Today is the first day that Sarah is back after slashing her wrists in the bathroom. She had been my roommate our first year of college. We had become close friends, doing most things together, until she had vanished to the hospital for a semester.
Sarah had been depressed for a long time before she came to college. We were freshmen, naive and foolish. We had both opted for the healthy living floor on campus and had been thrown together randomly. Surprisingly, we got along immediately. After all, what could I have in common with a business major? I am helping her unpack all her stuff in her new room, a stark single.
“Shelly,” she says from across the room, perched on her bed, “are you hungry?”
Long angry slashes grip the inside of her forearms, livid scars that are only so flagrant to my prejudiced eyes. She healed well. I'm glad.
“Shelly?” she asks again, standing now, her shorts hugging her hips tightly. If I were as beautiful as she is, I would never have tried to kill myself.
“Sure,” I reply, my eyes centering back on her, her pert face framed by short blonde hair. She smiles at me, lips pinked with gloss, sweeping her student ID off the desk.
She is pure functionality on the walk to the dining commons. I make ridiculous small talk. “So are you glad to be back?”
“Completely. I feel like I'm getting my life back on track.” Her voice is the same as it was before the last empty semester, strong and dulcet, but not stained with that tarnish of depression.
“I'm sure you missed the food too.” I am irony personified.
“Actually, school food is better than hospital food.” Blue eyes glint merriment at me and I find myself at a loss for words momentarily, but recover.
“Wow, I never thought I'd hear that!”
We laugh.
The food, as usual, is vile. You would think that such a small school would have less trouble making decent food than a big one.
I pick at the spaghetti noodles masquerading poorly as lo mein. I wonder if I were Chinese, could I sue the school? Slightly heartened, I start on my bagel. Bagels are always safe.
“So what classes did you take last semester?” she asks, having pushed her own noodles away from the rest of her edible food.
I can hardy remember last semester. “Umm... English, linguistics, French...” I trail off, thinking. “Chorus. And some comp lit class.”
She nods. “Still an English major?”
I nod back. This conversation is stilted. “Are you sticking with business?”
“Nah. I think sociology.”
Interesting. I chew and swallow, cream cheese and bagel tasteless in my mouth. “What are you taking this semester?”
“Lots of sociology classes.” She takes a sip of her milk and gives me a smile.
“Ah.” I reach for my coffee. It tastes bitter. I wonder if that is why I like it.
“Shelly?” Her voice is inquisitive, almost plaintive. I raise my eyes to her.
“Yeah?” She’s looking at me that same way she used to, that look I never understood.
“I missed you.”
Sarah’s parents are religious to the point of being neurotic. Christmas and Easter are full-blown affairs at her house. She is the eldest and has two younger brothers, both in some Christian high school where they have to wear uniforms. Despite her announcement when she was fourteen that she no longer believed in God, her parents made her go to church with them every Sunday until she finally escaped to college. Religion is their crutch, she once told me, and I’d rather die than hobble along like that. And I hadn’t known what to say.
Sarah had brought me home with her last Christmas break, just over a year ago. She had been jittery the entire trip, and I could not understand why. My parents had decided it didn't matter whether I came home for Christmas, but that I had to be home for New Year’s. Sarah had invited me and I had acquiesced.
She lived close to school. It was strange for me, being in some place without snow for the holidays. Christmas consisted of church and a dinner so large I could have sworn her mother must have invited a hundred people. But only about thirty showed up, Sarah’s extended family. The food was delicious and the atmosphere almost relaxed, but Sarah was still tense, her delicate features strained. Being the outsider, which was immediately apparent from my appearance, I kept relatively quiet, speaking only when one of her numerous family members inquired to my major and why I wasn’t with my family at Christmas. Most of them were shocked and a bit wary when I explained that my family wasn’t Christian.
The debacle started afterward. I tried to help by clearing dishes, but Sarah’s mother insisted that I go talk in the living room with the aunts. I felt like a display piece, some exotic art, but smiled cordially and agreed.
I was still in the living room when I heard a man’s angry voice, and a sharp alto I recognized as Sarah’s replying shortly. I was helpless, trapped between a wall of aunts and ottomans. Reluctantly I curbed my curiosity and waited. Sarah would tell me when she returned, if it mattered.
It did matter, it turned out, because within the next few hours, I found myself and Sarah gazing at a bus stop, chilly and stunned.
She refused to say anything about what had happened to her until we were on the bus back to school. She had insisted on paying for my fare. I did not argue.
“I think I want ice cream,” she announces, pushing her chair out as she stands. Her blue shirt, daringly low-cut, tucked into the waist of her shorts, is suddenly at my eye level. I glance up to her face. “Want some?”
“I think I’ll pass,” I say.
“All right.” She leaves, footsteps silent in the carpeted room. I watch her, my eyes idling over her form. She should have been a dancer, I think, and then I remember that at one time, she had been one, she told me. Her parents had made her quit when their church announced that dancing was not to be allowed.
We go back to my room, and there is a message for me. It’s umma. She sounds annoyed, as she always does when I’m not home. I pick up the phone to dial.
“Yoboseh yo?” she answer after the first ring.
“Umma,” I say in Korean, and I can almost hear her smile. “It’s me.”
“Ji Won,” she says, calling me by my Korean name. She proceeds to speak quickly, relating a message from my father to me. For some reason my father hates to call me at school. I don’t question him.
“So we hope you have a good semester,” she says in a pidgin of Korean and English.
“I will, umma. Thanks for calling.”
A click and she’s gone, three time zones and a country away.
“What did she want?” Sarah asks me, looking up from glancing through my schoolbooks. My new roommate, the one who replaced Sarah, is half-unpacked, so the room is messy. I’m not worried, though. She’s neat enough for my tastes.
“Just to tell me my father wished me a good semester.”
“He still won’t call you?”
“Yeah.” I crawl into my bed to set my alarm for tomorrow. “When’s your first class?”
“Early.”
“Nine? Ten?”
“Eleven.”
I glare. “Eleven’s not early.”
“Depends on what you’re used to.” She gives me a look, her face innocently serious. I’m tempted to throw my tissue box at her, but refrain.
God, I missed her.
She hadn’t wanted to go home to her parents for summer, but in such a tiny town, it was nearly impossible to find summer housing, and she didn’t have any money saved up.
I offered her a place with my parents, and I promised her they would speak mostly English to her, what they knew, but that would require her moving to a completely different country. She would need a green card to work, and it was unlikely that she could get one just for the summer break. It would have been more work that it was worth. I offered anyway, knowing that she would not accept.
I knew she was depressed. I tried to help, but anything I did made it worse. It was my fault more than anyone else’s that she could not go home.
I did not avoid her that last semester, but neither did I go out of my way to spend much time with her either. If you come face to face with something that shames you, it’s much more painful. I liked to hide my shame in dark recesses and keep it under my bed, collecting dust, where no one could see it.
“I’m setting my clock for nine thirty,” I inform her stoically. “I could come by and wake you if you need it.” She always had trouble waking up.
“Kind as usual,” she says, grinning at me from behind The Great Gatsby.
I understand why her parents threw her out. My parents would do the same thing if I told them what she had.
Admitting anything means it actually exists. And if it existed, then I, or anyone, would be living a lie.
But Sarah had been brave. Or foolish.
“You coming to breakfast with me? I think I’m meeting Maggie at ten.” I press the correct buttons on my clock. At nine thirty the alarm would shriek me out of my sound sleep as it always did.
“Maggie? Do I know her?” She pulls her head out from behind the book, a pen jostled by the movement from behind her ear. It falls on the tiles with a sudden click.
“She lived across from us two semesters ago.”
“Oh, that Maggie!” She pauses, considering. “Will I be interrupting?”
“Never.” I give her a smile.
“All right then. I’ll get up with you.” She bends down to retrieve the pen, then stands. “Morning people.”
She reconstructed the conversation for me in the bus ride, staring at the window. Her voice was reflected back towards me, as was her face in the dirty window, streaked with the ghosts of dried rain.
“I walked in,” she said, “and just asked my mother and father if I could speak with them. They agreed. It was probably stupid to do it with family there. I don’t know. But we sat down in the study.”
I nodded encouragingly, trying to show her I was supportively listening.
“And I took a deep breath and opened my mouth and just told them.” Her eyes had not left the cityscape the grimy window was presenting.
“Told them?” I asked, half-stupefied and half-amazed.
She turned to me then, her eyes shot with red. “Yeah.” She gave me a smile that was forced and somewhat hysterical. “This is exactly what I said: 'Mom, Dad, I love you both very much, but I have something to tell you.' That was when they started getting nervous. I never tell them I love them. It’s just understood.” She paused, rubbing her eyes with her fist, then settled her hands in her lap. “And my mother sort of gave me a smile and I smiled back. ‘I’m bisexual,’ I said, and I watched them stare at me in shock.” She gave me a rueful laugh, tinged with bitterness. “I thought they should have taken it better. I mean, at least I still have a chance with a guy, right?” That same laugh again. “But no. My father just threw me out. Told me not to come back unless I changed my sinful ways.”
I leaned over and hugged her tightly, and then her tears spilled out onto my shoulder.
“Does she know?” her voice asks quietly, sudden in the relative stillness of the room.
I glance up. “Hm?”
“Maggie. Does she know?”
I assume she’s talking about her wrists. “No. Just me.”
She is. She nods quickly, pushing a strand of blond out of her eyes. “Okay. Thanks.”
I don’t really reply. What can I say to that?
I was the first to find her suicide note. It was addressed to me, lying in the center of my pillow, where I would be sure to find it.
“Dear Shelly,” it had started. “I’m so glad that I knew you. I have some confessions to make, but first I want to apologize for everything. I want you to know that none of this has been your fault and that I love you very much. Thank you for being my friend.”
It was then I knew what I held in my trembling hands.
“I wanted to say I’m sorry because I know I’ve made your life hard recently. Did you know I’d fallen in love with you? It was an accident, you know, but I’m not complaining. You make me happy. I just want you to know that.”
By that point it was hard to read the note because of the shaking. I skimmed to the bottom.
“I know my parents don’t want me back. I’m dirty. I’m dead to them. It’s ok. I understand they did what they felt they had to. I also know that you can’t feel the same way about me. That’s also ok. But I have nowhere to go, Shelly. I’m trapped. I have no one and nothing, not even you anymore, because I’ve driven you away. I have no direction. I’m sad all the time and I want it to stop-”
I fled to the phone and called 911.
I set the teddy bear she gave me for Christmas next to my pillow like I always do. “Sarah?”
She’s engaged in The Great Gatsby again. “Hm?” She doesn’t even look up.
“You should come to my house this winter for New Year’s. It’s fun.”
Now she raises her eyes, a hint of a smile blooming in them. “I’d like that, Shelly.”
I smile back. “I would too.”