Hold Me Close(68)

Nobody takes a shower, even though the gym teacher said they have to. Effie does, though. She’ll shower any freaking place with hot water. What does she care if it means being naked in front of other girls? None of them ever had to spend weeks feeling filthy. Effie will never pass up a chance to scrub herself, especially after sweating on the track the way they did today. And it’s last period. She can take her time, no rush to get to her next class.

She closes her eyes to let the hot water stream over her face. Dreamily, she scrubs her hair, luxuriating in the way the shampoo leaves it squeaky clean. She lathers beneath her arms, over her belly, her thighs. She looks down to see the suds swirling down the drain around her toes. When she looks up, Cindy Jones is looking at her from the shower room doorway. Cindy wears too much black eyeliner and teases her hair high on one side, leaving the other side shaved. She’s the antithesis of a teen drama cheerleader, but she’s still a popular girl with a covey of followers who bill and coo around her. Now she’s staring in at Effie.

“What?” Effie says, challenging.

Cindy’s smirk says it all. When Effie comes out of the shower with her towel wrapped around her breasts and her wet hair still hanging in sopping strands over her back, Cindy is hovering around her locker in the next row over. Her voice rises enough to be sure Effie hears her.

“Yeah, she took a whole bunch of crazy pills with a bottle of Scotch. They had to send her to the hospital to get her stomach pumped.” Cindy says this with such confidence there’s no way anyone could dispute her.

Effie slips her panties over her still-damp skin. Then her bra. She wraps her hair in the towel, refusing to give them the satisfaction of knowing she heard them, but Cindy isn’t satisfied. She wants Effie to know they’re talking about her. She wants a reaction.

“It was a suicide pact,” Cindy says, a little louder. “With her and that guy she was with. Her parents found her in the bathtub with a razor on her wrist.”


Effie can’t take it. She steps around the row of lockers. “Shut up.”

Cindy turns with another of those smirks. Why she has such a f*cking hard-on for Effie isn’t clear, except that maybe compared to Effie’s story, Cindy is not even close to being the kind of badass she makes herself out to be. What has Cindy ever survived but the wrong pair of jeans under the Christmas tree?

“Everyone knows you were in the hospital two weeks ago. And you didn’t have the flu.”

The bleeding and cramping had stopped only a few days ago. Effie missed only three days of school. Now her hands fist with rage she forces herself not to show.

“So you assume I tried to kill myself?”

Cindy’s smirk falters for a second. She’s not expecting Effie to stand up to her, because nobody ever does. Effie takes the towel from her hair with a quick, drying scrub, then tosses it to the bench. She puts her hands on her hips. Nobody can look directly at her, whether they’re ashamed or because she’s standing so boldly in only her underwear and that intimidates them, her easy nakedness.

“If I tried to kill myself, they wouldn’t let me out of the hospital the same day. They’d send me someplace for longer than two days.” It’s Effie’s turn to sneer. She holds out both wrists. “I don’t even have a scratch there. So much for your razor blade theory.”

Cindy’s chin goes up. “Look, it’s not like it’s a big deal. Lots of people try to kill themselves. I mean, they’re losers, but whatever.”

Effie looks at each of the girls in the group, one at a time. None of them will meet her gaze. Her mouth tastes sour. She wants to spit.

She can’t tell them the real reason she had to go to the ER and why she missed school. The truth is worse than Cindy’s lie. Thinking of it all over again breaks her with the slow, spreading crackle of glass shattering. She thinks of her father saying, “Effie, you don’t have to go back to school right away. Nobody would blame you if you wanted to stay home.” Of her mother responding, “She needs to get back into normal life, Phil. Or she never will.”

If Effie ever wants to get back into normal life, here it is. The bullshit of high school, right in front of her. She’s already older than all of these girls, even if they’re still the same age. It’s not enough that she struggles with the curriculum in classes that are technically two grades behind so that she can catch up in time for graduation. She also has to eat shit or be an outcast.

“I didn’t try very hard.” The words are ash on Effie’s tongue. She sees the way their faces light up. The way Cindy looks around with smug satisfaction, even though she has to know her own story was a lie.

“My cousin tried to kill himself once,” pipes up Rachel.

Courtney nods. “Yeah, I went to summer camp with a girl who tried.”

One by one, the small group chimes in with their own stories. They all know someone who tried, but nobody seems to know anyone who succeeded. There’s acceptance in their eyes and voices, in the way they reach out to her without actually reaching, and Effie lets them take her into their circle because she doesn’t want to be outside it.

She can’t stop thinking about it, though. Later, after dinner when she’s supposed to be doing her homework, all she can do is stare at the pages of her history book and think about how she will never need to know who wrote the Magna Carta. Her stomach is empty, growling, because her mom made some kind of chili and there were simply too many...things...in it for Effie to eat.