All the Rage(41)

This is what it would’ve been like for Penny’s family.

This is what it’s still like for them, for her mom and her dad, for Alek. Their love, desperate messages sent out to the universe, waiting to be returned and her silence— Her silence.

I stare at my phone until it starts to blur. The first tears fall, bring focus, and that’s when I notice the last notification. 1 UNSENT E-MAIL.

An e-mail, waiting for me to send it.

But I haven’t sent an e-mail from my phone in a very long time.

Did I leave a note for myself, and I was so drunk I put it there? It seems stupid, reaching, but who else would—I fall through the thought before it’s complete, hit the ground hard.

Who else would, if not me?

I find the e-mail and open it.

In the TO field, the address of GHS’s student announcement listserv. Any time a student has an announcement—club meetings or volunteer work opportunities or tutoring offers and now, searches for missing girls—they’re invited to put it on the listserv and it goes out to the entire school: the faculty, the student body. After students started sneaking trash talk about teachers and each other in their messages, a code of conduct was written up and Principal Diaz got tough. Every time someone f*cks around on the listserv, the entire school loses some kind of privilege. To further prevent any misuse, signing up has also been open to parents. It’s our choice whether we want to show them the kind of monsters they’re raising.

There is no message in the body of the e-mail. What’s the point in sending a blank e-mail to everyone in school? But then I see the attachments at the bottom— Photos. From my phone.

Only the file names are visible. All the possibilities of what they could reveal become a vise around my heart, makes the question of whether I did this … or someone else that much worse. I check the sent folder to make sure nothing got out—that this wasn’t the last e-mail in a long line of e-mails, but it’s empty. Nothing was sent.

I go to my photos and as soon as I’m there, I glimpse thumbnails, tiny bursts of colors, shapes that make people, a night. I let it sink in. My phone screen dims, conserving its battery, while I try to find the will to tap the screen and pick a photo.

It brightens when I finally do.

I’ve hated having my photograph taken since I was eleven. There are albums full of me before that age, this smiling, happy kid, playing it up for the camera. After that, it’s all hands in front of face and Mom, don’t. She thought it was natural; a girl gets to be a certain age and she doesn’t want to see herself anymore. But it wasn’t that. I didn’t understand who I was looking at. I could see the beginnings of a takeover, a body turning, growing, changing into something that didn’t feel like it belonged to me and every moment since then I’ve spent trying to hold on to the pieces of myself I still understand.

The girl in the photo is a waste of a girl.

A wasted girl on the ground, folded in on herself, her head against her knees and she’s surrounded by a small crowd with their backs to the camera and I don’t know who I feel more betrayed by—them or her.

I make myself numb as I switch to the next photo and the camera is closer to the girl, too close, at a nauseatingly perverse angle. The girl’s shirt is loose and wrinkly and dirty, her hair is half out of the ponytail it was tied in, and the parts of her face that are visible look wrong, like she’s so far from where her body happens to be.

I switch to the next photo and she’s staring right at me now—the camera. Her eyes are half-open and I feel it, she’s dead. She’s dead. I feel her deadness, feel her stuck between two places, the party and the rabbit hole beneath her.

Fall, I think. Be anywhere else.

In the next photograph, her hands are at her shirt, fumbling with its buttons. No, no. I ache at the picture after—a first button is undone, her hand snaked past her collar, resting against her skin. In the next shot, the camera is even closer. Another button is undone.

I bring my hand to my own shirt and it’s hot in this room, the air weighs on me, more than normal heat, pushing on me from the outside, from the inside, something I want to separate myself from. The next photo, the girl is looking up, up, up, eyes searching for something she’s not finding. Her hands rest uselessly at her sides. She looks so small and exhausted.

In the next photo, her shirt is open.

The pink-and-black lace push-up bra.

There are hands on her shoulders, keeping her upright, keeping her from slouching forward just so everyone can see.

But that skin has been shed now. That skin, all of that touched skin has been shed now, cells have regenerated. Those hands aren’t on her anymore.

Whatever was on her then is gone, now—

My head throbs. The kind of headache that makes you want to vomit, but I swallow against that feeling and click forward and I imagine it how it must have been that night, all these people around this girl, trying not to laugh, but it’s too hard. It’s so hard not to enjoy this because how can you put something so golden, a girl who can barely open her eyes or her mouth—how can you put something like that in front of them and expect them to be better people?

Because in the next photo—the last photo—the girl’s hands are at her bra, her red nails teasing the clasp and I think wildly that I could reach through and grab her wrist, like I could stop her and take her away, because no one else is doing it. Because no one else did it.