A sweater—mine, but not really. Not anymore.
A sweater that I’ll never wear again. A too-cold room. A half-eaten pop-tart, strawberry.
Unfinished. Windows open with curtains drawn. Those are the things I saw before I saw her.
__
I wake up cold, my clothes laid out on my desk from the night before. Pants, socks, shoes, no top. I will get my sweater from Gracie, the girl in the neighboring dorm room, that she borrowed last week. Wednesday, maybe. No—Friday. She’d asked to wear it to chapel. It’s my favorite sweater, so I would not typically lend it out, but there was something about the way she’d asked me if it would look nice with her eyes. Like it was a long shot. I told her the green was sure to make her eyes pop. She smiled, and off she went.
I knock on Gracie’s door. I am looking at my phone, distracted. I open the door slightly. “Could I grab my green sweater?” I ask. Gracie’s room is warmer than mine, but darker. I look up from my phone, standing in the crack of the door. The sweater is folded on her dresser, beside a half-eaten strawberry pop-tart. “Oh, I see it.”
I step inside.
I step in something. I can feel it through my socks.
There is a second of tranquility before everything implodes.
I do not look up. Something inside me is already screaming, clawing to get out.
Clothes on the floor, but neat, folded. The rug is darker than it should be. Shinier. I do not want to know why. I look up.
The windows are open with the curtains drawn. Gracie. Gracie’s hair.
Gracie’s hair, stuck to her face.
Gracie’s hair, stuck to her face, darker than it should be. Shinier.
Suddenly everything is visible. Her forearms, strewn beside her, and split open. My gaze shifts. I find her eyes. Hollow, wide, green.
I want to go to her, to help her, to stitch her up. I want to make her better.. But I am frozen.
I cannot run to her, I cannot run away from her, I cannot do anything. I scream, but instead of sound, all that comes out of my mouth is bile.
I am on the floor, retching. Gagging, coughing, crying, choking.
I grip the rug, collecting blood under my fingernails and in the crevices of my palms. Her blood. My palms, but they are hers now. The blood is claiming them, tracing their creases, making a home for themselves there.
Acid stings my tongue.
The door opens behind me, but I do not turn to look at it. My eyes find the window instead. Open. Why?
The curtains are drawn. Pop-tart bitten, strawberry filling visible. Red, like what I used to think blood looked like.
My eyes again find Gracie’s. Open. Why?
Can she see me? Can she see the blood?
I feel a hand grab my arm, pulling me out of the room. I wriggle free from it. I lurch towards Gracie. I pull her hair from her face and wipe the blood from her cheek. My fingertips meet her eyelids, closing them. She cannot see this anymore. And suddenly, neither can I.
All I can see is an eyelash on my finger. Her eyelash. Make a wish.
__
I wake up in the infirmary. A small bed, its mattress imprinted on my back. Clean, sterile, intentional. The only thing I have in common with under these fluorescent lights is with the bed, in that we are both monstrously uncomfortable. But I am not clean. I remember cleaning the blood off of Gracie’s face. No one has cleaned any off me.
The news of Gracie’s death has circulated throughout campus already. There is an unfamiliar silence. Even the freshmen I see out of the infirmary window walk with their heads down, and when they lift them, they look lost – confused. Most have only lived fourteen years, and usually, in their eyes, it shows. But now they looked tired. Aged, almost. Like me. I can’t help but be comforted by this.
__
I am leaving my 24-hour stint in the infirmary when a nurse informs me that there will be an all-school assembly in the gymnasium to address, “the girl’s suicide.”
“She has a name,” I say too curtly.
“I know Gracie’s name. I just…” She looks down at her feet as her voice trails off.
I want to apologize, but I can’t. Frozen, all over again. Like I was with Gracie. Like I was the last time my parents and I sat together in the living room of my childhood home, as a family.
Honey, your mother and I… It’s really for the best…
We still love each other very much…
I shove the memory out of my mind, only for it to be replaced with a vision of Gracie’s hair plastered to her face with her own blood. I snap out of it.
“Can I get my medication, please?” The nurse pulls it out, but before she can extricate my prescribed two blue pills, I leave with the bottle. She does not say anything to me.
__
People tend to forget experiences they were not directly privy to. I thought that because everyone at school lost Gracie, that everyone felt as I did – that everyone felt, intrinsically, that nothing would ever be the same. I thought I could count on that, but I was wrong. I was foolish to think we’d all be stuck in that room.
I’m the only one stuck in that room, of course. I’m the only one who was in it. Besides Gracie. Me and Gracie, stuck in her room, just like her hair stuck to her face.
And there it all is – the half-eaten strawberry pop tart, the wind rustling the drawn curtains. Gracie’s green eyes, wide open like the windows. The strawberry fucking pop-tart.
I’d seen her eating it that night before check-in – during study hall, around nine o’clock. I was sitting in the common room, tutoring a sophomore in French. Gracie asked for early lights, saying she had to wake up early in the morning.
I feel sick.
“Oh, Gracie, do you have any more pop tarts?” I’d asked her, looking up from the sophomore’s textbook lesson on the plus-que-parfait. An odd-numbered page, I think – 17. But it could’ve been 23.
“This was my last one,” she responded. I remember thinking something in her eyes felt distant, but definitive. She blinked, and it was replaced with an air of tranquility. “But you can have the rest, if you want.”
“Oh, that’s okay.” I smiled. Kind Gracie. “But thank you.”
__
At night, alone in my dorm room, I pace back and forth, back and forth. How do I always end up so blindsided? There were signs; there must have been signs. There are always signs.
__
I’m not sure now how many days have passed since I found Gracie. At first, I was able to keep track by counting the missing pills in the Adderall bottle I swiped from the nurse, but at some point, I started taking more than I was prescribed, and I lost count.
Productivity. Stimulants. Schoolwork. Anything to block it all out.
The hair stuck to Gracie’s face. Her eyes, the pop tart, the windows. Precalculus does not remind me of Gracie; precalculus provides a reason to never return my parents’ phone calls.
I buzz all day, always doing something. The buzz wears off at night, and I am exhausted.
More exhausted than I’ve ever been in my life. Nearing delusion, I yearn for sleep. But sleep evades me. It tests me, and I do not pass.
At night, I think about all the things I did not pick up on. What am I not picking up on now?
Blood, hair, face. Eyes open, cold, unfinished pop-tart.
Close your eyes, I think to myself. Breathe. Try again. I close my eyes.
I attempt happier thoughts. I think of my childhood home. Crawling into my parents’ bed on Christmas morning, too early, but welcomed nonetheless. A bed now inhabited by my father and Meredith. Meredith, who looks like my mother. Meredith, who lacks any taste in music whatsoever. Meredith, who doesn’t like to watch The Office over a plate of scrambled eggs on a Sunday morning. Meredith, who had me begging to leave for boarding school at sixteen.
Boarding school. Here. Gracie. Blood, hair, face.
Green eyes open, cold, unfinished pop-tart. Close your eyes, I think to myself. Breathe. Try again. I close my eyes.
__
I wake up cold. I always wake up cold now. I swallow my blue pills and pocket some for later. I don’t go to breakfast. I don’t get hungry much anymore.
I do not hear much of the conversations that include me. If I am not buried in schoolwork, I bury myself in books and movies I’ve already read or seen. I no longer want to be surprised. If I’m not buried in something, I’m just buried. In my mind, I’m always in Gracie’s room. The only change of scenery I experience is when I find myself in my childhood living room. Not much better.
__
My parents informed me of their impending divorce on a Sunday morning. My father cracked six eggs in a pan, scrambled them, and split them sensibly into three portions. My mother and I made our way to our spots on our jaded leather couch, creased with memories of my childhood. She sat down on its right side, with me on the left, and my father relaxed into his dark brown ottoman. He turned on the television.
My parents informed me of their divorce with pauses punctuated by a rerun of The Office.
“Honey, we need to have a conversation. As a family,” my father said as he reached for the remote. His tone was calm, relaxed, a tone usually reserved for conversations about the delegation of dishwasher or dog walking duties. He turned down the volume, but not completely.
“Evelyn, your father and I have decided to–” my mother continued. Long pause. The first lull, Dwight: Does anyone smell something smoky?
“—split up,” my father finished. “But we still love each other very much.” “Oh, honey, so very much,” my mother reassured me.
Dwight continues: Oh, fire! What’s the procedure? Oh my goodness!
My parents kept speaking, and so did Dwight, but I can’t remember what they were saying. It all blurred together to create a frequency – high-pitched and uncomfortable – that was entirely new to me then, but is all too familiar now.
“And now that we got the hard part out of the way, your mother can take you to see her new apartment!” my father exclaimed with a squeeze to my shoulder. Somewhere in the city, he says. Closer to her job, he says.
Fire in the house, I thought to myself. What’s the procedure?
My mother smiled. Genuinely. “It’s really a lovely place.” I realized that there was no procedure. I didn’t plan for this at all.
“Absolutely,” my father agreed, reaching again for the remote. “You’re going to love it.” He turned the volume back up mid-Michael Scott line.
–and I knew exactly what to do. But in a much more real sense, I had no idea what to do.
My father chuckled – “Great line.”
– and I wanted to hit him in the face.
__
I should’ve known. I should’ve known Gracie was so lost, in so much pain. I should’ve known my parents no longer wanted to be together. What the hell was I doing instead of paying attention? I turn my attention to the candle lit on my bedside table.
I could knock that onto this bed, I thought to myself, and I wouldn’t know I was on fire until I heard the alarm. Always too late.
I wonder if these days will feel like a blur in the future, like the weeks after that conversation with my parents. Peppered with images, remembrances, that stick out of the bunch. Gracie’s blonde hair, turned dark by her own blood. Why? Why did she do that? Why didn’t I know she was going to? Why am I always so fucking blindsided?
__
About two and a half months after finding Gracie, I realize that I’ve been ignoring my parents’ phone calls for weeks. They have each left multiple voicemails that I haven’t listened to. I open up my phone. My mother’s voice is first:
Honey, are you okay? You haven’t called, you haven’t given any updates. Did you ever find out why that girl hurt herself? Please answer the phone.
I should call her back. But as I go to do so, my father’s voice comes right in with the rotation:
Honey, we are so worried about you. Please call us back. We love you. Just let us in.
We? Us? He and my mom have been talking about this together? Another voice sounds in turn.
Yes, Evelyn, we are very concerned, um, so, call us back.
Fucking Meredith. ‘We,’ is him and fucking Meredith.
__
I don’t know much about Meredith. I know she’s from upstate New York, and she’s a pediatrician. She moved in on my Dad about six months after the divorce was finalized.
We met the weekend I decided I wanted to attend boarding school. My father and I were supposed to spend the weekend together, just the two of us, and I was excited. I hadn’t been excited in a long time. I burst through the door, and there she was, sitting in my childhood living room, on my couch, beside my father’s ottoman. My mother’s spot.
“Who the hell are you?” I asked. She looked alarmed.
“My name is Meredith,” she responded kindly. “I really look forward to getting to know you.”
“Are you a shrink?” I wondered if this was some sort of intervention my father planned for me, to break me free of what he and my mother liked to call ‘my recent state of disassociation.’
“Meredith is my girlfriend,” my father joined in. “She’ll be spending the weekend with us.”
The weekend was a disaster, culminating in the moment in which I officially decided on boarding school. It was during the car ride back to my mother’s apartment. Your Body is a Wonderland attacked the speakers in my father’s car.
“Do you like John Mayer, Evelyn?” Meredith asked me, bobbing her head and singing along.
“No,” I replied. My father shot me a warning look. I corrected myself. “I don’t really know his music.”
“Adam, shame on you! It’s a father’s job to introduce his daughter to good music.” “He has,” I responded defensively, looking towards my father. “Right, Dad?” “Well, um, I guess I haven’t,” he laughed uncomfortably. He chose Meredith.
__
I haven’t cried since I found Gracie. I haven’t done a lot of things since I found Gracie. Slept, eaten, been present. I take my pills, I do my work, I distract myself. Life moves around me, but I’m stuck. Stuck in a room with a body that used to be a girl named Gracie.
I cried a lot after my parents told me they were getting divorced, but I stopped when I realized I was the only one crying. I don’t know how long they had known they wanted to end things, just as I don’t know how long Gracie had known she’d wanted to end her life. I don’t get to know anything, I just get to be the only one who has to deal with it. The school made peace with Gracie’s suicide in about a week, and my parents made peace with their divorce long before I’d been made aware of it. They didn’t fight before they told me. I didn’t suspect it. They were fine. There’s no reason, apparently – no infidelity, no huge falling out, no brawl of any kind – just a disconnect, a loss of feelings, a drifting.
A disconnect. A drifting. These things are contagious, but my parents did not think of that. My insular, grand disconnect from who I used to be – from my life in general – was a landmine that my parents planted and that Gracie stepped on. But I’m the one who has to clean it all up.
The blood, the hair, her face, the eyelash. Every day, it comes back to me in some order. I feel sick. Sick and tired. And then it fades. And I feel nothing again, entirely dull.
I go outside. I pace laps around the fields in front of my dormitory. It’s mid-April, and for once it isn’t raining. But the grass is wet from last night’s storm.
It isn’t dewy like that of a new morning, it’s soaked and muddy. It seeps through my sneakers as I walk, and by my third aimless circle, it’s reached my socks.
Like Gracie’s blood. And it’s happening. All over again.
I don’t look up, I just scream. I scream like I did when I found her, and I fall to the ground. I am covered in her blood again. It has made its way from my mind to the grass and into the creases of my palms.
All over again.
But how can it return if it never truly went away? Gracie is a part of me now. It’s all a part of me now. The blood in my socks, the world closing in, the retching feeling that migrates from my bloody feet to my knees to my hips to my stomach to my shoulders to my throat – it’s already plagued my brain for some time. Gracie’s blood and mine, running through my veins, forever. I scream. Why has no one come?
__
I wake up in an emergency room. My parents are peering over me. “Hi,” I croak. “What’s going on?”
“You had some sort of…” my mother begins. “Seizure, or something. I’m not sure.” “We don’t think boarding school is the right place for you,” my father states, looking to my nodding mother for reassurance. “We want you to come back home. Live at home again.”
“No.”
“What do you mean no?” my father retorts.
“I don’t want to come back and live with you, or you,” I respond, anger growing in me that had been planted long ago, festering, but I didn’t realize was there. Until now. “Or motherfucking Meredith.”
“Are you angry with us?” my father asks.
“Are you kidding me?” I am crying. I try to scream, like I did when I first found Gracie. Again, it does not come out that way, but it doesn’t come out choked or as bile either. It comes out powerful. I am yelling now. “Am I angry? You told me you were getting a divorce with the same tone you would’ve told me we were out of eggs! You didn’t even bother to mute the TV! And neither of you cared!”
“We didn’t want to upset you–” my mother defends. I am angry again. “And how did that work out?” I yell.
“Oh, honey–”
“Have you ever seen a dead body? A dead sixteen-year-old girl? A girl you knew? A girl who borrows your sweater one day, and the next is a body in a bed with her hair stuck to her face with her own dried blood?” I scream, and there is a moment of pause. A silence, before I continue. “So, you don’t need to protect me anymore. And you didn’t then.”
There is a long silence in the room. My parents look sick now.
“We just grew apart,” my father replies softly. “Genuinely. That’s it.”
“It’s true,” Mom agrees, squeezing both of our hands. “We loved each other, very much. And in the beginning, when we had you, we mistook that for being in love with one another. But it wasn’t that.”
“No matter how much we wanted it to be,” Dad adds, nodding. “And yes, realizing that was heartbreaking.”
“Devastating,” says my mother. They are both crying now. We are all crying now. “Why couldn’t you just tell me that? Why couldn’t you have just cried? Instead of making me feel stupid for being upset because I was the only one? I have never felt so, completely, entirely, alone,” I sob. “You just moved out and then Dad got a fucking girlfriend –”
“I waited–” my dad starts.
“I don’t care if you waited, you didn’t tell me! You just let me walk into my house to find her! You let her play her god-awful music on our car ride together! John Mayer? Are you fucking kidding me?” I am choking on my tears. I can’t breathe for moments at a time. For the first time in months. I start to laugh.
“Why are you laughing?” my mother looks to my father anxiously.
“Your Body is a fucking Wonderland?” I cackle, gasping for air. We’re all laughing now, laughing and crying. Feeling. It isn’t much, but it also isn’t nothing.
__
Two months come and go. In two days, the curtains will be drawn on junior year, and my classmates will leave it behind. But I think I’ll be stuck here forever. Trapped.
I call my parents every day. There was a relief that came with understanding that it was not my miscalculation or my lack of notice about the divorce. There is nothing I could’ve done to prevent it. I can finally breathe.
Except for when I think of Gracie. Because there – there, I could’ve done something.
That I should’ve noticed. But I was too focused on my parents, on my life, on myself.
I was awake the night Gracie died. I couldn’t sleep; I was reading. If I had been paying attention, I might have heard something from her room – crying, rustling, something. Anything.
I sleep late, and when I go out into the hallway in the morning, I find Gracie’s door ajar. I inch towards the opening.
“Hello?” a sniffling woman calls from within. “Is someone there?”
I freeze. “Hi,” I reply anxiously, afraid to peek my head in, afraid of what I might see, afraid of what I’ve already seen in there.
“You can come in,” the woman responds kindly. “I’m Gracie’s mother, Mary.”
Mary is packing Gracie’s things carefully. I wonder why she’s only doing it now, but I know why. This was Gracie’s space, the last place she ever was. Taking her out of it – her things, her spirit – for the next person to take over in the fall just feels wrong.
I push the door open and step inside. I try to keep it together, but I cry instantly. “I’m so sorry,” I sob. “I’m so sorry.” Without hesitation, Gracie’s mother takes me into her arms – she is gentle, but unquestionably sturdy. Stalwart.
“Evelyn,” she surmises. “You’re the girl who found her.”
“I’m so sorry,” I say again, crying harder. “I should’ve done something, I should’ve–” “Honey, there’s nothing you could’ve done.”
“But I should’ve seen something. I should have known something was different. I should have–”
“No, no,” she says, stroking my hair. “There was nothing different to see. Grace had been struggling for a long time.”
Gracie’s mother calls her Grace now, which I find only fitting as she tells me childhood anecdotes to punctuate the story of Gracie’s – Grace’s– demise. Her depression, her anxiety, a story about the little pink music box on her desk. Prozac, Zoloft, Gracie picked this top out in Paris. More medications, each name longer than the last, a turning point. Gracie was getting better. They thought she was better, that the medication made all the difference. And maybe it would’ve, if she’d actually been taking it.
“There was nothing you could have done, sweetheart. Nothing anyone could have done. It isn’t anyone’s fault. It’s just wrong.”
“But she was so young.”
“She was too young,” her mother agrees. She strokes my hair and turns back to Gracie’s desk full of belongings. I get up to leave.
“Evelyn,” she calls out to me. I turn back around to face her. “So were you.”
__
Dad calls me after the graduation ceremony as I’m packing my things. I answer.
“Hi, honey. Do you mind if I come pick you up from school? I miss you.” He is tentative in his request. I’ve been returning his calls, but holding resentment for him still, more so than for my mother. He knows this.
“I miss you too, Dad,” I respond. “Sure. I’ll see you soon.” “I can’t wait. I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
“Alright, bye honey, see you soon.”
“Wait, Dad,” I say. The words that come next come out of me almost involuntarily. “Why don’t you bring Meredith?”
“Really?”
“Yeah, really,” I laugh, wiping a tear from my eye. “As long as she doesn’t touch the radio.”
