Confess now, before we find you.
I stare at the screen for a minute, trying to reconcile the tone of this email with the Nathan I knew for a day. It feels like two very different people. I wonder if it’s possible that someone else has taken over Nathan’s account. I wonder who “the reverend” is.
The bell rings, marking the end of the lunch period. I return to class and the black cloud takes hold. I find it hard to concentrate on what’s being said. I find it hard to see how any of this is important. Nothing I’m being taught here will make life less painful. None of the people in this room will make life less painful. I attack my cuticles with merciless precision. It is the only sensation that feels genuine.
Kelsea’s father is not going to pick her up after school; he’s still at work. Instead, she walks home, in order to avoid the bus. I am tempted to break this pattern, but it’s been so long since she’s ridden the bus that she has no memory of which bus is hers. So I start to walk.
Again, I find myself wishing for the mundane possibility of calling Rhiannon on the phone, for filling the next empty hour with the sound of her voice.
But instead, all I am left with is Kelsea and her damaged perceptions. The walk home is a steep one, and I wonder if it’s yet another way she punishes herself. After about a half hour, with another half hour in front of me, I decide to stop at a playground I’m about to pass. The parents there give me wary looks because I am not a parent or a little kid, so I steer clear of the jungle gym, the swings, and the sandbox, and end up on the outer ring, on a seesaw that looks like it’s been banished from everything else for bad behavior.
There’s homework I could do, but Kelsea’s journal calls out to me instead. I’m a little afraid of what I’ll find inside, but mostly I’m curious. If I can’t access the things she’s felt, I will at least be able to read a partial transcript.
It’s not a journal in the traditional sense. That becomes apparent after a page or two. There are no musings about boys or girls. There are no revisited scenes of discord with her father or her teachers. There are no secrets shared or injustices vented.
Instead, there are ways to kill yourself, listed with extraordinary detail.
Knives to the heart. Knives to the arm. Belts around the neck. Plastic bags. Hard falls. Death by burning. All of them methodically researched. Examples given. Illustrations provided—rough illustrations where the test case is clearly Kelsea. Self-portraits of her own demise.
I flip to the end, past pages of dosages and special instructions. There are still blank pages at the back, but before them is a page that reads DEADLINE, followed by a date that’s only six days away.
I look through the rest of the notebook, trying to find other, failed deadlines.
But there’s only the one.
I get off the seesaw, back away from the park. Because now I feel like I am the thing the parents are afraid of, I am the reality they want to avoid. No, not just avoid—prevent
. They don’t want me anywhere near their children, and I don’t blame them. It feels as if everything I touch will turn to harm.
I don’t know what to do. There’s no threat in the present—I am in control of the body, and as long as I am in control of the body, I will not allow it to hurt itself. But I will not be in control six days from now.
I know I am not supposed to interfere. It is Kelsea’s life, not mine. It is unfair of me to do something that limits her choices, that makes up her mind for her.
My childish impulse is to wish I hadn’t opened the journal.
But I have.
I try to access any memory of Kelsea giving a cry for help. But the thing about a cry for help is that someone else needs to be around to hear it. And I am not finding a moment of that in Kelsea’s life. Her father sees what he wants to see, and she doesn’t want to dispel this fiction with fact. Her mother left years ago. Other relatives are distant. Friends all exist far outside the black cloud. Just because Lena was nice in physics class doesn’t mean she should be freighted with this, or would know what to do.
I make it back to Kelsea’s empty house, sweaty and exhausted. I turn on her computer and everything I need to know is there in her history—the sites where these plans come from, where this information can be gleaned. Right there, one click away for everyone to see. Only no one is looking.
We both need to talk to someone.
I email Rhiannon.
I really need to speak to you right now. The girl whose body I’m in wants to kill herself. This is not a joke.
I give her Kelsea’s home phone number, figuring there will be no obvious record of it, and that it can always be discounted as a wrong number.
Ten minutes later, she calls.
“Hello?” I answer.
“Is that you?” she asks.
“Yeah.” I’ve forgotten that she doesn’t know the sound of my voice. “It’s me.”
“I got your email. Wow.”