Suicide Blondes

by T. Blake Braddy

  The lower half of her face, the part not covered by her arm, twists into a half-frown. The botox prevents any real expression. She says, “Don’t listen to a word either of those bitches has to say. They’d just as soon slit your throat as talk to you, and I haven’t heard a good word from them in years.”

  “They seemed to say the same thing about you.”

  “Exactly what I’d expect the traitors to say. You go and get one DUI, and look where your friends go. Poof! Up in smoke. Good riddance, I guess. Shit.”

  “They seemed concerned about you,” I say.

  It’s a lie, but it’s a start.

  “Oh, the hell with them,” she says. “They were never the interesting ones, and we both know it. Girl, you and I made all the headlines, and they were the background ornaments.”

  She manages to pry her arm from her face and sit up. She’s flush and slack-eyed, on the verge of passing out.

  “You want me to call you an Uber?”

  She gulps at the vodka soda and then replaces the glass on an out-of-date magazine.

  “Fuck no. The night is just getting started. How long’s it been since I seen you?”

  “Long time,” I reply.

  But I know the truth. It’s been twenty years, almost exactly. I can still see her sitting in that formal way with her parents, putting up the angelic child front, pretending she’s been pulled astray by the poor girl from the other side of Nashville. She probably doesn’t remember it, but I’ll never forget.

  “Still, maybe it’s a good time to call it a night,” I reply. “I don’t know if you’ve heard, but my mom is sick and—”

  “Aw, fuck that. Let’s have a drink. You can forget all about that depressing shit. I’ve missed you. I really, truly have.”

  She doesn’t mean it—insincerity is as much a part of her DNA as blonde hair and stock options—but the compliment sends my heart to fluttering. She really knows how to work a room, and I find myself teetering between anger and admiration.

  And even though she looks like hell, I can’t quite take my eyes off her. She’s manic and fidgety, knocking over everything she touches, but still in possession of the kind of magical aura people are born with but cannot craft. It’s what separates her from common folks.

  “My life is pretty unremarkable,” I say, “but I’ve heard you are going through quite an exciting time.”

  Her head is listing forward. “I’d say. Fucking DUI. My husband is a lying, cheating scumbag. And I’ve got more money problems than Paul Manafort. It’s like a triumvirate of fuck-ups.”

  My head is cracking open, and I just don’t have time for the games. “Did you come here to complain about your life, because we can—”

  She looks up at me, almost confused. Her eyes are pleading. “I can trust you, right?”

  “You did once,” I say. “You can do it again, I guess. What’s the worst that could happen?”

  “You could ruin your life and spend the rest trying to make up for it, only to fuck it up much worse.”

  “It’s not that bad.”

  “Things are bad all over,” she murmurs, her voice a mushy exaggeration of the one I remember from high school. “I’ve got reason to be fucked-up and depressed, you know?”

  Sitting next to her, her beauty slips through the sadness, like smoke under a door jamb. Her face is drawn and tight, and not from the botox. I’m convinced she couldn’t smile if she tried.

  “I don’t remember you like this,” I say, and even though it feels preposterous, I place one hand on her upper back and rub. Wax on. Wax off.

  She doesn’t seem to notice at first, but then she places her head on my shoulder.

  “I miss you,” she says, hiccuping. “You weren’t a bad friend, you know?”

  Even though this whole experience is surreal, I try to find the authenticity in it, the reality. The words that come out of my mouth do not feel like my own.

  “What happened was bad,” I say. “I don’t think I ever recovered from it.”

  She places her clasped hands between her knees. She’s shivering, even though she doesn’t feel the least bit cold. “Yeah, me either. It was such an awful thing, wasn’t it?”

  I bite my lip. So far as I know, Madeline has never, not once, admitted responsibility for a single mistake in her life. The urge to tell her exactly that and get it over with, get it out so I can move on with my life, is so strong it makes my stomach burn, but then time gets away from me and I can’t find the words to say.

  Her hair is redolent of vodka and cigarettes, but she still feels soft and clean, the way babies are preternaturally soft. Underneath the facade of adulthood, I can still smell her. A flash of junior year, all four of us piled into Gillian’s bed, drunk on 99 Bananas and giggling over a pop song about Barbie dolls.

  My pulse quickens.

  She clasps my hand with her own, her thin fingers intertwined with mine, and the old emotional scab is torn away. The blood flows freely from a place deep within, and my whole body tingles with the force of it.

  I wonder if there is some new and underhanded way she can twist the knife in me, but there is something new about this experience. This person next to me, untouchable for so long, is now mortal. The Golden God has been ripped from her throne and dragged through the streets with her nakedness on display.

  But there are places in my mind where the past is still a fresh wound.

  She spread a rumor about Gary Pinkerton, a jar of peanut butter, and his yellow lab, on the off-chance that he had intentionally ignored her for the spring fling. She told everyone at school about the herpes Lacey Portnoy ended up not having. Lacey had to drop out of DDA after that, and eventually her parents sent her away to boarding school to quell the rumors about their daughter’s voracious and risky sexual appetites.

  And the low point: she was the first one of us to casually mention to Everett Coughlin, “Maybe you would be happier if you just killed yourself.”

  My mind picks up a series of memories, flashes of memories, like the claw vending machines that pick up cheap stuffed toys: fingers on a keyboard. The neon palette of a late-90s chat room. The feathered, crinkly texture of the ceiling above Gillian’s bed. The words suicide and better off dead.

  Even the thought of those typed statements makes the blood rush to my face, the sweat pop on my skin like morning dew, and I, the scapegoat, can’t imagine what Madeline St. Clair must feel.

  And right now, she feels sorry for herself.

  “I never forgave you for leaving,” she says into my shoulder, her voice thick from the tears. “I just feel like it was the ultimate betrayal, you turning your back.”

  “You didn’t say a word to me once I was arrested.”

  “That was all a public show. Because of the lawyers. It had to look like we were no longer friends. You know that was the game.”

  As if that is a completely understandable statement.

  Is to her, I guess.

  I pull away from her and seat myself in an adjacent chair. “It wasn’t a game, Mads. It was my life, and I paid a price. A real price for what we did. And it changed me.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” she says.

  “What do you mean?”

  She grimaces like she’s trying to hold something in. Or hold something down. “I expected us to go back to normal once you came back. But you never came back.”

  “So I violated our bond. That what you’re saying?”

  The way she nods makes it clear she doesn’t see anything wrong with that belief. How could anything be the Mad Queen’s fault?

  She’s not looking at me when she speaks next. “You said we were forever. We were all forever. And now we’re not. Now, we’re nothing.”

  Leaning forward from her perch on the seat, she seems to peer at the spot on the carpet between her feet, and two tears, like solitary raindrops, create the tiniest thud.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, at last. It comes out hurried and high and choked, but she gets it across, an
d part of me relaxes. “I’m sorry I fucked everything up. It will never make up for lost time, and it will never change the fact I was such a raging bitch, but I’m sorry. I’m sorry, and I’m learning. My life is in ruins, and I need someone to talk to.”

  She’s crying now. This is not a few tears. This is not someone being “emotional.” She’s breaking down, and I can’t say it doesn’t give me a slight thrill to see her cry. If she only knew how many tears I’d shed over my role in Everett Coughlin’s death.

  I need to keep a healthy distance. She’s the scorpion and I’m the frog, so to speak.

  “Please,” she says, pleading. “Please don’t turn your back on me. I’m begging. Please.”

  “I won’t,” I say. Anything to get her to stop drunkenly sobbing.

  “I don’t know how to be a nobody,” she says. “People have turned on me, and I feel completely anonymous. It feels like I’m dying. How do you handle it?”

  “It’s just who I am,” I say. “I prefer it to the alternative.”

  “I don’t have anybody else right now, M.E. Don’t abandon me, too. Please. Please. Just be my friend. Or at least pretend. I just need someone to acknowledge I’m here, or I’m afraid I’ll disappear.”

  “Okay,” I reply, more out of a fear of what she might say next than an actual acceptance of her offer. “Fine. We’re friends. I’m your friend, Mads.”

  We sit there—completely silent—for what feels like an eternity but is probably more like a few minutes. The whole time, there is this inexplicable hum in the room, and it doesn’t seem to come from anywhere, but I just know it is the unspoken thing between us that buzzes around our heads like old mosquitoes.

  “M.E?”

  “Yes?”

  Then there is another long pause.

  “What is it, Madeline?” I ask, at last.

  “Nothing. Never mind.”

  “You can’t do that. You have to tell me.”

  We are still sitting there, bunched up on the couch, and the hum I seem to hear slowly builds to a crescendo, but like most things in life, this secret energy goes nowhere, and soon it goes out completely.

  “Maybe I will,” she says. “But not yet.”

  “Then why—”

  “Can I go to the bathroom real quick before I jet? I know I look a mess.”

  “Sure.”

  Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to leap off a tall building, not for the death-and-dying, suicide-y aspect of it, but because it would be exhilarating to experience that first moment. The air whooshing past you. The sight of the ground coming up to meet you. The knowledge that, in a few moments, the whole world will be black and unknowable.

  This is how being friends with Madeline St. Clair makes you feel.

  6

  THEN

  > You should just kill yourself.

  Madeline floats the idea like somebody trying to convince a friend to change their hair color. You should go brunette. You should try out for cheerleading. You should ask Dave to the winter formal.

  Except it’s you should end your own life.

  There is a long and nerve-wracking pause on the other end of the internet. Madeline, Audrey, Gillian, and Mary Ellen stare in a kind of desperate interest at the blinking cursor in the Café Chat where they’ve been meeting Everett Coughlin for weeks.

  Mary Ellen is in the middle of all this, but she is uncomfortable. Her teeth feel too big in her mouth from all the fake smiling. Like she’s wearing a pair of those Halloween fright teeth, the ones that make you look like an old hillbilly.

  It’s not just her mouth. Her whole body feels out of whack, like she’s a Frankenstein’s monster of complete and utter teenage awkwardness.

  She thought this would be fun. She knew there would be some meanness, but ever since joining the group, her enthusiasm has flagged. At first, she enjoyed being angry for no good reason, to feel looked up to and envied, but that sensation quickly passed, if it ever even existed in the first place.

  Now, it has been replaced by a tense, muscle-tensing anxiety. Anxiety about what will happen next, what plan they will drum up to entertain themselves.

  She still enjoys the benefits of it all, but the dangers outweigh any fun she’s had over the last few months.

  Ironically, she spends a great deal of her time wondering how her old friends are doing. She fantasizes about watching MTV and eating popcorn while playing disgusting games of Would You Rather.

  She thought she would enjoy the danger of being with these girls. They are known around the school as the defiant, rebellious members of DDA, the ones always out drinking and smoking. Cheating on tests and hooking up with boys.

  Only, none of them seems to enjoy it.

  For example, when they drink—and they do drink, a lot—they go about it with zeal and purpose, but no fun. There is no risk. There is no challenge. Audrey’s mother doesn’t really care at all what Audrey does, so long as she doesn’t get pregnant or embarrass the family. In fact, they can drink in front of her parents, so long as they don’t make it seem like they’re getting hammered. It’s the antithesis of what Mary Ellen always thought it would mean to drink while underage.

  Same with smoking (or smoking weed). They do it as if it’s some status symbol, like, I bet the squares at our school wouldn’t do this! But they don’t get baked and talk about the universe, or giggle helplessly at cartoons on TV. They just kind of sit around and talk blandly about how much the other kids at school fucking hate them.

  If there is one thing Mary Ellen’s learned from being in the cool group—she had begun to wonder if that was even true—then it is that Madeline and the others spend a whole hell of a lot more time wondering what other people think of them than considering what they actually want to do.

  It’s the working paradox of their whole existence. What thing can we do to completely piss off everyone in the world?

  No, only the pursuit of evil seems to inflame them, and they take no joy in that, either. As they torment Everett Coughlin, they take on these...nasty faces. They look like cult members waiting for their turn with the Kool-Aid. Audrey has gone full Manson Girl, and Gillian isn’t far behind. Only Madeline seems sane, by comparison, but then again she’s the one hurtling toward this infinitely depressing future, pulling them all along with her.

  Mary Ellen desperately wants to exit the program, but she is in this as much as the rest of them, and so she feels significant pressure to see it through to the end.

  Her stomach hurts. It constantly hurts. She thinks she has an ulcer or stomach cancer or IBS or something, and there are times she hopes it kills her, just like the heart attack that killed her father. It would put an end to her fear, her terror that they might at any moment go too far.

  But since it’s just happened—suggesting suicide to someone counts as going too far—she supposes she should feel somewhat relieved.

  It cannot get any worse, can it?

  Only, the miserable irony of the whole thing is, she’s never been more popular.

  Boys from their brother school ask her out all the time. Not that she can go out with them. Madeline’s obsession with destroying Everett Coughlin’s life takes precedence over everything, even Mary Ellen’s own personal life.

  All their lives. They’ve had to forgo their own lives for the sake of Herr St. Clair, and it does not do anything but make them miserable.

  And she’s had enough of it.

  There is a fear, of course. She is afraid of what Madeline would do if she abandoned ship just before the Mockingbird Ball, the most exclusive social event in all of Nashville.

  But there is a part of her—the part that always got somewhat teary during the ABC After School Specials—that tells her she should defy her overlord just to see what would happen.

  Finally, Mary Ellen stands up. “I can’t be part of this,” she says, her voice quivering. “It’s one thing to do, I don’t know, whatever we were doing. But this is a step too far, and I think—”

  “S
it the fuck down,” Madeline says.

  She is staring. Her eyes—full of black hatred—stop Mary Ellen’s words in her throat.

  There is a moment in which Mary Ellen thinks she will do the right thing, the thing that is just out of reach. She envisions herself yanking the computer cables from the wall, unplugging everything and tossing the monitor out the window.

  But she doesn’t.

  She does the thing she always knew she would do.

  She sits back down, folding her hands over one another as she tries to avoid her friends’ pitying glances. Gillian and Audrey are in full-on Heaven’s Gate mode, and they watch this exchange like apes hoping to avoid a challenge from the Alpha.

  When the awkwardness seems to have evaporated somewhat, Madeline smirks as if nothing happens and then continues barreling toward the inevitable conclusion of all this.

  “Let’s begin the end game,” Madeline says, rolling her eyes and sighing. “I’m getting bored with this...project.”

  Everett Coughlin is a dog too loyal to know he should turn tail and split, and, like a cruel master, Madeline St. Clair is going to punish him for his devotion.

  The way she punishes all of them.

  Eventually, the tinny speaker attached to Gillian’s computer dings, officially breaking the tension in the room. Madeline’s gaze softens, and her attention returns to the screen.

  Everett’s response is terse and clear.

  > That’s not funny.

  “Oh, yes it is,” Audrey replies, giggling, glancing at Madeline for approval. She smiles and nods, ready for the next phase.

  > I think I better go.

  Yes! Mary Ellen thinks. Turn off your goddamned computer and run as far away from there as humanly possible. Even if she herself is too weak to turn her back, perhaps he can. All he has to do is exit the conversation and never return.

  She leans over Mary Ellen’s shoulder and takes over typing duties, not just because it signifies her role as the leader, but it places her in direct contact with Mary Ellen, who just has to sit there and take it.