After paying for our coffees I walked Jenna to her car, an enormous dark blue Dodge truck that looked far too big for her, and watched as she climbed into it. Before she drove off I asked her if she was heading back home.
She was staring out through the windscreen as she shook her head and said: “I can’t stand being in my room anymore. It’s so full of her. I can’t stop thinking … I just can’t stop thinking. About her. About it. I need to be distracted. By anything.”
“So, what are you going to do?”
She shrugged, looking lost, looking so much younger than seventeen—far too young for any of this—I thought. “I guess I’ll just go to school. Nowhere else to go.”
I had tried going to school as normal when Nora first went missing. Those in-between days when we all assumed she’d be found quickly and be back home soon took on a strange, vague quality to them, as if I wasn’t even there. It’s as though someone has told me about them and I’m remembering their telling of it. I remember sitting in the school gym on the Monday after she’d been reported missing, in an assembly for Nora, an assembly called by my own father, who was obviously having trouble getting the tone right. Were we grieving the loss of a fellow student and friend? Were we telling one another that there was still hope, that we could still find her? Were we being warned about the dangers of being a young woman out late at night? Were we blaming drugs? When we got to the drugs part I got up and walked out, Ange close behind me, and we spent the rest of the day crying in the backseat of her car. No one came to get us and force us back to class, and I ended up missing weeks of school.
I’d raged at my dad that night, stormed at him as soon as he got through the door, face like a distant thunderstorm. He didn’t understand, I screamed, couldn’t possibly understand; Nora hadn’t run away, she wasn’t some messed-up kid on drugs trying to find her way out. Nora was always on her way up, always, and I couldn’t understand how everyone could have suddenly forgotten that and recast her in this new role of troubled teen. He’d answered in a low voice, quiet, levelheaded, sympathetic even, telling me he knew, he knew, he knew, that he knew Nora as well as I did, but he had professional obligations, he’d been briefed by the police on what to say. I can still feel the hot tears that stained my face that whole evening as I realized my father had loyalties that extended beyond me, beyond Nora.
When I finally went back to school, every glance cast at me and every scrap of gossip thrown my way implying that I’d been given special treatment because my dad was also the principal, it was to a different place entirely. What had once been safe, innocuous, boring, was now unbearable. It was on one of these first interminably long days back at school that I found my first note.
***
It flutters to the floor as soon I open my locker, and I pick it up idly, expecting it to be from Ange.
It’s written in Sharpie, stark black against the clean, perfect white of the printer paper.
Your friend probably killed herself why don’t you do the same
I stare down at it, not taking it in. All I can see for a second or two is the black and white, the curve of the writing, the slope of the sentence. It starts to tremble gently in my hand, but the reaction seems completely divorced from me. I lean my shoulder against the locker next to mine, creating a shield with my open locker door, and read the note again. I almost want to laugh in some way; as if anyone could hurt me now. As if any number of notes stuffed into my locker could make me feel the way Nora being gone makes me feel. I fold the note over carefully, once, twice and then slide it into the back pocket of my jeans.
I slam my locker door shut, forgetting what it is I went there for in the first place, and walk out of school. The metallic noise of the doors banging into the wall sings in my ears as I step out into the dazzle of sun and snow. I squeeze my eyes shut and feel that familiar anvil pressing me down into the earth, the weight of life suddenly a burden too heavy to bear. I walk home through the snow slowly, slowly and crawl into bed, knowing I won’t leave for over a week. I don’t tell anyone about the note—it doesn’t even occur to me—until Serena comes home a few days later.
“You’re not asleep,” she says, coming into my room without knocking.
“No.” I don’t bother telling her that I’m never actually asleep. Just exhausted.
“Cool. I just wanted to come say hi.” She walks over to the window and stares out at the evening, which is a perfect dusky purple. “How are you doing?”
“Fine.”
“Mom and Dad are really worried.” She turns to look at me finally, staring me down, which I can tell she’s been wanting to do the entire time. Serena isn’t a stareoutthewindowattheevening kind of girl. That’s me. Or at a push Cordy, but definitely not Serena. “I’m worried too. I thought you’d gone back to school. I thought things were better.”
“They got worse again.”
“Can you tell me why?”
I have no idea how to tell her, so I just stay silent. She sighs, padding over to the bookshelf.
“Have you read anything recently? Maybe that would help you feel better.”
Several words, hell an entire sentence even, rise up inside me but end up getting trapped somewhere in my chest, so again I say nothing. Serena’s eyes drift along the bank of books, taking them all in until something stops her in her perusing. I stuffed the note in between two books rather than tearing it up and throwing it away, which I’m now regretting. She pulls it out from between The Return of the King and The Silmarillion and stares down at it before turning to look at me. My face is stuck to the pillow. I haven’t moved since she walked into the room.
“What is this, Mads?”
“An anonymous missive from a concerned classmate.”
“Maddie.” She’s staring down at it again, her eyes drawing in on themselves. “Have you told anyone about this? Shown it to anyone?”
“No.”
“Why the hell not?”
I finally push myself up, leaning my head back against the headboard and closing my eyes. “Because it doesn’t matter. That’s not the problem, Serena, just a symptom.”
“This is really fucking serious,” she says, “this is aggressive. Horrible. They’re telling you to kill yourself.”
My eyes snap open, and Serena is staring right at me, her grey-blue eyes headlights in the near-dark of my bedroom. “It’s nothing,” I say, my voice a rubber band suddenly stretched too far. “Just some sick, psycho jock trying to hurt me.”
“Has this happened to Angela too?”
“I don’t know.” I wonder suddenly what Ange might be keeping from me in light of what I’m keeping from her.
“So, you literally haven’t told anyone?”
“No.”
“Well, I’m sorry but I have to tell Mom and Dad.”
I don’t say anything as she walks out of the room, evidence in hand. I rearrange my pillows and slide back down the bed. The world