Give Me A Reason
Our superintendent broke the news through an email to all township residents: Annie had committed suicide, guidance counselors would open their offices to anyone wanting to grieve, here is a list of suicide prevention resources.
Some-days-ponytail-other-days-pigtails Annie was what people called a good girl: she pushed her chair in when she left her desk, she signed out on the half-torn sheet of paper before leaving class to use the bathroom, she turned in her homework on time and kept a second copy for herself for reference. Even though everyone in our Asian-plus-one-honorary-Jewish-white-kid group passive-aggressively competed against one another’s grades, Annie never tried to weasel classmates into revealing answers to exam questions. I bet she even answered spam phone calls and politely declined their promotional offers. She was the kind of person you’d find in a fairytale, untouchable yet a known presence. People left her alone because she seemed out of this world, living in a parallel dimension where all of us little people existed but at the same time failed to exist.
No one really spoke to me either, unless it was to drop a “what’d you get on that assignment?”. Those questions eventually tapered off, a result I attributed to my desire not to waste words. “How are you?” “I am.” But for how much I preferred to avoid social gatherings and in general, taking part, I still attended graduation in the same thirty-dollar rental gown and tassel that every other student wore. I spied the caps of our clique of tryhards, untangled tassels hooked on perfectly angled caps; these were all the Harvards and Princetons and Stanfords–congrats you made it in life, I thought. I listened to the valedictorian’s speech start with an anecdote about stepping on a sea urchin and conclude with blanket statements about life and “making a difference”. By the end of the ceremony, I needed to pee and swerved around the masses of people taking pictures. The trip to the bathroom required walking past the long stretch of a cafeteria where teachers mingled with students and parents, the lunch tables folded and wheeled off to the corner, everyone standing in heels or dress shoes, and I speed walked along the edge, hand tracing the concrete lines in the walls as my sneaker-clad feet pedaled forward. I felt odd in the cafeteria–a place I rarely spent any time in besides crossing to get to another location. During lunch, I preferred to hide in the newspaper room under the guise of working on the paper layout, when really, I just wanted a room to myself with spinning chairs and computers running windows seven or later.
I pushed the bathroom doors open and saw the shoes, navy blue converse that looked as worn out as I felt, before the blood. Other things I saw first: normally-ponytail-or-pigtail-Annie’s hair falling below her shoulders, dry and split; a leather crossbody bag folding in on itself against the wall and questionably clean floor; a moth caught between the window screen and glass, fluttering from corner to corner like it expected to find an opening in the woven aluminum. Annie’s sleeves were rolled up to her elbows and her right hand gripped a switchblade with a cheap-looking turquoise handle. I recognized the scars on her left arm. I had my own running along my arm, chalked up to a self-experiment, a curiosity in pain, a vector space where subspaces U and V intersect to yield a parametric equation for a line, without a clean general solution to the matrix, not with all these white lines mingled with red. I stared at her arm seconds longer than I probably should have.
When I did make eye contact, I noted how wide both our eyes were, strangely satisfied that the shock wasn’t one-sided. I attempted to rationalize she couldn’t possibly be doing what my eyes indicated she was doing–she must’ve been using the knife to cut a loose thread on her sleeve, these weren’t the best quality graduation gowns, and was Annie always pretty? Had I just missed her fae-like features before, when I was too busy hiding from crowds? Or maybe it was that she looked different without her pigtails or ponytail, with the lightest of bags beneath her eyes and lack of color in her cheeks and lips, without her Asian babyface. Maybe Annie was the type of girl whose prettiness revealed itself when she looked mature and messed up.
The faucet dripped water as we stared. A few seconds passed before I, staying true to all the heroic main characters who fought against the social norm and warmed the iciest of hearts, turned around and fled, taking my full bladder with me.
On the following Monday, our superintendent sent voicemails and emails to everyone about Annie’s death. Her suicide, a word no one used when speaking of the incident. Up until the moment in the bathroom, it never struck me that Annie’s blood also contained hemoglobin binding iron and oxygen into an indistinguishable red–same as the rest of us. And up until that Monday, it never occurred to me that Annie could die, never mind end her own life. But she did; the Good Girl ditched the world and her archetype for a new one: the Girl Who Killed Herself.
I watch waveforms animate across the screen in squares and ramps, the space between peaks dictated by, if I recall correctly, the elastic recoil of the respiratory system and resistance of intubated airways. I pick up on the slightest movement of the endotracheal tube connected to the mechanical ventilator, the machine that tethers my daughter–her and her little chest rising and falling–to this world. I focus on the waveforms, the same squiggles from a moment ago: I remember looking at similar graphs in a signal processing lab in the basement of my university’s engineering building.
I move the stuffed polar bear from her lap to her shoulder so its snout nuzzles her cheek. I wonder if she craves her favorite braised duck legs that we purchased every weekend with our stashed coupons–one coupon for every ten dollars spent in the grocery store; I wonder if she hid a diary in her closet or a letter slipped in a carved hole in the wall, patched with taping compound; I wonder if I misunderstood her silence when she stayed in her room to study and only toilet flushes and running faucets made her presence known; I wonder where she is right now. Maybe she tiptoes at the boundary of earth and non earth, faeries pulling her along, trying to get her to cross. I imagine the other side as an endless field of flowers, visited by unfettered moths under a sky with just enough clouds for equal parts blue and white. I imagine it’s a place where we’re pardoned for seeing what we want to see, for not knowing what we should know, where fairies weave daisy wreaths as crowns and place them on our heads without question.
These days, after I kick off a data pipeline to run overnight and slide my laptop under the bed, I swallow a melatonin pill and dream the same thing: I am shouting. I don’t remember when I last used my vocal cords to this extent–maybe never. My daughter turns toward me, her face a blur of skin with a hole for a mouth. I hear water drops of a leaky bathroom faucet. Once, I see Annie in my dream too. She holds my daughter’s hands, and they turn their backs to me and walk until I see only the horizon.
The doctor mentions ending life support. I demand numbers so I can weigh all the factors, slide beads on an abacus: the chances of recovery, the cost of treatment. The doctor asks more questions. I say I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.
Lucy Zhang is a writer, software engineer, and anime fan. Her work has appeared in Maudlin House, Parentheses Journal, Gone Lawn, and elsewhere. She can be found athttps://kowaretasekai.wordpress.com/ or on Twitter@Dango_Ramen.
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