R.I.P. Eliza Hart

by Alyssa Sheinmel

  My first attack was in an elevator on West Seventy-Eighth Street a few days after we moved. My mother thought it was asthma or anaphylaxis (a word I learned later that afternoon) and rushed me to the emergency room. She seemed disappointed when the ER doctor suggested sending me to a child psychologist and more disappointed still when the therapist (Dr. Shapiro, therapist number one) diagnosed me with claustrophobia a few days later. The attacks kept coming—in elevators, on the subway, once in a restaurant bathroom—so that by the end of the summer, I’d gotten used to taking the stairs and I’d learned to avoid drinking too much water when we went out to eat.

  By the time school started, my symptoms hadn’t improved and we’d moved on to my first specialist, Dr. Allen, who advised Mom to tell the principal about my condition. My teacher announced it to our class so no one would accidentally shove me in the closet or a locker. (The teacher assumed that no one would be mean enough to do those things on purpose, and—for a while at least—she was right.) My diagnosis followed me through middle school and into high school, but I never believed it was a reaction to the divorce, or some kind of emotional cry for help, the way my parents and all the therapists did.

  You know what they say: location, location, location. I always thought my body was rejecting moving from the wide-open spaces of Northern California to the narrow streets on the narrow island of Manhattan.

  So I hatched a plan—a cure: get back to California by attending Ventana Ranch, a prestigious boarding school for high school juniors and seniors built into the Santa Cruz Mountains on the California coastline.

  By the time I tucked myself into a closet the first day of orientation and discovered my claustrophobia had come to California with me, it was too late to go back.

  On the other hand, none of the buildings on the campus are more than three stories high, so I haven’t had to get in an elevator once since I got here. In fact, the only attacks I’ve had in California are the ones I’ve induced in the closet. (Even after more than six months here, I haven’t stopped testing my theory.)

  Sam’s still looking out the window. “Why would the Coast Guard be here?” he murmurs. I cross the room and stand just behind him, careful to stay far enough from him that we’re not actually touching. Still, I can feel the heat from his body seeping into the air around him like he’s radioactive or something.

  It’s almost dinnertime and the sun is setting over the Pacific Ocean.

  Later, I won’t remember exactly when it became clear that the bundle they pulled up from over the cliffs was a body. When it became clear that the body was human. When it became clear that its skin had turned blue.

  When I saw its long blond hair and knew they’d pulled a girl up over the cliff.

  When I find out that it’s her, a lump rises in my throat and I’m so surprised that it almost chokes me. I shouldn’t care. I mean, I care because caring is the human thing to do, but I shouldn’t care this much because I didn’t really know her. Not really. Not anymore.

  We’re still standing by the window. In fact, we’ve barely moved since Sam’s phone dinged with a text from a friend outside who heard the dean identify the body.

  I wipe my eyes, but that just draws more attention to my tears. Sam offers me a tissue, but I bet he thinks I don’t deserve to cry.

  “You okay, Elizabeth?”

  They put her on a gurney, zip her into a black bag, and wheel her into the back of an ambulance.

  “We held hands during recess.”

  “What?”

  I bend my fingers, pressing my nails into my palms so my hands will stop shaking. Like everyone else on campus, Sam’s heard the rumors about Eliza and me. I think even the teachers are wary of me thanks to her. But maybe Sam doesn’t remember them, maybe they went in one ear and out the other like my repeated requests that he call me Ellie instead of Elizabeth.

  “Nothing,” I say carefully. “I don’t know.”

  Sam’s phone buzzes with another text. “Cooper says someone called the police when they saw something strange out there.”

  “I just can’t believe it.”

  She wasn’t in Spanish class this afternoon (the one class we have together), but I didn’t think much of it. Arden Lin, one of her roommates and best friends, said she had a cold.

  “Is she okay?” I’d asked. Stupid. I should’ve kept my mouth shut. I couldn’t help it. It was a reflex.

  “Why?” Arden asked. “You wanna bring her some chicken soup? Can’t help noticing that when I was sick a few months ago, you didn’t seem so concerned.”

  “¡En español!” Señora Rocha admonished, oblivious to the fact that Arden was making fun of me. She made us repeat the whole conversation. Arden didn’t know how to say chicken soup in Spanish. While Señora Rocha clucked her disapproval, Arden stared daggers at me.

  Now Sam says, “I can’t believe it, either.” He takes a deep breath, his black T-shirt stretching over the muscles in his chest. “She didn’t seem the type.”

  “What type?”

  He shrugs. “I guess you never can tell. I read somewhere that in half of all suicides, the friends and family say they never had a clue. I thought they were just trying to cover up their guilt, you know? But maybe—”

  I interrupt before he can finish his thought. “You think Eliza Hart killed herself?”

  Looking out the window, the cliff where they pulled her up is across the road and to the left. Directly across the road from our dorm is another dorm (Eliza’s dorm), built right up against the edge of the hill. The drop-off is shallower there. You could probably walk down the hill toward the water if you wanted to, though it’s all covered in rocks and yellow grass. Not like the sharp, rocky drop where they found Eliza.

  “I guess she could’ve fallen.” Sam cocks his head to the side. “But that girl always seemed agile as a cat to me.”

  Eliza is the kind of girl who inspires even guys like Sam to say things like agile as a cat.

  (Was. Was the kind of girl. She isn’t anything anymore.)

  “Do you think her parents know?”

  “The dean probably called them by now.”

  I nod, backing away from the window.

  A fresh round of sirens fills the air. “Police.” Sam points to a car coming up the road from the valley down below. It pulls to a stop beside the cliff.

  “Would they call police for a suicide?”

  Sam shrugs. “Technically, it’s illegal, right?”

  I nod again. I read once that it’s against the law so that they can revive you if you make it to the hospital in time, so that they can force you to get help, so that you won’t ever want to do it again.

  Of course, all the help in the world hasn’t kept me from having claustrophobia.

  Anyway, I don’t believe Eliza Hart killed herself. I mean, I’m not naive. I know everyone has issues, that kind of thing. But mean girls don’t kill themselves. They’re too busy making other people miserable.

  Or anyway, making me miserable. I had no idea just how much this school would be like the one I left behind until I met Eliza Hart. Or, more precisely, re-met her.

  We were in kindergarten and first grade together in Menlo Park, but we didn’t stay in touch after I moved away. We were too young for Facebook and emails and Snapchat. We were too young for sleepovers.

  Back then, Eliza’s house was Disneyland as far as I was concerned. She had the best toys: an electric car you could sit in and activate by pushing a pedal. I begged my parents to get me something similar for Hanukkah—at Eliza’s house there was an enormous Christmas tree, of course—and they finally gave in and got me the one that you moved with your own feet. It was even lamer than a bicycle.

  Eliza’s Barbie dolls had hair that flowed in ripples down their backs. (My dolls’ hair seemed to come out of the box matted and tangled.) She had the best collection of Disney princess movies I’d ever seen. She had picture books with glossy pages that smelled like cologne, and her bedroom was covered in a thick, shaggy c
arpet that shone when sunlight streamed in through the windows.

  Champagne, I remember with a start. Her mother said the carpet was champagne-colored. I used to think the drink was named after the color, not the other way around.

  She even had a better name than I did. Just one syllable and four letters different, but so much cooler than Elizabeth.

  In kindergarten, our teacher started calling me Lizzy. She said that Eliza and Ellie were too similar, plus there was an Ally in the class, too, and she would get the three of us mixed up if she didn’t do something about it.

  I hated being called Lizzy. The one good thing about moving to New York was that I got to go back to being Ellie because there was already a Lizzy in our class.

  My first day here at Ventana Ranch, I was exploring the campus when I saw her name taped to a door on the third floor of the dorm called Harlan, directly across the road from my own. At first, I doubted it was the same Eliza Hart. What were the odds that after almost a decade my long-lost best friend would end up living across the street from me?

  But just in case, I lingered in the hallway, staring at all the girls I thought might be her—blond hair, gray eyes, California tan—waiting for one of them to stop at the door labeled with her name. And then there she was, toting her suitcase down the hall alongside her parents just in time for orientation, not hours early like I’d been. Not exhausted and jet-lagged from taking the red-eye. She was still just as perfect as one of her Barbie dolls.

  Maybe I shouted her name too loud. Or maybe I walked down the hallway too eagerly. Perhaps she just didn’t remember me—presumably (unlike me), she’d had other best friends since first grade, right? Instead of saying hello, she looked me up and down like she was taking stock of my dark jeans and brown hair (it was blonder when I was little) and gray eyes. (That was the only thing we ever had in common—we both had gray eyes. Though hers had a lot more blue in them and mine more brown. Just another way she was better than me.) She tightened her grip on her suitcase like she thought I might try to take it from her or something. Was I making her nervous?

  I turned my attention to her parents. I wouldn’t have recognized her father. I mean, it had been a long time, but his face was puffed out somehow, even though he looked just as thin now as he had then. I remember that I used to think he was handsome—you know, the way that dads can be handsome—but he looked so old to me now. If I didn’t know better I might have thought he was Eliza’s grandfather, not her dad.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Hart,” I said, “it’s so good to see you again. I’m Ellie Sokoloff. Eliza and I went to elementary school together.”

  Her father gazed at me without the slightest bit of recognition, but her mother nodded and said, “How are your parents?”

  I sighed with relief. At least one member of the Hart family remembered me. (Or at least she was polite enough to pretend she remembered me.) “They’re good. I mean, they’re not here. We couldn’t all fly across the country to move me in, you know?”

  I bit my lip, ashamed that I’d just admitted that my parents hadn’t wanted to spend the money to fly to California to move me into the dorms. (It wasn’t only about the money. They couldn’t decide which of them should move me in, and it’s not like they could have done it together. They barely made it through my middle school graduation without fighting and they’d been sitting on opposite ends of the school auditorium, not side by side on a plane.)

  “I’m glad to hear that they’re well,” Mrs. Hart answered. “Do you know where the nearest grocery store is? We want to drive into town to get Eliza some essentials.”

  I shook my head. “I took the bus here from SFO this morning.”

  Finally, Eliza spoke, rolling her shoulders down her back. She was taller than I was. She’d always been taller. “You don’t have a car?”

  “I don’t have a license,” I explained. “You can’t get it until you’re seventeen in New York.” Eliza already was seventeen, I realized, remembering that she had a September birthday. “Anyway, you don’t really need to drive there.”

  “Well, you need to drive here.” Eliza lifted her chin like she couldn’t believe that a girl who didn’t know how to drive had gotten into the same school she had. What had I been thinking, that I could make her nervous? I was pretty sure she was the kind of girl who didn’t get nervous. “You’re going to be trapped on this campus without a car,” Eliza warned.

  My heart beat just a little bit faster at the sound of the word trapped. The whole point of coming here was not to feel trapped. I swallowed hard, hoping the Harts couldn’t see my nerves.

  “What room are you in?” Eliza glanced up and down the hall.

  “Oh, I’m not in this dorm. I’m in Beronda.” I gestured vaguely out the window.

  Eliza narrowed her gray eyes. “Then what are you doing in Harlan?”

  Until then, I hadn’t known it was weird that I was there. Of course it was weird. I should’ve been back in my own room, waiting for my own roommate to show up. “Just exploring.” I looked at my shoes. Black boots with zippers up the sides. Out of place next to Eliza’s flip-flops. “Well, I better go unpack.” I gave a little wave and turned on my heel, heading back toward my own room, where every single thing I’d brought from the East Coast had long since been put in its place.

  “We didn’t go to elementary school together,” Eliza said to my back. “Just kindergarten.”

  “First grade, too,” I corrected, spinning around with a smile. I was happy that she actually remembered me. “I moved to New York after first grade.”

  “That’s hardly elementary school,” Eliza said, and I stopped smiling.

  Later, I saw Eliza driving her car out of the student parking lot. A cream-colored SUV with automatic everything. It probably knew how to park itself.

  The ambulance they put her in starts to drive away, without sirens this time.

  Jumping off the cliffs is one way out of here that doesn’t require a car.

  Not that I think Eliza jumped.

  I can’t remember what it felt like to fall. Falling never frightened me, even as a little kid. Before swimming took over, I used to do gymnastics and I laughed when I fell off the beam.

  Not like the other girls. They all cried.

  When I was little, the only thing that made me cry was waking up in the middle of the night. It meant that I would have to try to fall asleep again, the hardest thing in the world.

  I stopped sneaking into my parents’ room by the time I was seven. I spent my restless nights alone, tossing and turning and begging my body to turn off the way other girls’ did.

  Sometimes I tiptoed to my door and considered walking down the hall.

  Imagined waking my mother.

  My father slept all the way on the other side of their big bed, and anyway he had pills to help him sleep by then, pills that made it nearly impossible to wake him up. Sometimes I worried there would be a fire or an earthquake in the middle of the night and he’d sleep right through it.

  And then I’d imagine what life would be like with just Mom and me. It didn’t look so bad.

  And then I’d feel awful for imagining that, for thinking that, and I’d be even more awake.

  Just like I am now.

  The other girls called their mothers Mommy all the way through elementary school. Not me. I graduated to Mom early.

  My mother never wore perfume. When the other moms came to pick up their little girls after school, the air was thick with the scent of Chanel and vanilla, jasmine and apricots. Coconut from the moms who spent their days by the pool at the country club and mint from the mothers who’d had a drink at lunch and tried to cover up the scent by brushing their teeth. But my mother was decidedly odorless. I went into her bathroom once, smelled her shampoo and her soap—they had a scent just like everyone else’s. But somehow the smells all disappeared after they hit her body.

  When I was ten, my mother asked my pediatrician if she should be concerned that I had trouble sleeping. He said I
was just a healthy, energetic child. I wasn’t the least bit hyperactive during the day, so he didn’t diagnose me with ADHD or anything like that.

  When I was thirteen, they tested my thyroid—apparently, an overactive thyroid can keep you from sleeping. But my thyroid was perfectly normal.

  At least some part of me was.

  Now I wonder how my mom took the news, when they told her I’d died.

  Did she let them see her cry?

  Did her hair fall out of its tight bun, and did her shoulders slump? She always hated the way I slouched. One of our biggest fights ever, I swear to God, was about posture.

  Although that might have been a metaphor for something else.

  I’m getting distracted.

  But then, it was always like this when I couldn’t sleep. My thoughts would bounce one to another all on their own, no matter how hard I tried to ignore them.

  Did Mom tell my dad herself, or did she make someone else do it? Did he even understand what had happened, or is he still medicated into oblivion like he was at Christmas?

  I never knew which dad was going to be waiting for me when I came home.

  Medicated Dad,

  Dark Dad,

  Fun Dad.

  I hated all those dads, even though Fun Dad and I had some good times. But once in a while there was Normal Dad, even though normal wasn’t the right word for it since his appearances were so few and far between. But I really loved Normal Dad.

  Mom used to tiptoe around Normal Dad, like she thought maybe he would stick around a little bit longer if she just did the right thing or avoided saying the wrong words. She knew full well that remission didn’t work that way, but knowing wasn’t enough to keep her from tiptoeing, wasn’t enough to keep her from hoping (at first) that this time would be different,

  this time would last,

  this time he would be the man she fell in love with,