by Kate Gray
I don’t know where she’s going.
“All I can think about is Kyle’s hair, the way it sticks out.”
Kyle with his greasy hair, like pickup sticks. The gray sweatpants. Weird sounds. Poor personal hygiene. Inappropriate behavior. Erratic moods.
The signs were there.
He said he would do it.
I should have done something.
The ways Kyle pretended to commit suicide are images swinging in me. Kyle grabbing his tie, Kyle in the corn field, Kyle kidding. He wasn’t kidding any more, and this true thing presses against my neck.
Carla clenches her fist and opens it, hits her forehead with her palm, hits it again and again. She says nothing, shakes her head, hits her head. Different signs from a girl smart enough to know them.
If we were anywhere but St. Timothy’s, I’d reach for Carla, pull her down on this floor, and wrap my arms and legs around her. Her curls would get in my face, her head under my chin, and we’d lie here and watch the light come up in the window. But we’re at a boarding school, and even though I’m only four years older than she is, I’m the teacher. Teachers don’t watch the sunrise with students in their arms.
And besides, there’s Kyle. There’s Terence. There’s a goose cracking the night open.
“Everybody’s wrong, you know,” Carla says. She looks at me with the left side of her face lit up and the right side of her face dark. The left eye is a flare, spitting sparks out.
“You mean, Donny?”
“No, everything.” Her lips come together, and her nose wrinkles like she might spit. “Kyle killed himself.”
“How do you know?”
“I know.” She turns away from the light.
“But how do you know?” The way Carla isn’t looking at me feels like cells dividing, like something bacterial, spreading.
“There was no reason for him not to.” She turns her head to face me, her face a half face.
“There’s always a reason to live,” I say. The words are flat like something in a brochure, words Mr. White wants me to say.
“Like what?” she says.
There is no life ring for me to hold. There is no life ring for me to throw.
“Kyle’s better off. He did the right thing,” Carla says.
We’re sitting a few feet apart, but there’s an ocean between us. Whitecaps keep me from seeing her all the time. We’re both floating, but she rises into view, and then disappears.
“First of all, we don’t know that Kyle committed suicide.” I’m rising. She’s falling. “And even if he did, how could that be the right thing?” I say.
“It’s right for him.”
“What’s right for him doesn’t make it right.” All the muscles in my arms are tight, my hands flat on the floor. “It’s not that simple.”
“He didn’t murder anyone.” Carla tips her mannequin-head to the right, trying to see her way to a type of logic I can’t follow. Maybe she’s trying to look at right and wrong. Maybe she’s trying to figure out Donny. Surely this is wrong.
“Yes, he did.” My chin rises up a little. I tumble down the face of a wave into the bottom of the swell she creates.
“Well, it was self-defense. Really, it was. He defended himself against other boys. Against Donny.”
Carla has a point.
“Self-defense by killing yourself?” My voice goes high. At the crest of a wave, I see whitecaps all around me. We have no lifeboat, no shoreline, nothing but our bodies in all the waves breaking.
“He was just carrying out his means of survival, you know, the survival of the fittest, laissez-faire, Adam Smith, and all that.” Carla’s smile is curl. She’s enjoying the crashing, the submersion in water, the splash.
I swallow, drop my head down, tuck my chin in. Then, I look right at her. “Carla, he didn’t survive. If he’s dead, he wasn’t the fittest.”
A laugh almost leaks out of her. Carla raises one hand to ward off the thought.
“Well, it’s lucky then.” She pushes her hair behind her ear. “Then he won’t be disappointed when his dreams don’t come true. He saved himself from pain,” she says. “Smart.”
My hands rise up to my forehead. My elbows on my knees. The way I turn my head back and forth, I try to wipe my thoughts on my hands, back and forth, my forehead on my palms. “Tell me you’re not serious.”
“I’m dead serious,” she says, and she doesn’t flinch at “dead.”
“You would never kill yourself, right?”
Each time she turns the logic around, the waves hit. Carla rises, and I sink. Each time she disappears, a piece of me bangs against my skin from the inside, trying to get out.
“Sure I would,” she says.
The feeling I had when she came in the door is still the supple floor, the soft walls. Sarah gone, and now Kyle, and I am breathing shallow. Something has to hold. Something has to keep me from sinking.
Both hands push off from the carpet, and I’m up, and one step to the bed, and my two hands go to her shoulders, the shoulders still curled around an ache in her. I go beside her, curl her inside my arms, draw her into my chest. Her weight topples on me, her head under my chin, her curls soft on my neck.
Back and forth, I rock her. Back and forth until my abs ache. The world is this bedroom, no noise from Terence in the living room, no movement outside. But there’s that one goose, loud in the night, two notes rolling into one, above the trees, crossing over campus, the lake, over Delaware. It breaks the sky open.
With her breathing, I breathe. No drowning any more. Not one more drowning. Her head folds into my chest. She rubs her forehead on my shoulder. Her arms around my waist, we’re warm. My chin brushes her curls, her neck white and wet. My mouth opens, to let the hot out of my body, and my lips press against her neck. I kiss her neck.
And her mannequin arms shoot into the air, like someone sinking and trying to find the surface. She gets off the bed, turns around and faces me.
Holy shit.
Holy shit, I kissed a student.
Her eyes are big, and the ocean is there, too. She backs up a step, backs against the closet door, and slides to the floor. All I hear is the rush of her clothes on the wood. Her knees bend in front of her, her legs at funny angles, her lips make a smile that is more secret than happy.
Song / Suction
Knots too tight. No space, so, no air. No way to breathe. No breath.
Second Formers’ yelling comes with lights out, a regular routine each night for the youngest boys in the dorm. But tonight the yells are screams. Hurt coyotes. Coyotes all over San Diego hills when I grew up. Now a crash. And then they’re on my door, boys banging.
They’re coyotes, eyes too big for their sockets, voices too big for mouths.
“Kyle” and “Come on” are some of the words I make out. They start running back the way they came. Running back, they’re quiet. My sneakers, their bare feet on linoleum. Suction on the floor. We’re a herd. We fall in step, recruits, basic training, brothers. Every door is filled with boys looking. We pass Tommy Underwood lying against the wall. Tommy lies rigid, flat out. A boy kneels by him.
“He’s okay,” the boy says.
I’m ahead of the Second Formers, and they say, “Kyle.” And turning the corner to the common area, I see the curtains, the dirty canvas drapes, the insane treatment of Second Formers, animals in stalls, stalls with bed, and so many of us moving so much air, the curtains move into the hall a little, let a space open behind them, let me see the foot of Kyle’s bed. Before I slow down, I see the tie, the Tim-Tim’s maroon-and-gray stripes around the beam, the other tie knotted to the end. The tie around Kyle’s throat digging in, the chair on its side, the tongue, the blue.
And behind me, heavy steps, Alex Jeffers.
“Jesus,” he says, “I’ll lift him. Get the knot.”
Taylor / The Switch
“You know you wouldn’t miss me,” Carla says. She’s on the floor, and the dresser, the clothes off their hangers,
the comb are things I look at, have to look at. She keeps going.
“You wouldn’t,” she says.
From some other planet, I look at her. “Carla, what are you talking about?”
“You know, like if I were out of here.” She waves her arm like an umpire calling someone out who slid into home base.
“Stop talking like that.” I say the words. That’s all.
Carla starts to laugh, a laugh that is old like a hollow tree. “I’m right. No one would notice. How funny is that.” She presses her palms on her legs and stretches. “But you know who really wouldn’t miss me even if he were alive?”
I shake my head.
“My dad.” Her eyes wince in the corners. “My dad wouldn’t miss me.” The idea hurts her, but she throws it at me anyway.
“How do you mean?”
“Ever since I was old enough for school, he sent me away, to places far enough that he couldn’t see me during the week, or he sent me to boarding schools. It’s like I wouldn’t see him for days since he spent so much time with his artists, and then, on weekends, just the two of us, we’d walk down the rows of peach trees. He’d tell me how much he loved me. But I’d end up alone by the end.”
“What about your brother?”
“Sure, there’s Doug. Druggie, jail, the whole thing. He’s gone. We don’t talk about him.”
“I’m so sorry. Why did your dad send you away?”
“He loved me, too much, more than my brother,” she says. There is no curl in her words.
“Like how?” I say. How I say things sometimes is how she says things, young.
“Don’t know.”
“Giving you things?”
“No.”
“Holding on to you?”
“Kind of,” she says.
Whenever I try to get her to talk about her family, she changes the subject. This time, with Kyle and the sunrise in my apartment, she answers.
“What’s your dad like?” she says. Here’s the subject change, the switch of tracks. She’s back to the curl in her words.
“Doesn’t matter,” I say. It comes out more curtly than I meant.
My bedroom is the breeze outside, the growing morning, the fridge in the kitchen turning on.
“Nobody’d miss me,” she says.
My lips go tight. Her type of smart is the chessboard kind, each move carefully tabulated, angled. I don’t want to be a sacrificed piece. But she looks left and right as if she’s looking for a way through the floor. I don’t know how to move the pieces so we’re king to king.
“Sure they would,” I say, but the words sound like a brochure by Mr. White’s phone.
“No,” she says. “The only person who’d miss me is Kyle.” She’s shaking and her jaw gets tight.
That one hits me. My eyes squint. My lips stay tight and thin. There’s nothing but us in this room, nobody else in this world that’s tipping one way and then the other.
“I’d miss you,” I say.
She looks up. “Really?”
Her excitement came too quickly. I’m being played, and the game is more than a match in this room. There’s her life. There’s my job. There’s a goose crying out in the night sky.
“You’re just saying that because you think I’ll kill myself.”
Right now I’ll say anything to keep another person living.
“Carla, I care about you,” I say. And I do. Maybe too much.
“You do not. If you cared about me, you’d keep away from me.”
“Meaning?”
“People hurt what they love.”
“Wrong,” I say, “people protect what they love.” My feet over the edge of the bed, I lean forward, looking down at her on the floor.
“Like you loved Kyle,” she says. “Nice job.”
My head turns toward my shoulder, away from her. That was low.
“Nice, Carla” is all I say.
And we sit in my room for awhile, the sun coming up outside. Breakfast will be ready soon, and we’ll have classes, and everyone will be normal and “Fine, thank you” and worried about college. And we’ll forget tonight, and Kyle, and Donny Zurkus will get his name cleared, and St. Tim’s will make the top ten boarding schools.
“This isn’t worth it,” she says. With her elbows at angles, she gets up from the floor. Her head gets taller than my head in the room since I’m sitting on the bed, leaning my back against the wall, my legs flat in front of me.
“Where you going?”
“What do you care?” The curl to her words is sharp.
“Promise me you’re not going to do anything stupid.” I’m standing up, too, taller than her tall. One of my hands reaches toward her, but she steps away.
“I’m going to breakfast. Later, Ms. Alta.”
And she gives me a little salute with two fingers touching an imaginary cap.
“Come back after breakfast, okay?” I say.
Out of my bedroom, she’s already reaching for the outside door.
Song / Happy
It’s 5 a.m., and finally the boys are sleeping. Bodies can only take so much. Witness Tommy Underwood, only hours ago when it happened, his muscles froze when he was running with the others to get me. His flight mechanism overwhelmed by adrenalin, by shock. Every muscle in his body flooded, and his body went rigid. He slammed against the wall. Temporarily paralyzed. Too much moving through vessels too open.
There are two boys asleep on my pull-out couch, and other Second Formers are sleeping in older boys’ rooms. They can’t go back to their cubbies, not yet. The boys in my apartment don’t even move when the phone rings.
“Song, this is Alex.” He doesn’t wait for me to respond. “Kyle’s dead. DOA. So much for CPR. I mean, I took the class two weekends ago. The doc said there was nothing I could’ve done. But we tried, didn’t we, Song?” He is talking fast. Big man talking like a boy, a boy whose job was to ride with a dead student in the ambulance to the ER in Wilmington.
What am I supposed to say? Kyle was blue, and there was Alex putting his enormous mouth over little-boy lips, folding enormous hands and pumping boy lungs. The color of Kyle, his bloodshot eyes, I knew there was nothing we could do, but Alex acted. He tried, and what might have seemed foolish then proved the measure of him, a man with honor.
“His parents are here. Mom and Dad. It’s like they’ve checked out, zombied, nobody’s home.” Alex’s words trip on themselves. He starts to giggle. “They’re gonzo, gorked,” and his laughing has high notes, close to crying. A paper bag should go over his mouth to save the man from passing out. Every good man gets overwhelmed.
“What was the cause? Did the doctor say?”
“Cerebral hypoxia, strangulation.” He sounds like a report. Gone is Kyle, the boy wonder, the weird genius who made animal noises. Now he is a report.
“Suicide?”
“Looks like.”
“So, they’re not going to investigate?”
“No, Kyle did it. You know how he was, Song. Somebody found a note. It was in his pocket, his mother’s name on it, even a stamp.”
“A note?” Mr. Happy-to-Be-in-Study-Hall?
“His mom had it in her hand when I saw her. An envelope.”
My head feels heavy, so heavy I need my other hand to hold it up, my elbow on my desk.
Kyle wrote his mother, all smiles, not caring when Donny and his minions surrounded him, when the boys pushed him. The decision was made by then, and he was happy.
“Song, you still there?” I forget Alex is on the line.
“Still here,” I say, but I’m really back in study hall, back with a boy writing his mother. Kyle in his blazer, tie tied right. Kyle with his hair combed. The times he burst out laughing, the other boys ignoring him. The way he kept me waiting to fold the note just right.
“We did what we could, right?” Alex’s voice, so high, brings me back to my apartment, my desk, the maroon ink blotter. The phone is hard in my hand. His voice is so much smaller than he is.
“We did all we could, Alex,” I say, and I don’t say we could’ve done more.
Alex says he’ll be back for breakfast at school, he’ll teach today, hold practice. Mr. Tough Guy, macho jock who tried to breathe into a little boy.
He’ll fold.
There’s nothing left to do but fold.
Taylor / Beets
“Mr. White?” I said into the phone. “I’m sorry to bother you. This is Taylor Alta.” After Carla left for breakfast, thoughts piled up in my bedroom: She might kill herself, what if she tells, and why can’t I talk her out of it?
“Yes, Taylor. What can I do for you?” The headmaster’s voice was edges.
“A student last night talked a lot about committing suicide.” Telling Carla’s thoughts to the headmaster was telling secrets, a sin to be confessed.
“And you’re concerned for her safety and/or the safety of others?” His words were rehearsed. Maybe he was reading that pamphlet.
“Yes, she could hurt herself.”
“You’re sure. What you’re saying is very big, and we can’t take anything lightly.”
“I know.”
“Everyone is very shaken. Are you okay, Taylor?”
“Not really. But I’m more concerned about Carla.”
“Carla Spalding?”
“Yes, she’s coming back to my apartment after breakfast.” Meeting me at my place sounded dirty. How many Hail Marys would I say? How much would she say?
“I see,” he said. “We’ll have to act quickly. When she leaves your apartment again, call the school nurse who will pick her up outside the dorm, take her to Wilmington for a psychiatric evaluation.” Everything was happening fast. Carla would be pissed. A Hail Mary for wanting her neck, another for kissing her neck. A novena for saving myself.
“And after that?”
“Maybe hospitalization. Maybe not. You’re doing the right thing, Taylor. One suicide is enough,” he said.
“Too much,” I said.
“Indeed.” Mr. White hung up.
The receiver weighed forty pounds and landed in the cradle with a bang, like the little window on the confessional slamming shut.