Show me the money Faulkner
Post
Show us the pic
Put it on Insta
Post it
Post it
I feel sick. Thankfully, some people respond by telling EthanF8 to shut up, to stop trying to get attention, to not post any picture. Then my stomach drops when I read an exchange between my student Sarah Solomon and EthanF8 from fourteen minutes ago:
Total bot, Solomon_Sarah posted. You’re not Mr. Faulkner.
No bot, EthanF8 replied.
Then a fake.
No fake, either.
Prove it, Solomon_Sarah wrote.
No, no, no, I think. Don’t respond.
I scroll down to the rest of the thread, and I see that EthanF8 has replied.
You write beautiful essays but you hide behind those cat-eye glasses like the world’s youngest virgin librarian.
Shit.
Maybe that’s why you sent this pic
Followed by a copy of the picture Marisa stuck in my grade book, with a black line drawn across the nipples.
“No!” I shout, dropping the phone like a burning coal. I jump up and start pawing through my workbag, looking for the school directory, knowing Sarah Solomon’s home phone number must be in there. I find the directory, but actually grasping it in my hand makes me pause, though my heart is hammering away in my chest. What am I going to do—call my student to say it’s not me posting nasty tweets at her? That I wasn’t the one who posted a nude pic and basically accused her of being a stalker? Byron and Teri would love hearing that I did that. Plus I’d probably get Sarah’s mom or dad on the phone, and I can easily imagine them calling the police.
So I call Coleman Carter instead.
“It’s not me on Twitter,” I say as soon as he answers. “It’s Marisa. She’s bullying Sarah Solomon.”
“Slow down,” Coleman says. “What are you talking about?”
“On Twitter,” I say. “That account Marisa opened pretending to be me. She just posted that picture she put in my grade book and basically accused Sarah of sending it to her. Me. Whatever. You have to tell her it wasn’t me. You have to call Sarah, call her parents, and tell them it wasn’t me.”
“Hold on,” Coleman says. “Sarah who?”
“Solomon,” I nearly shout into the phone. “Marisa is posting on Twitter as me, but it’s not me.”
On the coffee table, Marisa’s phone dings. A new text. I glance down at it, and everything stops.
I know who killed your parents
I stand rooted to the floor, staring down at the text on the locked screen. Six short words, and they almost drop me like a heart attack.
I know who killed your parents
Coleman is saying something in my ear. “I’ll call you back,” I say, and hang up on him.
Marisa’s text vanishes from the screen.
“Shit.” I swipe her phone and get the request to enter a pass code. “Fuck!”
My phone rings in my hand. Another unknown number. If it’s Marisa, I’ll eat her fucking heart over the phone. I answer and shout, “Hello?”
There’s some sort of background wind noise, as if the person on the other end is calling me from a racing sailboat. “Ethan?” a voice says unsteadily.
“Who is this?”
A pause, a shifting kind of sound, like the phone is being brushed across something. That rushing, roaring noise continues. “I’m sorry,” the voice says. “I just … I’m sorry.”
Realization forms like a ball of ice in my stomach. “Suze?” I say. “Is that you? Where are you? What’s going on?”
A flat, hard sound like a car horn obliterates any reply she makes. Is she on a street somewhere? The sound fades abruptly and Susannah sighs. “I always loved the King and Queen buildings, you know? All lit up at night. Now they’re green. Maybe because it’s March. Like a spring thing.”
The King and Queen buildings are a pair of skyscrapers, glass towers sporting white latticed “crowns,” a square one for the King building and a curved one for the Queen. They are a good three or four miles away, just off the Perimeter. “Are you there?” I ask. “Susannah, are you at the King and Queen buildings?”
“So pretty,” she breathes, and the finality in her voice, the sense of an approaching end, lights up my spine with alarm.
“Suze, where are you?” I yell, searching around the kitchen for my keys. I snag them off the counter, then start looking for a pair of shoes.
“It’s not your fault, Ethan,” she says. “I’m sorry.”
“Susannah?”
She mutters something; the only words I can clearly make out are “way down,” and then the roaring noise increases, only to end in a jarring silence.
“Susannah?” I yell. “Suzie!” There’s no sound—the call has ended.
I brace myself against the back of my couch, fighting off a wave of panic, and force myself to think. She doesn’t have a car, but she could have Ubered to the King and Queen. But it’s Sunday; those buildings wouldn’t be open. You can see the towers from lots of places around Sandy Springs. Including the Roswell Road overpass that crosses I-285, about a mile north of my house.
I find my flip-flops under an ottoman, shove my feet into them, and race for the door.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Traffic isn’t bad for a Sunday evening, but I weave around what cars there are on Roswell Road, making liberal use of my horn. A traffic light turns yellow, and I fly beneath it just before it turns red. But I have to stop at the light at Glenridge, where the Church of Scientology has taken up residence in an old brick-and-column structure that looks like the bastard offspring of a Williamsburg mansion and a dentist’s office. I find myself thinking I will convert to Scientology if I can get to my sister in time. If I’m not already too late.
The light changes. By some miracle there are no police around as I gun the Corolla through the intersection, narrowly missing a pickup truck laden with ladders and paint buckets. Then I’m going down the long slope toward I-285 and the overpass. Ahead, an orderly array of red taillights crosses the highway. I blow through another yellow light, nearly clip a slow-turning SUV, and then I’m racing up the slight rise to the overpass itself. The sun has dropped below the horizon, but I can see a figure on the sidewalk, halfway across the bridge, standing at the rail. The safety barrier, a chain-link fence that usually rises up from the rail and curves inward, is gone—a few days ago a utility truck overcorrected on a turn and scraped the rail, tearing a long gash in the fencing. Aside from a waist-high iron rail and some plastic orange netting above that, there is nothing between the figure on the walkway and the open air to the highway below.
I pull the car as close to the side of the road as I can, stopping abruptly just at the start of the bridge. I punch on the hazard lights and get out of my car. A UPS delivery van rolls past, giving a quick blast on its horn, the exhaust blowing my hair back.
It’s Susannah, all right, thirty feet away, leaning against the railing, peering down at the interstate traffic flowing twenty feet beneath her.
“Susannah!” I call out.
She keeps looking down. I walk toward her slowly, wary of spooking her. “Susannah?” I call out again.
“I dropped my phone,” she says, still looking down at the highway. A tractor trailer zooms past below. Absurdly I think of alligators in a moat. “It just … slipped out of my hand,” she continues. “Almost hit a car. Jesus, that would be a shitty way to go. You’re driving along and someone drops their iPhone through your windshield. But it didn’t hit anyone.”
I come to a stop maybe six feet away, nerves on edge. I hate heights, and I feel if I glance one more time over the rail, I’ll either be sick or fall. My stomach clenches at the thought. I swear I can feel the bridge sway ever so gently beneath my feet. Another passing car honks indignantly. In the distance to the east, above the tree line, I can just make out the tops of the King and Queen towers, the greenish glow of their crowns like a pair of spectral
eyes observing this family reunion. I try to ignore everything except my sister. She still looks down at the interstate as if mesmerized by what she sees.
“Susannah,” I manage to say. I think I sound relatively calm. “What are you doing?”
“Thinking about jumping,” she says.
Someone drives past in an SUV, the passenger window down, shouting. All I can hear is, “—you crazy?”
“Susannah,” I say. “Suze. Let’s … let’s get in my car. Come on. I’ll take you somewhere. We’ll get ice cream or something. A beer.”
“I don’t want a beer,” she says. She is still looking down.
“I’ll get you whatever you want,” I say. “I’ll buy you a whole fucking bar. Just … don’t.”
She turns her head to look at me then, and I see tears have tracked down her cheeks. “You know what I want?” she says. “I want Mom.”
Her words are a sword through my heart. I open my mouth, close it again.
“I know it’s stupid,” she says.
“It’s not stupid,” I say.
She holds a furious grief in her eyes, like an unbearable flame. “I want to jump,” she says in a small, tight voice.
“Please don’t,” I say, my voice cracking. “Don’t do that, Susannah. I … I don’t want you to. Please. We can get you help. I’ll get you help.”
She leans against the railing as if winded. Below her, traffic streaks by at seventy miles an hour.
“Come on,” I say, extending my hand. “Just walk over here. It’ll be okay. I love you. It’s okay. I love you. Come on.”
Slowly, as if she has to decipher the meanings of my words, Susannah frowns, glancing at me. Then, quickly, she straightens up. A bright panic shoots through my heart.
“Okay,” she says in the same small, tight voice, as if speaking is painful. And she reaches out and takes my hand, then walks into my awkward hug, leaning against me as I clutch her and choke back sobs. Behind me, cars continue to honk, the passing commuters bearing witness to my sister avoiding death, again.
* * *
I DRIVE SUSANNAH to Northside Hospital, the closest ER. It’s known as the Baby Factory because most suburban moms in Buckhead and Dunwoody and Sandy Springs deliver their babies at Northside. Both my sister and I were born there. Taking her to Northside makes a strange kind of sense—she was born there and she will avoid dying there.
Susannah sits in the front seat and stares out the passenger window. I don’t know what to say and don’t want to just babble at her, so I say nothing. Instead I scan the radio incessantly, jumping from Fleetwood Mac to Usher to Selena Gomez to Zeppelin, until finally I just turn the radio off and we drive in relative silence.
I pull into Northside’s ER parking lot and head for the gate by the ticket booth, and Susannah stirs, seeming to realize where she is. “Just pull over,” she says.
“I am,” I say. “Just need to get a ticket and find somewhere to park.”
“No, just pull over.”
“Susannah, I have to—”
“Goddamn it, Ethan, just pull over,” she says, sounding angry and resigned at the same time.
I turn hard right, out of the lane leading into the parking lot, and stop behind a black Lexus in a handicapped spot, just across from the ER entrance. “Okay,” I say, turning to Susannah, “what?”
My phone, mounted on the dash, rings. The screen says Coleman Carter. I must have hung up on him when I ran out the door to save Susannah. I’ll call him back. “Sorry,” I say to Susannah. “What is it?”
“I need to go in,” Susannah says.
“Well, yeah,” I say. “That’s why I was looking—”
“I need to go in alone,” she interrupts. “Without you.”
“What?”
My phone rings again. Coleman. I reject the call.
“I need to do this alone, Ethan,” she says.
“Uh-uh,” I say, shaking my head. “I’m going in there with you.”
“Why?” she says.
“Why? Because I’m your brother. Because I want to help.”
“I know,” she says. “And that’s why I have to go in by myself.”
“I don’t—”
She raises her voice. “I have to do this on my own. My whole life you’ve had to pick up after me, clean up my shit. I just … I need to do this.”
My phone rings a third time. Damn it. I stab at the answer icon, then put the phone on speaker. “I’m really busy here, Coleman.”
“Ethan,” Coleman says, and the tone in his voice is like a cold wind on my neck. “I got Sarah Solomon’s father on the phone. Her mother found her locked in the bathroom, lying on the floor next to the toilet. She took a bunch of pills.”
I stare at the phone, struck dumb by the horror of what he said. “Oh Jesus,” I say.
“She’d thrown them up, thank God,” Coleman continues. “They don’t know exactly what all she took; probably some expired pain meds. They’re on the way to the hospital.” He pauses. “Sarah had her phone with her when her mom found her. I told her parents it wasn’t you on Twitter. I don’t think they care much right now—”
“No, that’s fine, it doesn’t—matter now. God. I—is she okay?”
“She should be,” Coleman says. “Just wanted to let you know. Are you okay?”
I want to sob. “Yeah,” I manage, my voice a bit high. “Yeah. I’m all right. Just—I’m sorry, but can I call you back in just a minute?”
“Yes,” Coleman says. “Call me anytime, Ethan. I’m here.”
I hang up and briefly close my eyes, then open them and turn to Susannah. “Sorry.”
She shakes her head. “It’s okay.” The look in her face is bleak, her gaze far away. “I’m sorry about your student.” She takes a breath. “Marisa did something?” she says, still facing forward.
“Yeah. She posted that picture on Twitter, the one she put in my grade book, said it was my student.”
Susannah continues to stare out the windshield. “Was it a naked selfie? No head?”
I frown, confused. “Yeah, but how—”
“It’s me.” She turns then to look at me, and the look in her eyes is bleak and resigned. No, not resigned. Resolved. “I sent Marisa that picture.”
“You sent … why?”
“Told you we were flirting.”
I stare at my sister, unable to think of a response. Someone nearby in the parking lot slams a car door shut.
Susannah nods as if in confirmation, then takes another breath. “Go ahead. I’ve got this. Really.”
I blink, surprised at the shift in conversation, still processing what my sister just told me. “But … you don’t have insurance; I need to help pay—”
“I’m still on Uncle Gavin’s insurance,” she says. She looks at me, her face softening a little. “I’ll call you later,” she says. “Might not be until tomorrow. But if there’s a problem or whatever before then, I’ll call. Honest.”
We sit there in the ER parking lot, looking at each other. My sister’s face is pale and tired, mushroom-colored circles under her eyes, but she still has a strength of will that I can see in her glance, a small but resolute flame. Still I hesitate. “You sure?”
She nods, a sad little movement of her head. Then she leans over and kisses me on the cheek. Before I can react, she’s out the door, closing it behind her and walking toward the ER. She’s halfway across the lot before I think about getting out of the car and following her, but I stay behind the wheel and watch her enter the glass double doors. There’s a nurse at the main desk, and I watch Susannah talk to her. The nurse looks out the glass doors at me, and Susannah turns around and gives me a little wave before turning back to the nurse. Then the nurse comes out from behind the desk and leads Susannah into the waiting room, then through it to a doorway leading back to the ER.
I wipe my eyes and take in a shuddering breath, then another as I watch Susannah walk back into the ER with the nurse. As soon as the ER door swings shut behind the
m, I start my car and drive off, heading home.
* * *
WHEN I GET home, I see Marisa has sent a single text:
I’m not going anywhere, Ethan.
Yes, you are, I think, and I turn off her phone and put it in a drawer.
I talk to Coleman on the phone that night for a good hour. I know he feels guilty about his role in the meeting in Teri’s office earlier today—today? my God, it seems like a thousand years ago—and so listening to me is his self-inflicted penance, but I don’t care. He assures me that he doesn’t think for a moment that I am capable of doing anything like what Marisa did on Twitter while pretending to be me. I don’t tell him the picture is of my sister. Coleman tells me Sarah Solomon had her stomach pumped and has been admitted to Scottish Rite Hospital. Physically she should be just fine, Coleman says. He doesn’t say anything about how she’s doing psychologically. He doesn’t need to. She swallowed a bunch of pills after Marisa bullied her on Twitter.
And circling in the background, like a wolf padding in the shadows just beyond the range of light, is Marisa’s claim that she knows who killed my parents.
Somewhere in the middle of the night, eventually, I fall asleep, because my own phone rings and wakes me up late the next morning. It’s Monday. I should be at school right now, teaching sonnets. When I answer my phone, it’s Susannah.
“I’m at Birchwood,” she says.
“You’re not at Northside?”
“They transferred me. Bed opened up this morning. My shrink works here.”
“Okay,” I say, sitting up in my bed. I know Birchwood—it’s where Susannah has her group therapy. And she’s been admitted there before.
“Are you okay?” I ask. “Do you need anything?”
“A brand-new central nervous system and a box of Marlboros,” she says. “But I’ll settle for some clean clothes.”
* * *
THE WAITING ROOM in Birchwood is tastefully decorated with light, muted colors on the walls and carpeted floors. Glossy magazines that are only a couple of months old lie on slim wooden tables. The tables look plastic, but maybe they’re made out of actual birch wood, I don’t know.
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