I still didn’t. Death wasn’t familiar to me. It wasn’t part of my life. People don’t just die, especially when they’re young and beautiful and have a boyfriend who paints pictures of them.
I asked Enzo how. I asked him why. But he didn’t answer. He sat on the edge of the bed and didn’t move. He didn’t even roll a cigarette.
Everything was wrong, and nothing made sense. Lizzie Lovett was dead. Five minutes ago, Enzo and I had been talking about her in present tense. One phone call, and she became past tense. One phone call changed everything.
That’s when all the details started to blend together. The tow truck showed up, and Enzo had to go down to the police station, and at some point, I must have called my dad, but I didn’t remember it. The afternoon was a whirl of motion and lights, and I kept wondering if I had been the one who’d died, because nothing seemed real anymore.
The next thing I remember, I was at home, lying in bed, and people kept trying to talk to me. I saw their faces, but none of them mattered. My mom said I should eat something, that I had to eat, but I didn’t want food, not even when she brought me fast food, hamburgers and fries and a soda, which weren’t usually allowed in the house. My dad tried to talk to me as if everything were normal. He’d picked up my car from the shop. It was fixed. I could pay him later—or not. He didn’t get that someone was dead. My car didn’t matter.
Even Sundog came to see me at some point. He’d never been inside our house before. My family was all making exceptions for me, breaking all the rules, but Lizzie was the one who was dead. Why weren’t they thinking of her?
When I started crying, I didn’t know if it was for me or Lizzie or just tears that had to come out. My eyes burned. Snot leaked from my nose. I thought, Lizzie will never cry again, and that made me cry harder.
Days passed. I only got up to go to the bathroom. That’s something they don’t tell you about grief and depression. In movies and books, the depressed person doesn’t ever leave bed. In real life, you have to get up to pee. You have to eat some of the food your mom brings you. You have to accept the box of tissues your brother sets on the bed.
“Rush, wait,” I said before he could leave.
He came back and sat down on the edge of my bed. My brother had never seemed so willing to listen to me before. What was happening to the world?
“Where did they find her?”
He hesitated and glanced at my open bedroom door. “Maybe I should get Mom.”
“I want you to tell me.”
“She was in a ravine,” he said, sighing. “I guess the woods are pretty thick around there.”
“How far from the campsite?”
“A few hours.”
I sat up. “A few hours? How did the search parties miss her?”
“They couldn’t check every inch of the forest, Hawthorn.”
But they should have. They should have uprooted trees if they had to.
“Will they catch him?” I asked.
“Who?”
“The person who killed her.”
Rush got a weird look on his face. “I thought you knew.”
Did I know? Did I know something I was forgetting? “Tell me.”
“There’s no one to catch,” he said carefully.
“So she got lost.”
“Hawthorn, Lizzie killed herself.”
Time stopped. The air in my room went still. For a fleeting moment, I thought my brother was joking. “What? No. That has to be a mistake.”
“I don’t think so,” he said.
“How do they know?”
“I don’t think we should talk about this right now.” He reached out to hold my hand.
I pulled back.
“How, Rush?”
He sighed. “They found her hanging from a tree.”
My mind raced. “But…no. Someone could have made it look like—”
“They have ways to tell, Hawthorn. I didn’t want to believe it either, but they’re sure.”
I lay back in bed and stared at the ceiling. Lizzie Lovett went into the woods to commit suicide. She was not a werewolf. She was dead, and she was never coming back, and it was because that’s the way she’d wanted it.
I kept returning to that night with Lizzie and Enzo in their tent. They whisper and laugh and talk about the future as if it’s still going to happen. He falls asleep. But she’s awake. She watches him. She knows she won’t see him again. Had she known from the start, when they planned their camping trip? Or was it a spur of the moment decision? How could she do it? How could she get up and walk out of the tent and leave everything behind?
“You’ll never know the answers, Hawthorn,” Sundog said later that night. He’d pulled my desk chair next to my bed and was sitting there as if he was keeping vigil over me, as if I were in a hospital, as if I were the one dying.
“She had everything, Sundog. How could she walk away?”
“You only know the part of the story people want you to see.”
But it still didn’t make sense. Nothing did. This was Lizzie Lovett. People loved her. She was a cheerleader. Cheerleaders didn’t kill themselves. At least they didn’t in the world I used to live in. Now, all the rules were reversed. Nothing was off limits.
On the day of the funeral, my mom tried to get me out of bed.