The weekend following my thirteenth birthday, I was forced to attend Jane Freeman’s funeral. Jane was a heavy girl; she had been skating on the pond behind the school, the one that kids sometimes used as a rink. It was only early November when the ice cracked beneath her.  Rumour has it, her skin turned purple and blue as rich and as dark as our school colours. As they lowered Jane’s body into the ground her father draped his suit jacket over her casket. He was worried about her being cold. A little too late for that, I thought. He looked so small without his jacket, like a bird without feathers. He didn’t look like a father, and I guess he wasn’t one, not anymore. 

For my birthday, I had received a notebook the size of a paperback novel, bound in suede. It felt good in my hands. Jane’s funeral left an impression on me. Unlike other teenagers who thought they were invincible, I believed I would be dead soon. I filled this notebook to the brim with letters for friends and family to have when I died. These letters were nothing but brutally honest; if someone were to take offence, I wouldn’t be alive to hear it. 

For example, I had written a letter to my mother when I was especially angry at her. In the letter, I explained to her that I know she was drinking while she was pregnant with me. That is why I am smaller than the other kids, and why I can’t speak around people so easily. And that even when she is sober, she looks at me like I’m a mistake she made. Like, if she could just put me in the back of her closet or stick me in a drawer somewhere, she would. 

I carried these letters with me every day, like someone carrying around a pocket knife. 

 

In eighth grade, I was put in a class with Melody, which was an ironic name considering her voice sounded like rusty door hinges. Melody would often make fun of my crossed eyes. As a joke, she would ask me what I was looking at. No one else really laughed, but it put her in a stitch. Once she laughed so hard, she puked. I can still smell the salty stench of it.

 

When I was really little, Melody’s mother used to babysit me; her name was Susan. Susan is a good name for a mother. She would buy us Sunny-D and fuzzy peach candies and let us watch late-night TV. She smelled like booze, the same way my mother did, but when Susan drank, she would laugh and dance. Susan would make me have a bath before bed and after she would twist my hair into neat braids so that in the morning my hair would be curly. And even though we were so young, I think Melody was jealous. 

 

One day, Melody took my notebook of letters; the grease on her fingers stained the suede cover.  As I watched her read my letters, a quiet rage was burning at the pit of my stomach, a fit of silent anger that I have never experienced since. I begged myself to say something, but I couldn’t. For weeks, Melody sat with my notebook on the corner of her desk. She would glance at me while she read it. What was especially embarrassing was that I had written a letter to my friend Billy.

 Billy was the only person who really looked at me. When Billy looked at me, he looked right into my eyes and held them there until my face would go red and I had to look away. Billy and I walked home the same way and he would talk the whole time. Sometimes when people talk too much it can be dreadful, but his stories were always interesting and never too self-centred. He just let me listen and didn’t need me to say much. In the letter, I told Billy that if there was a scenario where one us had to die, he should be the one to live because he is bursting with life. I also wrote that if I was ever to love someone it should be him. The thought of Billy reading this letter filled me with dread. I had to get my notebook back. 

 

Melody would bring her dad’s dirty magazines to school and share them with her friends; she took special care not to wrinkle them or else her dad would find her out. One afternoon during recess, her bag was tossed aside. I saw my chance and quickly took the magazines. Hidden in the bathroom, I decided to take a peek. The images of men confused me. Men wore bits of leather and their bodies were hard and shiny like polished floors. Heat spread across my cheeks and I stuffed the magazines in my bag.  

My plan was to ask Melody to trade my notebook for her magazines, but Melody had already found out what I had done. She handed me a note that read “Meet me at the pond;” the same pond Jane had died in.

When I arrived at the pond, I noticed Billy holding my notebook, but before I could say anything Melody’s fist hit my face. In seconds, I was on my back. Melody’s fists continued to pound into my face. Warm, thick blood pooled over my eyelids, blinding me. I could hear the ice cracking through the ringing of my ears. I knew the ice wouldn’t hold us much longer. I wondered if my parents would get my letters if I died. Suddenly, I hoped they wouldn’t. I didn’t want them to know the truth, I just wanted to tell them that I loved them and that they were good parents.  

 

When I woke up in the hospital my whole body hurt like I was bathing in a tub of hard rocks. My father was sitting in a chair next to my bed holding a balloon, but he looked angry. When he saw that I was awake his face softened, and he asked me how I was doing. I told him that my ribs hurt most of all, and he explained to me that I had cracked one. I asked him why he was angry. 

“It’s your mother. She’s supposed to be here, you could be dead for all she knows…” And then his face relaxed, and he told me not to worry about that. My father was sometimes distant, and sometimes I resented him for letting my mother be an alcoholic, but for the most part, he did the things that fathers were meant to do. 

A couple of weeks later, I was allowed back at school. On my first day back, I skipped class and I went to the pond. It was blocked off by a couple of orange pylons, as if that would stop anyone. I found my notebook in a melting snowbank. The pages were stuck together and tore when I tried to pull them apart, as if like the snow around it, it was melting too. I threw my notebook towards the pond. I wanted it to sink but it floated on the surface in an unsatisfying way. I never asked Billy if he read my letter. But whenever I talked to him his eyes darted back and forth in nervous flickers. He still walked home with me, but there was a tension between us that didn’t exist before. I wondered why he let Melody beat me up. I wondered why he just stood there. His cowardliness made me like him less. 

Melody was expelled. But she never disappeared. That summer her parents got a divorce, and her mother started going to the same AA meetings as my mother. It was that summer Melody warmed up to me, perhaps because she felt guilty about the scars she left on my face or maybe it was just out of boredom. But while we waited for our mothers to be finished with their meetings, Melody and I would look at the celebrity tabloids together and sometimes Melody would buy us each a coke. I accepted her kindness but refused her friendship.

My fear of death followed me throughout high school, but it was like a shadow that I only noticed occasionally. I didn’t feel the need to leave letters behind. I would die, the way I mostly lived, in silence.