A World Without You(71)

It’s fascinating but also a little creepy.

I’ve never seen him wear such a puppy-dog look on his face, like the one right now in the video, as he stares at the girl sitting beside him. It makes me want to know her. Is she cool? Is she using Bo? Does she feel the same way toward him?

On the screen, Dr. Franklin turns toward the girl. “Sofía,” he says, “do you have anything to add?”

She shakes her head mutely.

So that’s Sofía, the girl who killed herself. Dr. Franklin told me that she and Bo had been close, and now I can see the way he feels about her. More than “close.”

He loved her.

I can’t see how she feels about him, though. She’s guarded, but not obviously depressed. I guess I figured that someone who killed herself would look sad and tragic. A total emo, dressed in black, with a cutting habit. But Sofía looks . . . normal. There’s nothing in the way she sits by my brother, in the way she listens to the others, in the way she sweeps her hair over her shoulder, to indicate that she’s going to take her own life. I check the date on the file. It’s like a countdown clock over her head. Three weeks after this video, this girl sitting by my brother will kill herself.

I watch the rest of the video, and maybe it’s because I’m an outsider who doesn’t know her personally, or maybe it’s just because I know what will happen, but I can start to see the pieces of Sofía’s fate fall into place. It’s in the way she stands, as if just breathing is exhausting to her, as if carrying the weight of her own body around is dragging her underwater. It’s in the way she watches other people, detached, curious, like a scientist observing animals in the wild. She goes through the motions. When someone else is upset or sad or happy, it takes her a second to realize that she should mirror that emotion back, and another second for her to arrange her face into a mask of whatever emotion she’s hiding behind.

The little details all add up to one girl’s death. Each warning sign is tiny, almost imperceptible. I watch the last few videos straight through, knowing that Sofía has only days left. Her eyes lose focus during the group therapy sessions as she gradually becomes more and more disinterested in what’s happening around her. She gives the other girl in her class a silver bracelet as if it means nothing to her, but I saw the way her fingers lingered on it in earlier videos. When Bo smiles at her, it takes her longer and longer to smile back, as if she has to remind herself what that configuration of facial features means, or maybe she’s just mustering up the energy to mimic him.

Sometimes she is—I don’t know how to say it, and it’s weird to think this way because I never knew her, but sometimes it seems like Sofía is more herself. But then sometimes she just seems . . . absent.

I wonder, if I had been in Bo’s class, if I had occupied one of those blue plastic chairs, would I have noticed that Sofía was fading away? Would I have seen the signs, and would I have known what to do? Or would I have been like everyone else in the video: completely oblivious?

That’s not fair. Not everyone’s oblivious. The doctor tries to draw Sofía out of her shell. They have a private meeting four days before she kills herself. He changes her medication, he asks about side effects, he wants her to start keeping a “feelings journal.”

“I want you to know,” Dr. Franklin tells her, “that people love you. I know you feel alone in your family, but you’re not. People care about you. They see you. You matter.”

“I know,” Sofía says in a soft voice. But she doesn’t sound like she believes it.

That’s the last time she speaks on the tapes.

She doesn’t disappear. She’s still there, in each session.

Until she isn’t.

There’s a jump of several days without videos, and when they resume, a lot of the sessions are what I would expect—some students cry, and Dr. Franklin helps them through it, even though he seems on the verge of breaking down too. But not Bo. I watch him. I know he was close to Sofía, that he cared about her as much or more than anyone else. But any time her death is brought up, Bo’s face falls blank. He gets a sort of dreamy look in his eyes.

He never once seems to realize she’s gone. That she’s been gone for a while.





CHAPTER 47


Phoebe



I’m still thinking about the videos when I wake up the next morning and stagger downstairs for breakfast.

Bo’s already sitting at the dining room table, shoveling sugar-drenched Cheerios into his mouth. I almost ask him about Sofía, but I can’t think of a way to bring it up without being morbid.

“What?” Bo asks, his mouth full.

“Nothing,” I say, looking away and grabbing the box of cereal.

Bo’s spoon clatters on the table, and he scoots his chair back, ready to leave. The sweet dregs of his sugary milk are still on the bottom of the bowl. I will never understand how he can possibly skip the best part, but Bo never finishes the milk.

Rather than leaving as soon as he stands, though, Bo stares at me and then sits back down.

“Hey,” he says.

I look up at him, instantly on edge.

“I just . . . are you like me?” he asks.

“What?”

“Are you, you know”—he pauses—“like me?”