I flip to the end, past pages of dosages and special instructions. There are still blank pages at the back, but before them is a page that reads DEADLINE, followed by a date that’s only six days away.
I look through the rest of the notebook, trying to find other, failed deadlines.
But there’s only the one.
I get off the seesaw, back away from the park. Because now I feel like I am the thing the parents are afraid of, I am the reality they want to avoid. No, not just avoid—prevent. They don’t want me anywhere near their children, and I don’t blame them. It feels as if everything I touch will turn to harm.
I don’t know what to do. There’s no threat in the present—I am in control of the body, and as long as I am in control of the body, I will not allow it to hurt itself. But I will not be in control six days from now.
I know I am not supposed to interfere. It is Kelsea’s life, not mine. It is unfair of me to do something that limits her choices, that makes up her mind for her.
My childish impulse is to wish I hadn’t opened the journal.
But I have.
I try to access any memory of Kelsea giving a cry for help. But the thing about a cry for help is that someone else needs to be around to hear it. And I am not finding a moment of that in Kelsea’s life. Her father sees what he wants to see, and she doesn’t want to dispel this fiction with fact. Her mother left years ago. Other relatives are distant. Friends all exist far outside the black cloud. Just because Lena was nice in physics class doesn’t mean she should be freighted with this, or would know what to do.
I make it back to Kelsea’s empty house, sweaty and exhausted. I turn on her computer and everything I need to know is there in her history—the sites where these plans come from, where this information can be gleaned. Right there, one click away for everyone to see. Only no one is looking.
We both need to talk to someone.
I email Rhiannon.
I really need to speak to you right now. The girl whose body I’m in wants to kill herself. This is not a joke.
I give her Kelsea’s home phone number, figuring there will be no obvious record of it, and that it can always be discounted as a wrong number.
Ten minutes later, she calls.
“Hello?” I answer.
“Is that you?” she asks.
“Yeah.” I’ve forgotten that she doesn’t know the sound of my voice. “It’s me.”
“I got your email. Wow.”
“Yeah, wow.”
“How do you know?”
I tell her briefly about Kelsea’s journal.
“That poor girl,” Rhiannon says. “What are you going to do?”
“I have no idea.”
“Don’t you have to tell someone?”
“There was no training for this, Rhiannon. I really don’t know.”
All I know is that I need her. But I’m afraid to say it. Because saying it might scare her away.
“Where are you?” she asks.
I tell her the town.
“That’s not far. I can be there in a little while. Are you alone?”
“Yeah. Her father doesn’t get home until around seven.”
“Give me the address.”
I do.
“I’ll be right there,” she says.
I don’t even need to ask. It means more that she knows.
I wonder what would happen if I straightened up Kelsea’s room. I wonder what would happen if she woke up tomorrow morning and found everything in its right place. Would it give her some unexpected calm? Would it make her understand that her life does not have to be chaos? Or would she just take one look and destroy it again? Because that’s what her chemistry, her biology would tell her to do.
The doorbell rings. I have spent the past ten minutes staring at the ink stains on the walls, hoping they will rearrange themselves into an answer, and knowing they never will.
The black cloud is so thick at this point that not even Rhiannon’s presence can send it away. I am happy to see her in the doorway, but that happiness feels more like resigned gratitude than pleasure.
She blinks, takes me in. I have forgotten that she is not used to this, that she is not expecting a new person every day. It’s one thing to acknowledge it theoretically, and quite another thing to have a thin, shaky girl standing on the other side of the precipice.
“Thank you for coming,” I say.
It’s a little after five, so we don’t have much time before Kelsea’s father comes home.
We head to Kelsea’s room. Rhiannon sees the journal sitting on Kelsea’s bed and picks it up. I watch and wait until she’s done reading.
“This is serious,” she says. “I’ve had … thoughts. But nothing like this.”
She sits down on the bed. I sit down next to her.
“You have to stop her,” she says.
“But how can I? And is that really my right? Shouldn’t she decide that for herself?”
“So, what? You just let her die? Because you didn’t want to get involved?”
I take her hand.
“We don’t know for sure that the deadline’s real. This could just be her way of getting rid of the thoughts. Putting them on paper so she doesn’t do them.”
She looks at me. “But you don’t believe that, do you? You wouldn’t have called me if you believed that.”
She looks down at our hands.
“This is weird,” she says.
“What?”
She squeezes once, then pulls her hand away. “This.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s not like the other day. I mean, it’s a different hand. You’re different.”
“But I’m not.”
“You can’t say that. Yes, you’re the same person inside. But the outside matters, too.”
“You look the same, no matter what eyes I’m seeing you through. I feel the same.”
It’s true, but it doesn’t really address what she’s saying.
“You never get involved in the people’s lives? The ones you’re inhabiting.”
I shake my head.
“You try to leave the lives the way you found them.”
“Yeah.”
“But what about Justin? What made that so different?”
“You,” I say.
Just one word, and she finally understands. Just one word, and the door to the enormity is finally unlocked.
“That makes no sense,” she says.
And the only way to show her how it makes sense, the only way to make the enormity real, is for me to lean over and kiss her. Like last time, but not at all like last time. Not our first kiss, but also our first kiss. My lips feel different against hers, our bodies fit differently. And there is also something else that surrounds us, the black cloud as well as the enormity. I am not kissing her because I want to, and I am not kissing her because I need to—I am kissing her for a reason that transcends want and need, that feels elemental to our existence, a molecular component on which our universe will be built. It is not our first kiss, but it’s the first kiss where she knows me, and that makes it more of a first kiss than the first kiss ever was.
I find myself wishing that Kelsea could feel this, too. Maybe she does. It’s not enough. It’s not a solution. But it does lessen the weight for a moment.
Rhiannon is not smiling when we pull away from each other. There is none of the giddiness of the earlier kiss.
“This is definitely weird,” she says.
“Why?”
“Because you’re a girl? Because I still have a boyfriend? Because we’re talking about someone else’s suicide?”
“In your heart, does any of that matter?” In my heart, it doesn’t.
“Yes. It does.”
“Which part?”
“All of it. When I kiss you, I’m not actually kissing you, you know. You’re inside there somewhere. But I’m kissing the outside part. And right now, although I can feel you underneath, all I’m getting is the sadness. I’m kissing her, and I want to cry.”
“That’s not what I want,” I tell her.
“I know. But that’s what there is.”
She stands up and looks around the room, searching for clues to a murder that has yet to happen.
“If she were bleeding in the street, what would you do?” she asks.
“That’s not the same situation.”
“If she were going to kill someone else?”
“I would turn her in.”
“So how is this different?”
“It’s her own life. Not anyone else’s.”
“But it’s still killing.”
“If she really wants to do it, there’s nothing I can do to stop it.”
Even as I say this, it feels wrong.
“Okay,” I continue, before Rhiannon can correct me. “Putting up obstacles can help. Getting other people involved can help. Getting her to the proper doctors can help.”
“Just like if she had cancer, or was bleeding in the street.”
This is what I need. It’s not enough to hear these things in my own voice. I need to hear them told to me by somebody I trust.
“So who do I tell?”
“A guidance counselor, maybe?”
I look at the clock. “School’s closed. And we only have until midnight, remember.”
“Who’s her best friend?”
I shake my head.
“Boyfriend? Girlfriend?”
“No.”
“A suicide hotline?”
“If we call one, they’d only be giving me advice, not her. We have no way of knowing if she’ll remember it tomorrow, or if it will have any effect. Believe me, I’ve thought about these options.”
“So it has to be her father. Right?”
“I think he checked out a while ago.”
“Well, you need to get him to check back in.”
She makes it sound so easy. But both of us know it’s not easy.
“What do I say?”
“You say, ‘Dad, I want to kill myself.’ Just come right out and say it.”
“And if he asks me why?”
“You tell him you don’t know why. Don’t commit to anything. She’ll have to work that out starting tomorrow.”
“You’ve thought this through, haven’t you?”
“It was a busy drive over.”
“What if he doesn’t care? What if he doesn’t believe her?”
“Then you grab his keys and drive to the nearest hospital. Bring the journal with you.”
Hearing her say it, it all makes sense.
She sits back down on the bed.
“Come here,” she says. But this time we don’t kiss. Instead, she hugs my frail body.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” I whisper.
“You can,” she tells me. “Of course you can.”
I am alone in Kelsea’s room when her father comes home. I hear him throw down his keys, take something out of the refrigerator. I hear him walk to his bedroom, then come back out. He doesn’t call out a hello. I don’t even know if he realizes I’m here.
Five minutes pass. Ten minutes. Finally, he calls out, “Dinner!”
I haven’t heard any activity in the kitchen, so I’m not surprised to find a KFC bucket on the table. He’s already started on a drumstick.
I can guess how this usually works. He takes his dinner into the den, in front of the TV. She takes hers back to her room. And that marks the rest of the night for them.
But tonight is different. Tonight she says, “I want to kill myself.”
At first I don’t think he’s heard me.
“I know you don’t want to hear this,” I say. “But it’s the truth.”
He drops his hand to his side, still holding the drumstick.