I promised myself from the beginning that my end wouldn’t be a mess for someone else to witness and/or clean up. I want to disappear from existence and never be found because no one deserves the visual memory of suicide and death haunting their future. I don’t want to hurt anyone, even if I don’t know them, because you can never unsee death. I know.
I almost brought that bus driver, who probably has a wife and kids at home, into my shitshow. I almost forced him to makemyproblemshistrauma.
Before long, I’m looking at the bag in my hand and bargaining with myself.You’ve made it over two years; you can do a few more hours. This isn’t the time to go off script. Go to graduation. Give the middle finger to Mom if she shows. And then stick to the plan. No bringing others in, this is yours to finish.
An hour later,I’m lying on the wide concrete rim circling a big fountain in City Park. The park is deserted except for the random dog walker or jogger. My body wants terribly to sleep, but I won’t allow it, because lately when I sleep, I wake up screaming and thrashing in the grip of night terrors. I’m not putting on that display outdoors in the middle of a park.
My mind is preoccupied with Nina. What she would be doing now if she was still alive. I picture her married to a nice guy with a decent job. A little baby with dark hair and hazel eyes like hers in her arms and a smile free of worry, doubt, or sadness touching her lips. I don’t know if she ever wanted kids, but I like to think she did, which is torture because it’s yet another possibility I took from her when I handed her that gun.
Brevity is always the companion of good thoughts. They’re cut short and I’m reminded that I’m not worthy of them. While my thoughts turn dark and the internal monologue begins to play, I roll over on my stomach and take the hat and marker out of my bag and try to lose myself in something for my final hours. On the top of my hat I draw Batman in profile. I prefer drawing with pencils, but I can make do. The voices are still berating me, but when I’m drawing, I don’t have to give them my full attention. It’s an escape. Escape that I don’t deserve, but I take it anyway.
When I’m done, the surface of the mortarboard is covered in art except for a strip along the top edge that I intentionally left blank so I could fill it in with a message for my mom. I was going to write,Fuck you, Marilyn, but now that the time has come, I can’t.
I writeI’m sorry, instead.
And then I put it on along with the white gown. The red sash with Honors embroidered on it in white letters that came with my gown remains in the bag; I drop it in a trash can. I exit the park and walk two blocks west toward the school and the stadium behind it, where the ceremony will take place. I tell myself that I’m walking intentionally slow, but I don’t think I could move any faster if I tried.
I take my place in line behind a girl who was in my PE class junior year. She’s buzzing with excitement and her hair is so big in the front that her hat is pinned to the back of her head, instead of resting on top. It’s defying gravity, clinging to her ratted hair with strategically placed hairpins. I distract myself by counting them, twenty-seven bobby pins that I can see by the time I take my seat amongst a sea of red robes. There are nineteen other white robes like mine, the top twenty GPAs in our graduating class are required to wear them. Along with the ostentatious sash I threw in the trash. I worked hard for this robe. It’s amazing what you can do when you have a point to prove and a grudge to hold. My mom always said I was stupid and would amount to nothing. She was right about a lot of things, but I’m not stupid.
Our principal steps up to the podium on the stage and I try to listen, but after the first cursory line in a speech that feels like he wrote it ten years ago and has delivered every year since, I tune out. I think about scanning the crowd for my mom’s face, but who am I kidding? Anything ten feet from me is distorted, and the further my field of vision extends from there, the more it blurs. The people in the stands are a kaleidoscope of muted color, a combination of other people’s families cheering them on. Not mine. The isolation of the thought makes me close my eyes and tune them out. There is no one here for me. I’m going out alone. I know Alice is somewhere in the rows ahead of me. We’re seated in alphabetical order, but there are over four hundred in our graduating class, the gap between Es and Ps is immense. I can’t see her. And I can’t feel her either.
In the darkness behind my closed lids, the voices coming through the loudspeaker vary in pitch, but they’re all monotonous droning. The valedictorian’s speech is the highlight. I don’t hear words, but I think it’s valiant that the pride and excitement almost mask the fear in her voice. People like her don’t bask in accomplishment, they beat themselves up over tackling the next hallmark before it even comes into view. Stress is a way of life. The future is a way of life; the constant carrot dangling within view but just out of reach, is a way of life. There is no present. Only future.
What feels like hours pass before the presentation of individual diplomas begins. I still haven’t opened my eyes hidden behind Johnny’s sunglasses. Unbidden, the knot in my throat tightens and thoughts bombard me consecutively and uncensored: Nina coming to visit when I was five, acting strange, and leaving soon after a fight ensued with Mom. I hated that our mom fought loud, her anger amplified her voice to unbearable decimals. And I hated even more that Nina fought quiet, her anger muffled her voice to unbearable decimals. Nina’s eyes looked vacant, a look I would see many times in the years to come, but the first time left a scary impression. It was like her body was there, butshewasn’t. The moment the door clicked shut and Nina left, my mom looked at me and roared, “It’s all your fault she’s like this!” I loved my sister and the words crushed me, because even though I didn’t understand them, I felt the weight of them in my soul. My mother parented with tone. Hearing something enough, I believed it—and have turned into it. Reflecting back, I feel the guilt of my five-year-old self compound and blend with the guilt of my eighteen-year-old self. And then I see Nina’s body lying in a pool of blood. My mother’s screeching continues, “It’s all your fault she’s like this!”
“I know,” I say the words out loud. They blend in with the cheers and clapping that surrounds me and no one notices. Me in the midst of a singular meltdown, the rest of the world in the midst of a mass reverie. The juxtaposition sums up my life: there’s everyone…and then there’s me. Knowing from a young age that I didn’t fit in.
Just then the loudspeaker cuts my thoughts like scissors snipping a string. “Alice Eliot,” it booms.
The same obligatory, polite, congratulatory clapping continues, but I hear a loud whistle and a faint, but mighty yell from somewhere in the stands. “Way to go, Alice!” Taber. And it makes me do something I haven’t done in a while. I smile. I smile with cheeks still streaked in fresh tears. I smile despite myself, because Alice has her entire life ahead of her. And I know it’s going to be beautiful. The smile gives way to a few chuckles that feel foreign. My mind and body don’t know what to do with them and quickly they morph into what still sounds like laughter but is fueled by despair and accompanied by tears. I’m so tired it’s making me delirious. That’s my only explanation.
It’s a long time before the alphabet and ceremony proceed to my row. Lost in my thoughts, I take my cue when the girls sitting on either side of me rise, and I stand, mimicking them. I’m sweating like mad. I mop my face with the flared cuff of my robe sleeve to clear away the evidence of my crying, though the mania driving it remains etched in my features, I’m sure.
I wait: outwardly calm, inwardly growing more impatient by the minute. When I ascend the three stairs of the stage, I’m acutely aware of three things: how much I dislike the sound of my own name amplified and drawing attention to me; how clammy my hand is when it accepts Principal Scott’s proffered, robotic shake; and how I know, without a doubt in my mind, that Marilyn Page is not here.
My mom didn’t come.
Of course she didn’t, I think sarcastically.
Of course she didn’t, I think accusatorially.
Of course she didn’t, I think hopelessly.
And it’s at this exact moment that I realize maybe I didn’t have something to prove to her.
But that I just wanted her to be proud of me.
Proud.
Of.
Me.
With that final revelation, I descend the three stairs on the other side of the stage, and instead of turning left and remaining in line to return to my seat for the remainder of the ceremony, I walk straight ahead, set on a path toward a gate—any gate—that will get me out of here.
“Young man, you need to sit down. You can’t leave until it’s over.” The woman walking next to me is intermittently walking and jogging because her short legs are no match for the pace I’m suddenly keeping.
I don’t even look at her when I answer so many things at once: “It’s over.” And then I run. My cap falls off before I make it to the gate and I leave it behind. At some point, I unzip my gown and shrug it off, leaving it behind too. There’s a desperation like I’ve never felt thrumming through my veins. It’s terrifyingly persistent, high alert, need to take action. I don’t stop running until I’m standing on the front porch of the Victorian on Clarkson.
