by Leila Sales
I started reading.
May 6:
i hate my life and i just want to die. nobody likes me, and i deserve it. why WOULD anyone ever want to be friends with me? i’m ugly and boring and stuck up. i wish i could kill myself, but ever since the last time i tried, my parents keep our medicine cabinet locked up and they hide our knives. i hate my parents—why won’t they just let me die? i’d be doing them a favor. xoxo elise dembowski
May 1:
just think of all the attention i would get if i killed myself. i bet they would have a school assembly about me and people would have to say nice things about me, even if they didn’t mean them. maybe the paper would even run a feature on me! xoxo elise dembowski
April 27:
confession time: no boy has EVER kissed me. actually i guess that’s not a surprising confession since i am so awkward and gross. i know that i will be alone for the rest of my life, so i just hope that the rest of my life is short. xoxo elise dembowski
April 21:
today i made a list of everyone who i hate. my name is at the top of the list, obviously. amelia kindl is second. if only she hadn’t turned me in that first time i tried to commit suicide. then i could just be dead right now and wouldn’t have to keep living my pathetic, worthless life. but no. i told her, and she betrayed me. she puts on this ‘nice little girl’ act, but it’s just an act. i won’t ever forgive her. xoxo elise dembowski
I stopped reading not because I wanted to but because I couldn’t see the computer screen anymore. Black spots crowded across my vision, and I realized I hadn’t taken a breath since I started reading. I took my fist out of my mouth and exhaled, and my eyes got better, but nothing else did.
Somebody had taken my life, my identity, every negative thought I had ever had, and they had perverted them, twisted them into something grotesque. A version of me, but not me.
There was no question in my mind that this was what Amelia Kindl had been talking about during scoliosis testing when she spoke to me, for the first time all school year, to say, “And now there’s this.”
Who had done this, and why? Who would possibly expend the time and energy just to hurt me this much?
But the answer to that came to me instantly: lots of people. Jordan DiCecca and Chuck Boening had easily managed that iPod theft last year, so there was no reason why creating a fake Web site about me would be beyond their abilities, except for the fact that they may or may not know how to type in full sentences.
Lizzie Reardon, it seemed, had endless time to devote to bullying me. Writing a dozen blog posts over the past two weeks wouldn’t be nearly as hard for her to pull off as the time in seventh grade when she orchestrated a supposed date between me and Mike Rosen that wound up with me getting pelted with water balloons while waiting alone in front of the Baskin-Robbins, wearing my favorite lace dress.
Then there was that “Elise Dembowski: Let us give you a makeover!” ad that Emily Wallace and her friends had run in the eighth-grade yearbook. If they were each willing to chip in $25 to have a laugh at my expense, I felt sure they could get it together to create a free Web site that would give them an even bigger laugh.
It didn’t matter who had created this fake diary. In a way, that was the worst part about this: there were so many people who didn’t like me, I couldn’t even narrow down a list of suspects. It could have been anyone.
I logged out of the computer and went to class then, because I didn’t know where else to go. Amelia glared at me from her desk, and Mr. Hernandez gave me a demerit for being late. I sat at my desk, taking notes on autopilot, and writing affirmations in the notebook margins, like the psychiatrist had told me to. I am a good person. I like myself the way I am. Many people love and care about me. I have a purpose in life. I don’t want to kill myself.
I wrote over and over the words, pressing my pen down as hard as I could, until I broke through that sheet of paper and ink bled onto the page behind it.
As Mr. Hernandez lectured, I looked around the room and tried to figure out who had read my fake diary. Chava had said everyone. But what did that mean? Amelia had read it, that much was clear from the way her face scrunched up when she looked at me. Which meant that Amelia’s friend, the mummy documentary girl, must have read it, too, since she crossed her arms and glared at me when she noticed me looking at Amelia. A few rows ahead of me, two boys were whispering, and then I clearly heard one of them say “suicide girl.” Mr. Hernandez clapped his hands and said, “All right, folks, can I get some attention up here?” but I still felt the eyes on me.
Chava was not an exaggerator. Everyone had read it.
The moment class ended, I grabbed Amelia’s arm. My voice shook as I said, “Look, Amelia. About that thing you read—I didn’t write that. That wasn’t me.”
For some reason, I felt this intense need for her to know. I wanted to clear my name, of course. But also—and this is pathetic—there was some part of me that couldn’t give up on this dream, the dream of friendship between me and this normal, nice, happy girl. The dream had already died, it had died on the first day of the school year, yet I still felt like if I just told her the truth … if she could just understand …
But Amelia pulled her arm away and said, “Of course it’s you. Who else would have known enough to write all that?” And when I didn’t say anything, she went on, her voice trembling, “Please, Elise. I can’t handle any more of this. I never did anything to you. Please just leave me alone.” Then she hurried after her friend.
The rest of the day, I couldn’t stop thinking about what Amelia had said. “Who else would have known enough to write all that?” Because she was right: it wasn’t enough just to enjoy torturing me, like Lizzie or Jordan or Emily or anyone I had already thought of. Whoever did this also had to know, somehow, that I had once thought I wanted to kill myself, and that Amelia Kindl had ratted me out. Someone had to know what really happened on the first day of school.
After I cut myself, after I called Amelia, after she called 911, an ambulance drove up to my house, filling my dad’s quiet block with sirens and flashing lights. I opened the door to let in the EMTs because I didn’t know what else to do. “What’s the situation here?” one of them asked. So I held out my left arm. I hadn’t meant to, but I also hadn’t planned for anything like a 911 response team, and it seemed somehow like it would be rude to send them away with nothing.
Plus, I was scared. What if I had really screwed up my arm? What if I had cut through a tendon? Everything from my elbow down felt numb. I wanted to be saved.
The next thing I knew, the EMTs had loaded me into an ambulance and we were speeding toward the hospital. Some time after that, my parents showed up. Both of them, in the same room, which may have been the scariest and most disjointed part of the whole situation. Mom got there first, and she was completely calm and reassuring—until Dad arrived, at which point she freaked out at him, like this was all his fault. And Dad started out by crying and hugging me nonstop, until Mom’s hysterical ranting got to be too much for him, at which point he stopped crying and hugging and started defending his parenting skills.
Some time after that, and after my arm had been examined and disinfected and rebandaged, a woman came to talk to me. She was wearing a skirt and heels, not hospital scrubs, and she explained that she was a psychiatrist, and she needed to ask me a few questions.
“Have you ever tried to kill yourself?” she asked me.
And I answered, honestly, “No.”
“Do you ever feel so bad that you think about suicide?” she asked me.
And I answered, honestly, “Sometimes.”
So they kept me in the hospital for a couple days on suicide watch. Eventually I was allowed to go home, but my parents didn’t want me to go back to school right away. They wanted to keep an eye on me. I didn’t argue, because I didn’t want to go back to school either. I just went to therapy and downloaded new music. It was a fine life, but after a week or two of that, my parents decided that
I was ready to go back into the world. I don’t know what made them think that. As far as I’m concerned, I have never been ready to go into the world.
I returned to school having been through so much, but somehow school was exactly the same. It still smelled like cleaning supplies and meat loaf. My locker still jammed when I tried to open it. Lizzie still criticized me when I walked past her. No one asked where I had been, because no one had noticed that I was gone. All I really wanted was attention, but I didn’t even get that.
Amelia was right. Who knew enough of that story to write it? I knew, Amelia knew, my parents knew. Some doctors and the school guidance counselor. But that was it. Even my little brother and sister only knew that I had been sick for a while, and then I got better.
By the time school ended for the day and, thank God, the week, I had become overwhelmed with the feeling that maybe I really had written that journal. Yes, those were someone else’s words, someone else’s story of me. But it was so close to true that it almost didn’t feel like a fiction. If everyone else believed that this was me, did it matter if it was true or not?
At night my dad and I ordered in Chinese food and watched an action movie on the living room couch together. If I seemed quieter than usual, he didn’t comment. He was quiet, too, which was fine by me. I didn’t want to talk to him. I didn’t want to talk to anyone.
After my father went to bed, I went to my room. I brushed my teeth and washed my face and tried to fall asleep. This should have been easy, since I had gotten so little sleep the night before. But it wasn’t. I lay in bed and watched the changing pattern of lights on my ceiling as cars drove by. Why is it always like this? my brain kept repeating. Why are you always like this?
I got up, opened my laptop, and went back to Elise Dembowski’s online journal. I didn’t want to. I did it anyway.
May 7:
i know that some people don’t like the things that i write in this diary, but to them i say SHUT UP! this is MY diary, so i can say how i really feel. if you don’t like it, don’t read it. xoxo elise dembowski
As I sat alone at my desk in the dark, I thought about suicide. Sometimes I did that, thought about suicide, though not in an active way—it was more like pulling a lucky stone out of your back pocket. It was a comforting thing to have with you, so you could rub your fingers over it, reassure yourself that it was there if you needed it. I didn’t want to try to kill myself, didn’t want the blood and the hysterical parents and the guilt, any of it. But sometimes I liked the idea of simply not having to be here anymore, not having to deal with my life. As if death could be just an extended vacation.
But now what I thought about suicide was this: If I died tonight, everyone would believe this journal was true.
Like Amelia, Chava, and Sally, everyone would forever believe that I had written that diary. Everyone would believe they knew how I “really felt.” And how dare they?
When I thought about suicide, I thought about Start. I thought about Char and Vicky and Pippa and Mel, and I thought about all the songs I had left to discover and all the songs I had left to play.
I closed out of the Elise Dembowski diary, revealing Flash Tommy’s photo of me on the window below it. Tonight the Internet seemed filled with versions of me, like a fun house filled with mirrors. Some of them made me look prettier, and some of them made me look uglier, and some of them chopped me right in half, but none of them were right.
I changed out of my pajamas, put on my sneakers, grabbed my iPod, and slipped out of the house. I planned to walk as I did any night: I would walk until I was tired.
But songs and songs went by, and two miles, then three, and I never grew tired. Whenever I blinked, what I saw behind closed eyes was that diary Web page, a searing orange. I couldn’t go to sleep. I would walk until morning.
After a while, I looked around me at the darkened apartment complexes and I realized: I knew where I was. I had been here before.
I was just a few blocks from where Char lived.
And it hit me that this was where I had been walking all night long.
I found Char’s apartment in a courtyard surrounded by buildings that all looked the same. I leaned my head back to look up at the windows. They were all dark. I pressed my finger to Char’s buzzer, and I held it there for a long moment.
Silence.
A couple minutes went by, and I was just about to walk away when the door opened.
“Elise?” Char said, rubbing his eyes. His hair was sticking up in all directions, and he was wearing nothing but an old New Order T-shirt and a pair of boxer shorts. Even his feet were bare. It was all I could do to keep from throwing my arms around him and burying my face in his chest.
“What are you doing here?” Char asked, his voice confused. “It’s four in the morning.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Is everything okay?”
I shrugged.
“Do you want to come in?” He opened the door wider, and I stepped inside.
I followed him upstairs and down the hall to his apartment, which clearly hadn’t been cleaned since the last time I was here. His DJ setup still rested on boxes in the middle of the room, and the window beside his bed was open, letting in the fresh spring air.
“So what’s going on?” he asked as he locked the door behind us.
I found my voice enough to say, “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Okay.” Char rubbed the back of his head. “That’s okay. We won’t talk.”
He leaned forward and kissed me. I kissed him back this time, and his mouth was warm and soft. It felt like he was breathing life into every part of my body. I pressed my lips harder against his, and I felt his hands on my lower back, pulling me toward him.
I didn’t even notice that he was walking me backward until my legs hit his bed, and I collapsed onto it, pulling him on top of me, our mouths never separating. I didn’t know what to do with any part of myself, so I tried to mimic his movements as he ran his hands from my shoulders, down my sides, all the way to my thighs, before coming back up again.
“One sec,” he whispered to me. He stood up, and I readjusted myself on his bed while he went over to his laptop. I stared at the giant GIRLFRIEND IN A COMA poster on the wall opposite me. It seemed almost like a threat, which was creepy, but then I reminded myself that I wasn’t Char’s girlfriend, and that made me feel better.
After a few clicks on the keyboard, a song began to play from Char’s speakers. It was my Cure song, “A Letter to Elise.”
“You like this one, right?” Char asked.
“Yes,” I whispered back.
Before getting back into bed, Char pulled off his T-shirt, and when he lay down beside me again, I could feel the heat radiating from his body. He had a small tattoo of a record player a few inches below his collarbone. I brushed my fingers across it, scared to touch his naked torso anywhere else. I’d never touched anyone’s tattoo before. It just felt like skin.
Char kept his word: we didn’t talk. The only sounds were the music, and his breathing, and my breathing. He took off my shirt and my bra, and when I began to shiver, he pulled me closer to him, covering my body with his own. Time passed, but I lost track of it. Neither of us spoke at all until Char was pulling my jeans down my legs, and then it was me who broke the silence.
“I don’t even know your real name,” I said.
He paused, his hand resting on my stomach. “Does it matter?” he asked.
“Yes, it matters. I don’t even know who you are.”
“I don’t know your full name either,” he pointed out. “Just Elise.” He murmured into my ear, “I’ll tell you mine if you’ll tell me yours.”
I thought about this. What is a name for anyway? It’s for looking up people online. I thought about what Char would find if he searched for me. Elise Dembowski, MD. Elise Dembowski Tampa Florida school superintendent. Elise Dembowski suicide.
“Never mind,” I said. “Forget names. Just Elise is perfect.”
“Personally, I prefer DJ Elise,” he said, touching his nose to mine.
I kissed him. “DJ Elise works for me, too.”
We went back to rolling around on his bed. I grew braver, my hands exploring more and more of him: his head, his shoulders, his back.
After some time, our hands became less restless. Char rolled me over so that my back was to him, pressed against his chest, with my legs curled against his legs. I could see out his window now, to the dawn that was just beginning to break. “Elise?” he said sleepily. “What did you come here for?”
I thought about that. I hadn’t consciously planned to come here at all, but it wasn’t an accident either. Yet what had I expected to happen? Had I thought Char would erase my fake online diary, and erase the memories of everyone who had read it, too? Had I thought I would pour out all my secrets to him and he would grant me absolution? He wasn’t a priest or a psychiatrist or a magician. He was just a boy.
“I came here because I didn’t want to be alone anymore,” I answered him.
“That’s a good reason,” he murmured.
After a few minutes I felt his arms slacken around my waist, and I heard his breathing grow deep and regular. Char fell asleep. And then finally, mercifully, so did I.
12
The next three weeks fell into a pattern. I went to class. I did my homework. At home, Alex’s poetry castle continued to grow larger and more elaborate until eventually Steve had to move it into the sunroom so we weren’t constantly tripping over it. At school, I ate lunch with Chava and Sally, who spent most of their time, when they weren’t trying to decide who might invite Sally to the Freshman/Sophomore Summer Formal, trying to convince me that life was worth living because a beautiful future awaited me.
“Someday you’ll get your driver’s license,” Chava told me.