“What’s wrong?”
She looked at him like someone who’d been hit over the head and was being asked to count fingers—an expression of confusion and wonder, not sure where she was or how she’d got there.
And her voiced was laced with that same confusion and wonder as she said, “Jonas killed himself.”
“What are you talking about?” He’d said the words before realizing what an absurd question it was. The thing she’d said was completely rational—simplicity itself—she was telling him that a young man he’d last seen a few days ago had since committed suicide.
“Yesterday, he did it yesterday. Don’t you get it? While we were having fun in Paris . . . If only we’d got a connecting flight.”
She started to cry, and though he had seen her in tears or upset several times over the last day and a half, there was something shocking and pitiful about her distress now, perhaps because he no longer saw it as the self-indulgent sorrow of youth but as something more adult.
He stepped forward and tentatively put his hand on her shoulder, realizing that until now he had not had any physical contact with her. Her response was immediate, throwing her arms around him, great heaving sobs issued directly into his chest, a release so great that he wondered if she had not sought the comfort of her parents first. Perhaps she had come to him only because of what he’d told her about Jonas, because he was in on the secret of her attraction to him and had revealed the reciprocation that neither teenager had imagined.
He felt no emotion himself, only a sort of curious anger. Why would he kill himself? There had been no signs of him being suicidal on Wednesday evening, nor in the note he’d left on Thursday morning. Finn didn’t know him, it was true, had spent only a few hours with him in total, and yet he had never struck Finn as the kind of kid who would take that way out.
And yet, and yet . . . on Wednesday evening, for Finn’s benefit, they had looked at Hailey’s Facebook page, at Anders Tilberg’s page, and learned about their relationship. Finn believed that Jonas hadn’t looked at her page until that point, but he might well have looked at it many times since, drawn back by a sickening curiosity, particularly after they’d failed to return on Friday.
Jonas had been in love with Hailey, there was no question of that, and he had appeared sanguine about that love not being returned, had almost appeared to expect nothing more than her friendship. But perhaps witnessing her love for someone else had been enough to undermine his calm acceptance.
Yet it still didn’t make sense to Finn. He may have known him for only a few days, but it was still well enough to know that Jonas would not have killed himself.
Finn held Hailey by the shoulders, and looked down at her, saying, “Was he on any medication at all?”
He realized that he knew the answer already, that it was only Hailey’s parents who’d believed him to be in need of a prescription.
Still, she shook her head. “Nothing at all. He didn’t believe in . . . what I mean is, there’s a guy in school who’s on medication for acne and Jonas even tried to talk him out of taking it. He thought it . . .” She started crying again.
“When did this happen? How?”
She looked up, oddly hopeful through the tears, as if just by asking questions he would come up with some solution or prove it all to be a mistake.
“Last night, they think, in the basement of his building. He . . . he hung himself.”
“Okay, let me get my keys and I’ll come back down to your apartment.”
She nodded and let him go, and until now he hadn’t realized that she was still hanging on to him. He grabbed his keys, then almost without thinking about it, he pulled the memory stick from his laptop and slipped it into his pocket, and they walked back down the stairs.
It had been little more than a subconscious action, but his retrieval of the memory stick summed up the worst of his fears about what was happening now. The thought of Jonas killing himself was bad enough, particularly if it had been induced by his exploration of Hailey’s Facebook page, but the other possibility was even more sickening—that someone had killed him, either to get at Finn or because Jonas had delved too deep.
Finn thought back to the note he’d received on Thursday morning, trying to remember what he’d done with it, because although he could remember the two sentences that had been written there, he wanted to check.