How to Be Brave(54)

I hit the button to read the text.

This is what it says:

georgia im sorry for this and for everything and u need to know that u were the nicest person i ever knew and thank u for including me. tell liss too okay? my mom is making us move again and i just cant do it anymore. i cant be stuck like this forever. but its going to be ok i know it. it’ll be fine now that it’ll be over.


I call her and throw on the lights, but she’s not answering and I’m freaking out I’m freaking out I’m freaking out.

Shit shit shit. What does this mean? What is she doing? Why—f*ck—why is she doing this?

I call her again and again, but there’s no answer. I don’t know her mom’s number. I don’t know anything else about her except where she lives. Where she lives. I know where she lives. I have to call 911.

I tell the operator about the message and about the drugs, and luckily I remember her address and her apartment number, and the operator, her voice so firm but so human, asks me where I live and for my number and she thanks me for calling and tells me to wake up my father.

I do, and he’s confused because it’s 3:30 in the morning and I tell him we have to go we have to go, but he doesn’t understand so I have to explain it all to him—what Evelyn did—what we did, all of us together—and I’m worried, I’m just so worried that she’s done something worse—pills or something, I don’t know, it just doesn’t sound good. And he’s simmering mad—his fists tighten—his jaw tightens—he’s disappointed again, the deepest kind of disappointment I’ve ever seen. As he pulls on his socks and his shoes, he mutters: “This is who your friends are?”

There’s no time, there’s no time, let’s go already—we have to go.

We head out into the dark, chilly night. My dad drives quickly down the near-empty streets, and it’s too much of a familiar feeling, this middle-of-the-night feeling, this heading out into the unknown like so many times she woke up with chest pains or she was crashing or she was already in the hospital and they’d call us to come, it doesn’t look good, it doesn’t look good, this might be it, this might be the last night. And then it was. But that very last night we weren’t really rushing. That night we knew it was coming.

And now this again. The same unknowns. What was she thinking? What was she doing? Why didn’t she choose to do something else? Anything else?

Why am I always the one they go to?

I see the flashing lights of the ambulance and fire engine from a block away. They’re there already, thank God, maybe they saved her, maybe she hadn’t done it yet, whatever she was going to do, maybe it was a false alarm.

But when we pull into an empty space, when we jump out of the car, when we run to the front door, when we see the doorman’s face, that same old man who caught us naked so many months ago, when we see the stretcher and the strength of four men pushing her unconscious body forward, when we see them hoist her into the back of the ambulance, we know it was too late. Again. This time. We were too late.

*

I don’t know how they found Evelyn’s mother, but she’s here with us, rubbing her frail hands together, pacing up and down the waiting room floors. It took her four hours to show up, and my dad had to say something nasty. “Who are these people who leave their children alone by themselves?” I didn’t respond.

But somehow she made it. Maybe she was in Omaha or Raleigh or Washington, D.C. She’s rarely at home, and I’ve never met her. She’s older than I thought she’d be. She has big brown eyes, like Evelyn, and when she looks at me, they soften.

When she first arrived, she grabbed me and hugged me. “You’re her friend Georgia, right?”

I didn’t know how to hug her back, how hard to squeeze.

She held on. “I don’t know what I’ve done to make Evelyn try so hard to hurt me like she has. Did she give you any clue as to why she would do something like this?”

I didn’t know how to answer. I didn’t know how to say that she did, that she talked about it all the time. I didn’t know how to say, You move too much. You’re gone too much. You just need to be there for her.

And then I thought, I needed to be there for her. But I wasn’t.

At that moment, I felt sick, like I wanted to collapse and let Evelyn’s mom be the one to catch me.

We sat down, finally, and talked for a while about Evelyn, trying to piece together the time line between when her mom left and when she took the pills. I guess Evelyn is failing every class and her mom thought it would be a good idea to move again, this time to Nevada, where her sister lives. Her mom said that Evelyn was angry, of course. But she said that this was nothing new, and she even said, rather coldly, if you ask me, “She just brings all this upon herself.”

Now we’re here, the three of us, waiting in awkward silence. I can feel my dad, next to me, judging all of this, trying to piece together how I managed to surround myself with such unfavorable people, like I’ve been hiding my real self from him. I guess we each have secret faces that we hide from the world. Maybe Evelyn’s problem is that she doesn’t know how to hide them very well, that she’s the most honest of anyone.

A few doctors come out to us periodically to tell us first that Evelyn is alive and that her stomach’s been pumped, that she’s breathing, and that she may or may not wake up today.