Heads of the Colored People(31)
She did actually feel depressed now, thinking about it, dying and all. No one would associate her with Sylvia Plath. She wouldn’t look like the Lady of Shalott with her new weave framing her face as she lay on her back in a boat, or even Anne of Green Gables as the Lady of Shalott or even Megan Follows as Anne of Green Gables as the Lady of Shalott, because her natural hair wasn’t even red, and anyway, she’d read that when black women died it wasn’t glamorous, and people didn’t make metonymic literary connections about them, even to lynching—as they did for black men; black women’s bodies just died, out of frame, and that made her sadder.
The laptop pinged. Another notification.
“Love this song! You’re on a roll today, girl.”
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If Jilly were to run a content analysis of the style and type of posts that got the most responses, it would emerge that faux Ebonics always ranked high, especially up until the past year or so: “Peep this foos.” A picture of herself wearing red oversize Sally Jessy Raphael glasses and making a fish face was one of her all-time highs, with 384 likes and 73 comments; maybe yesterday’s reenactment photo, in the white skirt and purple bandeau, was just played out. Current events worked, if they were interesting, deep stories she’d seen on Yahoo News about medicines that actually made you sicker or soy milk filled with estrogenic compounds and neurotoxic proteins. Posts about television were even better: “Kerry Washington is SO gorgeous. I want that outfit . . . and that one. Go, Shonda!” Instant fifty-six likes. Cat videos outperformed babies, which followed closely behind, but delicate posts about family and #blessings could be tricky, because people didn’t want to see how happy you were too often, even if you were making it all up.
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Jilly returned to the kitchen and scanned the refrigerator. Several of her friends were on antidepressants and had attempted suicide before, and they got a lot of positive responses for their candor. Jilly had asked her third therapist for antidepressants twice, but she said, “No, Jilly, I’m still not that kind of doctor. And you aren’t depressed, just narcissistic, and there are, so far, no medications for that.”
In third grade, after reading The Secret Garden, Jilly had asked her mom—and subsequently two doctors—for a back brace to treat her scoliosis, like Colin. They had all laughed and said, “What an imagination,” in those adult voices.
Her second therapist said, “You’re not a hypochondriac; you just have too much time on your hands. Try volunteering somewhere.”
The old people in the nursing home looked uninterested when Jilly tried out her tap-dancing and Shirley Temple imitations. A man with long ear-and-nostril hairs fell asleep midact, and his snoring was so obnoxious that Jilly paused the show to try to rouse him.
Jilly thought going to and posting vaguely about therapy at least left something up to the imagination of her followers. She mentioned her experiences there frequently in her “Think About It” Tuesday posts, with captions like, “Who says black people don’t go to therapy?” and #therapy. If she mentioned it often enough, without saying why she went, people could fill in a sexier disease than narcissism, which you couldn’t exactly tell anyone you had, because it made you look bad, and she didn’t even have the malignant kind or the official personality disorder; even her narcissism was pastel pink, kawaii cute.
Jilly was really hungry now, and dying of starvation wasn’t a quick suicide option. She had a cabinet full of groceries, some even gourmet, but a meal of microwave ramen seemed more fitting for the occasion than, say, chicken tenders and broccoli. She chose one of the Thai-flavored packages from the cupboard.
She had forgotten to put water in her ramen a year ago and heated the dry noodles and powder sauce to a smoky black mess that left her kitchen smelling like burned fish for a week but which made for an excellent photo. 227 likes.
During senior year, she’d known a girl named Fatima who had bulimia, and though Fatima didn’t otherwise eat dairy, she often binged on big servings of nacho cheese. Jilly didn’t envy any sickness that made you throw up or poop uncontrollably or look so gaunt that you weren’t even pretty anymore, but it did seem that everyone else had a label, that their illnesses got more attention, that there was something chic about them.
One of her friends—not online, but her real friend—Carl from the eleventh-grade art club, at Eisenhower High School, had even died. He hadn’t asked anyone for permission or left a note. His mother and friends, even Jilly, had wept openly at his funeral.
Jilly shivered, thinking about Carl in the closed casket, and his mom’s eyes, glassy yet hollow. She took out a porcelain bowl, which she’d ordered from Etsy, printed with kawaii lollipops.
She’d heard people, including Carl’s sister, say that suicide was the ultimate act of selfishness, that it left everyone else behind to clean up the mess. Jilly wasn’t sure how she felt about that. It was Carl’s body and therefore his choice. And no matter how you died, it left a mess for someone else to clean up. If Carl had died in a car accident or from cancer, his family would have still asked why, and they would have still been responsible for the funeral arrangements.
Jilly chose a porcelain soup spoon and floral-printed chopsticks and placed them next to the bowl. Who would make the arrangements for her? Her mother didn’t even know her favorite flowers, and she would probably want Jilly buried in an Ann Taylor dress suit with a bedazzled collar. The auburn sew-in weave was cute, but Jilly wasn’t sure she wanted to be memorialized in it forever. Who would run her online tribute page or make sure the right people came to the service? And what good was a funeral if she couldn’t, like Tom and Huck, witness the mourners and see how much they had all loved her?