Grace was raised to know that appearances mattered. If you put your Xanax in a Tylenol PM bottle, no one would care if you took four of them, and no one would judge you if, a little bit later on, you fell asleep with your head on your boyfriend’s shoulder after just two vodka Red Bulls. Not that she’d ever commit suicide like that.
Pills were a coward’s way out. You weren’t really doing anything; there was nothing decisive about them; one call from a dorm monitor and you’d be halfway to the hospital with a tube down your throat, getting your stomach pumped out.
Slitting your wrists was a good method, along the vein instead of across it, the steely knife following the blue-purple terrain of your upturned arm. If Grace slit her wrists, she’d use a long, thin blade, freshly sharpened, and trace a delicate V on her left wrist—but that would only work at home because there were no bathtubs at school. Bleeding out on a dorm room bed was way too depressing. She’d rather be in a milky bath with a flickering candle and a pile of books. The blooms of blood would turn the water pink, and she’d drape herself across the edge so she looked like that painting they’d just learned about, The Death of Marat.
Hanging was ugly. By the time anyone found you, your face would be a purple bloat and your eyes would be bulging out of their sockets. A gunshot depended too much on aim, jumping in front of a train would make the conductor feel guilty, and self-disembowelment was just medieval. Swimming out to sea sounded nice if your brain would let you give in instead of fighting the ocean for air; freezing to death would be even better, you could just close your eyes and succumb to a sleep where everything felt warm. And your corpse would be perfectly preserved even if no one would ever find it because you’d have to be all the way out in the Arctic or something for it to be cold enough to kill you.
She’d run through all the different methods to Rachel when they’d first met. Rachel had still seemed cool then, like she might be someone to stay up late and get in some good trouble with, but Grace had figured out pretty quickly that first impressions were always a lie.
“You might look gorgeous if you froze to death, but you’d still end up in the guts of a beggar,” Rachel had said, staring up at Grace with round little eyes like an awestruck rabbit. An awestruck rabbit who wanted desperately to prove that it was faster and smarter than the tiger that was about to eat it, kind of like a girl version of the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. Maybe with the same waistcoat. God, Rachel wore such stupid things.
“Guts of a beggar?”
“Shakespeare. ‘A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.’”
“The worms would all be frozen, too,” said Grace. And then she realized that she’d forgotten about poison. Maybe OD’ing on heroin or something would be the best way of all. Then at least she would have gotten to try it out before she died.
As wrong as Rachel proved to be about boys and music and understanding anything beyond how to kiss Mr. Taylor’s ass so that she was cast in every single play, she was right about the suicide thing.
It’s not that Grace actually wanted to flail around and lose control of her bowels and lie there with her eyes cranked open until she was carted away and incinerated—actually, that was exactly what she didn’t want to do. She wanted to die young and beautiful, not all messed-up looking. It’s just that, well, with suicide you got to choose—what you were wearing, what kind of note you left, how the whole thing actually went down when you slept that sleep of death. If life was all about making choices and taking responsibility for them, like adults were always saying, then why did death get to be something that just happened to you?
四
Bel-Air, CA
YEARS AGO, Barbra had picked Charles out as the one among all the young men in his class who would make the most of himself. That was before she’d picked out her English name, before she’d learned to pluck her eyebrows and smooth her hair, before she’d yanked herself out of Taiwan and set out for America.