She gives it five minutes, staring at her phone, willing any ounce of magic she’s ever possessed to provide an easy answer to all her problems. Of course, my darling daughter, here’s the secret password, meet me in my fancy tour bus and everything will be fine.
When the five minutes are up, she reluctantly brings up her map app again and places the phone in the cup holder and puts the car back in drive, checking the rearview mirror before pulling into the slow lane. There’s not a single set of lights behind her, no more terrifyingly murderous assholes, so she gets back up to the speed limit, almost. Before, it felt like she was running from something, but now it feels like maybe she’s running to something. Against her better judgment, her eyes constantly flick to her phone, praying that an email or text will light up and block out the map that’s leading her to the closest thing she has to home.
Maybe ten minutes later, her phone buzzes with a text, and her heart skips as the car swerves sideways, jumping with her hands. She checks her mirrors and slows, risking a glance down.
IMPORTANT, is all she can see before the bubble disappears.
“Shit,” she murmurs, pulling off the highway for a second time. She hates how the shoulder grinds under her tires, as if actively repelling her. Once the car is stopped, hands trembling all over again, she checks her texts. But the message isn’t from her mom. It’s from Hayden.
God, to think: She’d almost forgotten about him.
**IMPORTANT**
I’m going to kill myself.
Ella, I’m really going to do it. The world has been too cruel, and I know I’m not perfect, but I don’t deserve this. I thought you cared, but it’s clear now that you’re just another shallow, out-for-herself bitch. I’ve bled my heart out for you, and you won’t condescend to answer.
“God, who does he think he is? Hamlet?” she murmurs, pretty certain that anyone who begins a message this long with **IMPORTANT**: I’M GOING TO KILL MYSELF isn’t going to. Probably.
Not a single answer as I spill my guts. Which tells me that you’re worthless, and that it’s your fault that everything that happened, happened. I didn’t even tell you the worst of what they did to me in quarantine, the things the older boys did after dark, when the guards thought we were asleep. You can’t begin to imagine it. I have been subjected to things that I can’t even
That’s it.
Hopefully it’s over.
But then the phone buzzes in her hand, the next part of the message.
begin to describe. I thought I could confide in you. Trust you. I thought you were special. You’re the only person I talked to during that hellish time. I hacked the system just to get to you! But no, you’re stuck up and cold, an ice queen, and you have no heart, and you won’t even answer me. So I’m going to do it, and when it’s done, it’ll be your fault.
“Weird flex, but okay,” she says to the quiet of the night.
Because this…doesn’t read like a suicide note. Or, at least, it doesn’t read like the ones she wrote after her dad choked her, when she just wanted to escape, to stop being scared all the time. Those, she wrote and burned with a forbidden candle and dumped in the toilet. She did not send them to people she wanted to make feel terrible. This is just some new kind of manipulative bullshit, and she doesn’t have time for it.
This is the very reason she’s never answered any of his missives.
All this, and not a single iota of care for her.
At no time during all his letters has he asked how she is, if she’s okay, if anyone in her family has been afflicted. It’s always about him.
Just like her dad.
Don’t you have anything to say to that? Are you even capable of feeling anything?
Her thumbs hover over the keyboard.
What she’d like to say is:
Dear Hayden,
It’s funny how you emotionally manipulated me, pawed at me, made me feel guilty for not being into it, physically abused me, and then suddenly discovered your emotional depths when your vile behavior was captured on video by a third party and displayed for the public to see. I’m certain that your time in the quarantine camp—to which you sent yourself, with no input from me—was not pleasant. Although you haven’t asked, my time has also been less than agreeable. After my dad beat up my mom and she turned him in for the Violence, she actually came down with it herself, and I had to watch her stomp my dog to death.
Have you ever heard a dog being stomped to death, Hayden?
The way its yelps go quiet in a fit of crunching?
I’m guessing not.
Even in the nightmare of quarantine.
Then my grandmother kidnapped my sister and me. And then she kicked me out.
And then I scraped up dead cats I used to feed and killed a man I was taught to call my uncle.
And then I lived like an animal for several weeks.
Perhaps, learning this brief history, you will understand why I have not tenderly crafted responses to each of your kind, informative missives about your ongoing emotional pain. I have in fact been dealing with my own emotional pain and have not had the bandwidth to care about you.
Sorry about that.
What I have learned in our time apart is that it’s not you, it’s me.
By which I mean it IS you, and everyone like you.
Everyone who thinks he’s a great guy who deserves everything good but doesn’t want to provide support in kind.
Everyone who thinks the word no means “maybe.”
Everyone who thinks he’s a victim when he creates victims.
You probably shouldn’t kill yourself, or at least, you shouldn’t kill yourself for the shitty, selfish reasons outlined in your text message. If you do go through with your cunning plan, please do it to rid the world of someone who appears to be, on all counts, a piece of shit who will only bring pain to whatever poor trophy wife he manages to ensnare and persistently shrink and belittle.
Good day, sir.
Signed,
Ella
P.S. You are a terrible kisser. It was like being attacked by a piece of escargot.
Instead, she simply types, New phone. Who dis?
And keeps on driving.
52.
Chelsea is about to go onstage, and she can’t stop shivering. She gave her phone into Arlene’s safekeeping, briefly explaining the importance of guarding it. Arlene nodded solemnly and now cradles it in her hand like a baby bird as she stares out the door, waiting for Harlan’s cue. Chelsea is grateful that there’s someone in this world she can trust. She didn’t have that, before the Violence.