The Survival List

by Courtney Sheinmel

  YOUR MISTAKES DO NOT DEFINE YOU.

  Well, I thought, sometimes they do.

  This was the last full week of classes. Next week was finals week. Kids who studied hard all the time had their noses in books, studying. Kids who barely studied were suddenly showing up to every class, paying attention, asking their friends if they could copy their notes. If anyone noticed me, they’d look away, or give me too long a look, or maybe even a hug. Then they’d move on, worrying about their own grades, their own lives.

  Monday rolled into Tuesday, into Wednesday. I had four classes in the morning, then lunch, then another four classes. Juno had been right about people getting used to me, and sometimes it was easy for me to forget what had happened, too. There was, like, muscle memory of what it felt like to be in school as an ordinary person whose sister hadn’t just died. Megan Hofstader made a crack about our history teacher, and I started to laugh. But then I caught myself, suddenly hyperaware of who I was and what I’d lost. In those moments of hyperawareness, nothing felt real—especially knowing that when I went home at the end of the day, I’d pass by Talley’s closed bedroom door and she wouldn’t be on the other side of it.

  Wednesday rolled into Thursday. And then it was Friday. I’d nearly completed my first week of school, ATD. Fourth period was Dr. Lee’s Advanced English Literature & Writing class. “How is everyone doing with their final stories?” Dr. Lee asked.

  Dr. Lee was my only teacher not giving a final exam. Instead, we had short stories due. I’d started working on mine a few weeks back. But then Talley had died. I hadn’t looked at my story since. It was still in the vomitous first-draft phase.

  “I know we’re not supposed to use the B-word in your class,” Megan Hofstader said.

  Dr. Lee gave her a quizzical look.

  “Blocked,” Megan said. “I mean blocked.”

  “Ah,” Dr. Lee said. “Not the word I thought you meant, but yes—that word is prohibited in here.”

  “Well, at the risk of breaking a rule, I am blocked,” Megan said. “I got to the middle of my story, but don’t know if I can finish it. I can’t even write badly right now.”

  “We can meet after class to discuss the specifics of your story,” Dr. Lee said. “But speaking generally, I’ll say this—writing is an act of betting on ourselves. It’s saying, ‘I bet this thing in my head is worthy of being in the world,’ which is essentially saying, ‘I bet I am worthy of being in the world.’ When we experience the B-word, as you call it, it’s usually a sign that we’re worrying about our worthiness. It’s the opposite of betting on ourselves. There’s a famous quote by the late senator Paul Tsongas: ‘No one on his deathbed ever said, I wish I’d spent more time on my business.’ Personally, I’ve always thought that was a crock. Almost every writer I know would pull their laptops closer and type faster on their deathbeds, because on our deathbeds, suddenly, we have nothing to lose by betting on ourselves. A better expression would be: No one on his deathbed ever wished he’d spent more time worrying. So my advice to you is: Don’t spend too much time worrying about your stories. Just write them, and revise, revise, revise.”

  She’d said the word deathbed four times in the space of two minutes. Each time, I felt a squeeze in my chest. Talley hadn’t had a business or a deathbed. She’d had a death floor. Had she said any words from that floor? I’d never know. But she did leave the list in her pocket.

  Remembering it, I dropped my hand to my own pocket. I’d taken Talley’s list to school with me that day, and my heartbeat picked up its pace as my fingers dug to find it.

  Ah. There it was.

  The edges had grown fuzzy from my touching them so much, soft as velvet. When I unfolded the paper, the creases had worn thin and had teeny tears. Maybe I should have it laminated. But to laminate Talley’s list would mean that I would no longer be touching exactly the thing that she had touched, and I liked thinking about how my finger could be pressing on the exact invisible trace of one of her fingerprints. It was like pressing my finger to her finger. If I laminated the paper, I wouldn’t be able to do that.

  When it came to the list, I felt like I was always trying to figure out what was the least bad between two shitty options: to leave it at home or to take it to school, both with their own risks; to laminate or not to laminate, both with their own shitty side effects.

  I slipped a finger gently between the folds, tracing the items on the list. Thirteen items, plus the initials TSL up top, and Adam’s phone number on the back. I hadn’t heard back from him yet.

  Adam, whoever he was, wherever he was—why hadn’t he called me?

  Whenever I was working on a story and working through a character’s motivations, I’d picture them in my head and play out different scenarios. Adam wasn’t someone I was making up, but I tried it anyway. I pictured him in my head, a faceless person getting a voice mail message, and then a text, from a stranger. What would he do next?

  He’d probably try to contact Talley, but Dad had already disconnected her line. It drove me insane that he’d done it so quickly. I wanted to be able to text myself from her phone, because then her texts would still be at the top of my messages. I hated that her name was slipping down, down, down. I had to scroll so far to find her.

  Besides, it was Talley’s phone number; even if she couldn’t use it, I didn’t want anyone else to have it. And if Adam had tried to call or text her and say, Hey I got a weird message from some chick saying she’s your sister, I couldn’t take her phone and reply to him.

  But Dad didn’t think about any of that. He was too busy getting on with things.

  I glanced up to check that Dr. Lee wasn’t looking at me. She wasn’t. She was writing something on the board. So I pulled my phone into my lap and tapped out another text to Adam: Hi, it’s Sloane Weber again—Talley’s sister. I’m sorry to put this in a text message, but I need to tell you that Talley died. She left a list of things along with your phone number in her pocket.

  I wrote out the items on Talley’s list, which made it a novel of a text. When I finished, I kept my phone in hand. It was so unlike me to send a text in a class, especially Dr. Lee’s class, and to keep my phone out afterward. But I didn’t care. I clutched it, willing it to vibrate with a call or text from Adam. I had little concern for Dr. Lee, or my short story, or anything other than things connected to Talley.

  Chapter Nine

  I WAS ON MY WAY TO THE CAFETERIA, STILL CLUTCHING my phone, when I was intercepted by my ex–best friend, Audrey Sheridan.

  Audrey and I had been inseparable from kindergarten to the middle of fifth grade, when our drama teacher, Mr. Stuart, cast me as the title role in Oliver!, which Audrey considered a shocking injustice. She was the one who wanted to be an actress when she grew up, and she’d talked me into auditioning with her, figuring I’d be cast as one of the lesser orphans. She blamed me for “stealing” her role. I quit the show so she could go on as my understudy, but she still wouldn’t speak to me. Luckily, Juno came to sit next to me at lunch. We didn’t know each other well back then. She was the kind of friend I’d invite to my birthday party if I was having more than ten people, but not if I was having fewer. Not having Audrey around opened up room for Juno, and I realized she was much easier to be around. She didn’t make up a million rules about what we had to wear each day, or how many notes we had to pass. I stopped begging Audrey to forgive me, which only made her hate me more. She hated Juno, too. I remember her confronting us once, saying we were terrible people who deserved each other. She said she never wanted to speak to either of us again.

  Over the years, she mostly kept her word, only talking to me when she absolutely could not avoid it—like if a teacher forced us to work together, or once in seventh grade, when she bumped into me in the hallway, and she said, “Oops, sorry.” Then she looked up and saw it was me. I think she would’ve taken those two words back if she could’ve.

  But now here she was, her hand deliberately on my arm. “Wait, Sloane,” she said. “I�
�m sorry about Talley.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “How are you? I mean, of course you’re awful.”

  “I’m just on my way to—”

  “I keep thinking about her,” Audrey said. “Remember how she used to bring us along to cheerleading practice, and we’d sit up in the bleachers and watch her?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I do.”

  Talley had started out on the squad when she was a freshman, which was really rare. She was the only one out of twelve girls—the youngest, the smallest, and also the best. She’d do this thing where she’d take a flying leap and basically cartwheel her way to the top. I hadn’t thought about it in a long time. If Audrey hadn’t brought it up, it’s possible I could’ve gone the rest of my life without ever thinking about it again.

  We live through so many experiences with the people in our lives, and some of those experiences we play like memory movies over and over again in our heads, and some just disappear, poof, as if they never happened. And then there are some we keep, but we forget to remember them, so it’s as if they never happened, either. Every memory I had of Talley was like a small treasure buried in the recesses of my brain. I wanted to keep track of them all.

  “Do you remember anything else?” I asked Audrey.

  “I remember how she’d come over and talk to us on her breaks. I thought she was the coolest person. I practically wanted to be her. Course, I had no idea what she was going to do to herself. It’s always the ones you least expect. Well, not always, but in this case, I never would’ve guessed it’d end like this. Then again, I hadn’t seen her in years, so maybe she’d changed. Did you expect it?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  I should have.

  “Wow,” Audrey said. “And you guys were so close. You’d think you would’ve noticed something.”

  “I—”

  “Oh, hi, Coop.”

  Cooper Davies, Juno’s ex, slung an arm across Audrey’s shoulder. “Hiya,” he said. “Hey there, Sloane.”

  “Hey, Cooper,” I said. I was trying to think of an exit line. Audrey kind of rested her head on his shoulder. “Wait a second, you guys aren’t . . . you guys are together?”

  “Yep,” Audrey said.

  “I guess we just went public about it,” Cooper added. “You can tell Juno if you want. I know you guys tell each other everything, and it’d probably be easier, coming from you. Also, I’ve been wanting to tell you—I’m sorry about your sister.”

  “That’s what I was just saying,” Audrey said. “How sorry I am. And you know, Sloane, you’re super brave to be here right now. I can hardly believe that you’re even standing. If my sister did something like that, I wouldn’t be able to make it out of my room. Not that I have a sister. I’ve always wanted one, as you probably remember. My parents say they broke the mold after they had me, and now my mom is going through the quote-unquote change of life.” She made air quotes around the phrase. “So it’s not in the cards for me. At least you got to have Talley for seventeen years. Plus you know she’s in a better place.” She gazed upward, presumably toward heaven, but really toward the waffle-shaped ceiling. “That’s got to be some comfort, right?”

  “What are you even talking about?”

  “I mean—”

  “Sloane,” Juno said. She took a breath. “And Cooper?”

  “Hi, Juno,” Audrey said. “Let me just slip out of this invisibility cloak so you can see me.” She gestured as if taking off a sweater or jacket.

  Juno’s narrowed eyes shot bullets at Audrey. “What’s going on here?” she asked.

  “Audrey stopped me to talk about Talley,” I said. “Then Cooper came over. I didn’t know about . . .” I let my voice trail off and gestured toward them.

  “It just happened,” Cooper said. “I was going to tell you, but then I figured you were upset about Sloane’s sister. The timing wasn’t right. But now Sloane’s been back all week, and—”

  “And what?” Juno asked. “Talley’s still dead, Cooper. And you’re an asshole.”

  “C’mon Ju, let’s—” I started. But then my phone buzzed. My hand turned instantly clammy. Before I even knew what was happening, it slipped from my grip and skidded across the floor. “Shit!”

  “Look what you did,” Juno said—to Cooper, to Audrey, maybe to both of them. I wasn’t sure. There were too many people in the hallway, and my phone had seemingly disappeared, like a lost memory.

  But how could a phone, a solid object, disappear like that? My eyes went hot with pressure. I was on my hands and knees, the scuff marks of a thousand footsteps blackening my palms. Juno dropped to the floor next to me, looking; though at one point, I saw her stop and call toward Cooper and Audrey, who’d begun to walk away. “The least you can do is help,” she told them. Cooper bent to the floor, and Audrey did, too. But Audrey did just barely. She was only pretending to look, and I realized Mr. Stuart had been right not to cast her all those years ago. She was a terrible actress.

  Finally, a guy picked my dusty phone up from the floor and handed it over to me. “This yours, Sloane?” he asked.

  I didn’t know his name, but he knew mine. When something tragic happens in your life, you become someone people know about. They learn your name; they look you up in last year’s yearbook so they can see what you look like. You get to be famous, in a way—not because you did anything special, but because your life is really sad.

  “Yes, it’s mine,” I said, grabbing the phone and forgetting to say thank you. Adam’s name flashed as a missed call. I pressed to redial him and started speed walking down the hall. I didn’t say goodbye to anyone—not even Juno. Behind me I could hear her berating Cooper and Audrey. I bumped through the crowd, phone pressed to my ear. It rang once, twice.

  “Answer, Adam. Dammit, answer,” I said.

  Three rings, four.

  His voice mail picked up. “Hi, it’s Talley’s sister, Sloane, again,” I said, when the message finished. “I’m so sorry I missed you. Please call back. Please.”

  I walked all the way to the back stairwell and pulled open the door. Our school is a long two-story building. There’s a main stairwell in the center that everyone uses. But people rarely use the back stairwell. It’s out of the way, and legend has it that a dead body was found there a few decades back. Once you’ve seen your sister’s dead body, old legends like that lose their power. I sat down on the bottom step, gripping my phone in my sweaty palms, waiting for it to ring. To cover my bases, I also sent a text:

  Hi, it’s Sloane Weber. I’m here now if you can call back. Or you can text—whatever is easier.

  A text message popped up and for the length of a heartbeat, I was filled with relief. But it was just Juno.

  Where are you?

  I didn’t reply. It wasn’t that I was mad at her for any reason. I had no reason to be mad at her, and I knew she was going through something, too. Finding out about Cooper and Audrey like that must’ve been awful for her. That was why I wasn’t replying. I couldn’t deal with anyone else’s awful right then.

  Another text popped up. Juno again: I’m worried about you.

  And then: I’m looking all over. Please answer. I need to know you’re okay.

  I finally wrote back: I’m in the back stairwell.

  The stairwell door opened a few minutes later. Adam still hadn’t called back, but Juno had found me, and the tears started. “Oh, Sloane,” she said, reaching for me. “I’m so sorry you had to deal with them. Can you believe they’re together?”

  “They deserve each other.”

  “I knew you were going to say that,” Juno said, her voice quivering. “And maybe it’s even true. But it still makes me feel awful.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I left you there.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. She was rubbing my back, and I wished I could go back in time and be a little kid again, lying in bed, with Talley rubbing her hand up and down, up and down, lulling me to sleep. “It’s all right. It�
��s okay.”

  “Adam called,” I said. “I missed his call because I dropped the phone. I called back, and texted, and he’s not answering. What if I never hear from him again?”

  “Not possible.”

  “Totally possible.”

  “He called you,” she said. “That means he’ll call again. Why don’t we get out of here?”

  I shook my head. “I know it’s creepy in here,” I said. “But it feels like the only safe place. I don’t want to be around anyone else.”

  “I could take you home if you’re not feeling well,” she offered.

  “Cut afternoon classes?”

  “Yeah, why not? Plenty of people do it all the time. I know you don’t. But I bet you won’t get in trouble for it. If you want me to stay with you, I don’t think I’ll get in trouble, either.”

  “Yeah, probably not.”

  “Come on,” Juno said, prodding me up. “Let’s go.”

  I stood, with effort, and took a step toward the stairwell door.

  And then my phone buzzed in my hand.

  Chapter Ten

  “I TOLD YOU HE’D CALL!” JUNO CRIED.

  “Hello?” I said. “Adam?”

  “Yep, that’s me. You’re Sloane?”

  “I am,” I said. “I’m so happy you called back. Thank you so, so much.”

  “No prob. It’s just—hang on.” He paused, then said, “Yeah, I heard you the first time, Mother. I said I’m taking care of it.” There was a scratchy sound like he was pressing a hand over the mouthpiece. A few seconds later he said, “Sloane?”

  “Yeah. Is everything okay?”

  “It’s fine,” he said. “Other than the fact that my mother is completely irrational. But listen, I got your text. I got all of your messages, actually. I would’ve gotten back to you sooner, but I thought you had the wrong number. Then I read what you said about your sister and—God, I really don’t know what to say. I’m really very sorry.”