Heads of the Colored People(30)
She checked her pages again, this time on her laptop.
Pills might not work the first time. All she had were six pseudoephedrine-free gelcaps, and they seemed most likely to upset her stomach. There was no alcohol in the house to mix with anything, because she drank only when people could watch. She was really funny when she drank, or at least she tried to be. Her impression of Shirley Temple as Heidi was a big hit. “I’ve got to see the grandfather, I’ve just got to,” she would say, bunching up her lips and hunching her shoulders. She’d tap-danced on a table once or twice to applause.
On the bright side, if the suicide attempt failed and she had to have her stomach pumped, she would lose at least ten pounds, and that would be better than last year’s colonic, the pictures of which had elicited an awkward silence from her online friends. Weight loss would make for a great status update.
Razor wounds were better, she decided, because even though there would be blood, she’d pass out before she saw much of it, and if she didn’t die, she could take pictures of the scars. Actually, scarring might be much better than attempted or completed suicide because there’d be questions to answer, like “What happened? Who did that to you? Are you okay? Do you need help with anything? You didn’t do that to yourself, did you?” She committed to becoming a cutter for an hour or so, like Ellie on Degrassi, and to make a few marks up one arm and then post a picture. She eyed her marmalade cat, Sherman, sitting on the window’s lily-print cushion. The cuts would have to be deep enough so they wouldn’t look like mere scratches but not so deep as to draw too much blood.
The first tiny cut hurt way more than it looked like it did when Ellie tried it, and Jilly was hungry. She put the knife back in its pouch, again, licked at her wrist—though there was no blood, only a superficial abrasion—rifled through the pantry, and finding nothing to snack on, sat back on the couch.
She had read somewhere, a book in Psychology 101 or something, that people who told everyone they were going to do it were just asking for permission, but she didn’t need or want permission.
? ? ?
The thing about Jilly—and this is something she’d feared about her life from adolescence onward—was that there was no backstory. Nothing exciting or terrible had ever happened to her, and if there was any oppression for her to overcome, it only grazed her but never lingered. She had been followed in posh boutiques many times by Asian and white women and twice by black women, but those were the only examples of racism she could remember experiencing. She knew that she should feel discontentment, connected to a large chain of disenfranchisement or systemic persecution—it’s not that black death and the news of the world didn’t touch her spirit—but she was somewhat ashamed to say, in therapy or publicly, that the bulk of her discontentment came from having very little about which to be discontented. Her mother was pushy but stable, her father claimed her, her friends were attentive if tired. It was she who broke up with her boyfriend, not the other way around, and they were still Facebook friends. She got a dozen “Are you okay?” direct messages after she changed her status from “in a relationship” to “single.” And she had a full network of supportive people, however superficial most of their interactions were. The support she lacked felt more fundamental, and she didn’t know where to seek it.
The picture Jilly had posted the day before had gotten only four likes and two comments: “HOTT,” from an acne-prone creep she’d known in high school; and “your welcome” when she replied to his post. Perhaps that was what set her off, not disregard for the difference between “you’re” and “your,” but the shallow comments. She thought the picture, which she’d taken in her bathroom mirror from her camera phone, warranted a better response, at very least because of the interesting angle from which she took it. The sideways shot showed her, fingers making a peace sign, lips making a fish face, in a cream-colored skirt that stopped at the upper thigh and offset her smooth brown skin, and a purple bandeau top that might or might not have been half of a bikini.
She put her laptop down and pulled her knees toward herself when an idea came to her. It was Thursday, after all. She posted “TBT” and a link to a YouTube video of “Dead and Gone,” to feel out the traffic, then waited for the notifications to start, for the thumbs to erect small monuments.
Within twenty minutes, a red square announced fourteen likes, no comments. She didn’t know how to read this. Were they saying they wanted her dead and gone or that they liked TI, or Justin Timberlake?
She waited ten minutes and tried a second video, then another, posting from her laptop. These things worked best in a quick succession that made them seem stream of consciousness. “Another one: ‘Give Up the Ghost’ by Immature, feat. Crazy Bone.”
“Oh and can’t forget Bone Thugs: ‘Crossroads.’?”
Jilly could boast of few superlatives that might be included in her obituary. In eighth grade, she was voted Most Photogenic by her peers and earned a quarter-page feature in the school yearbook. But she could never regain that former glory. By high school, she was one of four Prettiest Girls, and two of them were thicker than she was, and she wasn’t even the only black girl to win the honor. An undergrad boyfriend said she was the best kisser he’d ever had, but he cheated on her. A stranger at the mall said her feet were “the most adorable feet I’ve ever seen.” She wasn’t sure if the compliments of a creeper even counted. What did she have to show for her life, other than the near perfections of her appearance?