By the Time You Read This, I'll Be Dead Read online

  What time is it? Late. It’s pitch black in my room and silent.

  Kim and Chip are sound asleep—I hope.

  “A while later,” I continue to key, “we came back from gym and my face was red from doing gymnastics. I was overweight. Needless to say, gym was not my best subject. Everyone sat down and there was this loud farting sound. People laughed and pointed at me. That boy had put a whoopee cushion on my seat.”

  Their laughter echoes in my ears, still. I have to cover them to mute the volume.

  A minute later, I open my eyes and read what I’ve written. It seems trivial. Even funny, to some people. But back then, in second grade, it was like a defining moment in my life.

  J_Doe111091 responded: My teacher used to play pranks on me. Like he’d lock me in the art closet after school. Then he molested me.

  He, or she, should’ve put that in Sexual Assault.

  I remember my teacher was laughing at me too about the whoopee cushion. Big joke. I felt myself shrinking and fading away. I wanted to eat. I wanted to die. All year long boys made farting sounds with their hands in their armpits. Girls called me THE BIG FAT FARTING PIG.

  J_Doe092892 writes: I quit school halfway through 8th grade. I couldn’t take the shit. It was either kill everyone or kill myself.

  I couldn’t quit. My parents wouldn’t let me.

  I’m still back there, dying inside.

  * * *

  If I prop up two pillows I can lie down in bed without my brace. I wish I had a laptop. My head can turn without too much trauma if I’m at a forty-five-degree angle. I see the wedge of paper. It can sit there for the rest of my life.

  15 days. Occupy my mind. How many hours is that? I break down the equation in my head:

  15 days X 24 hours in a day = ?

  15 is the sum of 10 and 5.

  10 X 24 = 240

  5 X 20 = 100

  5 X 4 = 20

  240 + 100 + 20 = 360

  360 is the circumference of a circle. I will have come full circle.

  In how many minutes? 360 X 60 minutes. Too many to calculate in my head. More than a few. My focus wanes and my eyes flicker over it. I’m not opening the note.

  Self-control. He got that right.

  I gaze up at the ceiling. Through it. Past Kim and Chip’s room on the second floor into the sky, space, heaven, hell. Who says hell is down? It could be up. It could be next door to heaven. Hell could be a subset of heaven, like a ghetto in the middle of a glass city.

  How long will it take for me to get to where I’m going? It will be instantaneous, I hope. Do you actually walk through the light? Of course you don’t walk, because you’re no longer a physical presence. Do you feel it, though? Do you know you’ve passed to the other side? On TV you do.

  I’ve never been afraid of the dark. I’m more afraid of the day, of people. I love the night. The solitude. Well, I don’t love it. I don’t feel love. I hate people, so I hope when I get there it isn’t crowded. I hope the light is a momentary phenomenon and the other side is completely black.

  And silent.

  My throat feels like it’s closing, so I roll over onto my side. Secret note from Hervé. I’m so sure.

  It worries me that Chip might see what I write in the Final Forum. I didn’t tell Chip or Kim what was happening at school. Not the later stuff, after the closet incident. I don’t want to go there yet.

  They had to hear my incessant plea: “I don’t want to go to school. Please don’t make me.” Day after day.

  Year after year. “Please don’t make me go.”

  “You have to go,” Kim would say. “It’s a new school. Make a new start.”

  “Sticks and stones,” from Chip. Words will only kill you.

  I gave up pleading with them. I just gave up.

  I return to the desk and delete my entries from the forum.

  I’m not going to open that damn note. Or that closet door.

  — 14 DAYS —

  I don’t sleep. All night long I’m wide awake, thinking, Secrets, secrets, secrets. There are secrets in my past no one needs to know. Secrets in my present that might kill Kim and Chip. I don’t want to take my secrets with me when I go. When I pass through the light, I want to be free of everything and everyone.

  Through-the-Light.

  I’m addicted.

  Welcome, J_Doe071894. You have 14 days left. Will you be prepared? Yes No

  I touch Yes.

  It’s dim in my room; the sun isn’t up. There’s no stirring overhead and no one’s come to check on me for an hour. Maybe, finally, they’re trusting me to make it through the night.

  The sad truth is, they should never trust me.

  I need to know how secure I am online. In the menu I find the privacy policy and read it all the way through.

  Through-the-Light collects no personal information about its members. Your activities, while monitored by system administrators, are transparent to networks and central servers. Our patented Enigma encryption software completely cloaks access, usage, and online transactions. URL crawls to and from Through-the-Light are undetectable even for authorized users.

  Really? It seems too good to be true. I don’t trust it. I don’t trust anyone.

  Another line catches my eye. Once you delete your account, you can never reenter Through-the-Light.

  One chance. No turning back.

  My stomach churns. This is my final opportunity to get it right.

  I check the DOD list. Only three names. Wait. It’s populating as I watch. Four, five, six. People must live in different time zones or something. Eight, nine. Live and die.

  Secrets. I can’t take them with me. If I do, when I go, when I arrive at my final destination, I’ll be . . . impure. I have no choice but to trust that they’re safe here.

  I touch Final Forum.

  Bullied.

  I key, “I wasn’t the only fat kid in school. There were others. They got bullied too. This one kid, a fifth grader, brought a knife to school and had a wack attack, just yelling and threatening people. It happened on the playground at lunch. He got expelled. I heard rumors that he moved, then killed himself.”

  J_Doe050881 writes: You try to take on the tormentors. But there are always more where they came from.

  Exactly. So your only other choice is to take out the tormented.

  This other girl was a cutter, I remember. She was in my reading class. I could see the scabs on her arms. At ten, she was already cutting.

  At ten, I was planning my death.

  An alarm clock buzzes upstairs and I power down. The sun’s up. A new day is beginning. Or ending, depending on where you are.

  Already I’m exhausted. I rest my forehead on the desk, but it stretches the back of my neck and that hurts. I turn my head. There’s the note.

  Secret note from Hervé. He’d said, “Did you get it?” Before he forced this note on me.

  I get up and retrieve my book bag from the rocking chair. I open the front pocket where he’d slipped Desire in the Mist. What did Hervé leave in it, a rat turd?

  Inside the front cover, printed in blue ink, is one word: hervehotsu.

  What is that? Portuguese? Hervehotsu. Stupid. It’s like a screen name.

  A screen name. HerveHotsU.

  I throw the book in the trash.

  The shower goes on upstairs and footsteps creak in the hall. Watching. Always watching. I snatch the note and take it with me to the bathroom.

  On the toilet, I dig out the flaps and unfold the wedge of note. In black pen, like calligraphy, elegant letters centered on the page:

  IM me

  The last time I got baited into IMing, people wrote nasty, hurtful messages.

  I won’t set myself up again.

  I tear the note to bits and flush it.

  School is school. I dreamwalk down the halls. I pass the time wishing I was gone. We get our tests back in econ and I got a D-. A red scrawl under the grade reads: See me after class.

  For what? Confes
sion? Why did Kim and Chip pick a Catholic school? I don’t even believe in God.

  My test is snatched off my desk. This girl sitting next to me covers my paper with her arm and does something. Writes on it. When the teacher isn’t looking, she slides the test back onto my desk.

  She’d extended the legs of the D to make it look like an A. A-.

  She’s smiling.

  At me.

  Why?

  The bell rings and I’m the first one out the door. I hustle to the restroom. In a stall, I rip the test into shreds and cram them into the used tampons container.

  Don’t touch me.

  He’s there after school sitting on the bench with his arms resting across the back. My stomach flips. STOP.

  Why? Why are people making contact NOW?

  I retreat into the building, into the bowels of hell.

  He needs to go. They all do. They need to know I’m not doing this with them.

  — 13 DAYS —

  Trash day. I keep a box of Glad bags behind the bottom drawer of my dresser. I hope Kim doesn’t pull out the drawer. My clothes are sparse. I have underpants, socks, a bra. I’ve never owned much, since we move so often. I don’t care about keeping stuff. I spread what little I have evenly between all four drawers. Behind the fourth drawer are my plastic bags.

  Kim didn’t even think about locking them away. Heads up, Kim.

  Plastic bags are a suicide completer’s best friend. Especially if you choose to overdose. Drug overdose is an unreliable method, I read, because height and weight, general health, gag reflex—all of these work against you. On Through-the-Light it’s recommended that, in addition to taking as many pills as possible, you slide a plastic bag over your head and secure it with a belt. That way if the drugs don’t do their job—if they take too long or you panic—suffocation will render you unconscious.

  Even if I had access to my pills, I couldn’t get enough of them down my damaged throat now.

  Into a trash bag goes my slim stack of clothes and toys and the gilded jewelry box that Kim got me for my twelfth birthday. She asked, “Do you want to invite some friends over for cake and ice cream?” I said, “No.” I thought, Please don’t make me. The one time she listened. She said, “Okay, then. It’ll just be the three of us.”

  The music box plays “A Time for Us.” Ironic.

  Maybe I won’t throw it out yet.

  The book is still in the trash can by the desk. How could I be so stupid? What if Kim found it and read the message? She wouldn’t understand, but she’d spend a lifetime trying.

  That could be her penance.

  No, I’m not that cruel. I rip out the first page and bury it in the Glad bag.

  We have chorus rehearsal today for the May Day concert. I won’t be around for it, but I committed to chorus. I’m all about commitment.

  JenniferJessica keeps pushing me, nudging me, pressing her shoulder against mine. I want to tell her to cool it. Then the other girl on the left side of me starts doing the same thing.

  I move back and the girl behind me pushes me forward. They always come in packs of three.

  Mr. Hyatt stops rehearsal. “What’s going on?” he asks.

  JenniferJessica says, “Nothing.”

  I say nothing, of course.

  He purses his lips. The rehearsal resumes and so does the pushing. I want to scream, Stop it! Stop touching me. In this one middle school, people would shove me or push me in the hall. I wanted to chase them down and shove them so hard they fell on their faces. But then I’d get in trouble or they’d retaliate. In class, this one boy sat next to me and poked me in the arm. Just poked me. He’d press his finger into my skin until it made a dent. Why? Boys were always being pushed into me. They stuck notes on my back: KISS ME.

  PIGGY BACK.

  JenniferJessica pushes me out of line.

  Mr. Hyatt motions for the pianist to cut. He says, “Daelyn, would you mind singing alto?”

  Am I supposed to answer?

  JenniferJessica snorts. Everyone around us snickers and the roar in my ears crescendos.

  I shuffle over to the alto section. The joke’s on you, bitches. I sing alto.

  “You can stand by me,” a voice says. It’s the girl from econ. She has a face now. A face and a voice. Round face. Soft voice.

  “We can share music.”

  I feel grateful. STOP. Don’t feel.

  He’s not on my bench. I don’t mean “my.” Nothing belongs to me. I close the gate and walk past the tree. He doesn’t leap out to ambush me.

  You have no idea how relieved I am.

  I sit and set my book bag next to me; pull out Desire on the Moor. Exhuming the weight of the day, my bones go Jell-O and my muscles melt. I read, Maggie Louise took the outstretched hand that the Frenchman, Jean-Jacques, offered her. She was a deft horsewoman, but if a man—this man—wanted to help her dismount, she certainly wouldn’t refuse the offer.

  Santana’s plotting a sneak attack, I think. Waiting until I’m engaged in my book, then WHAM.

  I’m so wise to sneak attacks. It won’t happen to me again.

  I just called him by his name.

  Detach.

  “Do you wish me to cool your mare down, Miss?” Jean-Jacques crooned in his sexy French accent. He took the reins from her, touching her fingers lightly with his gloved hand. She’d never known a stable boy to wear leather gloves. Soft, creamy kidskin. If the gloves hadn’t given him away, his impeccable manners and grooming would have. “Who are you?” she asked. “Really.”

  He’d introduced himself as the trainer at Longshead, but Jean-Jacques was no stable boy.

  I suppress a yawn. It hurts to yawn. Especially in the back of my throat where the stitched skin catches. He’s late, if he’s coming. I don’t care if he’s early or late. I don’t want him springing out of nowhere is all. With a rat.

  “For me to know. And you—”

  “To find out,” Maggie Louise finished.

  No one ever found out what was happening inside me. How the pain was eating me away. No one ever came to my rescue, or stood up for me.

  I smell licorice. It alerts me.

  I’m at the ready as I read fast, Jean-Jacques bowed. Maggie Louise caught the teasing glint in his eyes. The game was on.

  No movement around me. No presence. Phantom scent of licorice. It’s my paranoia. I’ll never lose it.

  I wish I was Maggie Louise. Trusting, desirable, loved. Maggie Louise had lovers everywhere because she loved herself. Even if she wasn’t the most admirable person—always cheating on Charles, expecting his forgiveness—Maggie Louise saw what she wanted and took it. She’d never allow people to treat her like dirt. Charles, on the other hand . . .

  Who cares about him? He’s weak and powerless in her hands.

  I tear out the page.

  A footstep sounds behind me and I brace. The jangle of keys. A thud. Turning my torso slightly, I spy the UPS man heading into the building. The truck idles right in front of me.

  My vision blurs. Where was I? On the bench, with the book. In the body of someone I’ll never be. I rip out this page and the next.

  I’m only on page 59 and there are thirteen days left. Thirteen days to finish this book and the next, Desire in the Mine. I rip out a fistful of pages.

  For a while I sit and stare into space. At the truck, a passing car. A slight longing seeps in and I can’t will it away.

  I wish I could drive. I’ll never reach my sixteenth birthday.

  Where would I go, anyway? To the mall with all my friends?

  When Kim pulls up, I stand. Desire on the Moor flutters to the ground. I think to leave it, but I don’t want him finding the book. Leaving me a message.

  “Where’s Santana?” Kim asks.

  Like I know or care.

  * * *

  A total of thirteen people are on the DOD list tonight. I shouldn’t think of them as people. What are they now? Spirits? Energy? They’re happy; that’s all I know. They’re free.
r />   It’s Chip’s turn to invade my privacy. At least he knocks first, which gives me time to power down. “What are you doing?” he asks.

  I just look at him. He wanders over to my desk. Instinctively my hand raises to cover the monitor.

  “What were you working on?” He hitches his chin at my PC. “Just now.”

  I should’ve thought to open textbooks on my desk or something. Think, think. I retrieve my book bag and take out a spiral. I find a pen.

  I print, “I’m writing a story. For English.”

  Chip reads my note. “I saw you Google, then nothing.”

  I take back the spiral. I’m not sure what to say. Chip touches my shoulder and I flinch. When did I start to cringe at his touch? He goes, “Can I read your story when it’s done?”

  I print, “It’s boring.”

  Chip chuckles. “I doubt that.” He stays too long, checking his watch. “Well, I’ll leave you to it.”

  After he’s gone, I log back on. For Chip’s sake, I Google “Shakespeare.” I choose “Collected works.” In another window I’m back at Through-the-Light.

  I touch WTG.

  Explosives

  Effectiveness: 4–5 if detonator works properly.

  Time: 10 milliseconds (approximately).

  Availability: 1.

  Pain: 4–5, but quick.

  Notes: Difficult to acquire effective explosives and a detonator. Do NOT use gunpowder or other “slow” or homemade explosives. Use dynamite or “plastique.” Strap it to your forehead with the detonator. Taping a grenade to your head will work as well.

  Oh, right. Where would I get a grenade? Kim, next time you pass through airport security, could you see if anyone’s confiscated a wad of plastique and a detonator?

  I link back to DOD. Three more. It’s comforting, somehow, to know I’m not alone.

  Too bad I’ll never see my name on this list. Unless you can access Through-the-Light from the afterworld. Not on a computer, of course. I wonder, though, if you’re all-knowing, all-seeing. If you choose to, can you monitor activities here on Earth?