Girl on the Line

by Faith Gardner

  My own eyes fill up with tears. “Nicola, if you’re thinking about ending your life, you really need to get help.”

  She stops a sob and the line gets quiet.

  “Wait—what did you call me?” she asks.

  Oh no.

  I didn’t.

  Did I?

  “You said Nicola,” she insists. “How do you . . . ?”

  “I said Coco,” I lie.

  “I have to go,” she says.

  And the line clicks.

  I guess it really was her, then. I was right about “Coco” being Nicola.

  I stare at the tabletop in front of me, the useless binder, the stupid clip art on the wall. I take my headset off and listen to the quiet chatter of the other hotline volunteers.

  “No offense, but your so-called friend sounds like a real piece of shit.”

  “In psychology, we call that ‘projection.’ You ever heard that term?”

  “Have you tried acupuncture?”

  Suicidal ideation is different than suicidal intent, Wolf always says. Maybe she was only saying the words out loud to frighten herself. Maybe she’ll call back. She always does. And when she does, I’ll say all the right things. I’ll make sure she gets help. Things could be a lot better for her, if she had a Wolf in her life.

  I go to the bathroom, sit in a stall, wait for the mean self-destructive feelings to pass.

  “Decompress?” Lydia asks me when I come back in. “You look . . . ruffled.”

  Her words make me angry, because she always looks ruffled. Her hair’s a mess. Her eyes are bloodshot. She’s knitting something that honestly looks like entrails.

  “I’m fine,” I say.

  I am totally, totally fine.

  For the next couple of days, I keep my eye on social media, checking Nicola Albierti’s profile, noting that everything looks okay. And it does. Just smiling pics of friends and meals and gym trips and kitten memes. I channel Wolf and decide I’ve been overreacting. Nicola Albierti is not in the danger zone. She said she felt like she wanted to end it, not that she was planning to. Of all people, I should know there is a huge difference. Maybe she just needed to say the idea out loud to exorcise it.

  But still I think how weird it’ll be, being at graduation in just a week and listening to Nicola Albierti give her speech about hope, knowing she feels dead inside.

  I am steeping like a human tea bag in a hot tub with Etta in the dark cricket-noisy night (yes, the same hot tub I skinny-dipped in the first night I almost died). During our quiet conversation about the semester ending soon, I confess I’m technically still a high school senior, expecting her to freak out a little bit. Instead, after assurances that I am indeed eighteen years old, she asks me if she can come watch me graduate. I don’t immediately say yes.

  I ran into Jonah the other night and asked him to my mom’s wedding, and I’ve said nothing about it to Etta. Here she and I are, joking, flirting, touching, but she doesn’t know a thing about me.

  And across town there is Jonah, who knows everything about me, and totally wrecked me.

  And I’m so conflicted, because part of me wants her—and another part wants to push her away.

  It’s like we’re playing a game, she and I.

  “What?” Etta asks, her hand on my thigh, squeezing. She has a damn hard squeeze, one that both tickles the crap out of me and hurts at the same time.

  I yelp.

  “You don’t want me to come? You embarrassed by me?” she asks.

  “Yeah right,” I say. “I’m embarrassed by myself.”

  “Stop,” she says, and leans over to kiss me, which makes every nerve in my body stand to attention. I get lost in her kiss for a minute, my fingers tangled in her hair. The Brazilians have a word for that, by the way: cafuné, to tenderly run your fingertips through your lover’s locks. Those romantics.

  I doubt so much with Etta, but never for a moment do I doubt how completely magnetic she is and how completely attracted to her I am.

  My problem is, I keep comparing. Even now, in the bliss of this kiss, I’m thinking of the ways she kisses differently than Jonah. How she has this grip to her kiss, and Jonah had this ease. How her tongue feels in my mouth, dominating, when Jonah’s was passive, all softness. How I don’t know what to do with my hands with Etta, if I’m allowed to, like, feel her up. With Jonah it was so clear how far he wanted me to go (far, as far as possible). But I don’t know the rules here.

  My problem is: thinking.

  Etta pulls away, easy, and keeps her arms around my neck, looking into my eyes. The hot tub steams around us. She floats on top of me, straddling me, and kisses me again. I like this feeling, of being straddled. With Jonah, I did all the straddling.

  See what I mean? Even when I’m thinking positive, I’m still comparing.

  “But seriously,” she says, holding me, her head on my shoulder. I breathe in the sweet coconut smell of her hair. “Can’t I come?”

  “It’s dumb,” I say. “Pomp and circumstance. Muumuu gowns. You did it last year. I don’t want to put you through that.”

  “I want to be put through that,” she insists.

  She’s pulling my bikini strings on my back, loosening them, and now my top is floating in the water. She’s kissing my neck.

  I let her kiss me; I kiss her back; I taste chlorine; we laugh at the lipstick marks all over our faces. She has no idea. She has no idea about me. I can’t let Etta anywhere near my shadows. It’s like the hotline: I’m a different me here, one who has never screwed everything up.

  I’m a me who gets to third base with a girl in the hot tub.

  After we dry off and go in and shower together, I get dressed to go home. She sits there biting her nails as I wait for the Lyft to arrive.

  “I really like you,” she tells me, her eyes flickering. “Sometimes I get the feeling you’re not all here. Am I making this up?”

  “I’m here,” I say, even though she’s absolutely right. I’m here and elsewhere.

  “If something was up, you’d tell me, right?” she asks.

  She has a towel wrapped around her head, and for the first time maybe ever, she lacks her signature red lipstick.

  “Of course!” I say.

  It sounds so fake, so unlike me, so exclamation-pointy . . . I can tell she doesn’t believe me.

  We hug goodbye, a quick hug, and I hate myself for the relief I feel in the Lyft away from her. I don’t understand myself. There should be a word for the simultaneous feeling of wanting Etta’s nearness and wanting to run from her. I don’t get how I can be so attracted to someone, so on-paper perfect for someone, and yet have a mind that keeps wandering back to an ex who shattered me.

  I feel disgusting as I look at myself in the mirror tonight, getting ready for bed, a hint of lipstick still lingering around the edges of my lips. I feel like a bad person, a user, because even though I like Etta and I think she’s the healthiest, most amazing person who’s ever liked me, all I want is to run.

  I put on a hideous gold muumuu, one a company had the gall to charge a hundred bucks for, and a silly matching cap with a tassel and a name as attractive as it looks, mortarboard, and merge with the sea of my fellow graduates on the football field, all in rows of plastic chairs under the terrible, terrible sunshine. A block away, calm as a storybook picture, orange orchards climb up the farm-striped hill. It’s beautiful. It’s wonderful. I’m going to be sick.

  I’m supposed to be proud, or at least nostalgic. Although I know someday I will be looking back on this, I feel nothing right now but wanting this to be over with. This is no longer my scene, and I’ve never loved crowds and ceremony anyway. My fellow students have blown up beach balls and are painting their faces. The marching band plays cheeseball tunes.

  “I didn’t think you’d be here,” Marisol says to me, sneaking up from behind.

  I turn around, blindsided by her presence. Not that I shouldn’t have seen this coming—I’ve just been so preoccupied. We are standing in th
e aisle between seats before hundreds of butts sit in hundreds of foldable plastic chairs.

  “I mean, deigning to come back and grace this horrible place with your presence,” she says. “Are you going to ignore me in person, too? Or is that just something you do on your phone? Acting like you need ‘space.’ I mean, you couldn’t even be original.”

  Marisol’s manicured hands are shaking. She’s not one to be mean. She probably rehearsed this speech this morning in front of her mirror. Again, I get a wave of déjà vu.

  “I can’t deal with the stress of fighting with you right now,” I tell her.

  “I never wanted to fight in the first place,” she responds.

  Her dad’s entire family flew here from Puerto Rico for this. I spot them, a large family all in blue shirts with a sign that says “FELICITACIONES, MARISOL.” Her parents wave madly at us. A man next to her dad with a long ponytail and aviators blows an air horn.

  I take my seat, stepping on multiple toes and sticking my butt inadvertently into many faces as I find my place. Stuck, as with every yearbook, with the other Smiths, of which there are many. Isabelle Smith, who is eating a Costco-sized bag of Cheetos and has managed to get orange fingerprints all over her muumuu, somehow rendering the outfit less attractive, which I didn’t realize was possible. Oliver Smith, who is wearing an umbrella hat unironically because he is whatever the next shade darker than albino is.

  Jonah flashes me the peace sign and a maddeningly attractive half smile as he sits with the Ps.

  I scan the audience, a sea of pinhead-sized people in the bleachers. Microbes, from here. Somewhere out there, Mom, Dad, Levi, Gary, Ruby, and Stevie all sit together like some new weird fusion of a family. I know Etta was hurt I didn’t invite her. I wonder if she came anyway—but nah, she wouldn’t.

  It’s bizarre being here, baking under the sun with my high school class. Like I stepped back in time. I thought I escaped these people, this place. These familiar strangers I aged with, some since pre-K. Now here we are, dressed alike, lined up in rows, ready to confront adulthood. Above my head, a cloud shaped like a hand waving, or maybe a bird. I get a strange sensation, warm invisible fingers on my neck, colors brightening. There should be a word for a moment you suspect you’ll be looking back on later with nostalgia.

  In the As, there up front in the left section (I’m in the right, near middle), first row, I see the shine of Nicola Albierti’s long brunette hair and her movie star sunglasses as she laughs with fellow prep Laney Allston. Electricity surges through me. I open the program and see her name there, right after Principal Patrick, delivering a speech called “We’ve Been Given the World, Now How Can We Save It?” I watch Nicola do hair flip after hair flip. But then I see her lean down when she thinks no one is looking and reach under her chair, into her purse. She pulls something out—something flashing, a moment of silver—and she messes under her gown, tucking it away somewhere.

  It happens so fast, no one saw it but me. But I almost pee myself. Because suddenly I’m remembering:

  Maybe I won’t look back at all.

  That should be how everyone remembers me. On a stage, in a cap and gown, young and beautiful forever.

  I want to end myself at the height of me.

  I know where my dad keeps his gun.

  I didn’t call you to practice my speech. I don’t even know if I’m going to give it.

  I saw the flash. Something long and silver; something she’s quietly adjusting in the neck of her gown, even now. This is a girl who has nothing to lose. Who wants to go out with a bang. This stupid moment on a stage in her cap and gown, that’s the moment she’s decided she doesn’t want to live beyond.

  Principal Patrick’s speech booms in my ears, words with no meaning, and then everyone’s applauding except me.

  If I call the cops, they won’t get here fast enough. Breathing’s suddenly a task. She’s really going to do it. And she’s going to do it here. Now. In front of all these people.

  Inhale, exhale. Inhale. Inhale. Inhale.

  She called the hotline and told me what she told me because why?

  Why tell someone you’re going to kill yourself before you kill yourself unless you want to be stopped? Remember, Journey, what that was like, standing in front of the medicine cabinet mirror, phone to your ear, telling Jonah you wanted to kill yourself. Did you tell him that because you wanted him to know, or because you wanted him to stop you?

  The crowd is still applauding as Principal Patrick sits down in his foldable chair onstage and Nicola gets up from her seat to go up the stairs.

  “Nicola,” I yell into the applause.

  Oh God, right now? I had no time to think this through. I stand up, program flapping away in the breeze, and make my way out of the row. My classmates I pass give me stink eyes, but they don’t realize.

  “Nicola!” I yell as the applause dies and Nicola takes her place behind the podium. “Nicola, wait!”

  I run full speed toward the stage and I hear the hush—it’s weird how you can hear a hush, same as a sound, a thing, not an absence, a heavy, heavy thing—as it ripples through the crowd. Nicola stands frozen in front of the mic. Principal Patrick and Mrs. Marston get up from their foldable chairs with pure confusion on their faces, arms out as if I’m a beast to be tamed.

  “What is going on?” Nicola says into the mic, then backs up.

  “Don’t kill yourself!” In a second with no thinking, all body and no mind, I lunge at her so she can’t reach into her dress.

  In a moment that, like the car crash, feels like slow motion, she falls backward and I fall on top of her on the wood stage, which is hard, much harder than I would have imagined, had I taken the time to imagine.

  She yells.

  “It’s Journey,” I tell her loudly. “I—I had to stop you.”

  Her eyes, up close, are beautiful, deep set, so brown they’re almost black, her mouth twitching. I can see her thick makeup. I can smell her—lavender—and feel the gun between us, a hard shape between our bodies. Holy shit, I can feel it, the gun, the touch of cold metal. Her expression stays frozen, but her eyes change. First they quiver with fear, then they flicker with confusion, then they glaze over with something close to rage.

  “Get off me,” she roars.

  I feel hands on my shoulders, pulling me off. It’s Principal Patrick.

  “Ladies,” he keeps saying. “Ladies.”

  The crowd starts buzzing with a mix of uncomfortable laughter, murmuring, and, somewhere, a distant air horn.

  “I don’t even know her,” Nicola tells him, standing up and pointing an acrylic nail at my face. “She’s fucking crazy.”

  “She’s got a gun,” I tell Principal Patrick as I scramble to my feet. “It’s under her gown; I saw her put it there.”

  Principal Patrick, rubbing his enormous bald head with one hand, pulling his tie with the other, looks from her to me to her again.

  “I felt it just now,” I tell him. “She has one.”

  “Lift up your gown, Ms. Albierti,” Mrs. Marston says.

  “What?” Nicola shrieks.

  “Lift up your graduation robe, Ms. Albierti, and show us you do not have a gun,” Mrs. Marston says, voice raised.

  The mic, though a couple feet away, is picking this up. Echoing in the speakers. Everyone in the crowd is, understandably, rapt. Facing us like we’re players on a stage and it’s the worst performance of all time.

  Nicola gives me a look heavy with hatred and lifts her gown. There, tucked into the cleavage of her V-neck dress, is the shining silver thing. But it’s not a gun.

  It’s a flask.

  Mrs. Marston holds out her hand. Nicola gives her the flask. Mrs. Marston opens the flask and sniffs it, wincing from the vodka’s stink that even I can smell from here. She puts the cap back on.

  “Is this the ‘gun’?” Mrs. Marston asks me.

  “Maybe,” I say. “I guess.”

  She wasn’t going to kill herself; there was no emergency. My pu
lse does not get the message. Mrs. Marston turns to Principal Patrick and the two whisper.

  Here we stand in front of hundreds of familiar strangers, me and this familiar stranger.

  “I can’t believe this,” Nicola whispers to me, without looking me in the eye, keeping her gaze fixed on her four-inch heels.

  “I was trying to save you.”

  “Take your seat,” Mrs. Marston tells me sharply, and hands the flask to Principal Patrick. “You too,” she tells Nicola.

  We get off the stage in a state of shock, Nicola taking her seat and not looking back at me. Everyone’s faces in the audience are frozen in the same state of lustful intrigue and Principal Patrick takes the stage and blathers on about technical difficulties. So many eyes watching me like I’m dynamite ready to blow. And you know what? They’re right. They all see me, really see me, and it’s terrible.

  My parents are up there. And they see me.

  Jonah is in the audience. And he sees me.

  I couldn’t even give them this moment.

  I couldn’t even let this be normal.

  I don’t take my seat. I don’t care. I take my gown off and go running through the football field, away from the school and toward the parking lot, eyes full. And there, I sit between two cars and I bawl my eyes out. This, today, right here, is what the Germans call verschlimmbessern: to screw everything up when trying to make it better.

  Dear future self,

  If you even exist, I hope you have a terrible memory. I hope you completely wipe clean the worst day of your life when you ruined your graduation ceremony and everyone else’s. I hope you forget not only those horrid details, but the details of the phone call that came later that day from Davina, who told you that you violated hotline ethics rules by taking a call from a familiar person and then confronting said familiar person, and then let you go. Let you go? What am I saying. Fired you. Fired you from a volunteer position because, future self, that’s how pathetic you once were, if you even are anymore.

  My phone is blowing up. My dad is knocking on my door. He comes in and tries to talk to me but I refuse, not moving, mannequin girl, trying to get to a place where, like Nicola, I do not exist.