Even in school I just want to cry and I can’t help it. I started crying in fucking HISTORY CLASS. I would be so embarrassed I could die except I don’t give a shit about anyone at that fucking school. The nurse let me lie down in the sick room. I’m really worried that Maggie will hear about it and then I don’t know what I will do.
Jessica
May 7, 2001
I know I’m not going to care forever. I know in like five years I’ll think about Derek and Lexi and all of them and I won’t care at all, I’ll be like, what idiots. But right now I am so angry and sad I just want to SCREAM at everything and everyone. You’re lucky I’m writing you letters otherwise I would want to scream at you too!
Thank you for the drawing by the way. It doesn’t really look like him but it’s funny and it made me laugh. And you were right about Lexi and Elaine. Not that they are sluts necessarily though who knows! But definitely they were not my friends. They are loyal to each other and to Derek but NOT to me.
When I called Lexi she pretended to give a shit for like ten minutes, saying things like Oh you’re better off without him you’re going to meet someone wonderful just you wait! It was like something a girl in a movie would say when the main character gets dumped but it was better than nothing and then all of a sudden she was like sorry got to go! And I haven’t heard from her since. Elaine isn’t even answering her fucking phone. It’s like someone reached inside of me and turned off all the lights.
May 15, 2001
Dear John,
Last night was Elaine’s birthday. I knew for a fact that she was having a party because she told me about it when Derek and I were still together. And it’s not like I couldn’t tell I was no longer invited, I’m not fucking stupid, but you know how I’ve been feeling lately, and the idea of all of them hanging out in Elaine’s big beautiful house, having fun without me, it made me so crazy, I mean really crazy, like I was watching myself do stuff and thinking: Wow that girl is so dumb! She is going to get in so much trouble! I rode my bike to Elaine’s house, like two hours away from mine. I snuck in through the back garden gate. I could see inside the living room, where they were all hanging out. Loud music and bare feet because of all the white carpets. Drinking something brown out of big glasses. They were watching a movie but not really, more talking to each other, laughing. There were cards on the floor like they were playing a game and got bored of it. All of them in that room, together, just being happy and normal, and it felt like they were standing in a circle taking turns stabbing me. Do you think I’m exaggerating? I know it’s stupid but that’s exactly how it felt. I thought I would cry but I couldn’t.
Instead I had an idea that I would knock against the glass and hide, just to scare them a little. I thought maybe if I did it a few times it would really creep them out especially if they were watching a horror movie and already in kind of a scared mood. But the second my hand touched the glass a bunch of lights turned on in the garden and an alarm started blaring. I must have looked so stupid, so pathetic, just standing there. The only thing that makes me feel better is that I saw Derek’s face and he was at least a little scared. I could tell.
The police came, and Elaine’s parents, and then my mom. Elaine’s parents aren’t pressing charges (it’s not like I did anything that bad, or hurt anyone, or was even trying to) but my mom has not said a word to me since she picked me up. Maggie tried to get me to talk to her but I don’t feel like it. She’s really going to send you away now, she said, but more like a warning than she was trying to rub it in. Except if mom’s made up her mind there’s not much point in warning me is there?
Maybe boarding school wouldn’t be so bad? Especially if all the people there are there because no one wants to deal with them, maybe I could make some real friends. I’m trying to be optimistic, haha. Only thing is I don’t think they’ll let me write to you if I have to go there.
Best,
Jessica
Lizzie
In the week before her disappearance, Sara was working on an essay for her class on Giambattista Basile, the Italian folklorist. Her essay compared one of Basile’s tales, “The Handless Princess,” to the story of Saint Lucy. According to many versions of the story, Lucy, who had taken an oath of chastity, gouged out her eyes to dissuade a persistent suitor. When her own brother wished to marry her, Basile’s virtuous, unlucky princess chopped off her hands.
Sara never finished the first draft. She had a tendency to procrastinate and would probably have completed the essay the same morning that it was due. In the margin of her notebook, she wrote: should just cut off their dicks, instead. Sara’s notebooks, like her clothes, and her nail polish collection, and her camera, went to Lizzie after she died. Sara’s parents distributed her belongings haphazardly after the police said that they would not be needed as evidence.
Five years after Sara’s death, Lizzie sometimes wears her clothes, loose-fitting Levi’s and flannel shirts with paint stains on the sleeves. She hopes that if she dresses like an artist, people might assume she is one. She lives in New York City now, with her fiancé, Leo. He went to the same college as Sara and Lizzie, but graduated a year before they started. Lizzie met him at an alumni Christmas party the winter after she graduated.
She never thought of herself as the kind of person who would go to alumni events, but that’s how lonely she was, working as a receptionist in an Upper East Side retirement home, living in a tiny apartment that smelled like cat piss. In the months after Sara died, Lizzie’s haze of grief and rage had kept her from making any real plans.
Lizzie used to hate New York. She hated the piles of trash along the sidewalk, she hated all the sirens, she hated the men who yelled obscenities at her on the subway, she hated the businessmen who stared at their watches and did nothing. In those first few years after Sara died, Lizzie did not just miss her friend, but envied her. Sara did not have to worry about health insurance or student loans or her career path. She would remain smart and beautiful forever without even trying.
It’s not so bad anymore. She and Leo live in a small apartment near Morningside Park. He’s in his last year of medical school at Columbia, studying to become a psychiatrist. Lizzie edits textbooks for a big publishing house downtown. Her cubicle is full of cacti in brightly painted bowls and postcards she bought in the MoMA gift store.
Last year, they adopted a dog, a big, goofy German shepherd named Annette. They got her because Lizzie often gets restless at night, but walking around alone makes her nervous. She loves the freedom that comes with having such a large animal by her side. It’s how she imagines it feels to be a man.
It is a sunny Saturday in April. One of Leo’s mentors has invited them to a dinner party. Leo asked if Lizzie wouldn’t mind picking up flowers.
First, she has a hair appointment. Throughout college, Lizzie’s hair was all sorts of colors: red, black, white-blonde, even turquoise. It’s taken some effort to return it to the warm, pretty brown she was born with.
Margaret, her hairdresser, is a thin, austere woman who doesn’t talk much. Across the salon, a customer is speaking to her own hairdresser quite loudly.
“I used to be an EMT,” the woman is saying.
“Uh-huh. Wow. That must have been stressful.”
“A little. But I never saw anything that bad. Not like on TV. Sometimes people had a little glass in their face, or a broken arm.”
“What was the worst thing you saw?” the hairdresser asks.
“Oh. There was a girl who crashed her car into a guardrail, but she wasn’t that injured. She was just sort of—stuck inside the car. She was wearing this gorgeous brown leather skirt. And she was so beautiful. I remember saying to her: You’re so beautiful, and I’m so sorry this happened to you. Remember when leather pants and skirts were in fashion?”
Did you really say that? Lizzie wants to know. Couldn’t you get fired?
She imagines the beautiful woman in the car, how confused and afraid she must have been, and there was this EMT, tellin
g her how nice her skirt was. She probably thought it was a bad dream.
“Are you all right?” Margaret asks.
“I’m fine,” Lizzie answers.
“Would you like some water?”
“Yes, please.”
Several teenage girls walk past the salon, shopping bags dangling from their thin arms, wearing tank tops that make their shoulder blades look like angel wings.
Margaret gives Lizzie a paper cup full of water, which she gulps down gratefully.
“Any better?”
“Yes, of course. Thank you.”
While she waits for her color to set, Lizzie flips through one of the women’s magazines scattered around the salon. The actress on the cover has a face as delicate as a birdcage. Most of the pages are dedicated to diet tips and stilettos, but right in the middle there’s an article called “How I Forgave My Daughter’s Killer.”
The title is in big red letters, printed above a photograph that looks like it belongs in a Christmas card or a high school yearbook. The girl in the picture is sixteen or seventeen, wearing a purple dress with a puffy skirt. A boy, around the same age, is standing beside her, his long arm draped over her bare shoulders. Both of them are grinning.
The best day of my life was the day my daughter, Theresa, was born. The worst day of my life was when I learned that she was dead.
The author of the article describes her daughter in the same words that are always used for dead girls. Beautiful, kind, generous, clever, sweet. No one ever says: She was a real piece of work, or even, She could be a brat sometimes. At least some women who die tragically young must be something other than angelic.
From the first paragraph, Lizzie learns that Theresa was killed by her boyfriend. What a surprise, she thinks, numbly. She continues to read.
Before Theresa was murdered, “forgiveness” was just a word to me. So was “faith.” I believed in God, but I never heard His voice in my heart, because I never needed Him. Theresa, my angel, guided me to Him.
I wrote many letters to Jeremy before I finally sent one. At first, I wrote that I hated him, and that I wished he would burn in hell for taking my daughter from me. If not for Jesus, I would still be living with this rage and sorrow today.
One of Lizzie’s old therapists had suggested that she write Blake Campbell a letter. “You don’t have to send it,” he reassured her. “The point is to clarify your own emotions. It’s about you, not him, now.”
“I will when I’m ready,” Lizzie had promised him, lying. She had nothing to say to Blake, not even inside her own head. The only honest letter she could write would be a scream pinned to a page.
When I first visited Jeremy in prison, my whole body was shaking. I didn’t think I could look him in the eye. But I did, and what I saw was not the face of a killer, but that of a scared little boy. Part of me wanted to hug him and tell him everything would be all right. Part of me wanted to hit him, to hurt him, to make him feel the pain he had caused me. I nearly ran outside. But Jesus convinced me to stay.
In the years since Theresa’s death, I have gotten to know Jeremy. He is neither a child nor a monster. He is a bright young man with so much to offer this world. If he were free, he could join the army to protect our country. He could study to become a doctor and save lives. He could teach, he could be a firefighter. He could raise a family. He could serve his community, and God.
In prison, he is wasting his life. This is not what our family wants for him, and it’s not what Jesus wants, either.
Lizzie flips the page. There is a picture of Theresa as a baby, held in the author’s plump arms. There is another of Theresa as a child, dressed as Snow White, clutching a plastic pumpkin basket. The text below reads: Happier times.
Like a lot of the people she knew in college, Lizzie had an artistic temperament without the talent to match. She’s growing out of it, or trying to. Sara was the real thing. She won prizes for her paintings. The younger students in the art program worshipped her. Even Lizzie, through her haze of love and envy, could see how talented she was.
The obvious question about anyone who dies young: What would she have done if? Would Sara have worked at an art gallery in New York? Taught English in China? Become a famous painter? Actually, if she had lived, she probably would have married Blake.
They became friends their freshman year, part of the same loose gaggle of smart, sweet girls. Sara had the face of a silent film star, the kind of face that had gone out of fashion but was still striking—soft cheeks and big dark eyes. Lizzie, with her henna-red hair and her runner’s legs, was the one boys stared at when she entered the room, but it was Sara they wanted to talk to long after the party had ended. She doesn’t really care, Lizzie always wanted to tell them, as Sara stared intently at the boy rambling about Truffaut or Trotsky or whatever the fuck they thought would impress her. She doesn’t give a shit about you or what you’re saying, she just likes attention. She’s making you feel interesting and important, because that’s how she wants you to make her feel. It almost always worked.
Sara had an aversion—was it actually an inability?—to saying no to anything, ever. When they first met, this intoxicated Lizzie. By the time they were seniors it exhausted her. It was because of Sara that Lizzie went to parties that she never would have been invited to otherwise. It was because Sara suggested it that Lizzie posed nude for life-drawing classes, which was thrilling, at least before it became tedious and embarrassing. Sara even cut Lizzie’s hair short one dull evening. “You’ll look just like Jean Seberg,” she said. Lizzie did not. But the feeling of Sara’s long fingers at her scalp made the haircut—which took years to grow out—almost worth it.
With Sara, Lizzie tried ecstasy, a glittering experience that left her aching and miserable for days after. She slept with boys she found unattractive and uninteresting, just so that she’d have something to talk to Sara about after. Lizzie even wrote some bad, short poems under Sara’s influence.
Their junior year, Lizzie and Sara moved into a house off campus. It was tiny and perfect, painted yellow, with a small garden they tended to like old ladies.
Blake and Sara started dating that spring. They both knew him by name, even before he and Sara started hanging out, because he was so absurdly good-looking. More than once Lizzie had witnessed a girl at a party act like she had a head injury when Blake spoke to her. He asked Sara to dinner after seeing one of her paintings in a student art exhibition. On their first date, he brought her a bouquet of wildflowers tied with twine, and a weird little poem he wrote for her.
Shortly after Blake and Sara started dating, Sara woke Lizzie in the middle of the night, begging her for a ride to the hospital. Blake had some kind of accident, she’d said. It wasn’t until days later that Lizzie found out what the accident really was—he had stuck a needle through his hand while trying to sew Sara’s name into his palm. People at Crawford were always doing stupid shit and calling it art, and at first that’s what Lizzie assumed it was. She also assumed Sara, who was too smart to fall for that kind of thing, would break up with Blake. But she didn’t. In fact the whole disaster brought the two of them closer together.
Lizzie had no idea how to talk to Sara about it. She didn’t want Sara to think that she was judging her. The whole thing made her wonder if Sara and Blake knew something about love that she didn’t, that she was just too immature to understand. For many years, she was sick with guilt for not saying anything. It was Leo who finally reassured her.
“People who hurt themselves don’t usually hurt others,” he told her. “There’s no way you or Sara or anyone could have known what would happen. And anyway, even if you’d had an idea, would she really have listened to you?”
Lizzie admitted that Sara probably wouldn’t have. She and Blake lived in their own universe. Lizzie was not invited.
In the days before she disappeared, Sara was stressed about her senior thesis show. She didn’t think it was her strongest work, and she was hard on herself. This is what Lizzie to
ld the police. Personally, she believed Sara had run away—put herself on a bus to Chicago or maybe Montreal. She’d heard of Crawford students doing that. Lizzie was angry and lonely in their little house all by herself.
A local housewife found Sara, in a shallow grave of dirt and snow. Sara, who did not like scary movies, who spoke to cats and dogs as if they were people, who preferred to read the news because she found watching it on television overwhelming. All the life leaked out of her.
In the cab home from the salon, Lizzie tries, as she has tried so many times before, to imagine Sara’s last moments: the knife, Blake’s face, the sound of the water. The images are fleeting and far away, like watching a movie through the window of someone else’s house. It is empty, empty, empty.
Whenever anyone talks about women who die young, they say how sad and terrible it is that these women never got a chance to have a real life, with a job and kids and marriage. But lots of women don’t get to do those things, or don’t want to. And Lizzie has a job, and she’s about to get married, and she’ll probably have kids at some point—but so what? Who fucking cares? she thinks, on the verge of tears. What exactly is Sara missing out on?
Lizzie puts the notebook back in its place. She goes into the bathroom and stands over the toilet, willing herself to vomit, but nothing happens. Then she crawls into bed with her clothes on and falls asleep.
In her dream, Lizzie is sitting in the passenger seat of a car. The woman from the article, the mother, is driving. She is saying something, talking too fast for Lizzie to understand. There is someone in the backseat. Lizzie can feel the person’s presence, but she can’t see who it is. She tries to turn her head, but she can’t move it enough. Theresa’s mother, who looks a lot like Lizzie’s mother, is speaking loudly, but Lizzie still doesn’t know what she’s saying.
Nothing Can Hurt You Page 10