: Part 3 – Chapter 16

I like living with Blue. I like having a friend, a girl friend, again. Ellis is still inside me, and she always will be, but Blue is good in her way, and kind.

Sometimes, when I get home from my shifts at Grit, we take the bus to the midnight movie and buy salty yellow popcorn and chilly, overly iced sodas. I’m pleasantly surprised by Blue’s endless supply of money. She shrugs whenever I ask; My father feels guilty, she says. Money is his salve. “It’s weird,” she says, her face assuming a complicated texture of pain and grief. “I don’t want to talk about it. Maybe we can talk about it someday. Can we get extra butter on the popcorn this time?”

I can’t sit at the card table weeping or in the tub staring at the ceiling, thinking of ways I could have done better, could have helped Riley more or gotten out sooner, saved Ellis, made myself better, because all those things are wrong, I realize; they solve nothing, wondering what could have been done; I know that now.

I have to wait my bad feelings out and that means staying busy, means working at Grit, means spending time working on my comic, rereading Louisa’s composition books, thinking about who might want to read her story and mine.

It means going with Blue to meetings. It means sitting in the brightly lit basement of a run-down church on hard chairs that scrape the cement floor, drinking muddy coffee and listening to people stutter out their stories. It means really listening to them, and thinking about them, and thinking about myself.

Blue and I look around for a group like us, cutters and burners, the self-harmers, but we can’t find one. Blue says, “Heh, I guess we’ll just have to keep talking to each other, then, huh? Who would have thought it’d be us, eh, Silent Sue?”

I miss Casper, but I understand now why she had to let go. Maybe I was, in the end, just one more hurting girl for her, but she was kind to me, and she has to be kind to others, too, because even that small kindness, even for such a brief time—it was something.

It was something.

—

One night Blue comes home with a shiny new laptop. Once she gets it set up, she makes me get a Facebook account. Laughing, she says, “Social media is perfect for you. It’s totally for people who don’t like in-person interaction. But Twitter isn’t you, because it’s chatty, so don’t go there.”

I don’t do much on it, mostly just scroll around the news or look at Blue’s page. But one night I see I have a friend request.

It’s Evan.

I don’t feel scared that he’s contacted me, or nervous. I feel fucking grateful, in fact, that I can press Accept with all my heart, because he’s alive, and I thought for sure that he’d be dead.

The first thing he messages me is a newspaper story. The story is a few months old, but it has a photo that stops my heart.

Evan writes, EVIL HAS BEEN CAPTURED.

The house, Seed House, was shut down, Fucking Frank arrested for selling underage girls for sex, providing drugs and alcohol to minors, and so much, much more. In the photo, his face is gaunt, no longer full and angry. He looks frightened.

And then Evan says: In other news, this is day 92 of sobriety for me. How the hell are YOU, Charlotte?

I can’t stop smiling as I write back.