Every Day

But instead, all I am left with is Kelsea and her damaged perceptions. The walk home is a steep one, and I wonder if it’s yet another way she punishes herself. After about a half hour, with another half hour in front of me, I decide to stop at a playground I’m about to pass. The parents there give me wary looks because I am not a parent or a little kid, so I steer clear of the jungle gym, the swings, and the sandbox, and end up on the outer ring, on a seesaw that looks like it’s been banished from everything else for bad behavior.

There’s homework I could do, but Kelsea’s journal calls out to me instead. I’m a little afraid of what I’ll find inside, but mostly I’m curious. If I can’t access the things she’s felt, I will at least be able to read a partial transcript.

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.