Courtney was indeed given detention for her lateness, but the second it was over she bolted home, entering the front door with a white-knuckled grip on her bag. She made to dash up the stairs, but her mother called her into the living room, sounding worried. With a grimace, she entered, and found her parents staring at her with aggressively compassionate faces.
"Yes?" Courtney asked awkwardly.
Her parents glanced at each other before her mother spoke. "Your friend Duncan Dean just stopped by. He seemed very concerned about you; he said he thinks you might try to kill yourself."
Before Courtney could even show her shock on her face, her father added, "You have been depressed lately. Oh –" he pulled a small envelope out of his pocket, "he said this is for you."
Courtney took the envelope apprehensively and ripped it open. It only contained a small piece of paper, across which looped a message in her own elegant manuscript:
Recognise the handwriting?
"Oh my god…" she whispered, before darting for the stairs. Her mother's voice echoed after her.
"He says we should keep you away from sharp objects, closed garages, toxic –"
Courtney slammed her bedroom door, before glancing up and wishing she hadn't. A brunette Barbie in a The Drama Brothers T-shirt hung from a tiny noose suspended from a rafter. With a whimper, Courtney glanced at the open window, before diving for her bed.
Duncan laconically leaned against his motorcycle, legs crossed suavely. He looked up at Courtney's bedroom window, the ladder still propped up next to it, and heard another whimper emerge. He put a cigarette in his mouth and lit it with a smile.
Courtney curled into the foetal position, closing her eyes as the ever familiar voice rang out across the room.
"You can't ever find a place nice and peaceful because there isn't any."
Courtney opened her eyes to see Duncan kneeling over her on her bed, reading aloud from Gwen's old copy of The Catcher In The Rye.
"Nice," he commented. "It's got that Catcher-In-The-Rye-I-hate-the-world-and-the-world-hates-me-so-let's-commit-suicide ambience." He chuckled softly. "Hey, give it a try. Underline something." He giddily finished underlining the sentence he'd just read out before tossing the book to Courtney and sliding out to lie next to her. Courtney glared at him, enraged.
"Get off my bed, you sick psycho," she hissed. "You think you're a rebel. You're not a rebel. You're a sick psycho. Do you think you're a rebel?" Her voice got louder as her rage increased. "Do you think you're a rebel?" she repeated. "I wanna know!"
Duncan shrugged. "You say tomayto, I say tomahto." He shrugged one-shoulderedly. "Let's call the whole thing off… Hold it!"
Courtney froze. Duncan reached over to where her index finger had curled automatically into the book. He carefully opened it and peered at the word her finger had landed on.
"Look at that," he said softly. "'Eskimo'. One word. I love it. I usually go for whole sentences myself, but hey! This is perfecto. 'Eskimo'. So mysterious…"
"Wait a… You're not listening!" Courtney shouted. "I'm not on your side…"
The sound of the lock being jimmied echoed through the kitchen seconds before they burst through the back door. Duncan wasted no time in pulling on a pair of disposable rubber gloves, before heading to the dishwasher and opening it like a burglar opening a safe. Courtney followed him, hissing like an angry goose.
"You're still not listening! I'm not…"
"Nag, nag, nag, nag," Duncan mocked her, before pulling a knife from the dishwasher. "Nag." He stuck his tongue out.
Courtney snatched the knife. "This knife is filthy!"
"What the hell do you think I'm going to do with it? Take out her tonsils?"
"I think I know Gwen a bit better than you, okay?" Courtney snapped. "If she was going to slash her wrists, the knife would be absolutely spotless."
Duncan rolled his eyes, but grabbed a dishtowel and vigorously wiped off the knife. "How's this? Can you see your fucking reflection?"
Courtney looked, and she could. She saw the tears welling up in her eyes, and felt her body shudder as a shattered smile quaked onto her face.
"Tomorrow someone else will move into her place," she whispered. "That person could be me." She looked up at him, suddenly deliriously defiant. "Ha, there's only one of us who knows Gwen's handwriting, and if you think I'm doing another suicide note –"
Duncan interrupted her with a burst of wild laughter. "You don't get it, do you? Society nods its head at any horror the American teenager can think to bring upon itself! We don't need gloves, and does anyone really care about exact handwriting?"
He tore his gloves off with a giggle, before grabbing a pen and a cutesy memo pad from the kitchen counter. He shoved the pen into Courtney's hand, before grabbing her wrist and forcing her to scribble two words in all caps.
LIFE SUCKS!
"Perfecto," Duncan smiled. "Man, I've even got a marked-up Catcher In The Rye. What else does a suicide need?" He pulled the book from his pocket and opened the door to the living room, revealing Gwen asleep in an artful pose on the couch, the TV flashing MTV behind her. He raised the knife and wiggled his eyebrows. "Now, if you'll excuse me…"
"NO-O!" Courtney screamed, but Duncan had already slammed the door. Wailing, she maniacally rattled the doorknob, but he'd already locked it.
On Friday, an ethereal Miles Flemming scratched a chalk mark on a blackboard, next to three others.
On Monday, Noah, Cody and Leshawna manoeuvred pictures of Heather, Brady, Scott and Gwen in mind-bogglingly countless ways in order to accommodate them in the two-page layout.
On Tuesday, four students wearing 'What a Waste, Oh the Humanity' T-shirts stood on the cafeteria tables and tossed black armbands into the hungry crowd.
On Wednesday, Gwendolyn Duke lay serenely in her open coffin in front of the congregated funeral-goers. Father Ripper, wearing dark sunglasses and a terrifying toupee, walked in front of her to address the sizeable group of students and adults, who gazed back from their own dark sunglasses, sat, statue-like, in folding chairs before him. Father Ripper swept the room with a dramatic look before finally speaking.
"'Eskimo'." He let the word hang, before holding up a book – the book. "Gwendolyn Duke underlined a lot of things in this copy of The Catcher In The Rye, but I believe the word 'Eskimo', underlined all by itself, is the key to understanding Gwen's pain."
Standing next to the basin of Holy Water, Courtney could only stare disbelievingly as the priest brandished the book.
"On the surface, Gwen Duke was the vivacious young lady we all knew her to be. But her soul was in Antarctica, freezing with the knowledge of the way fellow teenagers can be cruel, the way parents can be unresponsive, and as she writes so eloquently in her suicide note, the way life can suck. We'll all miss Wawanakwa's little Eskimo. Let's hope she's rubbing noses with Jesus."
"Is this turnout weak or what? I had at least seventy more people at my funeral."
Courtney froze, turning to stare at the dark-haired girl standing next to her, who glared right back. Heather Chandler's mouth was still stained blue, but now her hair was done up in an elaborate twist, and she was dressed in what looked like some kind of intergalactic prison uniform, all sharp angles and red leather and black-and-white stripes.
"Heather?" she whispered. "What…?"
"Oh God, Courtney," Heather sighed. "My afterlife is so-o-o boring. If I have to sing 'Kumbaya' one more time…"
"What are you doing here?!"
Heather Chandler grinned. "I made your favourite," she whispered. "Spaghetti. Lots of oregano." She pulled the silver cover off the Holy Water basin, and continued to grin at Courtney with those blue lips, before plunging the other girl's face into the basin, which was now full of steaming spaghetti. "DINNER!"
Courtney's eyes snapped open. Uncurling from the foetal position she had fallen asleep in, she could hear her mother's voice filtering through the door. It was all a dream…
"Dinner! Courtney! Dinner!"
Courtney closed her eyes, her heart racing. Ignoring her mother, she launched herself at her desk, opened her diary, shoved on her monocle, and grabbed a pen – the expensive calligraphy kind. This entry was going to be special.
Dear Diary –
Last entry.
No one can stop Duncan. Not the F.B.I, the C.I.A., or the P.T.A.
He once told me that the extreme always makes an impression. Well, now it's my turn.
Let's see how the son-of-a-bitch reacts to a suicide he didn't perform himself.
