I stood at my locker, trading out my math book for my science text.
“So who’s the chick who tried to axe herself?” I heard a girl ask a few lockers away. I perked my ears and looked over at them.
“What do you mean?” her friend asked.
The girl’s eyes got big. “You didn’t hear? Some senior tried to kill herself a couple days ago. Took pills, I think. Or maybe slit her wrists, I don’t remember. Name was Ginny something.”
I gasped. “Ginny Baker?” I asked aloud.
The girls looked at me, their faces confused.
“What?” one of them asked me.
I took a few steps toward them. “The girl who tried to kill herself. You said her name was Ginny something. Was it Ginny Baker?”
She snapped her fingers. “Yeah, that’s her. You know her?”
“Yeah,” I said. I rushed back to my locker and crammed my books inside. I slammed my locker and headed for the office. I rushed past the secretaries and into Mrs. Tate’s office, where Mrs. Tate looked up from a book, startled.
“I just heard about Ginny,” I said, trying to catch my breath. “Can you drop me off at the hospital?”
39
I had to bite my palms when I stepped out of the elevator on the fourth floor into the vestibule of the psychiatric ward at Garvin General. I had a sick feeling in my stomach like if I messed up even the tiniest bit, someone would step around the corner with restraints and take me back into my old room, make me stay there and go to those insane group sessions. Make me listen to Dr. Dentley’s idiotic “Let me repeat what I’ve heard, Miss Leftman. Let me validate you.”
I stepped up to the nurse’s station. A bristle-haired nurse looked up at me. I was surprised to find that I didn’t recognize her at all, which either meant I was too drugged up and stupid to take in her face when I was here, or she was new. She didn’t act as if she recognized me either, so I was betting on the latter.
“Yes?” she asked with that weary and suspicious face all mental health nurses have, like I was going to help a patient escape and seriously mess up her day.
“I’m here to see Ginny Baker,” I said.
“Are you family?” the nurse asked. She rifled through some papers on her desk as if I didn’t exist at all.
“I’m her half-sister,” I lied, surprising even myself with how smoothly it came out.
The nurse glanced up from her paperwork at me. She looked like she didn’t believe it for one second that I was Ginny’s half-sister, but what could she do—demand a DNA test? She sighed, motioned over her right shoulder with her head, and said, “Four-twenty-one, on the left there.”
She went back to her paperwork and I shuffled past the desk and into the hallway, praying I wouldn’t run into anyone who most certainly knew that I wasn’t a Baker step-child, especially Dr. Dentley. I took a deep breath and ducked into Room 421 before I could think about it too long.
Ginny was propped up in bed, her arms hooked up to IVs and monitors. She was staring blankly up at the TV. A big Styrofoam cup with a striped bendable straw was sitting on the bed table in front of her. Her mother sat next to the bed, also looking up at the TV, which was playing some sort of dramatic daytime talk show. Neither of them was talking. Neither of them looked like they’d washed their hair today.
Mrs. Baker was the first to glance at me when I entered the room. A string of tension wound itself around her torso when she placed my face, and her mouth opened just the tiniest bit.
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” I said. At least I think I said it. My voice felt like a squeak.
Ginny looked at me then, and once again I was struck by how disfigured her face was. Once again I felt sorry. No matter how many times I looked at her spoiled cheekbones and flayed lips now it was always shocking.
“What are you doing here?” she mumbled.
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” I repeated. “I wanted to talk to you.”
Ginny’s mom had gotten out of her chair, but she stood behind it, almost like she was hiding behind it. I half expected her to pick it up and use it to fend me off, sort of like a lion tamer.
Ginny’s eyes roved to her mom and back to me, but neither of them spoke. I took a few more steps into the room.
“I was in Room four-sixteen,” I said. I didn’t know why this was important for me to tell her, but for some reason it felt right when it came out of my mouth. “It’s better on this side, because they keep the insomniacs over in the four-fifties.”
Just then I heard a voice that I recognized and the squeak of cheap shoes coming down the hallway. I braced myself to be kicked out, which sucked because even though I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say to Ginny, I knew I hadn’t yet said it.
“Well, how’s Ginny today?” the voice said behind me, coming into the room. Dr. Dentley.
He walked to Ginny’s bedside and lifted her wrist to take her pulse, the whole time yammering on about what a good group they had this morning and did she feel restless and how did she sleep last night before noticing that both Bakers were still staring at me. He turned, surprise dawning on his face.
“Valerie,” he said, “what are you doing here?”
“Hi Dr. Dentley,” I said. “I’m just visiting.”
He turned from Ginny and put his hand on my back between my shoulder blades, shoving me lightly toward the door. “I don’t think, given the circumstances, that you should be here. Miss Baker needs this time to—”
“It’s okay,” Ginny said. Dr. Dentley stopped pushing me. Ginny nodded when we looked at her. “I don’t mind if she’s here.”
Both Dr. Dentley and Ginny’s mom looked at Ginny as if she might have truly lost her mind. I wondered if Dr. Dentley was making plans in his head to send her off to the schizophrenic wing.
“Really,” Ginny said.
“Well,” Dr. Dentley blustered. “Regardless, I need to do some evaluating…”
“I’ll wait in the hallway,” I said.
Ginny nodded wearily, looking as if the last thing she wanted to do was spend a little alone time with Dr. Dentley.
I scuffed out of the room, feeling much freer now that I’d been recognized and invited to stay. I lowered myself to the floor and sat in the hallway, listening to the low rumble of Dentley’s voice coming through the door of Ginny’s room.
Soon I heard footsteps and Ginny’s mom came out into the hallway. She paused when she saw me sitting there, but only for the briefest moment. Had I not been paying attention I might have missed the hesitation entirely. She cleared her throat, looked at the floor, and began walking again. She looked so tired. Like she hadn’t slept in years. Like maybe she’d never in her life had a good night’s sleep. Like if they put her in Room 456, next to Ronald, who liked to sit up into the long hours of the night picking scabs off his elbows and singing old Motown songs, she’d be right at home.
She’d almost passed me but thought better of it. Her face was a straight line when she looked at me.
“I couldn’t see it coming,” she said.
I stared at her. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to respond.
Mrs. Baker looked straight ahead again. Her voice was toneless, as if even it had been worn out and could no longer do its job properly.
“I suppose I should thank you for stopping the shooting,” she said, and then she walked briskly down the hallway away from me. She glanced at the nurse’s station and then hit the double doors with a bang and was gone. She supposed she should… yet she didn’t. Not exactly.
Still. It was almost good enough.
Soon Dr. Dentley was leaving, too, whistling. I stood up.
“Dr. Hieler says you’re doing well,” he said. “I hope you’re still taking your meds.”
I didn’t respond. Not that he was waiting for my response, anyway. He simply walked down the hall, tossing a light “She’ll need to rest today, so don’t stay long,” over his shoulder.
I took a couple deep breaths and stepped into Ginny’s room again. Sh
e was wiping her eyes with a Kleenex.
I sidled over to a chair, the farthest from her bed, and sat down.
“He’s such an idiot,” she said. “I want out of here. He won’t let me go. Says I’m a threat to myself and it’s law that I have to stay. Stupid.”
“Yeah,” I said. “They make suicides stay for three days or something like that. But most of them end up staying longer because their parents are so freaked out. Is your mom freaked out?”
Ginny gave a sardonic little laugh and blew her nose. “She is so beyond freaked,” she said. “You have no idea.”
We sat for a moment and watched TV, which had turned over to one of those entertainment magazine shows. A photo of a dark-haired teen celebrity splashed across the screen. She looked neither glamorous nor happy. She looked like any other kid. I thought she even looked a little like me.
“When Nick first moved here, we were friends,” Ginny said out of the blue, breaking the silence. “He was in my homeroom freshman year.”
“Yeah?” Nick had never said anything about being friends with Ginny Baker. “I didn’t know that.”
She nodded. “We talked, like, every day. I liked him. He was really smart. And nice, too. That’s what gets me. He was really nice.”
“I know,” I said. Suddenly it felt like Ginny and I had worlds in common now. I wasn’t the only one who saw it. There was someone else. Someone else saw the good in Nick. Even through her marred face she still saw it.
She leaned her head back against her pillow and closed her eyes. Tears were slipping out from under her lids, but she made no attempt to brush them away. We were both quiet for a while and finally I leaned over and plucked a tissue out of a box on the chair next to me. I leaned forward and gently placed it on her face, beneath her closed eyes.
She flinched slightly, but didn’t open her eyes and didn’t try to make me stop. Slowly, my strokes on her cheeks grew bolder and I followed the curved scars along her cheeks with my fingers under the wet tissue. When her face was dry I leaned back in my chair again.
Her voice sounded croaky when she talked again. “When I started going out with Chris Summers at the end of that year, Chris saw me talking to Nick and completely freaked out about it. Totally jealous. I think that’s what started it. I think if I hadn’t ever been friends with Nick, Chris would have ignored him. He was so mean to Nick all the time.”
“Ginny, I…” I started, but she shook her head.
“I had to stop talking to Nick. I had to because Chris would just never let up about it. What do you want to be friends with a freak like that for?” she said in a low voice meant to mimic Chris Summers.
“But Chris was the one who…” I said, but she cut me off again.
“It’s just that I keep thinking… maybe if I hadn’t been Nick’s friend back then… or maybe if I’d stayed his friend and told Chris to shove it… maybe the shooting…” she trailed off, her face crumpling in on itself again. “And now they’re both dead.”
The images on the entertainment show turned to some rapper I’d never heard of. He was wearing one of those giant gold dollar signs around his neck and was flashing some sort of hand signal to the camera. Ginny opened her eyes at last, blew her nose, and gazed at him.
“It wasn’t your fault, Ginny,” I said. “You didn’t cause this. And I… um, I’m really sorry about Chris. I know you really liked him.” In other words, I thought, Ginny could see the good in Chris, too. Which made her somehow better than me, because I never did. Did that make Chris and Nick more alike than different—both bound by a side of themselves that wasn’t the only, or even the best, side of them?
Ginny tore her watery eyes away from the TV. She looked directly into mine. “I’ve wanted to die ever since Nick did this to me,” she said. She pointed to her face. “You have no idea how many surgeries I’ve had and still look at me. I didn’t want to die before, you know, when he was shooting. I was, like, praying that he wouldn’t kill me. But in some ways I wish he would’ve gone ahead and killed me. I hear people talking when I’m out in public all the time and when they think I can’t hear them they always go, ‘That’s such a shame. She was a pretty girl.’ Was. Like a thing of the past, you know? And it’s not like being pretty is the most important thing in the world. But…” she trailed off again, but she didn’t need to finish the sentence. I knew what she was thinking: Being pretty isn’t everything, but sometimes being ugly is.
I didn’t know what to say. She had been so outright about it—so bold. I looked at my jeans. There was a tiny rip in the thigh. I poked my finger into it.
“You know,” she said. “I don’t remember everything that happened that day. But I know you weren’t part of it. I told the police that. Went with Jessica to the police station and everything. My parents were really pissed. I think they wanted to be able to blame it on someone who was still alive. They kept telling me I didn’t know everything I thought I knew. That I could be forgetting things, you know? But I knew you didn’t shoot anybody. I saw you running after him trying to get him to stop. I saw you kneeling down trying to help Christy Bruter, too.”
I fished around in the hole in my jeans with my finger. Ginny leaned back against her pillow and closed her eyes again, like she was worn out. And, I suspected, there was probably a big part of her that was.
“Thank you,” I said. Very softly. More to the hole in my jeans than to her. “And I’m sorry. I mean, I’m really, really sorry for what happened to you. Not that it matters, but I still think you’re pretty.”
“Thanks,” she said. She laid her head back on the pillow and closed her eyes again. Her breathing came soft and steady as she began drifting off to sleep.
My gaze landed on a newspaper, which was lying in the chair where Ginny’s mom had been sitting. A headline screamed out at me:
SHOOTING VICTIM ATTEMPTS SUICIDE:
PRINCIPAL REAFFIRMS HEALING EFFORTS
OF GARVIN HIGH STILL FIRM
The piece was written by Angela Dash, of course. Suddenly I was struck with an idea. I reached over and picked up the paper, folded it into a small square and tucked it into my backpack.
“I should go and let you sleep,” I said. “I think I have something to do. I’ll come back later,” I added, almost sheepishly.
“Yeah, that’d be good,” Ginny said, never opening her eyes as I headed out the door.
40
“I think you should do it,” Dr. Hieler said, dumping half a cup of coffee down the drain in the tiny office kitchen.
When I’d left the hospital, I’d walked straight to his office down the street, not sure where else to go, and totally sure that I needed to talk. He was in between clients, but had a few minutes while he prepared. I followed him around the office, watching him pick up leftover soda cans from old clients and stack paperwork together on his desk.
“Write something. Doesn’t have to be any sort of apology or anything. Just something that represents the class to you.”
“What, like a poem or something?”
“A poem’s a good idea. Just something.” He puttered back into his office and I followed on his heels.
“And just make the suggestion that I read this poem or whatever at the graduation ceremony?”
“Yep.” He used his hand to scoop a small pile of potato chips off his desk into the trash can below.
“Me.”
“You.”
“But aren’t you forgetting that I’m Sister Death, the Girl Who Hated Everyone? The one everyone loves to hate?”
He stopped and leaned forward on his desk. “That’s exactly the reason you should do it. You’re not that girl, Val. You never were.” He glanced at his watch. “I’ve got someone waiting…”
“Yeah, okay,” I said. “Thanks for the advice.”
“Not advice,” he said, heading out the door with me at his heels. “Homework.”
41
“Can you wait here for me?” I asked Mom. “I’ll only be a minute.”
“Here? At the newspaper office?” she asked. “What would you be doing here?” She peered out the windshield at the brick building, the words SUN-TRIBUNE cast across the front of it.
“It’s for a school project,” I said. “The memorial project. I have to pick up some research from a lady who works here.”
Probably every warning bell Mom had was clanging in her head right now. Here she was, coming home late from work already and she had to pick me up at Dr. Hieler’s office, totally unplanned, and drive me directly to the Sun-Tribune office, with no more explanation than I’ll tell you everything later, I swear.
She seemed highly skeptical that I was doing exactly what I said I was doing, but she was probably so relieved that no police cruisers were following us home and I wasn’t in handcuffs that she didn’t push it.
“Mom, everything’s okay,” I said, my hand resting on the door handle. “Trust me on this.”
She gave me a long look, then reached out and brushed my hair off my shoulder. “I do,” she said. “I do trust you.”
I smiled. “I won’t be long.”
“Just do what you need to do,” she said, settling back behind the wheel. “I’ll be here.”
I got out of the car and pushed my way through the double front doors of the Sun-Tribune office. A security guard sitting up front pointed to a sign-in sheet without a word. Once I’d signed in, he turned it and read my name.
“And your business here… ?” he said.
“I need to talk to Angela Dash.”
“She expecting you?” he asked.
“No,” I admitted. “But she’s written about me a lot, so I think she’ll want to talk to me.”
He looked doubtful, but reached over and picked up the phone, mumbled something into it.
A few minutes later, a dumpy brunette in a too-tight denim skirt and out-of-style boots came plodding toward me. She opened the door to let me in the inner offices.