Suicide Notes From Beautiful Girls (8 page)

And I slip my hand into his pocket.

Chapter 17

I’m upstairs in a bedroom,
Max’s parents’, I think—it smells like fabric softener and old man cologne. I shut the door behind me and double-check that it’s locked. Only then do I take out Delia’s phone, her yellow painted finger’s final fuck you on the screen. I key in the code 5-8-0-0-8.

It was the code she used for everything, because upside down, it spells out BOOBS.

And just like that, the phone unlocks.

I scroll through her recent texts. There’s one from her mom on the first.
Happy New Year! On our way back. See you soon, sweetie!
And my heart catches in my throat, at the hopeful earnestness of this message, the tone of which does not even remotely match their actual relationship. But her mom was always like that, trying to pretend things were different than they were when she was in the mood for it, as
though by lying to both of them, she’d make a different reality.

There’s one from Jeremiah sent the same morning.
Things are so boring here with my parents’ friends. Wish you were here even though I know you’d hate it. Hope you’re feeling better. Tried calling you. Will try again!

The next one is also from him too, received at exactly midnight.
Happy New Year!!

I keep scrolling—there are a few other New Year’s texts from random names I recognize from back when we were friends, random people she saw sometimes. But then I see something else—a message from earlier that same afternoon. December thirty-first at 3:55 p.m.

hey sexy, ready to start hte new year off with some fireworks. outside your house

The message is from someone saved to her phone as “FUCKER.”

Right below is her reply, the last message in the conversation:

Doors unlocked . . .

My heart starts pounding because oh my God,
this
must be the guy Delia was cheating with. But then my heart pounds even harder as I start to realize something. I take out my own phone, go to my missed call log. Delia called me at 3:59, four minutes after she received this text, which means that when Delia called me, FUCKER was inside, which means
he was the one yelling in the background
.

This was the person she was with, whose secret she had threatened to tell. And maybe, just maybe, this was the person who stopped her.

Someone is turning the door handle. “Hey!” a voice calls. “What are you doing? No one’s supposed to be in there.” Hanny.

“Sorrrrrry!” I call out. I try to keep my voice sloshy, drunk sounding. “Jussa second.”

As fast as I can, I save FUCKER’s number into my own phone. And then I scroll down, to J, just to see. I’m still in there—J JUNE JUNIE JUNEBUG.

Bang bang bang
, the door rattles. “Open the door! If you’re having sex on my parents’ bed I will literally kill you.”

But I’m in a trance now, and I can’t stop myself. Who knows when I will get a chance like this again. I open up her pictures, telling myself I need to do this. Maybe there’s a picture of FUCKER in here or some other kind of clue. And I
am
looking for that, but also I want a glimpse of her and her life. I’m greedy for bits of her, whatever I can get.

Only there aren’t many photos in here, and they’re all from months ago—a hand holding an ice-cream cone, the inside of a pocket, a dog, the guy behind the counter at the 7-Eleven who always checks out teen girls’ asses even though he’s probably about fifty. But then . . . I stop breathing. Because there’s a picture of the two of us. She’s holding a chunk of my hair next to her face so it looks like it’s growing out of her head, and I’m doing the same with hers. Our eyes are shining bright
and beautiful, mouths stained cherry red. I’ve never seen this picture before. Where was this? When was this?

Suddenly it all comes rushing back. I remember the feeling of the night, the sense that anything could happen. The moment when the flash went off.

BANG BANG BANG.

I slip both phones back into my pocket. I open the door, lean heavily against the door frame. “Sorrrrry, I was trying to fine the bathroom-an . . .” I look up at the angry face of Max Hannigan, head square and hard like a block of wood. And next to him is Ryan.

“Junie,” he says. “I was looking for you.” He leans in and sniffs me. “You’re trashed . . .” I’ve only ever drunk in front of him once before, and it was over a year ago.

“Jeremiah . . . ,” I say. “We . . . toasted.”

By the time I get back downstairs, Jeremiah is so trashed, I could shove my finger up his nose and I doubt he’d notice.Getting the phone back to him is easy. He is not aware of anything—my hand in his pocket, the couch under him, the fact that he is passing out in the middle of a party. I wonder where his friends are, if he actually has any, because why else, when his girlfriend died three days ago, is he here all alone, with only me to think to take his keys away because there’s no way in hell he should be driving. It makes me feel sad for him. But I shake it off. I don’t have any sadness left to spare.

I ask Ryan to get me some water. And then I take out my
phone and I call FUCKER. My heart pounds as the phone rings and rings. It goes to the default voice mail greeting, telling me to leave a message. I don’t.

Not long later the three of us pile into Ryan’s car. He’s agreed to drive Jeremiah home. Jeremiah gets in back, leans against the door. Ryan is staring straight ahead.

And all I can think about is FUCKER. What he did, who he is, and how the hell I am going to figure it out.

Chapter 18

5 years, 1 month, 2 days earlier

Delia said it was her
diary, so when June unrolled the narrow paper scroll she was immediately confused.
My To Do List
was preprinted in purple at the top. Delia had crossed out “To Do” and written “Did.” Below that was just a list of names, a half dozen or so.

“I don’t understand,” June said.

“Well, it’s the only diary I will ever keep. Everything else, you can help me remember.” She grinned. “These are the boys I’ve kissed. I wrote really small because I figure there’s going to be a lot of them, and I’m going to keep this list for my whole life.” She pointed to the first name, Fraser Holmes. “We were in first grade. He tried to stick his finger up my nose after, the little perv.”

June had never kissed anyone, though recently she’d let a cute boy on the bus have a sip from her water bottle and it
felt kind of like
something
at the time, his mouth where hers had been and all that. But now, here with Delia, who was her brand-new friend and her very own age and had kissed—June counted quickly—five people, she felt the full weight of how silly that was.

“You’ve done a lot of kissing,” June said. She meant it as a compliment.

Delia laughed. “Well, I’m not sure the first few count. But yeah . . .”

June stared at Delia’s lips—shiny with mango gloss. You couldn’t usually just look at a mouth and tell whether they got kissed much. But the thing was, with Delia’s you kind of could.

Delia shrugged, then went on. “Why is it that so many of the most important things happen with your mouth? Kissing, telling secrets, eating cake. I don’t know.”

“Aren’t you afraid your mom or someone will find the list?”

“Nah. I keep it hidden in a really good place. Which is lucky, because shitbag would kill me if he knew. Like it’s any of his business at all
what
I do.” Delia tipped her head to the side and bit one of her very-kissed lips. “The messed-up thing is how so many people think your body is their business, especially if you’re a girl. It’s not really the same with boys. But your body
isn’t
their business . . . unless they’re your pimp or, like, a plastic surgeon. Or a pimp plastic surgeon. Then it totally is.” Delia stuck out her tongue. They’d only been friends for a couple months, but June already knew this was classic Delia—she’d say
something real and true, and then something ridiculous in the very next sentence. And the world would suddenly seem bigger and smaller and more serious and less serious. And Junie would feel just how incredibly lucky she was to have found this girl.

“Showing you this list is an important moment in our best-friendness,” Delia continued. “It’s like when a couple is dating and one gives the other a key to their house and that’s how they know it’s true love.” Delia paused. Then smiled. “Except, of course, we already knew it was . . .”

Chapter 19

Standing there in the sun,
the charred wood is the blackest thing I’ve ever seen. I force myself to look away and watch the house. I’m checking for signs of movement inside, even though I already know there won’t be any—it’s Sunday morning, and if they’re around at all, her mother and stepfather will be at church.

I’m not ready. But if I wait until I am, I’ll never do it at all. I give myself a countdown, 3-2-1. I pretend Delia is here with me now, holding my hand and pulling me forward. I run.

I make my way across the backyard, up the back stairs leading to the porch. I open the screen door, heart hammering. There’s the row of rocks. I spot the gray one, third from the end. It glitters in the sunshine. I lift it, and the key is right there where it always was, where it has been for years, tarnished and freezing cold between my fingers.

I slide it into the lock. And then . . . there I am, inside Delia’s kitchen for the first time in over a year.

I’m struck by the smell, exactly the same as it always was. Like air freshener and new paint, even though the house hasn’t been painted for a very long time, and that indeterminate Delia’s house smell that’s impossible to describe. The kitchen is all tile floors and yellow walls and cabinets made out of some kind of fake wood that is apparently more expensive than real wood. Delia said her stepfather claimed it was all “top of the line.” And when Delia imitated him saying it, she used a voice like a 1920s gangster. “Toppa the line, fellas!”

I run up the cream carpeted stairs and down the hall. I’m struck with a million memories at once.
There is no time for this.

At the end of the hall a cord dangles from the ceiling. I reach up and pull. The attic stairs come down slowly, unfold like bent legs. I climb up into the attic, heart hammering.

I make my way across unfinished floorboards to a bunch of cardboard boxes, and then to an old trunk, black lacquer over peeling cardboard. Delia’s box, still here, same as always. I need to know who FUCKER is, and the answer might be here. Right inside.

I open it.

And what I see now in front of me is this: three empty Wolfschmidt vodka bottles, two empty cigarette packs, four metal nitrous canisters stolen from someone’s job at a coffee shop. There are condom wrappers and two empty Robitussin bottles. But none of this is what I’m looking for. No. What I’m
looking for is a small paper scroll, light blue, worn from years of rolling and unrolling. The name at the top will be Fraser Holmes, and the name at the bottom . . . is what I am hoping to find out.

I rifle through the box, touching each item one by one. There’s a salt shaker she stole from the diner for no reason, a handful of loose googly eyes, a teeny tiny plastic bag with tiny red lips on the front, a dozen other random items. Only, no scroll of rolled-up paper. I check three times: it isn’t here. But flush against the bottom of the box is something I didn’t notice at first: an envelope, address written on the back in Delia’s lumpy little-boy handwriting. And the name at the top
is mine
.

My breath catches in my throat. When did she write this? And why didn’t she send it?

I slip the letter into my jacket, close the trunk. I walk back across the attic, down the dark stairs, and push the staircase back up into the ceiling.

I check the time. Delia’s mother and stepfather won’t be back for at least twenty minutes. I go to her bedroom, the place we spent so many hours together, snuck out of and snuck back into, where we laughed ourselves sick, where we told all our secrets.

I turn the knob. The door swings open, and I freeze. Her room is completely cleaned out. The walls are bare, no sheets or pillows on the bed, the surface of her desk is empty, and the floor is spotless. I open a dresser drawer; there’s nothing in it, in any of them.
She’s been dead for four days.

I feel a swell of anger at I’m not even sure who. I wonder
if her stepfather did this, claiming it would be easier on her mother not to have to see Delia’s things. As though cleaning out a room means she never existed at all.

Where is all her stuff? I need to see it. The only bits of her that are left.

Down in the garage I find a pile of trashbags stuffed full. I open one. There are Delia’s clothes—a purple sweater she always wore drooping off one shoulder, a pair of jeans with huge holes in each butt pocket, a brown leather jacket she loved. I lean down, and the smell of her rises up. I have a sudden intense desire to take all these things, to take them away and keep them safe, in case . . . in case what? In case Delia comes back from the dead? The second bag contains more clothes, and books with fairies and dragons and princesses peeking out from their covers. There’s one full of bedding, her pillows, comforter. The last bag is trash—crumpled-up paper towels, tissues, cotton balls streaked with eyeliner. And there at the bottom of the bag is a plastic stick with a clear plastic cap over the top. A pregnancy test.

Holy shit.

Heart thudding, I reach in and flip it over, and there I see two pink stripes. Pregnant.

Was Delia . . . ? Again?

I check my phone. I have five minutes or less before they come home. I close the bags, put them all back where they were, walk through the house, and shut off every light.

Then I go out the back door, lock it behind me, and I’m gone.