Alice Lee was someone who missed her best friend Tammy, and once, when she was six, a man pulled up in front of her house and tried to get her into his blue car, beckoning from the driver’s seat, saying he had a special secret to share. Alice Lee was the girl who froze for a full minute before she ran inside, and she was the girl who never told anyone about that minute and that man in the blue car.
This was Alice Lee. She never broke any bones and her teeth were straight and strong, and her mother died, and so did she. Not the same way, but not so differently, either. She liked fish tacos and fairy lights and hated the taste of licorice. She hadn’t read nearly enough books, and she was busy falling in love with the world, when she was yanked right out of it.
Smile. Is that what he said to her, just before? Or during? There were sounds he made she couldn’t hear, wouldn’t hear, but she’d made him angry, hadn’t she? By not answering his questions. She froze instead, just like that day when the strange man in his blue car tried to tell her a secret. She knew not to go toward him, could smell the danger between them, but for a full minute, she forgot how to move. And this time, Alice Lee remembered too late.
I will go to Hart Island. If no one claims me, my body will join a million others on that speck of land in Long Island Sound. A pretty sounding name for a mass of dirt, endlessly churned, bones buried on top of bones. Three persons deep, they say. When they remember those bones belong to people.
They might loan my body out to a university first, before they take me to the island. I wouldn’t mind that so much; I like the idea that some parts of my body might help fix other bodies, other warm, kinetic beings in need of repair. I have no further use for this mass of calcium and marrow, for the hair and fingernails and those blue, blue eyes. I don’t get to coil my muscles; I don’t get to taste something before it reaches my mouth or come so intensely that I’m flying. I don’t suppose it really matters what they do to my body now.
There used to be an asylum on Hart Island. There was an asylum here, too, next to the mortuary. The dead and the damaged, side by side, out of sight. When a famous person dies, a princess or a politician, say, the public gets to see it. Their funeral is kind of like a celebration. There are flowers and candles and photographs, and songs that tell you something about who the person was before they died. The ones left behind stand up and share their memories, they take the life that was lived, and they put a frame around it. So that people don’t forget. I will not get flowers and candles and songs. If I am buried on Hart Island, no one will even know my favourite song. It’s ‘Try A Little Tenderness’， by the way. Otis Redding. The first time my mother played me that old record, I cried. I loved his soulful voice so much. And those lyrics—it seemed like he was singing to me, about me. Because we do get wearied, girls like me. Not the kind of song you’d play at a funeral, I suppose. But at least I would be there. Present at my own mourning. If they take me to Hart Island, it’s all gone. My favourite song, and my favourite word （sarsaparilla）， and my first ever crush （Michael from Mrs O’Connor’s class, fourth grade）。 People mourn the future that is lost when someone dies. But what about the past? What about all that is bound up in a person, and all the things that disappear when they die?
And what if you’ve even lost your name? What then? You will be placed in a plain pine coffin, and an inmate from Rikers will dig your grave and lower you down. Bones upon bones, names unknown, buried with the lost and the forgotten. An asylum for the dead.
I would like to be remembered better than this. Josh says we are lucky. That people will pay closer attention to a girl like me. But what if they never find out who I really am? Even worse—what if they stop caring about me once they do know?
What if it turns out I’m the wrong kind of victim, too?
Don’t go there. Don’t do that.
Skirt’s too short, street’s too dark.
Why couldn’t you—who did you—how did you—？
When you go around asking for trouble like that. What exactly did you think would happen!
Look at all the things they tell us. Listen to the words ringing in our ears as the bodies stack up. As another young woman is added to the pile of limbs and hearts and hopes and dreams, and all the things she’ll never do. Because of all the things she didn’t do.
Or all the things she did.
That’s the part they seldom make clear. When they decide who gets to be the right kind of dead girl.
If they think of us at all.