The World Without Us Read online

  I’ll have to stick with what I told the social worker—that I was trying to talk Jeremy out of jumping. It feels like another betrayal, but I can’t see any alternative. Telling the truth is not an option.

  The door opens again, and my breath catches in my throat as I see who is entering the room behind Christine.

  “Mrs. Weathers,” I stammer out. I’ve only met her once and we didn’t say much more than hi. She’s tall and thin, like Jeremy, with dark hair and fair skin. She’s gorgeous, but right now she looks like hell. Her hair is straggling over her shoulders, and she’s wearing saggybutt track pants and a T-shirt, with a raincoat pulled over top.

  “Melody,” she says. Her eyes are all red.

  I stand up awkwardly. “I’m so sorry,” I blurt out. “I should have stopped him.”

  “You did your best,” she says, and she reaches out to pull me into a hug. I put my arms around her and I can feel her shoulders shaking with sobs. “Don’t blame yourself.”

  I pull away. If she knew the truth, she’d hate me.

  “Did you know…did he seem depressed to you?” she asks. “I can’t believe this. How could he? He seemed fine. I’ve been going over everything in my head, again and again, trying to figure out what I missed.”

  Christine murmurs something sympathetic, but Mrs. Weathers ignores her. “Did he say anything to you, Melody?” she asks. “Did you know he was thinking about doing something like this?”

  I shake my head. “Not really. No. I mean, not before, you know, tonight.” My heart is beating so loudly I swear she must hear it, and my palms are slick with sweat.

  My mom says she can always tell when I’m lying. She says I’m terrible at hiding things. I hope to god she’s wrong about that.

  The whole suicide thing had started out as a game. Or maybe not a game, exactly, but a fantasy of sorts. A sort of dark joke, I guess. I wouldn’t admit this to anyone—especially now—but it had actually been kind of fun.

  It started the second time I talked to Jeremy. After that first meeting across from the school, I started noticing him in the hallways. I’d nod hi and he’d nod back, but we didn’t really talk. Then one day I found something jammed into the crack of my locker: a piece of lined paper, folded over and over into a tiny square. I pulled it free. It was one of those things you make as a kid, where you fold the paper to make little pockets and put your thumbs and fingers in to make it open and close like a little paper mouth.

  I looked closer. The four corners each had a number on them, one through four. I tried to remember how the game worked. Pick a number, then open and close that many times. One, two, three. Now what? Pick a flap to open? I felt a prickle of irritation. Was this some trick, another let’s mock Melody moment? I unfolded the toy to see what nasty comments were written inside. There were eight tiny triangles, each with a message neatly written out in minuscule letters.

  And they all said the same thing: “Since we’re all going to die, it’s obvious that when and how don’t matter.” (Camus, L’Étranger, 1942) Melody, meet me after school? Let’s hang out. From Jeremy, your compatriot on Death Row

  I couldn’t help grinning. It was weird, but so what? I’d always been pretty weird myself.

  Jeremy was waiting for me at the bottom of the steps in front of the school.

  “Hey,” I said, lifting one hand in a wave.

  “Nice nails,” he said.

  I held them out for his inspection: short and lime green, with pink skull-and-crossbones stickers on them. “Suzy, this kid I babysit, did them for me.” Suzy’s eight, a third-grader with a genius IQ, an obsession with outer space, a very pink bedroom and questionable fashion sense. “You like?”

  “Very, uh, Pirates of the Caribbean,” he said. “Disney princess meets Jack Sparrow.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, that’s what I was going for.”

  Devika and Adriana walked past us, turned and stared over their shoulders for a moment, then started whispering and giggling as if they’d just caught Jeremy and me doing something much more outrageous than having a conversation.

  “What’s that all about?” Jeremy asked. “How come those girls give you a hard time?”

  I liked that about him, the way he was actually interested, the way he asked questions as if he wanted to understand me better—but this was one question I didn’t want to answer. “Honestly, you don’t know?”

  He actually blushed, which was rather endearing in a goofy kind of way. “I heard something, but I didn’t know if it was bullshit.”

  “What did you hear?”

  Jeremy hesitated. “I heard you attempted suicide last year. At a party.”

  I wondered if that was why he’d approached me: curiosity about my supposed suicidal tendencies. “Yeah,” I said. “They call me Death Wish. Nice, huh? So supportive.”

  “Did you, then? I mean, is it true?”

  I shook my head. “Not really. I’d had a few drinks and I was all depressed. I took a few Tylenol, like five or six, and stupidly told someone. Adriana. I thought she was a friend.” I shrugged and tucked my hands into the long sleeves of my sweater. “Next thing I know, I’m being forced into an ambulance and the whole school knows about it.”

  “Five Tylenol? Huh. Girls always do that. Or else they cut themselves.” He grinned. “They like the drama without the real risk.”

  “I never said I was trying to kill myself. Duh. If I wanted to die, I’d have taken the whole bottle of Tylenol, okay? I’m not an idiot. Smoking, now? I guess that’s probably going to kill me if I live long enough.”

  “So which is it, then? You want to die or not?”

  Not, I was about to say, but I didn’t want him to lose interest. Besides, sometimes I thought maybe I really did. Sometimes I thought the world seriously sucked. “I don’t care enough either way,” I told him. “Like it says on my report cards, I’m unmotivated.”

  He laughed. “Ah, a suicidal underachiever.”

  I liked his laugh, the clear light sound of it, the way he lifted his chin, the way his eyes narrowed into dark lashed lines.

  He leaned back against the brick wall of the school. “When I saw you the first time, you were reading Camus, weren’t you? The Stranger?”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Aren’t you observant.”

  “I wasn’t being stalkerish or anything. I always notice what people are reading.”

  “Have you read it?”

  He shook his head. “I started. Couldn’t get into it.”

  “You should try again,” I told him.

  “Yeah. I just couldn’t relate to the character. What’s his name again?”

  “Meursault.”

  “Yeah. I mean, at the start of the book, when his mother dies and he’s just, you know, like nothing happened? It just seemed a bit out there, you know?”

  “Hmm,” I said noncommittally. “Haven’t you ever not reacted the way people thought you should?”

  “Probably. Still.”

  “I know. It’s kind of extreme.”

  “I’ve read some of his other stuff. I do better with nonfiction. I’ll lend you The Myth of Sisyphus, if you like. Did you know that Camus said suicide was the fundamental philosophical question?”

  “Did he? What, like to be or not to be?”

  “Basically, yeah.”

  “Shakespeare said it first, then.”

  He just laughed. “Death Wish,” he said. “It’s kind of cute, actually. Can I call you DW for short?”

  “No,” I said. “You can’t.”

  It didn’t feel like a particularly important conversation at the time, but I guess that’s really where it all began.

  Death Penalty

  Mrs. Weathers is crying and Christine is talking softly to her, and even though we’re all crowded into this tiny room, I think they’ve both forgotten about me. I’m wondering if I could perhaps slip away when there is another knock on the door.

  “Mrs. Weathers?” A doctor—at least, I assume he is, because he�
��s wearing hospital greens—steps into the room. “Jeremy is out of surgery. It went well. He has a number of fractures, several ribs were broken, and he had a collapsed lung.” He clears his throat and fingers the name tag that hangs around his neck. “His spleen was ruptured, and we’ve had to remove it. A couple of fractured vertebrae, but luckily, no spinal cord injury. He’s going to be here for quite some time, but there’s every reason to believe that he should make a good recovery.”

  Mrs. Weathers stands up and starts crying harder than ever. “Oh god. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Can I see him?”

  The doctor nods. “He’s not conscious yet, but you can see him.”

  She follows him out of the room without a word to me, and I watch her go. I wonder what Jeremy will say when he regains consciousness.

  Christine turns back to me. “Well, that’s good news.”

  I try to smile and feel like I’m wearing a mask. “Yes. Yes.”

  “Amazing, really. After a fall like that. What is it, a hundred feet?”

  “Uh, more like a hundred and ninety, I think.” I wish I could suck the words back in. I shouldn’t know that, should I? I tug at the hem of my short dress, pulling it down toward my knees. My bare thighs look inappropriately naked against the plastic chair.

  “A miracle,” Christine says.

  A miracle. I suppose it is, if you believe in that sort of thing. It’s not that I’m not glad he’s alive—of course I am. I just can’t believe he jumped.

  “Let’s call your parents,” Christine says. “I don’t see any reason to keep you here, but I’d feel better about you going home with a responsible adult.”

  It’s not like I can keep this a secret. “I’ll call them.” I take my phone out of my pocket and dial home.

  Vicky picks up on the first ring. “Melody? Where are you?”

  “I’m at the hospital. Um, Bayfront Medical Center.”

  “Oh my god. Are you okay? What’s wrong?” Her voice is rising, and I know she’s picturing car crashes, drunk drivers, god knows what.

  “I’m fine, Vicky. It’s Jeremy.” And then I lose it, crying so hard that I can’t even speak, and Christine gently takes the phone out of my hand and fills Vicky in on all the gory details: Melody’s friend Jeremy…a suicide attempt… seriously injured…I feel kind of numb, like a part of me is separate and just watching myself fall apart. I can’t believe any of this is happening.

  I can’t understand how I ended up here.

  It is weird how one thing leads to another. I might never have talked to Jeremy if he hadn’t noticed the book I was reading. My mom would feel awful if she knew that, because she was the one who gave me the book. She thought I’d be interested, not because of the whole life-is-absurd theme, but because—spoiler alert—the main character gets sentenced to death.

  The death penalty is a big deal around here. Florida has more prisoners on death row than any other state, though Texas actually kills more. Everyone knows when there’s an execution scheduled. Protesters show up from all over, university students organize stuff, tensions run pretty high. My mother has been an activist since I was a toddler, and she’s lost more than a few friends because of it. She’s the chair of this local group and she’s always doing something—going to meetings, phoning senators and reporters, blogging, circulating online petitions and printing out flyers. My dad, Bill, is a prof at USF and is more academic than practical, but he’s against the death penalty too. Which is good, because otherwise they’d probably have had to get a divorce. Despite all her talk about open-mindedness, Vicky can’t accept anyone disagreeing with her on this subject.

  Bill’s brother—my uncle Pete—lives three hours away, in Jacksonville, and works at Florida State Prison. Vicky is always trying to get him on side. Last time was at my sixteenth-birthday dinner.

  “You don’t have to support the death penalty just because you work there,” she told him. “In fact, that’s all the more reason to oppose it. You know these men.”

  Pete rubbed his short beard. “They’ve done some horrible things, Vicky. Maybe they deserve to die.”

  “And who are we to judge that?” My mother’s voice was calm. “Most of them have horrific backgrounds. Childhood abuse. Poverty. They are who they are for a reason, Pete.”

  “We all make choices,” Pete said. “They made bad ones.” He never seems to mind Mom arguing with him. He’s pretty unflappable.

  “Doesn’t it bother you?” I asked him. “Getting to know someone, taking care of them, sort of, and knowing that they’re going to be killed?”

  He shrugged. “Be worse if no one took care of them. Someone’s gotta do it.” He cut himself a second slice of key lime pie, pulled out the birthday candle and licked it. “Mmm. Vicky, this pie is to die for.”

  I put down my fork, thinking about the men who’d been executed at the state prison over the last year. Vicky had their pictures up on the wall in her office. “Still,” I said. “It seems kind of…I don’t know, cold-blooded. Keeping them alive for years and then killing them.”

  “Better than killing them right away,” he said. “They get their due legal process and all that. Besides, half these guys have appeals pending; they could be around for years.”

  Vicky just shook her head. It was a conversation they had been having for years, and as far as I could see, it was a waste of her time. Pete wasn’t going to change his mind. When he and I were alone together, he’d tell me all kinds of stories about the men on death row, and sometimes I felt like I knew them.

  There’s a lot of stuff that bothers me about death row, but it’s the details that get to me the most. Like the whole deal of the prisoners requesting a last meal. Before Pete started working there, I always figured that last-meal business was just in the movies, but they actually do it. It seems so weird to prepare some fancy dish and then, the next day, kill the guy who ate it.

  Rennie, the last guy, asked for a chocolate shake, a cheeseburger and fries. He was forty-five and had been on death row for fifteen years. He killed a conveniencestore clerk in a robbery when he was in his late twenties, which is horrible, but by the time they executed him, he’d converted to Catholicism and earned a history degree. That’s who they killed—not the young guy who killed the clerk. I mean, what’s the point? How does that make any sense at all?

  Anyway, Vicky’s been fighting against the death penalty for as long as I can remember. Before I was born, she was a social worker in child protection. Then, when she was on mat leave, she got involved with an advocacy group, and by the time I was starting preschool, she was running it. She had a job too—counseling families and running support groups for parents—but her volunteer work was her real passion. It was weird: most people didn’t think much about the people living on death row, but I felt like I’d grown up with this huge extended family of people all waiting to die. I could date events in my life by who was executed that year.

  I didn’t usually get into my mom’s business with kids at school, but a couple of weeks after we started hanging out, Jeremy told me he wanted to meet my parents.

  Why? I typed. It was late, and I was in bed; we were texting.

  Why not? I’m always curious about people’s families.

  Huh, I typed back. Brilliant. Could I be any less eloquent? God.

  It’s interesting, don’t u think?

  I hadn’t really thought much about it.

  You get along with your folks ok?

  Yes. You?

  Complicated. What do yours do?

  I rolled over on my bed, balancing my phone on my pillow. Dad’s a prof. Mom does counseling and volunteers a lot. No need to get into that now. Yours?

  Teachers. Divorced. High school. Math and English. Different schools. So when can I come over?

  I’ve never been one of those kids who gets embarrassed by their parents. I love Vicky and Bill, and even though they make me crazy at times, I actually have a lot of respect for them both. So I wasn’t quite sure why I didn’t want to introdu
ce Jeremy to them. I sighed in the darkness. He wasn’t going to drop it. After school tomorrow? I typed.

  The next day, Jeremy and I headed back to my place together after school. It just felt easy being with him, like we’d known each other for a long time. I wondered if he had a girlfriend. I’d never seen him with anyone. Maybe he was gay.

  I glanced sideways at him as we rounded the corner onto my street. Halloween was a week away, and there were pumpkins everywhere, and those Kleenex ghosts hanging from the trees.

  “Wow. Your neighborhood really gets into Halloween, huh?”

  My family lives in Old Northeast. It’s one of my favorite parts of St. Petersburg, the kind of neighborhood where people hang out on their front porches, wave to the joggers and dog walkers, and look for any excuse for a community celebration. “Just wait,” I said. “Some of these folks have barely gotten started.” I pointed at a narrow wood-shingled house with two very crooked palm trees in front of it. “That house there? There’s these two gay men who live there—some kind of artists, I think, but they’re in, like, their eighties—and they do a haunted-house setup you won’t believe.” I stopped walking and looked at Jeremy. “Hey, are you doing anything for Halloween?”

  He shook his head. “No plans. I usually stay home. Actually, it’s kind of goofy, but I love handing out candy.”

  “We should go trick-or-treating,” I said. “Old Northeast is awesome for trick-or-treating. We even close the streets for the evening.”

  He laughed. “I haven’t been since I was about eleven.”

  “Yeah, same. Maybe twelve. I think I was a vampire. You?”

  “Um, one of the Blues Brothers. Hat, sunglasses and sideburns.”

  “God, weren’t you original.”