“Where do you want to die?”
Verso blinked a few times in surprise before looking at Alysm.
“What?”
The two friends were perched atop the roof of Aly’s house, a small, rustic thing that was more like a shack than anything else, and in dire need of renovations. Their seat was the uncomfortable, ridged tin roof that sheltered the interior from rain, albeit with spotty reliability. The sun was setting in the distance, sinking into the black mountains way past the marshy grasslands adjacent to her house. The light of the sunset cast everything behind cover in a deep, impenetrable shadow.
“I mean, I was just thinking about how a lot of people imagine how they’re going to die, or when, but I’ve never thought about where I’ll die.” Aly twirled her hair, which had grown long and unkempt over the summer.
Verso, still thrown by the suddenness of the question, found herself hugging her knees closer to her chest.
“Why does it matter?” she asked. “I think it means more if you know how you’ll die, if you do it well or poorly.”
Aly furrowed her brow.
“No,” she argued back. “It’s important to know where you’ll die, that informs how you’ll die. Think about it, do you want to go surrounded by family and friends, or alone? That’s location.”
Verso dug her shorts out of the uncomfortably tight space they’d hiked up to, still unconvinced.
“And if you don’t have any family or friends?”
Aly sighed. “Maybe it was a bad question.”
“Where do you want to die?”
Suddenly, Aly perked up a bit.
“I want to die somewhere out there,” she pointed to the marshlands, swept by tallgrass and mud. “Don’t you think that would be the most romantic place to go?”
Verso let out a laugh with boyish gusto. “Romantic? What are you talking about?”
Aly blushed, embarrassed by her own words. “Not romantic, maybe that’s just how I feel about it,” she muttered. “I guess I meant that- it’s so close to the Earth; going back to the Earth, isn’t that what we’re supposed to do?”
It was quiet for a moment between them. They noticed that the silence wasn’t really silence, because the cicadas had been chirping the entire time they’d been speaking.
“Whatever,” Aly dismissed the idea altogether. “It’s the cicadas, they kind of put my thoughts into order like that.”
From below, a voice called to them, a gravelly, ugly tone, a familiar one.
“Vers! Your motha’ wants you home!”
Aly cupped her hands and shouted at the ground, “We’ll be down in a second!”
Verso looked back at the sunset.
“Jesus, it really is late…”
They shimmied their way back through the upper-story window and into Aly’s room; Verso nearly tripped over a box at the base of the windowsill, knocking over an album of butterfly photos.
“Agh, the butterfly thing again?” Verso gave her friend a ribbing.
After returning the album to its place in the box, they hopped downstairs and exchanged a hug in front of Alysm’s mother. She was a stout woman, wearing a pink tank top that barely held her body inside; one could tell her approximate age just from glancing at her face, but she paradoxically looked much older than she really was. While they embraced, Verso whispered quietly into Aly’s ear.
“See you at school tomorrow.”
This manner of speaking about school in hushed tones was something neither of them knew the beginning of. On her way out of the property and into the warm evening colors that painted the street, Verso passed under a tree and noticed something.
“The cicadas stopped.”
It was a behavior she was accustomed to, but checked every now and again to make sure it was still real. When one stopped under a tree nested by cicadas, the insects would cease their whining in a heartbeat. Like school, it was something that hushed as soon as you approached it.
Verso continued down the street, never quite alone.
---
The air in the classroom was so frigid, Verso felt as if any sudden movement would shatter it like a brittle sheet of ice. The seats took about five minutes to be warmed by her body’s heat, and the flat, gray desk was so ubiquitously cold she thought she could chill a drink on it. It was forbidden to put up one’s hood or close their jacket, so she found herself pulling its folds closer and tighter together without actually fastening it. The light was low and this drab, soulless feeling penetrated every corner of the room; at times, Verso forgot she could see color.
Mr Frasier finished what he was doing at his desk and stood up to the front of the class, wearing a muted plaid shirt and brown slacks, his hair receding but well combed, his glasses large-lensed and straight.
“Alright, everyone,” he began in a matter of fact tone of voice. “We’re looking at root quadratics today,” he paused for a second, looking around the room to check if he had the class’s attention; “60% is enough,” he thought. “Everyone did the homework, I’m assuming?”
There was a low din as the couple of students who hadn’t completed their work turned to their friends to remark about how funny it was.
Verso handed her paper to the student in front of her, unimpressed by the coolness of forgetting to do homework. Not that she was above it, but if one was going to be a troublemaker, this was a lame way of doing it. There were close to 100 security cameras around the school, so any actual act of dissidence was practically untenable, unless the offender was trying to make some kind of protest statement. They often joked that there were probably even cameras in the bathrooms.
Mr Frasier walked past the columns of desks, collecting work. Each column was arranged into a hierarchy; students were assigned to a column and would take a desk corresponding to their grade in the class, the students in the front row were named the “Captains” of their column, and were responsible for doing menial tasks like collecting work and attendance for every columnmate beneath them. Verso found the idea obnoxious, especially the tedious process of rearranging the seating after every test was graded, but there was nothing she could really say about it; she usually ended up in third or second place most times, so it wasn’t like it hurt her any.
Mr Frasier stopped in front of Alysm’s desk, prompting Verso’s attention, if for no other reason than that it was her friend.
“Congratulations on a strong semester,” he noted to her offhandedly.
“Thank you,” she replied softly, clasping her hands over her desk.
“Aly must be cold,” Verso mused, noting that she hadn’t worn anything that covered her arms. Her hair was drawn up into a ponytail, probably until she had a chance to get a haircut. School had only been in session for a month and a half, so the dress code had relaxed a little bit, although it wasn’t a good idea to push it for too long. Verso, for her part, made sure that her hair never exceeded further than shoulder-length, partially because she preferred it that way, and partially to appease the disciplinary committee. Hair wasn’t allowed to be grown out further than an inch below one’s collarbone, except for religious reasons.
“Okay,” Mr Frasier sounded exhausted; it was only ten o’clock. “Take out your books and turn to 418.”
Verso opened her backpack and lifted out the Algebraic tome she hated so much. It was ungodly heavy for something that could easily be compacted into a PDF, but the school demanded that she lug it around along with a series of other books supplied to them through the government’s partnership with Jameson Education Solutions(™).
Behind her, some of the same students snickered about forgetting their textbooks “at home” or “in their lockers.” She rolled her eyes again.
“Everyone can see that, dumbass; our backpacks are clear.”
Mr Fraiser knew this as well, but hadn’t said anything until now.
“Alexander, Alvarez, Davis,” he rattled off the usual names. “Sign a behavioral violation before you leave today.”
Knowing that they wouldn’t and never would, he returned to the lesson.
“Okay,” he read off the page. “So, you know how to factor a quadratic is, so you’re going to see this on a test, where the prime coefficient is a square root. Did anyone read ahead?” He looked up at the class again, a room full of blank faces filtered through his big glasses.
“So…” he turned to the board and uncapped a dry-erase marker, demonstrating the process for the class.
“You’re going to multiply the prime coefficient by the tertiary coefficient-- you might remember that that’s called ‘C’-- then take the product of that and divide it by the… Wait…” he glanced back at the book. “Before you do anything with that, you’re going to take the bilateral coefficient-- that’s ‘B’-- and factor it by the exponent of the prime coefficient, and that’s what you divide C by. Any questions?”
Another sea of blank faces.
“Great, that’s step one. Next, you’re going to take the first denomination of the quotient you got from step one and plug it into your X-Y diamadam, then put it into a four-way graph…”
The lecture continued, underscored by the sounds of scribbling pencils as the class took furious notes for the test.
The door was thrown open, slamming into the opposite wall with a heart-rending BANG. A man, six feet seven inches tall and broad-shouldered, rushed into the classroom before the air could even escape the students’ lungs. He brandished a semi-automatic gun and aimed its sights at the desks.
The first screams came from the girls in the class, their high-pitched shrieks pierced the air over the sound of the gunman unloading, each round letting out an explosive CRACK-CRACK-CRACK-CRACK.
After ten seconds, the gunfire stopped, and the gunman lowered his weapon. Every student lowered their hands and arms from in front of their eyes. The gunman pulled out a sheet of paper from his back pocket and began making notes.
“Not a very well-prepared class, today…” he commented to Mr Frasier without looking up from his notes.
“No, Bill…” Mr Frasier agreed awkwardly with the gunman actor, discipline committee chairperson Bill Gavel.
Mr Gavel left the room, closing the door behind him. It took Mr Frasier a moment to return to the lesson, he wanted to let some of the girls finish crying. The cold, brittle air had been shattered to pieces.
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Verso sighed painfully, she was just glad that they hadn’t gotten the same lecture as every few months when these drills happened; “That red line of tape on the floor is the border between safety and the line of fire, got it?” Yes, she understood that she was liable to death at any moment, it was getting to the point that she wished someone would actually fulfill the threat to make all of this worthwhile. She felt stupid for a moment for not anticipating the test, but had to remind herself that the doors were not only bullet-proof for their safety, but also sound-proofed so that they wouldn’t be able to hear drills occurring in other rooms. There was no way to communicate a warning to someone in another class, either, as phones were confiscated by security at the metal-detectors that framed the school’s entrances. This, also, was done for their sake.
---
The back door of Verso’s house led her into the kitchen, the screen rattled as it shut behind the heavier, wooden door. Without rhyme or reason, the drill popped back into her head. It had been a few days since the incident, and she had mostly blocked it out of her mind. Today, however, at this very moment, she stopped to think about it. She didn’t much with it, though, just turned it over in her thoughts like a peculiar antique that one wasn’t really interested in buying, and was soon placed back on the shelf. There was something about it that bothered her, something she couldn’t place, and eventually decided to drop altogether.
As she walked through the kitchen, she heard the sound of the television in the living room.
“Did I leave it on this morning?”
Stepping through the threshold to the hallway that led to the living room, she turned the corner and saw her mother sitting on the couch.
“Hi!” she turned around to see her daughter with a cheery grin.
“Did you get off work early?” Verso set her things down on the table.
“There was a surprise drill today, and they decided to let us off,” she explained, grabbing a glass of tea from the coffee table.
“Oh, nice.”
“How was school?”
Verso thought for a moment about the question.
“It was alright,” she finally answered.
“Did you learn anything?”
“Yeah, some stuff about how to calculate tension.”
“Good!”
Verso’s mom held down a job as a dental assistant, and made enough to support the both of them, with a few checks from the military, of course. Her father had died when she was only four, killed in action during a raid on some terrorist hideout in the Middle East; she thought it was Syria, she thought it was terrorists. The war, as she recalled, was started over something to do with oil and was resolved shortly after the raid occurred. It wasn’t even the right building.
“Hey, we need toothpaste,” Verso noted.
“Toothpaste?”
“Yeah, we just ran out, I couldn’t brush my teeth last night.”
“Well, I’m going to lay down for a bit,”
Verso climbed the stairs to her bedroom and threw herself under the sheets. After a moment of letting her body relax and soak up the silence, she took a deep breath and grabbed her laptop. Her homework for the day was light, so she figured she might as well start it now.
“Okay…” she muttered to herself, booting up a search engine and navigating to her assignment, a worksheet for her Honors History class, something about the American Revolution.
She worked diligently for about an hour, when her focus was interrupted by a tremorous knocking at her bedroom door.
“Yeah?” she paused her music and looked up from her assignment.
Her mother opened the door and stood before the threshold awkwardly.
“Mom?”
Her mother closed the door and looked at the ground for a second, her face had an indecipherable emotion plastered on it, but it was clear that something was wrong; the muscles tensed in her face, something buried in her eyes.
She walked to Verso’s bed side, prompting her to sit up and move her laptop to the side.
“Vers…” she spoke quietly, anxiously.
“Mom, what is it?” Verso was getting frustrated. “Just say it.”
With great difficulty, her mother wetted her dried lips and explained.
“Aly’s in the hospital right now…”
At once, Verso’s heart sank. She didn’t know what was happening, but the way her mother was breaking this to her caused the atmospheric dread to seep inside of her.
“W-what?”
Once the first words were out, it was easier to say the next.
“She tried to kill herself.”
Verso took a deep breath through her nostrils that filled her lungs deep down to her core, an unthinking response to the words.
---
The hospital was always an unsettling place for Verso. At around the same time that her father had been killed, she came down with an intense case of pneumonia and was rushed to this same hospital for emergency treatment. The doctors believed that she couldn't hear them talking, but she distinctly remembered a discussion that occurred just outside of her room, in the hall.
“What’s the likelihood she doesn’t make it?”
“Maybe thirty percent.”
She had never thought about her death before that moment, and despite her eventual recovery, she was hounded by anxiety over the end of her life ever since that day. She would go through periods of intense fearfulness, falling victim to panic attacks that came at night, always at night, until forcing herself to drop the issue. All it took, however, was a single mention of mortality to send her back into the spiral.
“Hello, I’m here to visit a patient,” Verso noticed after saying it that her voice was more timid than usual.
“Name?” the nurse at the front desk looked up from her computer.
“Mine? Or-”
“The patient’s. You write yours in the guestbook,” she pushed a clipboard towards Verso.
After filling out all of the visitor information, she was directed to the right, towards a beige hall to the elevator. Before the hall was a tall man in a black shirt and slacks, the word “SECURITY” printed in bold, yellow letters across his breast.
“Excuse me,” he stopped her before she could leave the hall. “I’m going to need to see that.” He pointed to the wrapped package she had in her hand.
“T-this?”
“Yes, that.”
“It’s just a gift-”
“I need to see it.”
Regretfully, she handed over the small package to the guard, who placed it on a table at the corner. The process of unwrapping it safely took approximately five minutes, as he couldn’t take any chances in the case that it was a dangerous object.
Once the paper wrapping was systematically removed, he inspected the gift for a moment. It was a small cardboard box which, once opened, revealed a handcrafted origami butterfly. The moment the guard picked it up, Verso felt something touch her heart, like brushing a sensitive nerve. He turned the butterfly over on his hands and checked the box once more to ensure that there was nothing dangerous afoot.
“Okay, you’re good to go.” He placed the butterfly back on the table, leaving her to return it to the box and try and awkwardly repackage it. Every sound in the hall seemed magnified; when she swallowed, she felt as if she were going to trip some kind of alarm system.
After waiting for the elevator for a moment, the cold, steel doors parted and she stepped into the empty car.
“What floor was it again?” the instructions given to her by the nurse at the desk seemed jumbled now. “Four, it was four.”
She hit the button and watched the doors close, sealing her off from that hallway. There was a camera in the elevator, of course, so it wasn’t like she wasn’t being watched, but the prospect of someone in a room far away staring at her was much less unsettling than the eyes of a security guard focused on her.
“Be grateful,” she thought. “At least he didn’t search me.”
It had happened several times before, especially at school, when after passing through a metal detector, she alerted the system and prompted a pat-down search. Whether it was a male or female guard performing it, she always felt uncomfortable with the process. An adult’s hands running over her arms, her thighs, her stomach, in front of her classmates no less, left her with a slimy, unpleasant sensation, the kind one gets when touching a greasy surface. It was supposedly necessary for safety, but couldn’t they make it any less violating of a procedure?
The sound of the doors opening ripped her from her thought. Another long, beige hallway greeted her.
“Room 325…”
Verso scanned the room numbers to her left and right until she finally came upon the right one. She lifted her hand to grab the handle of the door, but hesitated before grasping it. It felt momentous, to turn the handle, it meant that she was committing. Say Alysm was awake, the sound of the handle rattling on the other end couldn’t just be left alone.
But still…
From the moment she’d heard the news, Verso couldn’t accept it. She believed it, but it was so much easier to believe something that only existed in an idea. Someone could tell her what had happened, but seeing it for herself was entirely different. This would make it real.
After standing in front of the door for a solid fifteen seconds, she let out a quick huff, laughing at herself in way.
“What am I talking about?” she thought. “Of course I have to go in.”
The handle turned, the mechanism within clicking, and she pushed the door open.
The room was dark, the curtains were drawn and the lights turned off. There was a television at the foot of the bed, but that too was dark.
The instant they made eye contact, Aly burst into tears. Verso closed the door behind her and rushed to her friend’s side.
“Aly…” she wanted to comfort her, but was lost on what to say.
When she had collected herself, Aly gripped the sheets of her bed.
“I’m sorry…” her voice was dim and her eyes cast downwards.
Verso place her hand on the bedside.
“There’s nothing to be sorry for-”
“No,” Aly shook her head and wiped the residual tears from her eyes. “I want you to know why I did it.” Her voice was pained, like there were cracks in her words.
“Aly…” Verso felt her heart in her throat. “You don’t have to tell me anything, if you don’t want to-”
“No,” she insisted. “I need to,” she looked at her friend with anguish. “There’s no one else who would understand.”
Verso said nothing, and in her silence, she agreed to listen.
“Vers…” Aly began. “Everything is getting worse… I don’t know when it started or how, but it feels like it’s only getting worse, and I don’t know what I could do to stop it or slow it down… And…”
She paused, unsure of how to express what she meant.
“I feel like I’m going to live and die here.”
Verso looked into her friend’s eyes and tried to understand what she was saying; she forgot about the feeling in her body as everything focused on Alysm.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she finally responded.
Aly looked around the room silently and leaned closer, speaking in hushed tones.
“There’s a camera in this room,” she whispered.
“Yeah?” Verso’s eyes tightened slightly in confusion.
“Do you think that’s strange?”
“The camera?”
“Yes,” Aly wanted desperately to be understood.
“No, it’s for safety.”
Aly rubbed her thumbs together, thinking.
“Nevermind.” There was a removal in heer voice that Verso couldn’t quite grasp the reason for. What was so significant about a camera in a hospital room? The whole line of thought eluded her, but she knew that it must have been incredibly important to Aly to have brought her here.
One of Verso’s legs sank into thought as another silence hung between them. Abruptly, Verso pulled herself out of her empty contemplation; she’d been holding the paper-wrapped gift the whole time, and just now remembered it.
“I almost forgot,” she laughed. “Here you go.” She held the gift up, offering it to her friend. Aly gently took it from her palm and carefully unwrapped it. In the back of her mind, Verso knew that it was not the first time it had been unwrapped.
From the chrysalis of the box, the butterfly emerged; Aly’s eyes became at once soft and excited. A pure, joyous grin spread across her face.
“Thank you, oh… Thank you, Vers…”
Verso left an hour later, returning down the elevator and past the guard, out into the lobby. Beyond the front doors was a black wall, an inky world.
“Is it already dark?”
She hurried home, cut into by sheets of icy wind. The moment she stepped into her home, she was enveloped in a blanket of warmth. As she returned to her room, her whole body felt thawed out, her troubled thoughts steaming off of her as well.
Settling into bed, Verso decided to browse the internet before falling asleep. She opened the screen and began poking around, looking up one of her favorite actors. Amused at learning a few details of his life, she found herself clicking on a video of an interview he’d given a few weeks ago. Before the video had loaded up, an advertisement played for toothpaste.
“That’s funny,” Verso thought. “We were just talking about that the other day.”
Before the ad was done playing, her brow furrowed.
“Why is that strange to me?”
She paused the video and sat in her bed for a moment. How could something so innocuous cause her a feeling of unease? It was stupid, but she couldn’t deny the uncomfortable sensation brewing in her chest.
“Is that normal?” she thought. “Is that…?”
Verso’s mother was sitting on the couch, watching the television when she heard her daughter coming down the stairs.
“Hi!” she turned and smiled at her before noticing that she was dressed up to go outside. “Are you going out again?”
Verso had a strange look on her face, something she couldn’t quite place. In a way, she seemed distant, like she wasn’t really in the room; some other part of her was far beyond what the eye could see.
“I’m just going to get some toothpaste,” she said, walking to the front door.
“Okay, stay safe, sweety,” her mother turned back to the television, not registering Verso’s failure to look her in the eye.
The closest store was just down the street going right; her mother would be able to see which way she turned from the living room window, but she knew she wouldn’t notice. Verso turned left, away from the store and the downtown, and into the black of night.
She walked in the direction of Aly’s house, towards the marsh.