What to Say Next(45)

I consider texting her, but I am too scared to turn on my phone. As soon as I got home it started buzzing from numbers I don’t recognize.

u little shithead. I’m gonna kill u.

How dare u say my gf looks like a miss piggy? Next time I c u, u r fn dead.

die retard.

weirdo turd. ur the pizzaface.

wtf is WRONG WITH YOU?

do us all a favor and DIE.

That’s a recurring motif in the texts and also in the online comments. My classmates’ desire for me to die. Which seems disproportional to the crime, as it is obvious that I was not the one who published my diary. How can people be angry for things I never expected or wanted them to see? It’s illogical. Like prosecuting someone for a thought crime.

And they want me dead. For real. Like, for my heart to stop beating, for my mother to lose a son and Miney to lose a brother, for me to no longer exist, at least in my current form. All that just because I filled a notebook with simple observations to help me remember people’s names and who to trust and how to survive in this confusing world called high school. Joe Mangino, the captain of the football team, looks nothing like a Joe, but he does look a lot like a ferret and used to squeeze my nipples when he passed me in the hallways at school. Was it so wrong of me to write that down? To make a note to myself that when I saw a rodentlike meathead, I should get out of the way? Purple nurples hurt.

I’m assuming that the threats to kill me are not literal. Miney used to threaten me all the time when we were little and I don’t believe she ever meant it. But I see no other way to interpret the desire for me to be dead. Maybe they do not want to do it by their own hands and actually murder me, which could risk them getting caught and going to jail, not to mention force them to cross certain universally agreed-upon moral boundaries, but certainly they want the same end result. For me to no longer be living.

do us all a favor and DIE.

Kill urself u piece of shit.

No, it gets even more specific. They don’t just want me dead, they want me to commit suicide. Apparently the best way I can contribute to this world is by leaving it.

My hands are flapping again. Tears are running down my face. I am losing control. Slipping into a vertiginous vortex. I used to think loneliness was being stuck with only the one voice in your head. I was wrong. Loneliness is hearing everyone else’s voices too, except they are stuck on repeat: Die, die, die.

—

A knock on my door. Then it opens. I don’t bother looking up. Not sure I could even if I wanted to. I know it’s Miney by the one-knuckled sound and the smell that follows. Her new sandalwood perfume and dirty hair.

“It’s down,” she says. “The link. It’s down. I thought you’d want to know.”

I don’t say anything. Continue to rock, head to knees, my hands tucked in, so the flapping makes me swing forward and back. My mom must have gone to Principal Hoch after all. Too bad it’s too late. Everyone who matters has seen it, and I’m sure it’s cached on at least a hundred hard drives.

Kit will never talk to me again.

Miney asks if she can rub my back. I shake my head no. Once. Hard. I can’t quite make out words yet. Orange. The world is orange, like the blazing center of a cartoon sun. Or a volcano.

No touching. Just oblivion. Give the people what they want, as the expression goes.

“Okay. I love you, you know. This will be okay. I promise, Little D,” she says, but it comes out all garbled. Instead there is orange, and a sound like roaring. Not soothing like the ocean, but loud. Deafening. Annihilating. “I know this feels like the end of the world, and I’ve been there, believe me, I’ve been there. But you will be okay.”

But in order to be okay, I need to be here. And I’m not. I’m floating away. The balloon inside my head is getting smaller and smaller until it disappears altogether into the blue sky.

—

I don’t go to school for the next three days. I stay in my room and fill the time with my flapping and with pi. I sleep too. Long, dark sleep that is neither restorative nor dream-filled. It is as close to dead as I can get without dying.

Miney and my mom take turns checking on me, and sometimes they sit on my bed. A safe two and a half feet away so we don’t touch. But they rock with me, their rhythm matching mine, and I like it. The almost-company. A tiny reminder that I am not alone. Not completely.

On what must be Tuesday afternoon, one day in, Trey knocks on the door. I do not stop rocking. I do not lift my head. There will be no guitar lesson today.

“I’m here for you, buddy. Whenever you’re ready,” Trey says, but I am not ready.

Later I hear Trey and Miney in the hall. I try to pay attention, as if listening to their words and translating them into sentences I understand will help bring me back.

“You’ve done good work with him,” Miney says, and I get stuck on that word, work. “He’ll be okay.”

“You think?” Trey asks. “I don’t know. That was…scary. Has this happened before? This bad?”

“Not really. Not like this.”

“I thought we were making progress.” I think about guitar riffs. Latch my brain onto the sequence of notes Trey taught me last week.

“You were. He’s been doing great. He made a friend. He’s been cracking jokes. He seemed to be really connecting…until now,” Miney says, and then their words get softer. I can’t tell if it’s because they are moving farther down the hall or if it’s my brain closing back in.