Courtney Summers - Defy the Dark

It didn’t. And it didn’t.

Now, again, she traced her silver souvenir with her moth-stained fingers.

Cali sucked at dying, too.

It was the note, see. That’s where the whole problem started.

Dear Everyone I Know,

By the time you read this, I’ll be . . .

It had occurred to Cali sometime last month, not long before she was released for good behavior and unexpected mental-health progress, that maybe Doctor Berg and her parents and everyone else would realize she’d meant it if she’d left a note. She’d skipped some of those vital steps last time. Skipped the note, skipped the part where you gave away your prized possessions while expressing a string of fatalistic thoughts to those around you. She hadn’t known those were requirements, benchmarks, the things that separated the attention seekers from the real pros.

But now she knew. The living thought they deserved some sort of reasonable explanation for this very unreasonable action by the dead, and they needed to check off, in retrospect, all the warning signs they should’ve recognized.

So this time Cali had a book of Sylvia Plath poems her roommate at the center had given her and a list of the few nice things she still owned: her iPod with wireless speakers (wires were dangerous), some of her art supplies, the gift certificate to Macy’s her aunt had sent to celebrate her return home. Next to each, she’d designated its new rightful owner.

The funny thing about the gift card was that she hated almost everything in Macy’s, and she hated almost everything in her aunt, and it would probably take her an entire decade to cash the card in, one pair of nonoffensive socks or rubber-backed clip-on earrings at a time. And the funny thing about the poems was that reading them didn’t make her feel morbid at all. They made her feel understood, less alone. Those words got her; they marched in and grabbed her and held on. But you couldn’t walk through life with a book in front of your nose at every breath and turn, words tucked under your arm like the warm touch of a best friend, and whoever found the poems would jump to the right kinds of conclusions, and they’d see the note and the makeshift will and they’d nod somberly and say they should’ve known, they should’ve seen the signs. But at least they’d finally understand she wasn’t screwing around, and maybe they would tell Doctor Berg, too, when they called for the medical files or whatever they were supposed to do in that kind of situation.

Tonight was the night, and after her mother had left the soup and probed her mouth and looked at her once more with those sorrowful eyes, Cali was ready to sit down and write the all-important note.

There were no sharp things left in her bedroom. If her father could’ve sanded the corners of the walls into harmless curves, he would’ve, but ultimately they concluded, over family dinner one night, that if Cali wanted to hurt herself using the corners of her walls, she couldn’t possibly do it in silence. They’d be able to intervene. Still, her dangerous books were all paperbacks now, her dangerous glasses had been fitted with kid-friendly plastic lenses, her dangerous colored pencils had been confiscated. Cali had to settle for a new box of crayons, presented to her on her first night back home with a stack of soft, white stationery on which Cali had already written her list of valuable items. The crayons made Cali smile yet again, and she thought she should add those to the list as well. They were the most extravagant box of Crayolas she’d ever owned. She’d begged her mother for the ninety-six-color pack every year for a decade, back when things like crayons mattered. But her mother always said forty-eight was more than enough for any scenario a girl growing up in the great state of Maine might encounter.

Cali pulled a fresh sheet of stationery from her desk drawer and explored the color palette in the yellow-and-green box before her. Her fingers passed over the reds, which she felt were melodramatic and would detract from her message, and the blues, which were too overtly symbolic. Black was typical and uninspired and she hated the way it looked on her cloud-colored paper. She finally settled on a pink-orange one called Mango Tango and gripped the crayon between cold fingers, thinking. She didn’t want to address the letter to her parents directly, even though they’d undoubtedly be the ones to find it. Her. It.

To Whom It Concerns

May Concern . . .

Cali inspected the script, fat and slanty. Like the baby’s attempt at writing his own name. She thought about his pudgy little hand holding on to a spoon or a crayon like this, drawing lopsided circles and stars with too many points. A weak pulse tingled at the bottom of her heart, a pressure, a squeeze she almost recognized, like a memory you didn’t know whether you’d actually experienced or only seen in a photo. But it disappeared quickly and she underlined her words on the page twice, off to a good start.

The wind shifted and pressed itself against Cali’s bedroom window. The black pines in the backyard swayed, their branches forced apart, then mashed together, and just inside the screen, a spider scurried across the sill. An orb weaver, Cali realized. She’d read about them somewhere, read that some of them didn’t even make webs, despite their names. They didn’t need anything so elaborate, that particular kind; they simply dangled a sticky substance from their front legs and enticed the unsuspecting little moths to approach. The moths got ensnared and the spider casually reeled them in, closer and closer. Then, predator devoured prey.

Cali appreciated that. Nature protected some, eliminated others, and left the rest to fend for themselves. Beautiful and terrible at once.

The spider explored a corner of the sill, and Cali thought this one was likely the kind that made webs, the kind that ate their own silky strands every twenty-four hours. They’d evolved from the Jurassic period, Cali remembered. A hundred and forty million years of doing the same thing every day: making a web, destroying it, making another, destroying it. The creature’s bulbous body was orange and black like a tiger’s, and now that Cali’d spotted it, she couldn’t unsee it. The spider paced back to the other corner. The thing was trapped; she’d probably starve. Cali should do something, she thought. Open the window and the screen, maybe. Show her the way out.

Her phone buzzed against the desk and she jumped. She checked the caller ID after the vibrating stopped. Wrong number.

No one called her on purpose anymore.

Cali returned to her letter and scrawled out the next part.

by the time you read this I’ll

I don’t know how to

sorry I am somessed up

everything with the

Damn it. This was already the twenty-third draft, if you counted all the versions she’d written in her head. She’d probably have to start over. She had to get the words right. She had to get all of it right—nothing left to chance tonight, nothing misinterpreted by family, law enforcement, or medical professionals as anything less than the real thing.

Cali’s eyes found the spider again. The creature dangled from the bottom of the upper sash now, suspended on a single, silky thread. Behind her, the sky was velvety purple and blue, smudged in places with hazy dark clouds. The summer sun must’ve set hours earlier, but Cali had no recollection of it. The whole day had been a blur, same as all the others, and now Cali tried to remember the last time she’d watched the sun go down. Really watched it, noticed the oranges and reds like fire in the sky.

Briefly, she wondered if she would miss it. She didn’t think so.

Her phone buzzed again with that same stupid number. She hit IGNORE. The phone was kind of pointless, but Cali couldn’t get rid of it. Memories, she guessed. Or maybe inertia. Her parents had kept the account for her while she was away, and after she’d returned, she’d checked an empty voice mail box, scrolled through a list of no missed calls from all the friends she used to have.