The St. Ambrose School for Girls(41)
She’ll never recover from this. Even if it doesn’t bother her, the adults in this institution won’t have it. I’ve read enough People magazines to know that this kind of juicy tragedy sustains the national news feeds. Ambrose’s reputation will be on the line, and there’s no way this school and its long, proud legacy will go down with the ship of a one-hundred-and-ten-pound, blond-haired bully.
Even if her name happens to be Stanhope.
She’ll be dealt with accordingly, and I cannot wait.
Faster and faster I move, so hungry for the end result, so impatient, that I’m unaware of putting on my clothes. I just discover, some minutes after I rise stiffly from my bed, that I’m pulling on my coat and shoving my remaining five-dollar bill into my pocket. Even as I make a brief, inconclusive assessment as to whether or not I need to pee, I remain mostly disconnected from my body. I’m no more aware of the status of my internal organs than I am of the constriction of the boots upon my feet or the weight of the clothes on my back.
All I know is my vengeance, and oh, how I am more than willing to sacrifice my pathetic life at the foot of Greta’s downfall.
chapter THIRTEEN
The next thing I know, I’m in the CVS. I remember nothing of the walk down into town because I’ve spent the trip lost in images of how it will all happen. The boiler room in the basement is where I’m going to do it, and I see my body being found by a workman servicing the furnace. I see him tripping over his own feet as he rears back in horror. I see him calling Hot RA down, and it’s my beautiful residential advisor who kneels by my remains and picks up the handwritten note in which I state all my reasons why. Administrators are called, the big ones, who have offices on the other side of campus. The police are called, and they come with an ambulance even though it’s too late. I see my note being read by the adults with badges, their brows down low, their offense over Greta’s actions both personal and professional.
Greta is called to the headmaster. She arrives, confused, because news of what has happened has been strictly quarantined. She’s summarily kicked out of school, and when she protests that she’s a Stanhope, she’s cut off with the announcement that her father has been forced to resign from the Board of Trustees as a result of her actions. While the others in my dorm gather in the common area for a special meeting, at which grief counselors are made available, she’s upstairs packing her things under the furious glare of her father, who cannot fathom how he managed to bring such a horrible child into this world, his bankruptcy now not the worst thing that’s ever happened to him.
In the aftermath, the girls in my dorm will sink into the role of victim/bystander and all of the adults in their lives will minister to the tender hearts affected by my tragedy; not because their elders care about me, but because they’re terrified that I’ll start a trend. The emotional outpouring my peers feel will be both honest and dishonest. They’ll pitch forward authentically into their sadness, exploring the landscape of loss and the fragility of life on a cursory level, although it will be in inverse proportion to what they felt for me while I was walking among them. Living, I am a ghost. Dead, I will finally have substance. I will finally be accepted and I will be epic in my absence.
Greta, meanwhile, will be relegated to a life of shame in the less-than house her parents had to move into after their own downfall. She will have to go to a public school because no other preparatory institution will take her for fear of an exodus of current enrollees and a dearth of potential applicants. Colleges will not touch her, either. She will while away her mortal years in the invisible prison of the cautionary tale, no longer someone with a future, but a person irrevocably tied to a single, shattering event that occurred when she was fifteen.
As I return to the present, I find that I am standing in front of the over-the-counter analgesics, the kind of low-level pain relief medicines that you have to take some number of in order to get the result I intend. I’m unaware of whether Roni and Margie, who helped me with the dye, are behind their cash registers, and I don’t sense the pharmacist anywhere in the store. Nor am I cognizant of any other shoppers. It’s just me and the display of pills.
I am really planning now, getting into the nitty-gritty. After I write my note up at my desk, I’ll go down to the basement and sit on the concrete floor by the boiler. I can swallow the chalky pills in two small handfuls. The bitter taste that takes root on the back of my tongue and the burning that goes down my throat will make it hard not to retch, and retching has to be avoided because it can potentially lead to vomiting, which I cannot permit. Fortunately, I remember a solution for the taste problem, a best practice. At the mental institution during my second stay, one of the girls gave me a helpful tip: Swallow the aspirin with an orange soda. Even if the taste of fake Florida doesn’t appeal, she told me, it’ll be enough to mask the bitterness, and make the soda cold, too, to settle your stomach as much as possible.
Oh, and above all, be certain you do it first thing in the morning, before you eat anything. Empty is best, a clean foundation on which to build your mausoleum.
It’s now quarter to two in the afternoon, but fortunately, I missed breakfast by becoming a black hole and going back to the start of the universe.
I picked up some other handy information during my stays at the institution. For a girl of my weight, I should need only ten to fourteen pills to get the job done, and I used this base of knowledge two weeks after I was released the first time. Unfortunately, however succinctly something can be calculated in theory, reality tends to be more messy and unpleasant, and I failed because I vomited. This will not happen now, thanks to the Orange Crush girl and her helpful refinements.