Miss Me Not

"That one on Wednesday. The family one, 'Modern Family.'"

"Me too. What else?" he probed.

His questions were never ending and we talked through all the shows. The questions should have bothered me. I hated opening up to anyone, but his questions were different. Maybe he was playing me by keeping things light. Time would tell. The hours bled away and before I knew it I was startled by the opening of the front door. Donna was home from Friday family night. I couldn't remember the last time I'd been awake when she returned home from church.

"I gotta go," I told Dean when our conversation had hit a lull.

"Oh shit, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to keep you on the phone so long," he apologized.

"It's all good," I said. "Besides, my ear is barely bleeding," I mocked.

"I'll try harder tomorrow. What's a phone conversation without a good ear gusher?"

"Night," I said, feeling the corners of my mouth rising slightly.

"Night, Mads, I'll talk to you tomorrow," he said, not asking for permission. He knew me well already. Tonight had been fun. It'd be wrong to do it again the next night. Maybe I just won't answer the phone when he calls again. I am such a liar.

Our call the next night went much the way the previous night had gone. We talked about our favorite shows, teachers that drove us nuts, places we wanted to go, which stumped me since I never thought I'd be around long enough to travel. We steered clear of the taboo subjects like suicide and my family life. I knew it was only a matter of time before he'd get sick of the fluff topics. I dreaded that moment.

Sunday dragged for me. Dean had told me at the end of our conversation the previous night that he'd be out of touch all day Sunday. He had some family reunion in Flagler County to attend. It was insane to miss him. A week ago he wasn't even a blip on my radar.

Sick of waiting for a call that wasn't coming, I threw myself into straightening up my room and cleaning out my school bag. As I was organizing my bag, the note from Friday slipped out of my world history book. I crouched down on my floor and extracted a wooden box that I had named "The Coffin," out from under my bed. It was covered in dust bunnies because I hadn't taken it out in a while. I pulled the lid off to reveal the stack of notes inside. It had been almost four years since I added my last note to the box. I climbed back up on my bed with the wooden box cradled on my lap. As I slowly leafed through my hate mail, my sins from the past began to resurface, threatening to strangle me. I had no secrets from my peers. They knew everything. The crinkled papers in my lap proved that. Extracting the bottom one from the stack, I recalled with clarity the day I'd gotten it. It was the day after my father had fled our house, horrified and without a word of goodbye. After a weekend of screaming, tears and rants, his silent departure was observed with grief from me, and indifference from Donna. Their words had torn each other to shreds, leaving a tattered mess behind. I stood in the middle of their crossfire, completely to blame for the wedge that had popped up between them. I smoothed the paper in my lap, studying the one word that was scrawled in red across its surface:

WHORE

As insults went, it wasn't very clever, and as the months following my parents' separation slid by, the insults from my classmates became more imaginative. I became the queen of fading into the background, abandoning my flamboyant ways I'd adopted to get attention. I gave up the black and purple streaked hair I had sported all through junior high, and went back to my natural plain auburn locks. The eyebrow ring that had hurt like a bitch to have done was removed along with the bar in my tongue that I never liked. A tattoo on my right wrist was my final act of rebellion. I'd slipped the tattoo artist an extra hundred to ignore my age so he could use his tattoo gun to scrawl two words on my wrists. The words were used to remind me of the lives I'd ruined with one unforgivable act. I threw away all my provocative clothing, which even at thirteen had turned heads of men twice my age, and at times, three times my age. Loose jeans and even looser black t-shirts replaced them. I used my new change in appearance to fade into the background, and eventually the gossip died away. By freshman year, I was officially a shadow. The notes of hatred stopped and my peers ignored my existence. I kept the Coffin filled with the notes to remind me of the life I had lost.

I sat on my bed reading through the notes for more than an hour. The despair I'd felt so many years ago began to fester inside me. This was why I contemplated taking my life. This was why I'd made the pact. I had no place on Earth. For years I'd believed I could leave the world the way I lived it—silently. In one week, Mitch's death had changed everything for me. I would not leave a mess behind. Pulling a clean sheet of paper out of my binder, I scrawled out my own note to join those in the Coffin.

We had a pact.

Leave the world behind much as we lived it.

No one would miss us. No harm, no foul.

Our personal demons would be left behind once and for all.

It was the only thing we could count on.

It was all we had.

Living is hell.

Death would have been so much easier.

It felt weird to see our pact written out. I felt a wrenching ache of sadness to be letting go of something that had kept me going for so long. I gathered the stack of notes together, placing mine on top and laid them gently in the Coffin. With one last look, I closed it back up before sliding it under my bed. It may be the death of me, but it was time to live.

Chapter Nine

Dean was waiting for me by Ms. Jones's class when I arrived at school the next morning.

"Hey," he said.

"Hey, how was the reunion thingy?"

"Crazy, hectic, mass chaos, overeating extravaganza. You get the idea," he said laughing. "I think there was close to sixty of us there all together," he added, all blasé like having sixty family members wasn't a big deal.

"Sixty?" I gasped.