“That’s…that’s, um, in there?” I ask, wondering how much David has written down. Did he expose me to all of Mapleview? I try to remember how I’ve even framed the question for him. I want to know the exact last second my dad’s accident could have been avoided. When the brakes needed to have been pressed. If the whole thing could have been stopped in the first place. I want to make mathematical sense out of the inexplicable. Now it just sounds insane.
“Like I said, you should read it. See who you’re ditching us for,” Annie says. “So you’re not going to tell us? About the Accident Project.”
“It’s nothing. Really. And I’m not ditching—” Annie shakes her head at me, gives me the palm of her hand, and before I can finish speaking she’s already halfway toward her car. I turn to Violet. “I’m not ditching you guys. It’s not like that.”
“She’s just, you know, pissed about Gabe,” Violet says. “And we miss you.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. This hurts, I want to say. Even just standing here talking to you. It all hurts more than you could possibly imagine. I want to show her my watch, how time barely moves forward. How I don’t much care for this version of me either. I stay quiet.
“Do you really like him? David, I mean,” Violet asks, and her voice is hopeful, as if my liking him will excuse everything else, like the fact that I no longer want to hang out with her and Annie. I don’t deserve her forgiveness or her understanding. If things were the other way around, if Violet suddenly ditched me for some random guy without much of an explanation, I’d have no sympathy.
“I don’t know. He’s really easy to talk to,” I say. “I like being around him.”
What I don’t say: I can tell him things that I can’t tell anyone else. Like about my dad and my mom. Maybe one day about me. He weighs information honestly.
What I don’t say: He moves time forward.
Violet nods, but she looks sad.
“You used to like being around us too.”
—
It’s bad enough that I get a guilt trip from Violet and Annie, but then a few minutes later, as I sit in my car and garner up the courage to put the keys in the ignition and head home, I get a text from my mom. Awesome.
Mom: I know I’m not your favorite person right now, and my timing isn’t great, but I really don’t think you should hang out with David Drucker anymore.
Me: ARE YOU KIDDING ME?
Mom: Saw that “Guide to Mapleview” link. Annie’s mom sent it to me.
Me: How dare you. THAT WAS HIS PRIVATE JOURNAL.
Mom: I’m just worried about you. That’s all.
Me: Leave me alone.
Mom: Sweetheart, what’s “the Accident Project”?
Me: Screw you.
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.