Pi doesn’t work. Neither does the periodic table. I try simple counting, and I make it all the way to three hundred thousand, but I cannot let any of it go. My notebook is in the public domain. Kit must have read the whole thing by now. Even positing the assumptions that (1) she didn’t see the link until after four p.m., which allots thirty-five minutes for a pit stop on her way home from our meeting and 2) that she reads at a painstakingly slow rate, a page every five minutes, which I realize makes no sense given her high PSAT scores, she would have made it all the way to the end at least an hour ago. Which means that it’s all over: us sitting together at lunch, the Accident Project, me being in any zone. The Venn diagram of our relationship has un-Venned.
I consider texting her, but I am too scared to turn on my phone. As soon as I got home it started buzzing from numbers I don’t recognize.
u little shithead. I’m gonna kill u.
How dare u say my gf looks like a miss piggy? Next time I c u, u r fn dead.
die retard.
weirdo turd. ur the pizzaface.
wtf is WRONG WITH YOU?
do us all a favor and DIE.
That’s a recurring motif in the texts and also in the online comments. My classmates’ desire for me to die. Which seems disproportional to the crime, as it is obvious that I was not the one who published my diary. How can people be angry for things I never expected or wanted them to see? It’s illogical. Like prosecuting someone for a thought crime.
And they want me dead. For real. Like, for my heart to stop beating, for my mother to lose a son and Miney to lose a brother, for me to no longer exist, at least in my current form. All that just because I filled a notebook with simple observations to help me remember people’s names and who to trust and how to survive in this confusing world called high school. Joe Mangino, the captain of the football team, looks nothing like a Joe, but he does look a lot like a ferret and used to squeeze my nipples when he passed me in the hallways at school. Was it so wrong of me to write that down? To make a note to myself that when I saw a rodentlike meathead, I should get out of the way? Purple nurples hurt.
I’m assuming that the threats to kill me are not literal. Miney used to threaten me all the time when we were little and I don’t believe she ever meant it. But I see no other way to interpret the desire for me to be dead. Maybe they do not want to do it by their own hands and actually murder me, which could risk them getting caught and going to jail, not to mention force them to cross certain universally agreed-upon moral boundaries, but certainly they want the same end result. For me to no longer be living.
do us all a favor and DIE.
Kill urself u piece of shit.
No, it gets even more specific. They don’t just want me dead, they want me to commit suicide. Apparently the best way I can contribute to this world is by leaving it.
My hands are flapping again. Tears are running down my face. I am losing control. Slipping into a vertiginous vortex. I used to think loneliness was being stuck with only the one voice in your head. I was wrong. Loneliness is hearing everyone else’s voices too, except they are stuck on repeat: Die, die, die.
A knock on my door. Then it opens. I don’t bother looking up. Not sure I could even if I wanted to. I know it’s Miney by the one-knuckled sound and the smell that follows. Her new sandalwood perfume and dirty hair.
“It’s down,” she says. “The link. It’s down. I thought you’d want to know.”
I don’t say anything. Continue to rock, head to knees, my hands tucked in, so the flapping makes me swing forward and back. My mom must have gone to Principal Hoch after all. Too bad it’s too late. Everyone who matters has seen it, and I’m sure it’s cached on at least a hundred hard drives.
Kit will never talk to me again.
Miney asks if she can rub my back. I shake my head no. Once. Hard. I can’t quite make out words yet. Orange. The world is orange, like the blazing center of a cartoon sun. Or a volcano.
No touching. Just oblivion. Give the people what they want, as the expression goes.
“Okay. I love you, you know. This will be okay. I promise, Little D,” she says, but it comes out all garbled. Instead there is orange, and a sound like roaring. Not soothing like the ocean, but loud. Deafening. Annihilating. “I know this feels like the end of the world, and I’ve been there, believe me, I’ve been there. But you will be okay.”
But in order to be okay, I need to be here. And I’m not. I’m floating away. The balloon inside my head is getting smaller and smaller until it disappears altogether into the blue sky.
I don’t go to school for the next three days. I stay in my room and fill the time with my flapping and with pi. I sleep too. Long, dark sleep that is neither restorative nor dream-filled. It is as close to dead as I can get without dying.
Miney and my mom take turns checking on me, and sometimes they sit on my bed. A safe two and a half feet away so we don’t touch. But they rock with me, their rhythm matching mine, and I like it. The almost-company. A tiny reminder that I am not alone. Not completely.
On what must be Tuesday afternoon, one day in, Trey knocks on the door. I do not stop rocking. I do not lift my head. There will be no guitar lesson today.
“I’m here for you, buddy. Whenever you’re ready,” Trey says, but I am not ready.
Later I hear Trey and Miney in the hall. I try to pay attention, as if listening to their words and translating them into sentences I understand will help bring me back.
“You’ve done good work with him,” Miney says, and I get stuck on that word, work. “He’ll be okay.”
“You think?” Trey asks. “I don’t know. That was…scary. Has this happened before? This bad?”
“Not really. Not like this.”
“I thought we were making progress.” I think about guitar riffs. Latch my brain onto the sequence of notes Trey taught me last week.
“You were. He’s been doing great. He made a friend. He’s been cracking jokes. He seemed to be really connecting…until now,” Miney says, and then their words get softer. I can’t tell if it’s because they are moving farther down the hall or if it’s my brain closing back in.
This will end soon, I realize much later. I feel the despair seeping away. That’s not true. The despair—that horrifying realization that I am not just disliked but hated, and that I have managed to lose the only friend I’ve ever had—that feeling is not going anywhere. Still, I decide it’s time to come back, and I feel my mind hardening around its edges, putting its tray tables and seats upright in preparation for landing.
I swing my legs over the side of the bed and stand. I’m dizzy with hunger and greedily suck up the smoothie my mom has left on my desk. I shower, and when I go to wash my hair I am shocked by how little there is. I had forgotten about my makeover. Afterward, when I open my closet and see that my mother must have gotten rid of my old shirts and khakis, I fight back the panic. I reach for my new clothes. If normal people can handle buttons and creases and hoods, so can I.
When I walk downstairs, Miney and my mom are chatting quietly in the kitchen. My mom offers to make me my favorite sandwich or heat up chicken soup, as if I’ve been laid up with the flu. Miney’s hair is back to its normal color, and she is not wearing pajamas. It occurs to me that this is the first time I’ve seen her dressed since she’s been home. Something deep inside of me sighs at this realization, loosens up an invisible knot.
“I’m going to school today,” I announce, too loud, I think. This is the first time I have spoken in three days, and I’m out of practice. I am going to school and if anyone asks me to die, I will say, No, thank you, and keep walking. Or maybe I won’t say anything at all. Either way, Gabriel and Justin are the ones who should be suffering, not me. I did nothing wrong.
“Not right now,” my mom says, laying out an elaborate assortment of food in front of me, each item on a separate plate, just how I like it.
“I’m not scared,” I say.
“It’s not that, Little D. It’s evening. School’s closed,” Miney says, and she reaches over and touches my shoulder. She might be testing me. I don’t flinch.
I look out the window and see that the sky has turned dark and blue. A bruise. I want the world to be green again. Like Kit’s eyes.
“Eat,” my mother says. “And then we’ll figure out what to do next.”
Her we sounds nice—not like the we of What are we going to do with you? This we implies that I am not alone, that we are all on Team David. I imagine us as a ragtag group of do-gooders on the side of the underdog and the wronged. Team David, in my imagination, looks a lot like the Bad News Bears.
“Okay,” I say, and then I dig in, making my way clockwise from plate to plate. After a little while I look up, and my mother and sister are still here, sitting and watching me eat.
“Welcome home,” my mother says, her voice thick with surprise, like I had gone away to a place she thought I might never come back from.
Later, Miney and I take a walk around the block. We bundle up in our winter coats and scarves and gloves, like we used to when we were little and my mother would send us out to play in the snow. I used to hate being forced outside and away from my books, into the wet and the cold. I remember the stinging flesh in the gap between my sleeve and my glove, how that one inch of exposed skin ruined everything. I never understood how Miney could keep on building snowmen and making snow angels with cold wrists.
Now I don’t mind it so much. I like the bulk of my coat. The way I feel buttoned into it, like getting tucked into bed.
“Fresh air will do us good,” Miney said. I agreed since I’m already off schedule—I have not practiced martial arts in three days, which is the longest break I’ve taken since I started training—and we are here, walking down the street. It looks like the rest of Mapleview has all gone in for the night. There are few cars. No one else is walking.
“I like your hair,” I say, pointing to the spot that used to be purple.
“I thought I needed a change, and then realized that’s not what I needed at all,” she says. I think about her words, weigh each one, the same way my mom squeezes fruit in the supermarket, but I don’t come out the other side. I don’t know what she means. “I’m proud of you, you know. School hasn’t been great lately, and then something happened, nothing big or anything, but I know how you feel. I’ve been where you’ve been, sort of.”
“You sat and rocked back and forth in your room reciting pi for almost seventy hours straight?” I ask.
“Okay, not exactly where you’ve been. But the public humiliation part, totally. And honestly, I realized that if you are brave enough to go back to school and face all those jerks, then I can too. So thank you for that. But that also means I’m leaving soon. Consider this your first warning,” she says.
“Okay,” I say. The old me would have cried or screamed or begged her to stay. But I’m not the old me anymore. Despite the events of the past seventy hours, I am growing up, getting stronger. I’m miles away from Normal—I will never live in the same state as Normal, nor do I necessarily want to—but I’m getting a little closer. I’m a refugee on Normal’s border. It will be okay when she goes. I will be okay. And I assume she will be too, because she’s Miney. “Just don’t dye your hair again. I like to recognize you when you come home.”
She smiles at this and nudges me with her elbow. Both of our hands are in our pockets, so it becomes a game, our nudging.
“I doubt you actually humiliated yourself,” I say.
“I sort of did.” I don’t ask how, because I know from personal experience that it’s not fun to talk about the ways we’ve embarrassed ourselves. Then you have to feel it all over again in the retelling. And if Miney wanted me to know more, she would have told me.
“How long till you leave?” I ask.
“A week, maybe? But I’ll be back for spring break. And there’s FaceTime.” I nod. “So I saw some of those texts you got. I wish I could kick all those kids’ asses.”
“I actually could,” I say, and for a moment I let myself picture it. A series of palm-heel strikes and the entire football team would be on their backs. “I could kill them if I wanted to.”
“Please don’t.” I laugh, because we both know I never would. When I was little, I used to get upset if I accidentally stepped on a bug. I may have mastered the art of self-defense, but I don’t like to hurt things. And anyhow, despite how they all feel about me, I don’t wish anyone dead. Not even Justin or Gabriel. Even if I believe the quantum theory that consciousness survives death, I don’t want their bodies to go still forever.
I wouldn’t mind if they moved away, though. That would be nice.
“What are you going to do at school tomorrow?” Miney asks.
“Same as always. Put on my headphones. Ignore them all.”
“And Kit?”
I think about Kit’s eyelashes, how the snow gathered and nestled between them, like it was a good place to rest. I think about her fingers linked with mine.
I see her back as she ran away from me as fast as her legs would take her.
I think about the contours of the word disgust, its guttural g.
“I don’t know,” I say.