As I look around, I am aware that the light in my room is different and I decide that it’s the tail end of my hallucinatory stroll into the womb of the cosmos. Except it’s not. According to my alarm clock, it’s after one o’clock in the afternoon.
I have been on this bed, in this position with my knees to my chest and my arms linked around them, for six hours.
Other things have changed, besides the angle of the sun: The drawer in Strots’s dresser is closed. Books that were on her desk are moved, and some are gone. She’s been here. Sometime during my lock-in, she’s come and gone.
The reality that she must have seen me, tucked in as if I were yet to be born, on my bed only in a physical way, which is the least significant manner of existence for any person, confirms that I must act.
Enough of all of this. This school and this roommate. My over-present mother and my absent father. My suffering that cannot be elevated no matter how much lithium I take, or group meetings I go to, or hospitals I am committed to.
Everyone will be better off without me. Except for Greta, of course, and as with my letting that football fly free of my grip, I’m emboldened by the idea of cheating her out of the pleasure she gets from hurting me.
It’s what Strots said as I first arrived here.
Do not give her what she wants.
The idea of releasing people, especially my mother, from the burden of me has long been a motivator, and further, the release from my own inner pain and the terrifying trips I take inside my mind is also a blissful prospect. But what truly motivates me to stand and get dressed is the idea that I can take me away from Greta.
I can take her toy away. I can break it so badly that it doesn’t work anymore and she’s got to find another, more inferior thing to play with and take her petty revenge out on.
I will not give her what she wants.
Spurred on by my anger and a growing, maniacal need for retaliation, Greta becomes the sole focus of my energy, the dark thoughts that collapsed me transferring onto her, tentacles attaching and tightening. I am moving faster now, eager to mete out a punishment the likes of which that pretty girl, with her flicked cigarettes and her nasty smile and her malicious ways, is wholly unprepared for. This loser, this freak that she so disdains, is going to even the score, and ruin her in the process: I’m going to blame my death on her. I’m going to leave a note that details it all, and I’m going to make it clear that my corpse is her trophy.
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.