It’s not a journal in the traditional sense. That becomes apparent after a page or two. There are no musings about boys or girls. There are no revisited scenes of discord with her father or her teachers. There are no secrets shared or injustices vented.
Instead, there are ways to kill yourself, listed with extraordinary detail.
Knives to the heart. Knives to the arm. Belts around the neck. Plastic bags. Hard falls. Death by burning. All of them methodically researched. Examples given. Illustrations provided—rough illustrations where the test case is clearly Kelsea. Self-portraits of her own demise.
I flip to the end, past pages of dosages and special instructions. There are still blank pages at the back, but before them is a page that reads DEADLINE, followed by a date that’s only six days away.
I look through the rest of the notebook, trying to find other, failed deadlines.
But there’s only the one.
I get off the seesaw, back away from the park. Because now I feel like I am the thing the parents are afraid of, I am the reality they want to avoid. No, not just avoid—prevent. They don’t want me anywhere near their children, and I don’t blame them. It feels as if everything I touch will turn to harm.
I don’t know what to do. There’s no threat in the present—I am in control of the body, and as long as I am in control of the body, I will not allow it to hurt itself. But I will not be in control six days from now.
I know I am not supposed to interfere. It is Kelsea’s life, not mine. It is unfair of me to do something that limits her choices, that makes up her mind for her.
My childish impulse is to wish I hadn’t opened the journal.
But I have.
I try to access any memory of Kelsea giving a cry for help. But the thing about a cry for help is that someone else needs to be around to hear it. And I am not finding a moment of that in Kelsea’s life. Her father sees what he wants to see, and she doesn’t want to dispel this fiction with fact. Her mother left years ago. Other relatives are distant. Friends all exist far outside the black cloud. Just because Lena was nice in physics class doesn’t mean she should be freighted with this, or would know what to do.
I make it back to Kelsea’s empty house, sweaty and exhausted. I turn on her computer and everything I need to know is there in her history—the sites where these plans come from, where this information can be gleaned. Right there, one click away for everyone to see. Only no one is looking.
We both need to talk to someone.
I email Rhiannon.
I really need to speak to you right now. The girl whose body I’m in wants to kill herself. This is not a joke.
I give her Kelsea’s home phone number, figuring there will be no obvious record of it, and that it can always be discounted as a wrong number.
Ten minutes later, she calls.
“Hello?” I answer.
“Is that you?” she asks.
“Yeah.” I’ve forgotten that she doesn’t know the sound of my voice. “It’s me.”
“I got your email. Wow.”
“Yeah, wow.”
“How do you know?”
I tell her briefly about Kelsea’s journal.
“That poor girl,” Rhiannon says. “What are you going to do?”
“I have no idea.”
“Don’t you have to tell someone?”
“There was no training for this, Rhiannon. I really don’t know.”
All I know is that I need her. But I’m afraid to say it. Because saying it might scare her away.
“Where are you?” she asks.
I tell her the town.
“That’s not far. I can be there in a little while. Are you alone?”
“Yeah. Her father doesn’t get home until around seven.”
“Give me the address.”
I do.
“I’ll be right there,” she says.
I don’t even need to ask. It means more that she knows.
I wonder what would happen if I straightened up Kelsea’s room. I wonder what would happen if she woke up tomorrow morning and found everything in its right place. Would it give her some unexpected calm? Would it make her understand that her life does not have to be chaos? Or would she just take one look and destroy it again? Because that’s what her chemistry, her biology would tell her to do.
The doorbell rings. I have spent the past ten minutes staring at the ink stains on the walls, hoping they will rearrange themselves into an answer, and knowing they never will.
The black cloud is so thick at this point that not even Rhiannon’s presence can send it away. I am happy to see her in the doorway, but that happiness feels more like resigned gratitude than pleasure.
She blinks, takes me in. I have forgotten that she is not used to this, that she is not expecting a new person every day. It’s one thing to acknowledge it theoretically, and quite another thing to have a thin, shaky girl standing on the other side of the precipice.
“Thank you for coming,” I say.
It’s a little after five, so we don’t have much time before Kelsea’s father comes home.
We head to Kelsea’s room. Rhiannon sees the journal sitting on Kelsea’s bed and picks it up. I watch and wait until she’s done reading.
“This is serious,” she says. “I’ve had … thoughts. But nothing like this.”
She sits down on the bed. I sit down next to her.
“You have to stop her,” she says.
“But how can I? And is that really my right? Shouldn’t she decide that for herself?”