them. I pushed my hair out of my face. All the cool girls at school seem to have smooth TV hair, but mine is a frizzy, curly, snaky mess. The day I first talked to Drew, he said, “Man, I love your hair—it’s that wild witchy hippie kind of hair.” He loved it, he said. I started to not mind my head so much after that. Drew likes when I wear drapey hippie blouses too. I have lots of those now.
I don’t know how long I stood there thinking about that sort of stuff, but when I heard the front door opening, I dropped the Valium back in her drawer. I went into the living room as Marlene came waltzing in, all giddy and grinning. Turned out she’d never made it to the roof. She’d been hanging out with the goof upstairs, the unemployed guy with the moustache who lies around on his balcony all day, tanning. I went to my bedroom and closed the door.
I didn’t tell Mr. Walters any of that, though. I told him I had insomnia. It wasn’t a lie either. I had been awake till one or two in the morning trying to think of quick and easy ways to die: eating Drano (in gel capsules so it’d just slip down), electrocution (blow-dryer in the bathtub), fast-moving truck (stepping in front of). One time on The Phil Donahue Show, I saw a woman tell the whole world how her son died by auto-erotic asphyxiation. He hanged himself with a necktie in his closet, accidentally suffocating while he jerked off over a porn mag.
How can you tell a guidance counsellor shit like that? You’d sound like a whiny pathetic jerk, snivelling for attention. Sam says that serious people don’t talk, they act.
But after I left Walters that day, I was pissed off that I couldn’t say anything to him. I’m pretty sure that is when I first started to actually plan Marlene’s suicide. She could wash a couple of Valium down with vodka. Maybe she’d forget and I’d give her a couple more. When she passed out, I could lay the pillow on her face and slowly push down. What would be so wrong about it? She kept on insisting she wanted to die, and I could help. I could be the one to make things right for her. I started to think that this was the only way out for Marlene and me. She couldn’t bear to be alive and I couldn’t bear to watch her misery any more. I would be a strange kind of angel.
But I had to figure out the money situation. I’d need enough to get me through for the first few weeks at least.
What if I endorsed the welfare cheque over to me when it came? Or I could deposit the cheque into her account and write myself a new one.
I couldn’t stop thinking how it would work.
I remember it was one-thirty in the morning and I was in my room, sitting up in bed, practising Marlene’s signature in my school binder. I had started by tracing her name from an old cancelled cheque. Then I went freehand. I’d done two nearly full pages of Marlene Bell, Marlene Bell …
It was quiet that night. No sirens in the distance. No voices in the halls.
I thought I heard muttering and I glanced at the wall that separated our bedrooms. It almost sounded as though she was crying. Then nothing.
I went back to my signatures.
A screech ripped the air.
Jolting up from the page, I knocked my head against the wall.
Marlene.
I stared at the wall between our rooms again. Her scream became a crying wail and I ripped the signature pages out of my binder and crumpled them up. I switched off my lamp and stared into the dark, my heart banging away like a monkey in a cage.
The wailing turned into loud gasping sobs and I jumped out of bed just as my mother’s door flung open. I heard her stagger against the wall as she rushed toward the kitchen. I chased after her.
As I came round the corner, she pulled a butcher knife out of the sink. In just her bra and panties, she turned the point of the blade toward her stomach. Then she let it drop.
“It’s too dirty,” she said. She sank to the floor, choking on her tears. “And I’m too fat. It’ll never go in. How did I get so fat?”
I tried to help her up, but