Suicide Notes From Beautiful Girls (7 page)

Chapter 15

Even sobbing, Ashling is beautiful.

Underneath the red blotches her skin is porcelain smooth, and, though swollen, her eyes are clear and blue. And here I am, watching the pain pouring out in the form of snot, tears, and muffled wailing. My gut clenches, and I try to keep from floating off the way I always do when things are too much. I hand Ashling tissue after tissue, while Krista leans in and pats her arm. “Oh, honey,” Krista says.

Finally, the ocean leaving her face slows to a stream, then a trickle. Ashling smiles at me, mouth shut tight, perfect lips quivering. She reaches out and squeezes my hands. “I’m so glad Buzzy gave you my number. It’s nice to get to talk to someone else who loved her.” She shakes her head. “No, screw that. Loves. Present tense.”

Ashling finishes mopping the tears. There is a feeling
peeking through the numbness now, a tickling deep in my stomach. Mostly, it’s relief that Delia had someone in her life up until the end, a best friend who really truly cared. But under that, way down at the bottom, is the tiniest pinpoint of something else, and I don’t want to admit even to myself what it is—it’s jealousy. Which is disgusting, I realize. But there’s no time for
any
of this now, because I’m here for a purpose: I need to find out what Ashling knows. And to do that, I need her to know the truth.

But how do you even tell someone something like that?

You blurt it out. “Do you think it’s possible . . . that Delia didn’t . . . really kill herself?”

Ashling opens her big eyes wide. She looks like a doll.

“You mean like her spirit is still out here?” Ashling says. Her voice is low, slightly Southern sounding. She nods and smiles a bit. “I feel it too.”

“No,” I start. “I mean, what I’m trying to say is . . . that maybe someone else did. Kill her. Who wasn’t her.”

There. The words are out. I can’t take them back now. I brace myself.

Out of the corner of my eye I see Krista lean forward, like,
holy shit
. Ashling is clenching her jaw.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t want to say it like that, but I’m not sure how else to do it.”

“Why would you think
that?” She sounds disgusted.

And so I tell her everything, from that first moment at the
memorial when I met Jeremiah and then saw the burned-down shed, to the voice mail she meant to leave me and the voice mail she didn’t but left anyway, and my visit to Tig, and Delia’s need for protection. I tell her everything up until this very moment with the three of us sitting here together in this coffee shop, where Ashling is slowly shaking her head, and Krista is staring at the two of us like she’s watching the very best episode of her very favorite TV show.

“Delia was no one’s victim,” Ashling says. Her voice is soft. “She lived life by her own terms, and she died by them too.” Ashling’s eyes fill up again, but underneath the sadness there is something else. She seems angry. “And how dare you say otherwise.”

It would never have occurred to me that someone would
want
to believe their best friend had killed herself, that somehow that would be preferable to the alternative. But if she cares about Delia as much as she obviously does, I can’t stop here. I have to keep going.

“I know it’s so completely beyond insane to even imagine that someone could have . . .” I’m trying to make my voice calm, to modulate my tone so she’ll listen. I know the look that’s in her eyes now, I’ve seen it before on my mom—that wild animal look. And you have to be careful to keep them from biting you or bolting. “Did you see her or talk to her the day she died? Did she maybe mention anyone who was . . .”

“I talked to her for, like, three seconds. But she didn’t say
anything about anything. She was coming off a bunch of drugs from the night before. She picked up to say she felt like shit and she was going to go back to sleep. And that’s literally all.”

“Okay,” I say. “But it’s just that Jeremiah said—”

Ashling snorts and cuts in again. “You’re actually going to believe that idiot about anything?” She shakes her head. “He was totally out of his depth with Delia. He never had any idea what was going on.” She sets her jaw and shakes her head again. “He didn’t even know his girlfriend was cheating on him is how much of an idiot he was. So if you want to take his word for anything about anything? Well, that’s on you, girl. It has nothing to do with me, or
my
best friend, or what
happened
. She was miserable. She was using drugs. Her life at home was even shittier than usual. If you were her friend, you would have already known that, and you wouldn’t be questioning any of this. What
happened
to her is, she made a choice. And it was hers to make.”

Ashling stands. She looks like she’s going to cry again, but then instead narrows her eyes and grits her teeth.

And then before I can say anything else, she turns and starts toward the door.

“Wait!” I call out. My entire body is tingling. I get up and chase after her. “You said Delia was cheating on Jeremiah.”

Ashling blinks. “So . . .”

“Who was she cheating with?”

Ashling raises an eyebrow and smiles slightly. “That was her
own business,” she says. Then she shrugs, pushes through the door, and she’s gone.

And I am left standing there as the thoughts swirl in my head, arranging themselves into shapes. And then arranging themselves again.

I feel Krista’s hand on my shoulder.

“Do you really think she was murdered?” she says very quietly.

But I don’t turn. I’m barely even aware of her. I’m thinking of Jeremiah standing alone in the dark, his big hulking body and Boy Scout face. I’m thinking about how Delia was cheating, and Ashling said Jeremiah didn’t know. But what if she’s wrong? What if he somehow found out?

Chapter 16

Ryan’s hair is damp from
the shower, and the chemical tang of chlorine still clings to his skin. I can smell him from his bed, where I sit, cross-legged, watching his naked back. It’s hours later. After Ashling left, I left Krista. I needed to be alone. I spent the rest of the day just driving and thinking, running everything over and over in my head.

And now here I am, trying to pretend like everything is normal, like anything is.

“You sure you’re up for going?” Ryan asks. He opens his closet and takes out a shirt—green with
PANTS
printed on the front. His favorite. He slips it on over his head. And then, just like I knew he would, he takes out a green button-up shirt to wear over it. A couple of days ago, before any of this happened, I would have felt oddly satisfied to notice this. There’s a sweet comfort in knowing these kinds of things about a person.

He turns back as he does up the buttons.

“It’s only that usually . . .” He trails off. “Hanny’s parties have never really seemed like your thing.” He is putting it mildly, being polite.

Max Hannigan is part of the popular sports crowd, which is one of the ones Ryan is a part of. He’s tall and rich, with a big giant jaw. Delia once said, “He looks like a date rapist, but one who’d only stop raping you because his dick wouldn’t stay hard.” She said things like that, and I’d laugh in spite of myself. I still think of that sometimes when I see him.

He has an enormous house with a pool, and his parents are always going out of town and either are oblivious or do not care that whenever they go away, he has fifty people over to drain their liquor cabinet. We’ve met dozens of times outside of school, but every time we meet, he acts like he’s never seen me before in his life.

Ryan comes over to the bed. He leans down and kisses me lightly on the lips.

And I feel a stab of guilt. Because the truth, which I can’t tell him, is that I only want to go to this party because of Jeremiah. And his text from a half hour ago.

Found something. Need to show u tonight,
is what he wrote.

It’s not like I’m so scared of Jeremiah now. Since this morning, nothing has even changed, really . . . but I have this feeling in my gut that it’s better not to meet him alone. So for now, I’ll trust that.

“It’ll be good to get my mind off things . . . ,” I tell Ryan.

When he leaves his room and goes to the bathroom to put the tiny touch of gel into his hair that he thinks I don’t know he uses, I take out my phone and write back.

Hanny is having a party, meet there at 9?

Jeremiah is part of that big group of guys too. A second later he writes back:
See u then.

I look up at Ryan, back in the room now. “So we’re going, then?” he says. It scares me how easy it is to break a promise.

“Yeah,” I say. “Sounds fun.”

Hanny’s parties are not fun. I know I’m only seeing the very surface when I look at these people. Everyone has their shit, but when I walk into Max Hannigan’s big living room full of people laughing in unison, their big white smiles glowing under Max’s parents’ customizable mood lighting, it’s easy to imagine that no one here has ever been lonely or sad or scared for a single second of their entire lives.

I feel myself starting to sweat under Delia’s sweater. Ryan leans in and whispers into my ear. “We can blow this pop-stand whenever. You know that, right?”

And I turn to him and nod.

He takes my hand and leads me forward into the crowd. “Fisker,” a guy calls out. Fisker is what some of Ryan’s friends call him. Up ahead is a guy they call Rolly. Rolly gives Ryan a bro hug.

“Hi, June, nice to see you as always,” Rolly says. Rolly talks to me like you’d talk to someone’s mom.

“Hi.” I can’t do the small talk thing, not even at the best of times and certainly not now. “I’m going to find the bathroom,” I tell Ryan. “Don’t wait for me, I’ll find you after.” And we lock eyes, only for a second, before I slip away.

I spot him almost immediately—Jeremiah, standing near the door, hands in his pockets, scanning the room. When our eyes lock, my stomach twists and I don’t even know why.

Jeremiah motions for me to follow him outside. I look for Ryan. He’s in the kitchen where someone is handing him a beer. I head toward Jeremiah, feeling a couple girls watching me. They turn to whisper as I pass. I think I hear “Delia,” I think I hear “suicide.”

Outside now, the sounds from the party are muffled through the big thick windows. The night is barely getting started. Two girls I recognize from school run across the lawn, tumbling over each other. The air is fresh and cold, a few tiny snowflakes drift down.

Jeremiah pulls something out of his pocket and holds it up: a phone.

The wallpaper is a photo of a hand—chipped lemon-yellow polish on a stuck up middle finger, three thin strips of leather wrapped around the wrist. This is Delia’s hand. And this is Delia’s phone. In front of the hand is a number pad, ENTER PASSCODE written at the top.

I’m staring at his face, suspicion coiled in a tight ball in my belly.

“Where did you get that?”

“I went back to her house this afternoon,” he says. “And this was right there in the woods like someone had thrown it. There must be something in here that’ll help us. We’d know who she was talking to, who she was texting. But I can’t get it open.”

I take the phone. I’ve held it a million times before—reading texts out loud, writing back as her, or sometimes just listening to her stepfather yelling when she couldn’t deal.

“I brought it to one of those shady phone repair places in the city,” Jeremiah continues. “The guy said he could wipe it clean if I wanted to use it, but that was it. He couldn’t unlock it.” He’s looking at me now, curious and intense. “Anyway, so I was wondering. Do
you
know the passcode? I know best friends tell each other that sort of thing sometimes. . . .”

White flakes fall faster, like we’re shooting up through space now.

“No,” I say. “I’m sorry.” I keep my gaze steady. “Like I said, we hadn’t been best friends in a long time.”

He nods, and I watch as he slips it back into the right side pocket of his gray and red ski coat.

He rubs his hands together. “Freaking cold out here.” Jeremiah looks around. “So what about you? Anything? Any news?”

I shake my head.

There’s laughing; a guy and a girl are making their way up the driveway.

“Okay then,” Jeremiah says.

The girl sticks out her butt and shakes her hips.

I try to keep my face calm. I can see the top of the phone peeking out of Jeremiah’s pocket.

The girl tumbles forward with a shriek. The guy wraps his arm around her to keep her from falling.

“Come inside?” I say.

Jeremiah shakes his big square Boy Scout head. “I’m not in the mood for a party.”

I look down at Jeremiah’s pocket again.

“We should have a toast,” I say. “For Delia.” He hesitates. “A real one, from people who care.” I’m thinking about the memorial by the water. I know he is too.

“Okay,” he says.

Back inside, the music is loud. People stand in clumps of twos and threes. It’ll be a couple hours before things get sloppy and ridiculous. I see Ryan in the living room, so I lead Jeremiah to the kitchen. I feel eyes on us.

I think I hear someone say, “girl who died.” I think I hear someone say, “fire.”

The kitchen table is covered in party stuff. I grab two red plastic cups from a stack, and a bottle of vodka. I spot a little jar
of maraschino cherries stuck in with the tiny plastic mermaids. So I take those, too.

To our right, three guys are chugging beers. I pour Jeremiah a shot. He reaches for a two-liter Coke and fills up the rest of his cup. His big hand crushes the bottle.

I fill my own cup with vodka, pouring till I reach the top.

“Hold up, there, cowgirl,” says a guy next to me. He’s wearing a lime-green polo, collar popped. “Save some for the rest of us. On a mission, huh?” He’s smiling.

“Something like that,” I say.

Jeremiah is watching me. I fish a cherry from the jar, then I pass the jar to Jeremiah, who does the same.

“No mixer?” he says.

“I like to be efficient,” I say.

And then I raise my drink. “To Delia.”

“To Delia,” he says, “who deserves a hell of a lot better than what she got.” We clink our plastic cups. I bring mine to my mouth. The smell is nauseating. The vodka wets my lips. I try not to breathe. I keep my lips clamped together and my mouth empty, and swallow nothing, twice. I fake flinch.

Then I pop the cherry into my mouth.

Jeremiah is still watching, and so I let my eyelids droop just a little, let the corners of my mouth turn up, the slow smile of alcohol hitting me quick.

Jeremiah looks off into the distance. I pour half my vodka
into a cup of brown liquid with a bloated pretzel bobbing in it.

“Do you believe in heaven?” Jeremiah says.

Behind me someone lets out a laugh.

“I’m not sure,” I say. Only, what I’m really not sure about is whether I want to tell him the real answer, which is no. I don’t and I can’t. I’m jealous of anyone who does.

“I do,” Jeremiah says. There is desperation in his voice. Maybe he believes this, or maybe he just wishes he did. “And I think Delia is there.”

I nod. I take another fake swallow, and then dump more of my vodka into the cup on the table.

“I’ve been praying a lot, y’know? For her. I know she wasn’t religious, and that maybe that means if there is a heaven, she won’t be in it . . .”

A girl in a pink tank top reaches around him and grabs a bag of chips off the table. Her elbow brushes his pocket where the phone is. “Oopsy,” she says. “Skyoooz me.”

“But I don’t think that’s true. I think, maybe, because of what happened, she’ll get to be there anyway. So I’ve been praying for her, that where she is now is better than where she was before. . . .” His jaw is set and his eyes are dark and shining. He takes another sip of his drink, the cup crunching in his big hand. “And that whoever did this to her gets what they deserve.” There’s something simmering in him, a fierce anger, leaking out into the air between us.

Another burst of laughter comes from behind me. Jeremiah looks up.

I raise my drink one more time. “To justice,” I say. I am swaying a little bit now, bending my knees, letting my weight carry me forward and side to side. And I fake swallow, dribble vodka down my chin.

But Jeremiah doesn’t toast this time. He is watching someone behind me. The guy in the green polo is across the room now, talking to friends—a tiny blond girl, a tall skinny guy. Polo holds up the vodka bottle. He mimes drinking, then says, voice jovial and drunk-loud, “And then she jumped. And she screwed some fish at the bottom of the reservoir and then drowned. That’s what I heard, anyway. . . .” He is smiling.

Jeremiah slams down his cup and in one swift motion swoops across the room, grabs Polo by the collar, and pulls him in close. Polo struggles against him, but Jeremiah is too strong.

People are turning to watch, excited. I slip through the crowd. “Let him go,” I say. “This won’t help anything . . .” But Jeremiah pulls Polo in even closer, holds his collar tighter. Polo’s face is bright red. He’s wheezing now, his shirt choking him.
“Let him go,”
I say again.

For a moment Jeremiah just holds him there, their noses touching. “That’s not what happened,” he whispers finally. He drops Polo, who stumbles back, eyes wide. Jeremiah pushes through the crowd and out the front door.

“Psycho,” Polo says quietly after him.

I catch up with Jeremiah on the front steps.

“I don’t . . . ,” he starts to say. “I just . . .” There are big fat tears rolling right down his cheeks now. “This should not have happened like this.”

My heart squeezes. I don’t like what I’m about to do, but I know I have to. And this is my chance. “You’re right,” I say.

I lean toward him and put my arm around him as though I’m drunk now, warm and loose, limbs flopping. “It deff-nitly should never have happened.” I am slurring my words, acting as trashed as I’d be if I’d drunk all I pretended to. I let my legs wobble, collapse forward against Jeremiah’s warm bulk. He feels solid and strong, like nothing could ever topple him. He catches me.