The Truth About Keeping Secrets(16)

Chapter 5


It wasn’t really the ‘dyke’ that bothered me. Entirely uninspired. Try again.

It wasn’t even the ‘Your dad deserved it’. That sounded almost childish, like some valued contributor to the human race was sitting around and twiddling their thumbs, thinking, ‘What’s the worst thing I could say to this bereaved individual?’

It was the ‘so will you’.

Not so did you. As in, you deserved his death and the repercussions of it. So will you. As in something that hadn’t even happened yet.

I thought about messaging back. Asking, ‘Um, yes, excuse me, are you sure you meant to threaten me?’ But it wasn’t the fear of the confrontation that held me back; it was the fear that they’d say more that I didn’t want to hear.

God. Who hated me enough to send this? Did I even have enemies?

Bea?

But she wouldn’t. Right? God. Maybe she’d been kind of a shitty person, but she wasn’t evil. Was she? And even if she was, why now? Why get back at me now?

I sucked on my sandpaper tongue. Screenshotted the conversation without replying and sent it to Olivia, who texted back almost immediately.

Her: uh, what the HECK

Her: wth do they mean ‘and so will you’???

Her: typo???

Me: I don’t know. I don’t think so

Her: soooooo creepy

Her: wanna come over and watch ’flix later??

Her changing the subject so nonchalantly made my blood boil. Maybe she was trying to be helpful. Maybe she was just doing what I’d asked: pretending everything was the same. Regular programming. But nothing was the same; the decay was creeping into everything, and I was pretty sure I was the only person in the world who could see it.

October became November, and two Dad-less weeks became two Dad-less months. My encounter with June became a memory. Everything became death.

Time passed relentlessly, and because I rarely slept, days seemingly didn’t end or begin, just rolled into one another. This illusion was facilitated by the fact that it was always dark and freezing cold. Bone-shatteringly cold. The chill had arrived in full force, dripped into you and clotted along the underside of your flesh. Snow covered everything like a second layer of skin; it clung to branches and gathered in clumps that looked like giant grey tumours. Most days, I shovelled the driveway at Mom’s request. I switched to the bike with the winter wheels. I liked to watch the blizzards from my bedroom window, or Dad’s office, remembering that thing in Ron Howard’s Grinch where he implies that each snowflake contains its own tiny universe. I liked to watch them smack against the ground, melt against the salt on the sidewalk. Splat, splat, splat.

Any gossip about me at school, imagined or otherwise, had seemingly stopped. I guess they’d all got their fill of my despair. Misery, when finite, is a fevered game of limit-pushing: running your finger quickly through a lighter flame or jabbing a knife in between your outstretched fingers. Something to get the adrenaline pumping. But when it gets to be too much, you can shut it off, catch your breath, and nothing’s lost. Turns out it’s a lot less fun when it’s not on a switch.

They’d all moved on. I figured I was supposed to as well. Two hours was enough to kill Dad, I guess, so why wasn’t two months enough to heal me? Two months, two lifetimes, two hundred Big Bangs.

And the texts. I’d waited to see if there was a follow-up, but there wasn’t. Even my anonymous harasser had got bored of me. I’d kept an eye on Bea just in case. She still refused to even acknowledge me, instead seeming angry when she accidentally caught my eye in Film. I wasn’t sure if she was able to hold a grudge for two years, or why that grudge was seemingly being exacerbated by the death of the target’s dad – but she was the only person I could think of who had enough history with me to have a motive. The ‘you will too’ reared its head at unexpected moments; I was surprised how much the words had actually unsettled me.

And June. If I hadn’t held her file in my own two hands, I might have been able to convince myself that I’d made the whole thing up. I barely saw her at school. Didn’t hear from her. Except for one time when I passed her in the hallway, and I swore she glanced over at me just before she walked into my blind spot. Other than that, though, she was just as distant as she’d been before I’d spoken a word to her.

The most prominent actor in my life, though, was death. A former side character who had stolen all the leads. Since death had become the new lens I filtered everything through, how could I ever trust myself? I was obsessive. Death became my new neutral. And more terrifying than not being able to think straight is knowing you’re not able to think straight; I could feel my mind slipping. I’d have much preferred some sort of ignorant melancholy, where I wasn’t acutely aware of why I was thinking and feeling everything I did. God, I was aware. I was going insane.

I was terrified.

I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want to die. Whenever I thought about it, the inevitability of the thing, this dull, aching dread would swoop over me, settle into my pores, and the only thing I could do was let it pass. Nothing prevented it. Nothing ended it.

But Dad had done it. To so vehemently fear the thing he was forced to confront made me feel borderline pathetic. I wished more than anything that I could summon the courage to look into death’s face, to say I wasn’t afraid, because fearing it gave it power over me, over Dad, and I knew that, but it didn’t even matter because I was a coward.