Even the ways to say I miss you aren’t the same: in French, tu me manques is more like you are missing for me, which robs me of my activeness, and makes things worse; in Spanish, extrañar connotes estrangedness, a complication; the Polish, tęsknię za Tobą is more like I pine away for you, the preposition making our connection less direct

**

Amy has never liked to shower at the Honors House, but now it hurts

Amy has never liked to shower at the Honors House, but now it hurts. She hates it because you have next to no privacy, just a flimsy curtain anyone could pull open by mistake. She hates it because the suds from your shampoo collect at the drain and slime up everything. She always tries to be quick. But now she has to be careful. The hot water makes the cuts on her wrist sting from where she has been practicing. She tries to find a way to wash her hair without getting her wrists in it but can’t.

One night Tommy hears her crying and comes into her room to ask if she’s okay. He offers to drive her anywhere, and she thinks and pulls herself together and says, Let’s go to the liquor store, because tomorrow is Sunday, and they will all be closed. Tommy has a fake ID. They buy three bottles of vodka. He buys them. He says she can pay him back later. She knows she will probably never pay him back, but she doesn’t care: she needs the vodka.

According to their mother, suicide is the most selfish thing you can do

According to their mother, suicide is the most selfish thing you can do. Amy weighs this against the certainty that Sasha was perfect, and that everything he ever did was perfect. At the funeral, Amy overheard one of the college girls saying that Sasha had spread a tarp out over his bed so that he wouldn’t get any blood stains on the sheet. He had done it in the middle of the night but held a pillow over his face thinking that way the gunshot wouldn’t wake his roommates, although it had, although it hadn’t mattered, because he was already dead.

One thing that puzzles Amy is why Sasha did not leave a note. In Amy’s understanding, suicides left notes to say goodbye and to explain why they were leaving. Without this explanation, no one will ever know what made him go, and that question will scrape up their insides like a swallowed fish hook, forever.

Amy cannot bear to think about Zoe, or how she feels.

For the millionth or trillionth time, Amy asks herself why Sasha started crying that day after their last class, and why he killed himself. For the millionth or trillionth time, she runs through all the scenarios she can possibly think of. None satisfies.

For a while she cries in bed, but then she starts to suffocate. She gets up and quiets down. She can’t think of anything to do besides shots. She starts on the peppermint vodka she hasn’t tried yet. Then she goes outside and sits on the front step and smokes a cigarette someone gave her at a party that she didn’t use because she never really smokes. It gives her a headache.

She walks in circles around the House. The grass is wet.

She watches MTV all night after everyone else has gone to bed. She falls asleep around dawn and misses all her classes. It doesn’t matter.

She thinks of Sasha: how they never heard him play the drums. Amy thinks he would have been good at dancing. She wishes she had seen him dance.

One night, in the middle of the night, Amy sneaks downstairs to the living room in the Honors House to take the rest of the cough syrup samples

One night, in the middle of the night, Amy sneaks downstairs to the living room in the Honors House to take the rest of the cough syrup samples. She finds some samples of some migraine medication, as well. She takes everything, stuffing it into her backpack and then dumping it back out on the floor of her closet.

Katie’s door is cracked open when she walks by. She doubles back and peeks inside. Katie and another girl are sitting on a bed with a mirror covered in white powder balanced between their laps. Amy looks at the other girl trying to figure out who she might be, and Katie looks up and leaps up and almost knocks the mirror over, but the other girl grabs it in time, spilling little.

Katie grabs Amy by the arm and pulls her into the room and slams the door shut. Her friend shushes her and eyes Amy and then looks back down. Katie pulls Amy towards her and asks, in a whisper, if Amy can see the insects. Amy pulls back and looks at her friend, brow furrowed, and now she sees that her friend is scratching at her arms and her neck, and that there are bloodied welts all over everywhere where her skin is bare. Amy looks into her face, which is scratched up and drawn. Amy does not understand, and Amy does not know what to do, or say. For a moment she just stands there, and then Katie lets her go, and she goes back over to the bed and sits down with the other girl. Amy looks at them, and then she goes back to her bedroom.

The next day, when Amy gets back from her classes, there are people coming out of Katie’s room when she walks by, holding boxes. She doesn’t see Katie again. The rumors say she’s gone to rehab, but nobody knows where. 

All evening Amy thinks of things she has to talk over with Katie. Outside the lag between these thoughts and the remembrance that her friend is gone now she’s not capable of any kind of motion. She drinks and grips the box knife in her fist.

That night for the third night in a row she does not call Zoe. Amy knows she is responsible for other people’s pains and disappearances. Like the time she tried playing with the children at the hospital, who all lost at Chutes and Ladders because she was winning.

It will be worse for Zoe if Amy sticks around. She hurts people, and doesn’t help them, and she can’t help it.

Amy knows that to save Zoe she must sacrifice herself.