Freshwater(44)

Uche’s corpse leaned back and extended a long leg toward her refrigerator, folding its arms. A large flake of skin hung precariously off the steep height of its cheek.

“Alexander Uncle, Bishop Uncle, Grandpa, you.” Ada looked up at Uche’s corpse as she listed Saachi’s dead family and frowned. “I feel you’ll either be the most welcoming or the most angry.” Her face crumpled into sadness at even the thought of it. “Don’t be angry at me, please,” she said. “I’ve had too much of it down here. I know I’m too much and everyone is tired of it, especially me. And I know the others care, but they’ll stop me and I just want to lose, just this once.”

She spilled the pills on the table, above the bowl and next to the open packet of freeze-dried strawberries. Uche’s corpse dropped its heavy-lidded eyes to the pool she’d just made. I followed its gaze, looking down at the thousands of milligrams that were on our side. We couldn’t lose, not this time.

I leaned into Ada’s ear. “You know how they say take things a day at a time?” I said. “You can manage a pill at a time.”

Ada nodded and I kept the count for her. A few hundred milligrams down, several thousand, a few hundred more to go. She always hated taking tablets with water and she’d meant to make grapefruit juice earlier, but the juicer was dirty. The dishwashing liquid was grapefruit scented. She tipped the bowl of miso soup to her mouth. When she was a child, Ada used to take medicine with chocolate milk, or else it would all come pouring thickly back up. I kept count for her.

A few thousand and a few hundred down. The trick, I had realized, was to get Ada to pretend that none of this was happening. Because if it was happening, she’d have to call her best friend, and what could that one do except worry from far away? So I made the kitchen unreal and Uche was there to prove it. If you die in a video game, do you die in real life? She had practice in the unreal from all those years of fairies, all those years of believing in floating lands and split selves; they were preparing all for this moment, this true attempt, this ultimate belief. I kept the count for her.

More thousands, more hundreds of milligrams. We were halfway done. Ada thought of Bassey Ikpi and her fifteen-year-old friend who killed herself. There was a whole nonprofit now named after her, the Siwe Project. She thought of all the gay kids who had killed themselves back to back that year, including the young man she spoke to on the train in Brooklyn, who’d gone home and hanged himself. The unseen and hurting ones, all leaving together. It felt like she had missed a train and was trying to catch up, slipping on the tracks.

I kept the count going. We had spent entirely too long with a foot in this world; the hold had to give, the foot had to return. The Obi may kneel down, but it never crumbles.

Hassan spoiled everything by calling her.



I watched it fall apart from there. I watched Ada talk to Hassan as if nothing had happened, as if Uche hadn’t been and then not been in her kitchen, as if the unreal I’d spent all morning building hadn’t just been destroyed. Right before she got off the phone, she told him.

“I think I did something stupid,” she said, only calling it that because she knew that’s what he would call it.

“What did you do?”

“… I took some pills.”

“What?”

“I took some pills.”

“Some? How many did you take?”

Ada said nothing.

“How many did you take, Ada?!”

She tried to make it sound like a joke. “Um, quite a lot.”

“What the fuck?!”

“No, no, it’s fine. Let me call you back. I’m going to call one of my friends and sort it out.” Ada hung up on him and turned on her computer. I watched, frozen. Just like that. Everything, gone. She was video chatting now, explaining what happened to one of her friends, being bright and chirpy in a way that was probably obscene.

Her friend was panicking. “Should I call 911?” she kept asking.

“No!” At least Ada and I were still on the same page with that. “Don’t call anyone. It’s going to be fine. I’m just going to make myself throw up—I didn’t take that many. It’ll be fine. Hold on.”

I followed Ada numbly to the bathroom and watched her stick her fingers down her throat. Nothing came up but a piece of seaweed and some bile. She kept trying for about ten minutes, then went back to the computer and kept talking to her friend.

“I was just having a bad morning, like I was tired of everything—” Ada was interrupted by a banging on the front door and her friend started crying.

“I’m sorry,” she said to Ada. “I had to call them.”

Ada burst into short and panicked sobs. “No, no, no!” She slammed the laptop shut and I stepped in quickly, smoothing out her face so we could answer the door.

“Don’t let them see you like this,” I told her. I could barely feel anything—my failure was overwhelming—but we were still alive, and I still knew my job. Three police officers came in and started asking questions as I watched.

“Why would you go and do something like that?” one of them asked, amused. “Things can’t be that bad.”

I put a smile on Ada’s face and she kept it as she looked at him, as she walked down the stairs and out to the sidewalk, where the ambulance was waiting for her. Donyen jumped out of a taxi and came up to Ada.