Tease(80)

The guidance counselor gets up to talk. I’ve only seen him once, at an assembly they made us go to about picking a college, but now he starts talking about supporting each other and getting through this difficult time. I don’t know, I’m not really listening. I’m watching Dylan, so I see when he moves—he finally drops his hands from his eyes and stands up, all in one motion. He shoves his way past everyone in his row and takes the stairs down, two at a time. The bar on the gym door makes this loud squeak when he pushes it open, hard, and everyone in the gym is looking as the door closes behind him. It’s set up so it doesn’t slam, but that almost makes it worse. It takes a long, long time to close. Finally it clicks shut and I think, Dylan must be in his car by now. Or anywhere—wherever he’s going.

And I think, He’s never going to talk to me again.

And that’s the saddest I feel all day.

We get dismissed for the rest of the day. Brielle and Noelle are going to Brielle’s house, so I go too. They smoke weed but I don’t. They call Kyle and Jacob, who come over, and then Marcus is there, and Brielle pulls out a bottle of vodka from her parents’ cabinet. I drink a little, but I’m not used to having vodka in the middle of the day, and when I go upstairs to use Brielle’s bathroom I think, I’ll just lie down for a minute, and then I’m waking up, like, two hours later, which is totally embarrassing. I go downstairs, expecting everyone to make fun of me, but they’re all watching the local news and laughing. It’s all about Emma, of course, and I don’t know what’s so funny, but I hear Jacob say something like “Who doesn’t just take pills?” and Kyle goes, “She was too stupid to figure out what pills to take. She would’ve tried to OD on, like, Advil.”

It’s two thirty already so I just sneak into the kitchen, grab my bag, and leave. I have to get my brothers, I have to go home. My mom must’ve heard about this by now. Suddenly I remember our meeting at the school tomorrow—that’s cancelled, right? Is my dad still coming out? I guess I didn’t really want to see him, anyway. I didn’t want to go to that meeting, but—shit! That meeting was about Emma, wasn’t it? So . . . so now what?

There’s a light snow falling when I pull up to Pleasant Hill, and both boys come running out of the school with their arms spread out, trying to catch it. One of Tommy’s friends is with him, yelling, “Snow day! Snow day!”

They do their usual front-seat shove-match, which Tommy wins, and crash into the car. Alex yells, “We’re gonna have a snow day tomorrow!”

“It’s March, dummy, there’s no way there’s gonna be enough snow for that,” Tommy says, but he’s grinning and his cheeks are all red from the running and the cold.

I notice that I’m shivering, even though I’ve been in my warm car this whole time. Suddenly I realize I forgot to eat lunch. The inside of my stomach is cold. I’m used to it being upset, in knots, stressed. Now it’s just . . . empty. I don’t even say anything to the boys. I just drive home, hoping I don’t get us in an accident along the way. My hands are so numb I can’t really feel the wheel.

I can’t really feel anything.

It’s obvious as soon as we’re home that Mom already knows. She sends Tommy and Alex up to their room and tells them we’re going to order pizza. They’re almost as excited by that as they were by the snow, and we hear them thump up the stairs, yelling about what kinds of toppings they’re going to get.

Mom and I just stare at each other for a minute. Finally, she says, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” I say. It feels like I haven’t used my voice at all today, it comes out all scratchy. I guess I haven’t talked much, but of course I’m okay.

“Is—is everyone okay? Brielle? And—oh, God, what about Dylan?”

I just shrug.

“Of course,” she says. “Of course this is hard for all of you. God, I can’t believe this. She was sixteen . . .” Mom sits down heavily on one of the kitchen stools and just stares at the counter for a while. I stand nearby, not sure what to do.

“I’m just gonna . . .” I have to stop and clear my throat. “I’m gonna go to my room, okay? I don’t care what kind of pizza. I’m not really hungry anyway.”

She looks up at me, her face stricken and worried and, like, ten years older than it usually looks, but she just nods. So I go.



The next morning, there are news vans parked outside school. That afternoon they’re outside my house. By the end of the week everyone knows that Emma Putnam stayed home that Monday, she waited until her parents went to work, and she tied a heavyduty extension cord around her neck. She tied the other end to the exposed beams in her parents’ garage.

And everyone knows that Emma Putnam didn’t just kill herself. She killed herself for a reason.

And that reason was Brielle. Dylan. Kyle. Jacob.

And me.

A special prosecutor brings charges against us. The Facebook stuff has already been on the news. Emma’s crying parents are on Good Morning America, sitting next to the lawyer, talking about bullying and suicide and Emma’s bright future cut short.

Megan Corley goes on the Today show and tells them how “some girls” painted the word SLUT on Emma’s locker on Valentine’s Day. I’m watching it on my computer in my room, and when she says that I almost choke. And when the interviewer asks if she means the girls “in the lawsuit” and Megan nods, I scream. I push the laptop off my bed and for a second I think—I hope—it’s broken, but it’s not. The video is just paused, with Megan’s stupid, tearstained face looking up at me from the floor.