what’s expected of him. Then again, maybe I’m wrong about that.

“Should I come over?”

“No,” I say. “I’ll come to you.”

Chapter 13

Fifteen minutes later I’m pulling
up to his house, my entire body buzzing. All the windows are dark, but the big bright front door light is switched on, and there’s Ryan, standing out on the walkway, rubbing his hands together.

I step onto the grass, ice crystals crunch beneath my feet. I can just barely make out his face. “Baby,” he says, all warm breath in the cold air.
Baby
is not even something he calls me. “Are you okay? What’s going on? Tell me.”

He starts to pull me toward him and for a second I almost let him. I am ashamed at how desperately I want to be held, to feel a body against mine, letting me know that everything, or even anything, is okay.

I step back and hold my hands up.

“You were with Delia,” I say. This is the first time I’ve actually said her name to him in a year.

“What do you mean?” He is whispering. “Did you have a bad dream or something?”

I shake my head. “You were with
her in real life on New Year’s Eve.” I can barely even get the words out.

“You’re scaring me, Junie. Because I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. . . .”

I take out my phone, dial voice mail, and hold it out on speaker. “Listen.”

Message received . . .
There’s Delia.
Hey, J, it’s me, your old pal . . .
I watch the numbers on the timer tick by. At nine seconds, she stops talking to me. I can feel Ryan staring at me. I don’t look up. “What’s this . . . ?” Ryan starts.

I say, “It’s coming.”

At second forty-two, the voices start again. Delia:
I’m going to tell . . .
Then the shouting.
Only when the message finally finishes and I shut off my phone do I look up.

“I don’t understand what that is,” Ryan says quietly.

“That was a voice mail she left me the day before she died,” I say. “And that’s you in the background.” My voice is cold. Hard. He’s never heard me sound like this before.

I wonder how he is going to begin to explain this. I’m scared to hear what he will say next. I’m scared not to hear it too.

But he stands there, completely silent. Finally, he lets out a long, heavy sigh that puffs white in the air. “Please tell me you’re not serious,” he says. He’s using that gentle, concerned tone again.

“I’m very serious,” I say.

“The random yelling in the background that you can barely make out? That’s supposed to be
me
?” He doesn’t sound angry, just hurt and so honestly confused that I’m starting to feel confused too.

Back at home I was so certain. And that certainty filled my belly with fire. But out here in the cold night . . .

“It’s not me,” Ryan says. “Have you slept at all since yesterday morning? Have you been eating? I get being really insanely upset. Believe me, I do . . .” He pauses and looks up, like he’s waiting for me to think about what he’s saying.

And the truth is, I haven’t slept much. I’ve hardly eaten anything. But how can I eat when Delia is dead? How can I sleep when whoever did this to her is out there?

“We were still in Vermont then,” Ryan says. “I wasn’t even back from vacation yet.” He almost sounds sorry to say this, sorry to have to make me face how completely wrong I am suddenly realizing I am.

Because with all that adrenaline coursing through my veins, I forgot all about the vacation he just got back from. And the time line of everything—the entire rest of the world, really, and how it works and what makes sense. I hold the phone to my ear again, play the message again. And this time the shouts sound like . . . nothing. No one I know. That person could be anyone.

“Oh God,” I say. My voice is so quiet, I can barely hear myself. I feel so ridiculously ashamed now, for rushing over here in the middle of the night. For getting Ryan up out of his cozy bed and his family’s nice house, for accusing him of who even knows what. I’m ashamed for dragging him further into this darkness. “I’m so sorry.”

“This is a big, enormous, crazy, shocking thing that happened,” Ryan says. “You have nothing to apologize for. But admitting that she . . . that what really happened happened doesn’t make this somehow your fault.” He holds my shoulders. “This isn’t your fault or anyone else’s. She was a very messed-up girl who made a terrible mistake and killed herself, and if she fought with some guy before she did it, that doesn’t change anything. So please, you have to promise me you’ll stop this, before you drive yourself crazy.”

I stare at him, at his beautiful face out here in the dark.

I want to say yes, and I understand why he
would think that. But Ryan didn’t know her like I did. I can only begin to imagine how all this must look to him. He is so calm and reasonable, and that is what I like—maybe, I realize now, even love—about him. He doesn’t have access to a certain part of the world that maybe I do, to a certain kind of darkness that I have been trying so hard to shed.

“Promise me?” he says.

I force the tears back into my face, where they sit, burning.
I desperately do not,
do not
want to cry in front of him. Around him I am someone else—myself, only better, but in a different way than with Delia. The version of me he sees is always strong, always unafraid, at least on the outside. Except for that one weird thing in the beginning, our relationship has not been about drama. There is coiled-up fear inside me, though. I’m always worried this will end. But I keep that buried deep, so the surface is left bright and clean and pure. It’s not like this is news to me, but standing out there under the black sky, I fully get how much I need this not to change. I loved Delia, love her still. But I can’t drag Ryan into this any further than I already have. He doesn’t belong in this. I won’t bring him here.

“Okay,” I say. “I’ll stop.” And now, in this moment, I’m glad for the dark so he can’t see that I’m lying.

He hugs me again, and asks me if I want to come in. “I’ll sneak you into my room,” he says. “You can stay the whole night.”

But I tell him no, I tell him thank you and that I hope he has a good swim practice tomorrow morning and that I’ll see him tomorrow evening.

“Are you sure?” he says. “You’re okay?”

I nod. “I’m really tired,” I say. “I think I need to sleep.” And he nods back, like I’m finally making sense.

I get in my car and I drive myself home, where I play that message over and over.

So it’s not Ryan on the voice mail. But Delia knew something someone didn’t want her to know, that’s for damn sure. And she threatened to tell. So whose secret was it? And what were they willing to do to make her keep it?

Chapter 14

Morning. Saturday. Slanty winter sunlight
comes through my window. I can hear my mother banging around downstairs. I barely remember getting into bed, but sometime late last night after listening to that message a dozen more times, I fell into a heavy, dreamless sleep. I sit up, heart poundingly awake now. Well, Ryan was right about one thing: I sure as hell needed this. I don’t feel better, but I feel sharp, quick; the cloud has lifted. I am, if it’s possible, even more determined. This is a cold steel arrow to follow. It will help me ignore everything else.

I swing my legs out of bed, grab my towel, and walk down the hall to the bathroom. I turn on the shower and stand, shivering, waiting for the water to heat up. I haven’t showered since Wednesday night and it is a relief to be clean.

Back in my room I get quickly dressed—dark jeans, gray boots, black T-shirt. And Delia’s sweater again. I think about
calling Ryan to apologize again for last night, or maybe, even better, to say hi and pretend everything is normal. But I’m not even sure I have that in me. When I look at my phone, I realize it’s after eleven and he’ll have finished swim practice and be out for waffles with his teammates. So instead, I call Jeremiah, glad I took his number two nights ago even though I wasn’t sure I wanted it. I need to see if he’s found out anything new, and I think I might even tell him about Tig and what I found out at his party. I get his voice mail. “This is Jeremiah Fiske. I’m not able to come to the phone right now. Please leave me a message and I’ll return your call as soon as I can.” He sounds so formal, like he’s expecting a call about a job at a bank.

“Hey,” I say. “It’s June. De . . . Call me back.”

But then something occurs to me and I call him again, get his voice mail again. I close my eyes, really concentrate on his voice this time.

I try to imagine him angry.

I hang up, then listen to Delia’s message again, fast-forwarding through the first part because right now I can’t bear hearing her talk to me, asking me for something so simple and small that I would not, did not give her. I stop, instead, at second forty-two. The shouting. But it’s impossible to tell who the other person is.

So now what?

I make my way downstairs. My mother looks up when I come into the kitchen. It smells like burnt coffee in here and
she is scraping scrambled eggs into the sink. She always does this, like she forgets that we have a garbage can, and don’t have a garbage disposal. And that scrambled eggs are not a liquid. I used to bother telling her. I don’t anymore.

She works the night shift at a nursing home, which means she only got back a couple hours ago. She hasn’t been to sleep. And there’s something on her mind that she’s going to want to talk about. I know that from the way she’s moving and the expression on half her face when she turns partway around to look at me. I’m some kind of weird expert at reading my mother, like she’s a radio signal and I can always pick up the frequency, even when I don’t want to.

“You slept late,” she says. Her tone isn’t accusatory the way it sometimes is. She sometimes feels bad for not being around much, so she tries to make up for it by occasionally getting mad at things she thinks parents are supposed to. But not this morning.

I shrug.

There is bread on the counter, so I put two slices in the toaster and take out the peanut butter. There’s an apple in the fruit bowl and I start eating it. I realize now how hungry I am.

“That girl who went to your school who died . . .” She is prompting me.

I try to keep my face blank.

She continues. “Someone at work was talking about her, one of the night nurses. Said it was a girl from her nephew’s
school, which is your school.” She reaches out for the coffee pot. “Delia. You knew her.” She pours the dregs into her mug, adds too much sugar, stirs, licks the spoon. “You used to bring her over here sometimes.” She leans against the sink and raises the mug to her lips. She’s trying to get me to look at her. I pop the toast early. I spread the peanut butter on thick.

And she is still watching me, waiting for an answer. “I did,” I say. And then I take a big bite so my mouth is glued shut.

She nods, half-pleased with herself, as though remembering the name of the only best friend her daughter ever had is some impressive feat to be proud about. Then her face drops. “Sucks,” she says then, “that that happened.”

She is staring now, and I accidentally look her in the eye. It feels too personal. I quickly look away. I know she is really trying here, that is the thing. Under different circumstances, I suppose I could probably get pretty sad thinking about how this is the very best she can do. But I do not have room for this now.

“Yeah,” I say. “It does.”

After that we are both silent. My mother stirs her already stirred coffee, clanking her spoon against the side of the mug.

My phone buzzes with a text, and I know we are both relieved. I figure it will be Ryan, or maybe Jeremiah, even. But it’s Krista:

You weren’t in homeroom yesterday. You okay?

It’s weird, because we’re not the kind of friends who check
up on each other. I mean we’re barely even friends at all. Before I can respond, another text comes in:

Wanna meet up?

I look up at my mom. She glances at me, then her eyes flick over to the cabinets. She’s wondering whether I’ll say something if she does what I know she wants to do. I look at the text again, and I’m surprised to realize the answer. I guess I need to talk to someone. And right now I don’t have a lot of options.

Krista is sitting cross-legged on the trunk of her car when I get to the Birdies parking lot. She’s wearing a big puffy jacket, no gloves. Her nose is red in the cold.

It’s weird to see her outside of school, because except for the party, I never have. She spots me and waves me over. When I get to her, she doesn’t say hello, just slides so there’s room next to her on the trunk. Then she takes a breath and starts talking fast as though she was planning out what she was going to say before I arrived. “I was always kind of jealous of you guys. I guess that might seem weird to say now, considering. I’m not trying to complain about Rader or whatever. He’s great, obviously, but our thing is not like what you guys had. You always seemed, like . . . so perfectly in tune with each other, like, connected in some cosmic way. Back before, when you were together.”

“Wait, what?” I say. It takes me a second to realize what she even means. It’s been so long since anyone thought this, though
people used to all the time. Krista thinks Delia and I were a couple, in love.

I shake my head. “It wasn’t like that. We were friends.” And I’m careful not to use the word “just,” because I remember what Delia always said. “Friends aren’t
just
, dating is just. Friends are the very highest thing.”

“No shit?” says Krista. “But you were always . . . all over each other.”

I shrug.

Delia and I
were
always kind of touchy. But it wasn’t sexual, even though sometimes people, guys especially, wanted to see it like that. I remember once, at a party, she’d been playing with my hair, braiding it and unbraiding it, twirling it through her fingers. A guy was staring at us, practically panting, like he was watching porn. “It’s soothing, like knitting,” she said to him. My hair was longer then. She took my braid and wrapped it around her neck. “Look, I made a scarf. . . .”

“Kinky,” the guy said. And Delia snorted and rolled her eyes, and then ignored him even though he tried to get her attention for the rest of the night. She hadn’t been trying to impress him. She did it to make me laugh.

Now I turn to Krista. “Seriously,” I say. “That’s just how we were.”

Krista nods. She looks like she’s suddenly realized something. “Well, then I guess that Buzzy thing was a serious long shot.”

“Who?” I say.

“You know . . . Buzzy, the girl from the party who asked for your number. The one I was trying to set you up with. I guess I can tell you that now, since, y’know, it’s not like I’m going to make it uncomfortable for you guys.” Krista lets out an awkward laugh and rubs her nose. “Too bad, though. Buzzy’s the best.”

And then we just sit there in silence. Coming here was a bad idea, I think. I was looking for comfort when there is no comfort to be found. There wasn’t any for Delia, and I don’t deserve any either. I start to get up off the trunk.

“Buzzy is how I found out what really happened, actually,” Krista says slowly.

And then I stop. My pulse speeds up. “Buzzy knew Delia?”

Krista shakes her head. “No, but this girl Buzzy dated for, like, a minute, who I was hoping you’d help her get over, that girl was Delia’s new best friend or something. She feels really sad for her ex now, Buzzy does. Like, wants to be there for her, a shoulder to cry on and all that even though the girl doesn’t seem into it. That’s what Rader was telling me, anyway. I don’t know . . .”

Krista keeps talking, but I’m not listening to her anymore. Two words flash fire inside my brain.
Best friend.
Somehow it had never occurred to me that Delia had one. Other than me, I mean. Especially not after what I saw down by the water.

“. . . suicide is a horrible bitch,” Krista is saying. “That’s why
I texted you. Because you didn’t come to school, and then last night Buzzy said what happened with Delia. My dad had a cousin who did it, killed himself, I mean. He was really messed up about it for a long time. So listen, if there’s anything I can do, then . . .”

And what I am thinking is this: Delia’s best friend was the one person she really talked to. Her best friend was her heart, her secret keeper, her everything. Whatever there is to know, Delia’s best friend is the one who is going to know it.

“Krista,” I say slowly. “I think maybe there is. . . .”