shrugs. “Hanna’s brother didn’t tell her.”
“I read a thing once that women, girls, whatever, are more likely to use pills, but I don’t know, I could sort of see her, like . . .” Nicole puts her two fingers together and sticks them in her mouth. Then she jerks her head to the side and lets her tongue hang out.
The water is pounding down into the sink and splashing onto my shirt. Maybe I am going to throw up.
“She always seemed sort of off the rails . . .” Laya says.
“Totally. Like one of those famous people who do insane things, except not actually famous.”
“Yeah, like, famous only in her own head, though.”
My sink has filled up. Water drizzles out onto the floor.
I face them now, something inside me sparks and catches fire. “Stop talking about her like that,” I say. I try to keep my voice from shaking. They turn toward me, like they’re only now noticing that I’m here at all. “Just fucking stop it.”
“Um, hi?” Nicole says. “Private conversation. Besides, were you even friends?”
She looks at me, lips pursed slightly.
“Yes, we were,” I say.
“Oh,” says Laya. “Sorry.” And for a moment she almost kind of sounds it. Laya and Nicole exchange a quick look and then head toward the door without another word. They are best friends, which means they don’t always need to speak to understand each other. I watch them go. There’s a squeezing in my chest, and my eyes tighten. The tears are starting to come, but I grit my teeth and I blink them back.
The thing is, when I said Delia and I were friends, that wasn’t really true.
If we were still friends, then when I saw Delia’s name flashing on my phone two days ago for the first time in over a year, instead of clicking ignore and not even listening to the message, I would have picked up. I would have picked up and heard Delia’s voice, and would have known something was wrong. And then, no matter what Delia said, no matter what Delia was planning, I would have stopped her.
1 YEAR, 6 MONTHS, 4 DAYS EARLIER
It was a relief to know she didn’t have to explain. Not about the ache in her chest, the pit in her stomach, where it was coming from, and how much she didn’t want to talk about it – Delia would just get it. She always did.
June imagined what Delia was about to say, maybe something along the lines of, “Parents. Fuck ’em,” or “Only boring people have perfect lives.” Delia could make you feel like the things you didn’t have were things you didn’t want anyway. She changed the whole world like that.
So that’s what June was expecting, standing out there in the summer sun, waiting for Delia to fix this.
Delia tipped her head to the side as if she was considering something. She raked her curls behind her ear, hiked up her low-slung cutoff shorts, then reached out and took June’s hand. She squeezed it tight, but still she didn’t say anything at all. She just grinned and waggled her eyebrows.
Then she started to run.
And because she was holding June’s hand so tightly, and June’s hand was attached to June’s arm, which was attached to June’s body, June had no choice but to run with her. She stumbled at first, adrenaline coursing through her veins as she plunged toward the ground, then righted herself. Delia was ahead of her, arm stretched back, racing across the empty field, legs pumping, pulling June right along.
“Wait!” June begged. “Please!” June was in flip-flops. They were flapping against the grass until she accidentally ran right out of one of them. “I lost my shoe!”
But Delia didn’t wait or stop.
“Fuck your shoe!” Delia called out.
So what could she do? June kicked off the other one and pumped her legs. When was the last time she ran as fast as she could?
“But where are we GOING?” June shouted.
“WE’RE JUST RUNNING,” Delia shouted. Trees zipping by them, they were flying through the air.
The pit in June’s stomach dissolved, sweat broke out along her back, her lungs were bursting. But still they ran, giddy and breathless, the pieces of June’s life dropping away bit by bit until she was nothing but legs in motion, arms, a heart, a hand, held. A body, stumbling, tripping, almost falling. Except she wouldn’t fall, that’s the thing. Delia wouldn’t let her.
After school I meet Ryan out front and follow him to his house like it’s any other day. That’s where we always go, even though no one is ever home at my house after school and someone is almost always home at his, and we’re supposed to want to be alone.
Ryan puts his arm around me as we walk inside into the enormous open foyer. Ryan’s family is rich. For some reason I didn’t even understand that when I first started coming over. I knew that his house was nicer than mine, that it felt much better to be in here in this big beautiful space than it ever did to be at home, but that wasn’t saying much. Delia was the one who explained it to me the one time she ever came here. Ryan was out of earshot and she’d leaned over the edge of their giant leather sofa and stared at me in this really intense sort of googly-eyed way that she only did when she was already drunk. “Shit, J,” she said. She was holding one of their very soft throws, stroking it like a bunny. “Why didn’t you tell me that your love-ah was loa-ded ?” But things were already kind of weird between us at that point, so I didn’t say, “Wait, he is ?” which is what I was thinking in my head. Instead I shrugged like it was nothing.
Now I’m on the sofa and Ryan has gone into the kitchen area. I can still see him from where I sit.
“Are you sure you don’t want anything?” He opens the freezer. “You might feel a little better if you eat something.”
I shake my head. I’m underwater.
While Ryan puts things in the microwave, I look down at the phone in my lap, at the tiny icon on the screen – the message from Delia, which I still haven’t listened to. Which I can’t even bring myself to mention.
The microwave dings and Ryan takes out his plate, carries it to the couch, and sits down beside me. He pulls his laptop onto his lap and opens up the Kaninhus website, which is Swedish for “bunny house.” Basically there’s a guy in Sweden who has these two rabbits who live in a penned-in area in his backyard, and the guy keeps a webcam on them all day long. Ryan showed me the site when we first started seeing each other. “I really, I mean, I really, really like these bunnies,” he said, almost like he was embarrassed about it, which was what made it so charming. He told me his friends would think it was super weird if they knew. (His friends have an extraordinarily low bar for what weird is.) The bunnies mostly sniff around and wiggle their noses and eat stuff. We talk about them a lot, as though they are real and have hopes and dreams and complicated interior lives.
“Hi, Adi. Hi, Alva,” he says to the rabbits on the screen. He is using a terrible fake Swedish accent, which is another one of our couple things. “How are you today, bunnies?” One of the bunnies is eating from a little dish. The other is asleep.
I guess he’s trying to distract me, to keep my mind off things, as though somehow that’s possible. Or maybe it’s that he doesn’t know how to talk to me about her, to have this conversation at all. I sure as hell don’t either.
But I’m thinking how it feels wrong to be sitting here staring at these rabbits while Delia is dead.
And I’m thinking how Delia would say, I’m dead, what the fuck do I care?