Chapter 15 #3
I lean forward and wrap my arms around his shoulders. He pulls me into his lap and holds me there, our heads together, our breathing even. Making the small space smaller. I kiss his cheek, his temple. He makes a soft noise and relaxes against me.
“I was right,” he mutters against my neck, voice muffled.
“About what?” I ask.
“This definitely would have made me feel better about my leg.”
I laugh and hold him tighter. “Thank you for telling me all that. It helps me understand.”
“Thanks for listening.”
He pulls back, flipping his hair out of his face.
I pretend not to notice his eyes are red.
“Children of Hypnos now?” he asks. Honestly, I’d rather make out with him, but we both probably need a breather after that story.
He reaches for the bedside table, the pouch of edibles.
He takes one, then holds the bag out for me. “If you want one.”
I take the bag. Ash disentangles himself from me and returns to his desk. “Stick ’em back in the bedside table either way. If my parents find out I have those, they’ll yank my power cords too.”
I take one and put the pouch away.
We play CoH for an hour and a half, Ash at his desk and me spread out on the bed.
The game helps us both relax, but everything he told me sits inside, percolating.
If I ever stop feeling this way, something could happen that starts it all over again.
Maybe I get in an accident. Or my mom dies.
I shiver violently at the thought, but Ash is concentrating on the game, so he doesn’t see.
I know the edible starts kicking in when those thoughts fade away and I focus on Raven’s running animation.
I could imagine this being months ago, and Alissa is across the hall in her room, and Mr. and Mrs. Whitaker are having a nice quiet evening together downstairs.
There’s nothing wrong. That’s the edible talking, but it’s nice to feel this way.
It’s the only way not to spiral. Mr. Whitaker isn’t numbing himself with television and sleep.
Mrs. Whitaker isn’t shoving it all down and pretending to be okay.
Ash doesn’t avoid the world with edibles and video games and me.
Their daughter, his sister, didn’t kill herself.
“Bathroom break,” I say, pushing my computer off my legs. I wobble a bit when I get up, which makes me giggle. On my way out the door, I lean over the back of Ash’s chair and kiss the top of his head. His hair smells nice.
The bathroom is closer to Alissa’s room than Ash’s. On my way out, I pause and stare at her closed door.
We spent so much time in that room. Sitting on the floor, on the bed, by the window, at her desk. We grew up there. Learned things.
In that room, we watched videos we shouldn’t have ever seen, much less at the age we were.
People getting in horrific accidents or having slurs screamed in their faces or doing all kinds of humiliating or dangerous things for money.
We listened to real 911 recordings. We saw post after post of people arguing over the meanings of words and the moral failings of hypothetical events.
In that room, we watched the cornfield at the end of the street get razed and a beige housing development go up in its place, all the houses cookie-cutter copies, with no trees or bushes or even yards, their prices high enough to make our parents shake their heads in astonishment.
We were in that room when Mr. Whitaker told us there were plans to cut down the trees between our two houses and build a second development.
Those trees where we played as little kids and middle schoolers.
That we traveled across, like a different realm, to reach each other’s houses every day.
We would instead walk a winding asphalt path through a barren field of drywall skeletons that would eventually fill with upper-middle-class workers and their children and their goldendoodles and their expensive SUVs.
In that room, we talked about the horrible things people had said to or about us or people we knew in real life or online.
Calling us ugly, sluts, fat, bitches, or all four.
Telling us we should die because we expressed an opinion in a public forum.
Making assumptions about who we were and what we did.
Saying sexual things to us because they didn’t realize we were minors.
Saying sexual things to us despite knowing we were minors.
Commenting on our bodies, then trying to sell us something to fix them.
Always trying to sell us things. Products to make us prettier, thinner, cooler, more desirable.
Junk to make our lives easier. An endless assortment of premium water bottles, shoes, phones, makeup, bags, drinks, games.
If you don’t have The Thing, you will miss out.
If you don’t have The Thing, you will be lesser.
If you don’t have The Thing, no one will love you.
In that room, we discussed the classes we would take in college.
How excited we were to leave. But also how much school would cost. The loans we’d have to take out.
How our parents worried over it. How college was not about finding who we were or what we wanted to do, but about ensuring we got a job that paid enough so that we could crawl out of debt and later afford to live.
We weren’t oblivious; we saw the cost of groceries, of gas, of rent.
We knew no one from our generation was ever going to own a house, unless they were already rich or they got lucky.
We knew there was no retirement waiting for us.
We barely even knew what Social Security was. We knew we were never going to get it.
When I think of all of this, it is less and less surprising that Alissa killed herself. Maybe the only people who want to live in this world are the ones who can’t see what’s going on in it, or who don’t care.
I turn away. I pad back down the hall, past the staircase. I don’t make it to Ash’s room.
“Evie, could I talk to you for a moment?”
Mrs. Whitaker is at the bottom of the stairs. Was she waiting for me? Shit. I glance at Ash’s door, then down at her. I can’t say no. But I’m high. Will she be able to tell I’m high? The Whitakers don’t seem like people who know drugs very well, so maybe she won’t. I head down to her.
She makes room for me on the bottom step. “You’re not in trouble,” she says. A lot of people are saying that to me lately. “I wanted to ask you a question. About Alissa. Is that okay?”
I clear my throat. Vocal cords still working. Good. “Sure.”
“Before . . . before she died, how did she act? Do you remember anything strange? Anything she said, or maybe anywhere she went?”
It’s like Ash and his mom are on the same wavelength.
Maybe we all are, these days. I don’t feel like I can push back against Mrs. Whitaker’s feeling that she should have seen something the way I pushed back against Ash’s, though.
She’s an adult; there are different rules for making her feel okay. “What kind of strange?”
“Was she upset? Or acting erratically at all?”
I’ve thought this through a million times, remembered her in the days before she went missing, searched for anything that might have been a sign.
Of course Alissa’s parents would have done the same thing.
“Not really,” I say. “I know she was excited about the new Children of Hypnos expansion and the fifth book coming out, but that wasn’t out of the ordinary. She just seemed like Alissa.”
“Was anyone at school b-bullying her?” Mrs. Whitaker’s voice catches. “Was there a boy, or maybe stress with classes . . . ?”
I shake my head. “Everything was normal.”
I have a flash of a blue windbreaker caught in the rocks in Moss River. Normal. Everything always normal. More houses, fewer trees. More connection, less understanding. More wealth, fewer people able to afford to be alive.
Her face falls. She looks, somehow, more haunted than before, as if I’ve taken her last hope away.
Guilt is a vise around my heart. Should I have lied?
Made up a specific reason Alissa hated her life so much she wanted to die?
I don’t know the reason myself. I have imagined a hundred possibilities, but I don’t know how everything could have seemed normal to everyone around her, how life hadn’t changed for any of us, but to her the world had shifted so drastically that she needed to leave it.
One day she just couldn’t take it anymore.
Mrs. Whitaker’s intensity ratchets up several notches, though she isn’t saying anything. If I stay here any longer, I’m going to say something stupid, something wrong, and I’m not going to be able to take it back.
“Sorry,” I blurt out, and race back upstairs.
Ash raises his eyebrows at me when I close his bedroom door.
“Your mom,” I say by way of explanation.
“Ah.”
I rub my face. After a moment, I hear Ash’s chair creak, and a second later the bed sinks down next to me. His shoulder touches mine; our thighs press together. Making the small space again.