The ghost laughs. This time, his voice comes from the center of my mind. Fine. If you won’t bring me back, I’ll take another body. I always wanted to see what it’s like to be a girl.
“Luna,” I croak, digging my nails into the soil.
“I’m sorry, Lee,” Luna says, face heavy with regret.
She doesn’t look at me, doesn’t see Tripp’s icewater hands reach down my throat, his arms invading my ribs. I let go of Gabi, who shudders to the forest floor, coughing, face a muddy red.
Luna continues to flip through the grimoire.
I open my mouth. A black cloud rises from within me, spirals into a blade of smoke, advances toward my sisters.
Luna finds the page, joins hands with Gabi. They start to chant.
“GODDESS, MAY YOU RECOGNIZE OUR PLIGHT—”
The garbage bags shielding Tripp’s remains melt away. His body parts start to rattle like electric toy trains; his legs, his arms, his head, his fingers, his dick all lift into the air, circle like a tornado, a rainstorm of flesh.
“WITH YOUR GRACE AND MIGHT, TURN OUR MINDS TO THE BLACKEST NIGHT—”
My limbs jerk up and forward, and I’m hurtling into the flesh and bones. Inside my skull, he’s laughing, and I can’t even cry. This is how I’m going to die. I bet my family will describe me at my funeral as conscientious—
“WITH THE LIFE OF ANOTHER I VANQUISH MY FRIGHT—”
I shut my eyes, I shut my eyes and Tripp’s laughter climbs to the peak of my mind—
“MAY THAT WHICH HAS HAUNTED ME LOSE FOREVER ITS BITE—”
In the dark, there’s a kiss, the musty petrochemical whiff of Axe, uncut fingernails marking the back of my neck, tongue forced between my lips.
Tears stream down Luna’s face.
“Lee, I’m seriously going to call 911,” Luna says. “Lee, if you don’t stop it, I’m going to call the police, I’m going to have to let them take you again, I’m sorry, Lee, I’m sorry.”
Gabi cradles Luna’s head as she cries.
“Tripp is literally right in front of you,” Luna shouts through mucus, clogged throat. “Tripp is right here.” She leans into Gabi’s shoulder, muffles her own words. “Leisl Ann Davis, I’m seriously going to call 911.”
“It’s okay, Leisl,” says Tripp, arms around my waist. My hands rest on the square bones of his shoulders. He is breathing, wholly intact, clean pleats on his grass-stained khakis, whiff of detergent and peppermint two-in-one shampoo. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to let the police take you. We’re going to calm you down right here, right now, and get you back to bed. Then I’ll drive you home to your mom, okay?”
He smiles. His breath is slightly rotten.
I start to wail. Tripp presses my head into his chest.
“Tripp is your boyfriend,” Gabi says, sniffling. “Lee, seriously. Tripp is trying to help you. He’s the only one who’s willing to help you. If you don’t stop it, we’re going to call the police.”
“Tripp’s taken care of you all semester,” Luna chimes in. “What the fuck, Leisl? Tripp has been so good to you.”
Tripp whispers in my ear: “Leave them alone, Leisl. Let them be dykes. You and Luna were never going to work out. I could have told you that back at Christmas.”
He presses me tighter.
“Luna,” I call.
“You’re safe with me,” Tripp says, hands dripping down to my ass, and I remember, crisp November, his high school varsity jacket surrounding my shoulders, the gray cashmere leash he wound around my neck at New Year’s, telling me in the shower during January term, “You’re not a real lesbian, Leisl, you love dick and you know it,” pressing his nails into my blue-veined underarm skin, my knees slipping to the drain and banging the tiles, gargling water up my nose.
His blood staining Rachel’s headboard—
I look over his shoulder at Gabi and Luna. They’re kissing, muttering to each other, cuddling and grinning like I don’t exist, like none of us knows the truth. I feel like my chest is a vase shattered by a whirring baseball; the loss I should have felt, the sharp incision of grief, when Sienna got in a car accident and Charlotte overdosed, when the police shut down the march—all those months ago in the bathroom—all that loss swallows me and I don’t have a choice.
“You’re dead,” I tell Tripp.
“You’re a crazy bitch,” Tripp says, baring his faded teeth.
He forces me into a kiss, fingertips digging into my back, like thorns cutting under my shoulder blades. I’m drowning in him, gargling his words, nothing but a stupid little girl, unable to escape, even when I have my chance between my hands, I can’t fucking move. I’m a deer whose internal organs have shut down because a human touched it, capture myopathy. I know what I should be doing. I know what I need. I still need the closing, the ending, NO, but beyond the ditch of deep dark frustration in my chest, I’m blocked. I’m a human crossroads and I can’t move on.
He spins me, his arm clenching my shoulders.
“I’ll never go missing again,” he assures me as he escorts me from the woods.
Luna is tangled in Gabi, oblivious.
He buys me these yellow-5-Creamsicle roses at the natural foods store. The hemp shop with the tight red window, neck-down female form in bondage, we stop there too, he shoplifts too, he’s the worst kind of person, shoplifting and dying young. Only he’ll unscrew his own hands from the cross and land face first in the snow, he’ll break his nose but plastic surgery does wonders, sixty-five years old it’s a silver dollar toss-up between the Turks and Caicos and the Supreme Court, leisure or power, he was born sucking on a solid gold egg and he’ll have both so long as he lives, that’s how he was born and how he will die.
He’s used to people on their knees, he knows what it is to be the heir to someone. After he buys me a new outfit I kiss the WASP fantastic and think of what Sienna said, her second or third lecture, when we were handing in our first assignment, All you girls who can’t write your papers unless you’re under your covers with Pooh Bear and a personal sleeve of Thin Mints, you worry me, how you’re going to survive in this world, and she was right, she was right that we’re lollipop-throating pink gingham girls, we sin by being who we are, we deserve this, we deserve to hurt and bleed and follow him wherever he insists on taking me.
I complain that the tiles are wet, and hurting my knees.
He drops me off at my room after.
Charlotte doesn’t answer her phone. Neither does my mom. My Internet searches turn up quite informative—Zoloft isn’t like lithium, one of those psych drugs where you need another drug to effectively keep it down and not just throw up your self-hatred and get chained to a hospital bed by intravenous needle.
I go to the vending machine downstairs to grab some water. Just to be safe, I dig out some old Ativan from the secret pocket of my purse.
The whole time, I’m thinking about her, per usual, how all I ever wanted was for someone to see into my heart, to understand me, to get me, and how Luna did see me, did get me, and she chose to leave me anyway. She saw the wolves and left me anyway. It hurts enough that I’m never going to open myself again; it’s enough for me to ruin the temple of my body, surround my corpse with NO TRESPASSING yellow tape, announce to potential looters that all the treasure inside has been stolen, she took it all.
Chapter Seventeen
The Snake
IT ENDED WITH AN UNSUCCESSFUL hex and a bottle of pills prescribed to me by Dr. Applebaum, and tiles for a pillow.
(THE DOCTOR SAYS SHE ALSO HAS A TYPE A PERSONALITY.)
Trying to kill yourself with Zoloft is like manually removing the pus from each of your pores with unwashed fingers, ravishing your skin with the imprint of everything your phone has touched. It’s clarifying; satisfying. Until the next morning you wake up and see bloody little hovels rising on your chin, cheeks, and the space between your eyes that isn’t forehead but isn’t nose or eyebrow either. Nothing can cover the last defense of your immunity against your dirty fin
gers, not NARS or peroxide or Colgate, the bottle swung upside-down like that early Hockney with the lovers and their sixty-nine toothpaste cocks, that piece you saw with Luna when the soft fluorescence of the campus museum convinced you that you loved her.
(MISS, CAN YOU HEAR ME? MISS DAVIS? CAN YOU HEAR ME?)
Here’s a little suicide primer: Taking a bunch of psychotropic medication will not kill you. You’ll throw it up, the whole bottle. I don’t know if the pills all disintegrate, or if digesting the first five pills powers your vomiting and the rest of the bottle comes up whole and draped in stomach acid, white cylindrical horseflies that tried to get a bite and couldn’t, because your body and mind aren’t on the same page, if they were on the same page you would be a flickering old woman and not Almost Nineteen, you would never be Almost Nineteen for the rest of your life.
(HOW MANY FINGERS AM I HOLDING UP?)
Our world prefers girls dead. In the dead girl, Everygirl sees her self for the first time, the self she is when she goes outside, ever since she was little, ever since she went to the playground, ever since she ran, screaming, sprinted as fast as she could, the boys had her Payless sandal, mud stained, white felt flowers, he took a fistful of shirt and she ran, she’s running, she’s running for the rest of her life.
(MISS DAVIS, CAN YOU HEAR ME—)
She’s been a dead girl ever since her mother told her to make up for her lack of a penis by sticking the sharp metal part of the car keys out while she’s walking through the parking lot, never go anywhere without that cragged silver phallus sticking out from your fist like a dagger.
NEVER LEAVE YOUR SCISSORS AT HOME.
(MISS DAVIS?)
Every time a girl goes outside she is dead, now and inevitably.
(MISS DAVIS?)
You could say that by taking a bunch of Zoloft I did not actually intend to kill myself, that I was looking for help, attention, making excuses.
(EXCUSES—)
Are you going to tell me I didn’t try hard enough?
(EXCUSES—)
It’s true that I want to be saved.
I open my eyes and my eyes are surrounding me. I am the witness to all the flaws of my own dead body: the slightly bowed turn of my legs, reclined amid the silken casket, sheathed under black pantyhose, the sausage blocks of my thighs stacked over my too-thick knees, the short dress that highlights the chunky pair of twin fat deposits between my armpits and my breasts, the way my nose curves slightly to the left under hair that is frizzing up from the holy water, brassy under the relic-yellow chapel light, dark roots still growing even though I’m finished with life.
The mortician did a shit job: I’m bloated under the tight dress, and the poorly chosen shade of archangel pink on my cheeks does nothing to offset either my deathly pallor or my acne.
No one is crying, except for Tripp, sobbing in the first pew, clutching my mother’s elbow, face shaking against her collarbone.
Luna is at the pulpit, reading from a gospel I don’t recognize. “I used to dream, you know, about some kind of magic potion that could make me forget him, some sci-fi dystopian innovation that could get inside my mind and get rid of him forever—”
Luna takes her seat in the pew and a priest in an infinite black cassock starts to read some psalm my grandmother chose, Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones, amen, and the priest has long lashes and lips that sneer and Tripp’s upturned nose, his dusting of freckles, the gaping red hole between his legs, thick and rich and cranberry blood soaking the cassock and dropping ping-pong onto the marble edge of the altar, he’s drinking the blood of Praise to You Lord Jesus Christ.
I look to the stained glass, the eaves, watch a flower girl, age three or four, distributing peonies and black dahlias down the aisle. The apocalyptic wardrobe of the funeral crowd catches the midmorning sun coming through the heads of Mary and Joseph and the open-jawed Byzantine apostles; my mother encapsulates Tripp and strokes his tearful face.
A veil shields my corpse’s head. The priest reaches down and slips a ring onto my dead finger.
I sit up in the casket, rip off the veil and shake my head.
“No,” I say, throwing off the ring, clink against the golden bowl of Eucharist, and my sentence is complete.
When the fire cools and the night comes and you can see again, the comforting automated blink of artificial lights, wheels down the hall, footsteps, you’re deathless, and he’s gone.
Gone.
You hold your hands up and see yourself for the first time, new cells, new life. This is not the same body he touched. You are remade, new skin, new feelings; the only magic you need is time.
Chapter Eighteen
Documenting Madness
YOU COULD SAY THAT BY taking a bunch of Zoloft and Ativan I did not actually intend to kill myself, that I was looking for help, for attention, which is what they say at the hospital, and what they repeat once I get transferred to McLean SouthEast, closer to home, where they upgrade me to group therapy once I’m keeping down solid food again.
The first time they mention the word psychosis is when I’m sitting across from the doctor and the resident who’s going to overhear my evaluation (it’s always really awkward when you think you’re going to have a private audience with the doctor and then he informs you his resident is going to observe the meeting, like you’re a fish fossil, an artifact, a specimen to gawk at). Tongue blurred by benzos, I accidentally let slip something about flying tarot cards and the resident gapes for a moment before he starts laughing, and the doctor laughs too.
They can’t decide what’s causing the psychosis, if it’s my PTSD (forty percent of combat veterans with diagnosed PTSD have visual and auditory hallucinations, a nurse tells me), if it was drugs (I insist I never did drugs, and they struggle to believe me), if I’m actually bipolar instead of “just” depressed. The most helpful perspective comes from the staff therapist, a prematurely bald man in a Hawaiian shirt, who explains that, yes, there’s chemistry involved, but, like most big problems, what’s wrong with me is multilayered, multifaceted, a many-legged beast. “You can have trauma and you can have a chemical problem,” he explains as we sit on a bench in the hall, watching the nurses guide patients from individual clinicians’ offices to the group ward.
“So there isn’t one magic solution that’s going to fix me,” I say.
He shakes his head. “It’s not like you’re a murderer. You self-harmed. You tried to take your own life. But don’t let anyone convince you that your action was selfish. You were trying to escape from very real pain. And we’re going to help you manage that pain, so you won’t break the hearts of your friends and family by removing yourself from the world.”
I wish this were a neat ending, in which I choose to make Daddy proud and become a lawyer after my Hallmark-boxed experience of justice, that it will end in the courtroom and the validation of an old white guy judge can soothe my mind enough to let me know I need not freeze anymore and remember him when I’m chopping scallions, when I’m between yellow intersections, when I’m in the shower and the lobby and the fitting room and my front-row business class seat with seventy-five dollars of extra legroom. But I know the truth: The bruises on my knees won’t heal at the magic wand of an objective someone else telling me it really did occur.
“Leisl, we discussed this already. There is no evidence of rape, dear,” the therapist repeats, and dear ruins it, though it doesn’t rot so much as sweetheart, Leisl sweetheart, Miss Davis my darling girl, YOU’RE FUCKING CRAZY, bipolar and too attached to the past, do you take pride in being a victim of a crime that never took place anywhere but your fucked-up Pretty Pretty Princess head?
I should care but all I care for is dusk and blackout curtains. I am too tired to fight for myself. I just want to float into nail salons and other people’s motorboats and Bowery bars where I can wear little secondhand designer skirts and feel the hands of some other mind that can confirm real and true for me, so long as I ha
ve sex with him whenever he wishes. I only care to be a satiated civilian; if I go to the front lines my stitches will burst and I will be dead soon enough (or back here, with all the other unbaptized trauma babies in marshmallow-walled limbo). Someday I might even get diamond-skinned enough to grow into one of those freeze-dried-astronaut-bananas women who glance up from the laundry and say to you, She got raped? So what? What’s the big deal? Get over it.
Later, in the zen room, when I topple out of a crane pose and catch the creepy guy from morning tai chi staring at my upturned ass, I excuse myself from the class and walk the halls, nod to passing staff like I know where I’m going, find my way outside and go sit in the courtyard, watch the nascent bees circle the geraniums. There’s a broom leaning against the bricks, bristles caked in dust. I hesitate, surveying the windows for onlookers, but I can’t resist. I seize the broom, feel the familiar tingle of power coursing through my fingers, straddle the handle and lift into the air.
I stay close, do several rounds of the parking lot and the hospital roof, skirt the edge of the neighborhood, avert the Cape seagulls and, mostly, lift my face to the sun, smile wide, thank the power within me for this one last time, for the confirmation that I’m not crazy, that, even if I suit the diagnostic boxes the doctors are trying to cram me into, what I saw was real, I can be sick but that doesn’t make me a liar, I didn’t imagine anything.
I return to the courtyard, leave the broom where I found it, avoid the creepy guy when I see him in the hall. Back in the zen room, just in time for savasana (corpse pose), I lie on the mat and feel some measure of peace, knowing that there is no peace but at least I can trust myself.
When my mom comes to visit over the weekend, I beg her to let me sleep at home; I can complete the last few days of group therapy commuting back and forth, the doctors confirm. Wading through the adolescent ward—middle schoolers with teddy bears and hospital bracelets, grim boys with Power Rangers blankets—she relents, tears in her eyes.
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