Tanya Denali died early on a Friday, around three a.m.
She'd thrown a huge party the night before, taking advantage of the fact that her parents had gone out of town overnight on a business conference. Around midnight, she'd disappeared upstairs into her room with her boyfriend, Mike, making no attempts to lay low or not draw attention to herself. She stopped midway up the stairs, spun to face the crowd, threw her hands in the air, and shouted, "Party on, bitches!" Everyone cheered and someone cranked the music louder. Beer and liquor flowed freely. People chatted and laughed and danced. Cigarettes and bongs and joints and bowls were passed around, along with some stronger stuff, like little white tablets with smiley faces and baggies of white powder. Everyone was having the time of their lives.
At about one thirty in the morning, Mike reappeared at the party with a smirk on his face and a willingness to fist bump whoever in the vicinity wanted one. Tanya didn't rejoin her classmates until twenty minutes later, and the first thing she did was snatch a bottle of liquor and tip it back, much to the delight of anyone who saw. Mike approached her, they shared a long public kiss full of smugness and booze, and then they went their separate ways. Mike joined his football teammates at the beer pong table, Tanya joined the rest of the cheerleaders by the edge of the pool, and the party continued.
Around two thirty, Tanya announced to her best friend, Irina, that she had to use the bathroom and freshen up. She made sure to tell her whole group not to wait for her, to party on and have a great time. She stopped and spoke to a handful of her classmates on the way, finally disappearing into the bathroom around two forty. No one noticed anything amiss. No one followed her, or even bothered to check on her.
At three ten a.m., one of the partygoers, a soccer player named Tyler, had to use the bathroom. Tanya's house had three, but this particular classmate was too drunk to make it upstairs to the other two, so he made a beeline for the first floor bathroom. He knocked for a solid three minutes with no answer before he decided that the door was locked with no one on the inside. Three steps backwards, a deep breath, and a charge forward later, and the bathroom door flew open, ripping a sliver of wood from the doorframe. The first thing he saw was the girl on the floor. Figuring she was just drunk and passed out, his eyes blurry and unfocused due to overindulgence, he stepped over her and used the toilet. It wasn't until after he washed his hands that he thought to flip her over to try and wake her up. That's when he saw the blood.
Tanya Denali died early on a Friday, around three a.m. She locked herself in her bathroom, took one of her father's guns out of it's hiding place in the back of the linen cabinet, pressed it against her temple, and pulled the trigger. Tanya Denali took her own life, while a party raged around her, the sounds of drunk high school students and loud music drowning out the sound of the single gunshot. Tanya Denali is dead, and it was ruled a suicide when a note was found in the drawer of her bedside table, and the case was closed. Everyone mourned, but ultimately the world kept spinning and life went on.
Except mine.
I met Tanya Denali in sixth grade when she first moved to my small town of Forks, Washington. She was very rich, very pretty, and very aware of both. Due to this, on top of the fact that I was neither rich nor very pretty, we butted heads immediately. We were pretty evenly matched all through the rest of junior high, slinging childish insults back and forth and just generally being nasty to each other.
It wasn't until high school that I grew up, and she grew meaner. I stopped responding to her taunts, stopped insulting her and left her alone. She took it personally and made it her number one goal to bully me until I snapped. When that didn't work, she turned her sights on my sweet, sensitive best friend Angela. That did the trick. She found that the only way to make me angry enough to stoop to her level was to pick on Angela, and did so frequently. Her hate for me continued all the way through high school to senior year, until the day she died.
Tanya and I were never even close to being friends. We didn't even have one of those moments like some bully/bullied relationships do in the books and movies; like where the bullied happens upon a secret about the bully that makes it so obvious that they only bully to hide how truly sad and down they're feeling about their own life. We never had one of those. It was never clear to me exactly why she was so mean, other than the usual excuses of conceited condescension and that misery brought her happiness.
Due to this, it never made sense to anyone why I was so torn up over Tanya's death. No one understood why I cried myself to sleep for days, and walked around school like a zombie. Honestly, it didn't make any sense to me, either. All I knew was that Tanya was like the sun: a shining, bright ball of energy that warmed the people close to her, and yet left everyone else burned and blistered if the proper precautions weren't taken. She was a force of nature, blowing through the hallways and turning heads as she went. She was a proud, beautiful, young girl with her whole life ahead of her. And then, out of absolutely nowhere, she was gone. Poof. Just like that. In a cloud of gunpowder and questions. It was like the sun was snuffed out, or all the air had been sucked into a vacuum. Her absence was a tangible thing in the hallways of my high school, and for some reason, I was one of the ones who felt it the most.
The day Angela had called me to tell me about Tanya, the school shut down. So many parents had called their kid in with grief related illness (most of which were probably from kids that didn't particularly care and just wanted to extend their weekend) that half the school was going to be absent anyway. No one saw any point in showing up and going through the motions.
I, on the other hand, sat in my car for twenty minutes while Angela cried into my ear, and then drove the seven and a half minutes to the school parking lot. And for two hours I just stared, unable to cry but really wanting to. At the football field, with their two stories worth of stainless steel bleachers blanketed in ice. At the building, the grey bricks shimmering through my windshield in the heat coming off the hood of my car. At the parking lot, usually packed and teeming with rowdy high schoolers, sitting totally empty for hours after the first period bell was scheduled to ring. Everything I'd been seeing for the last four years of my life, exactly the same as it had always been, and yet so different it was barely recognizable.
It was sitting there, staring at my surroundings, that I first saw Tanya's older brother, who I'd only ever seen in pictures and from afar at family functions the school threw for the students. He was sitting on the front step of the school, leaning against the brick with his shoulders hunched. As I️ watched, he dropped his head forward, heaved in what looked like a sob, and smacked his head backwards so hard that the baseball cap he was wearing fell off. My heart broke for him as he did it again, and then a third and fourth time. I️ debated jumping up and running to him before he gave himself a concussion, but before I️ could, he stood and swiped his cap off the ground, yanking it onto his head and pulling the bill down to cover his eyes. He stood motionless, staring into the football stadium, before bending and scooping up a handful of snow. He used his hands to pack it into a ball and, without warning, launched it at the glass doors. The snow hit the doors with a thwack, breaking into pieces and scattering in the wind. I was captivated by the droplets of water left behind as they slid down the glass.
My eyes were so riveted by the sight that I didn't notice the exact moment he noticed me. I didn't know he even cared about his audience until, only moments later, he was rapping his knuckles against my car window. I jumped, almost giving myself whiplash as I jerked my head around to face him.
"The schools closed!" he shouted angrily through my still-closed window. I could see the icy tear tracks on his cheeks, and my emotionally muddled brain wondered if they burned his face, and if he'd be embarrassed that a stranger was witnessing his grief. When I didn't respond to his declaration, he knocked on the window again, harder than before. "Hello?! Anybody home?!" I felt the corner of my mouth pull down in a frown, but fought against the response I wanted to spew back for his rudeness. I knew how upset he must be, and that pain sometimes makes people say and do things they don't mean.
"I know," I whispered back. His eyes focused on my mouth, and his eyebrows pulled down in what looked like frustration.
"I can't hear you!" I took a deep breath, still fighting the temptation to lash out, and rolled my window down a crack.
"I said I know. I know it's closed." He stared at me for a second, and tilted his head to the side. Despite the inappropriate timing, my heart fluttered a little, and that's when I really looked at the boy in front of me.
He was absolutely gorgeous. Granted, I knew that, as it wasn't the first time I was seeing him. But I'd never seen him so up close and personal before. I didn't know that his auburn hair looked so soft where it fell out from beneath the baseball cap. I didn't know that his jawline was so defined, or how sexy it looked with a light dusting of scruff. I'd never known his eyes were that shade of green, or that he had the most beautiful lashes I'd ever seen. His nose must have been broken at some point, because there was a slight bump on the bridge. It took me all of my willpower to keep from scanning my eyes down his body to take in the rest of him, but somehow I managed.
"Who are you?" I snapped out of my thoughts at his angrily spat words and met his eyes, sucking my lower lip into my mouth to chew on it. I knew who he was in theory, but I didn't really know anything about him. All I knew was that he was Tanya's older brother, and that he went to an all boy's school a town away when they moved here because they had a better baseball team. I didn't even know his name, and that made me uncomfortable with the idea of giving him mine.
"I go here," I said instead, hoping he'd leave it at that. Instead, he sighed and leaned against my car like he could no longer hold himself upright. My heart ached for him, and my hesitance to talk to him began to fade.
"I figured that much. Do you know why the school's closed?" he asked, and I could hear reluctance in his voice. I met his eyes again, and the wariness and hurt in his gaze melted away the rest of my self-preservation.
"Yes, I know. I know who you are, too. I can leave if you want me to, if you want to be alone," I murmured gently. He lifted his head and pressed his chin against the doorframe of my car, and I could see the skin turning white from the pressure. He mumbled something, but I couldn't make out what he said. "I'm sorry, I can't hear you. Do you want me to leave?" He didn't move for a long moment, and then he sighed and dropped his forehead against the car where his chin had been, the smacking sound making me flinch.
"Being alone is the last thing I want right now, but that's no one's problem but my own." With that, he pushed away from my car, turned his back, and started walking away. The way his shoulders sagged and his head dropped dejectedly officially shattered my already battered heart, and I didn't stop to think. I threw the car into drive and pulled up next to where he was walking, rolling down the passenger side window all the way. He stopped and turned his head to look at me, but I couldn't see his eyes underneath the brim of his hat.
"I don't have anything to do today. We don't have to say a word, if you don't want to. But I don't really want to be alone either, so if you'd like some company, I'm free." He didn't move or say a word for what felt like forever, and I was beginning to feel uncomfortable. I was just about to apologize and drive away when he took a hesitant step towards my car, and then stopped. I pressed the button on my door to unlock the car, and watched as one corner of his lovely lips pulled gently upwards before he took the final steps and threw my door open. He plopped heavily down in the seat next to me and closed the door before he turned to meet my eyes, pushing the bill of his hat upwards.
We stared at each other wordlessly for a long second, before I smiled and turned away. I had no idea where we were going, but I knew what we were running from. And as I drove out of the parking lot, I could feel the boy next to me relaxing in his seat as the school and all the memories and ghosts it held faded out of sight.