On December 17th, I was shot in the throat one minute and forty-six seconds after I hugged her goodbye.
She didn’t see me get shot. No one did.
The police found my body hours later, on Interstate 89. I guess someone saw my fluffy brown boot or tripped over my meticulously manicured fingers. Maybe they saw the light glinting off my number necklace, 143.
I don’t know who found me. I have no idea how either. I stopped paying attention to the speeding cars during the third hour of my solitude.
No one gets murdered in New Hampshire. At least, that’s what I thought.
Hana had done her research, alongside her other responsibilities: honor roll, cheerleading, the works. She told me to tell my mother about the notes, the rocks thrown at my window, texts, calls, and gifts in my locker. I didn’t want to tell my mother. She wouldn’t have believed me. She would tell me that I was hallucinating, that maybe I was schizophrenic and I spent too much time on my phone. My mother wouldn’t have believed me. I didn’t want to believe me.
All Hana wanted was for me to say something. Maybe if I had, I wouldn’t have died.
“Stalking can escalate, Mara. You should tell someone,” she had said to me as her right foot cascaded towards the cracked sidewalk, small rocks running from her boots.
“It hasn’t gotten bad yet. It’s October, this has only been going on since August. I’ll be fine. All this dude is doing is leaving notes in my locker.”
“Go to the school then, they could pull cameras, figure out who he is,” Hana muttered. “I’m not going to the goddamn school. I’m not a snitch. It’s not a big deal.”
Leaves were floating magenta and gold around us, crunching underneath our feet as we walked past house 143. Even the jack-o-lanterns on middle-aged white ladies’ porches were urging me to tell someone. Their crooked smiles and triangle eyes stared me down, taunting me. They knew my fate, but I guess they forgot to tell me.
I saw his face before I saw the gun.
I knew this boy. He had a familiar face, a familiar body. I had known him , had loved him deeply. He was once my best friend. Not in the same way Hana was, but in the way that your parents are. Your lover is always your best friend.
I realized he was holding a gun when the sun glinted off it, blinding me.
I felt the bullet hit me before I heard it.
My final thought being:
Hana.
My body was moved onto an uncomfortable stretcher as the sky turned purple. School buses drove past, and middle school girls flashed their phone cameras,
posting pictures of the police tape on their Snapchat stories, questioning what happened. My death was their introduction to popularity. I hope they learn that it isn’t all that great. Girls are cruel in those friend groups.
Police muttered sporadically as they put up their yellow tape. A sixteen-year-old girl with a bullet in her larynx wasn’t something they saw every day.
I was brought to the Merrimack County Coroner’s Office. I frantically whispered my goodbyes to my favorite pair of jeans, my least favorite flannel.
My advent calendar chocolate was still in my pocket.
I had eaten sixteen so far, but I had nine left in my calendar. The countdown to Christmas had me excited to go downstairs on the inky December mornings. I had missed one day of my calendar while I laid helplessly on the side of I-89. I will never finish my calendar, or any others, for that matter.
I would never eat an advent chocolate again. I would never love again.
I am gone.
I felt violated as I was cut open.
The pathologist dug my organs out of my skin.
I still needed those.
I didn’t pay much attention to my funeral. It happened two days after Christmas. Hana wore my favorite perfume. My mother had bought me a new bottle; she didn’t know who else to give it to. Hana wore it reluctantly. My mother had begged until she gave in. I’m guessing she wanted to smell our beach vacations and salt air with a hug, one last time.
January came and went. Hana stayed in bed for most of it. Her room was dim, only her nightlight illuminating her once vivid sapphire eyes, now dimmer than her room in the dead of night. As the next two months passed, Hana cried and cried, like it was all her body knew how to do. Every time I watched a tear run down her cheek, my heart stopped beating for a fragment of a second and broke for an eternity.
She began to blame herself. She decided that if she had walked me home that day, I wouldn’t have been shot. I would be alive. But how could she have known?
As she continued her self-blame, I tried to show her I was okay.
“Hana!” I would say, my hollow ghost aching to hold her. She didn’t need to hear me yet.
“I’m here,” I whispered as Hana shifted on her mattress. The carpet scraped against the soles of my feet. I cried on this carpet eleven months ago. Time moves faster in death.
“Get the hell out of bed!” Hana’s mother had been screaming for twenty minutes. “She’s not here! Crying will not bring Mara back! How the hell would she feel if she knew how you’ve been acting?”
“I’m here.”
Hana didn’t react. I moved closer to her. “It’s okay.”
She cried harder.
I couldn’t breathe. My heart splintered and frayed in my chest, and I didn’t know what to do, didn’t know how to feel. I got up and sat on Hana’s unmade bed as fresh mascara streaks started to coat her cheeks.
“I’m here,” I said softly as I began to stroke her back.
She shuddered at my touch, pulling the stained white blanket she took from my bed closer around her as she began to cry harder.
“It’s my fault,” she repeated over and over, as her rain noise CD began to skip. The sound burned into my eardrums like the hurricane currently playing on the spinning disk.
“What’s your fault?” I murmured, pulling the blanket farther up her spine.
“You. You died. I could’ve said something. I should’ve said something.” She hiccupped through her tears. “I’m so sorry Mara.” Her tears flowed freely, her body shook as she sobbed.
“It’s not your fault. I never said anything. It was never your fault. You’re falling apart.” I looked down at her. “You need to let me go.” I knew I was deepening the gash on her soul with those next words, but I couldn’t not tell her. “Even if you wholeheartedly believe for the rest of your life that my death is on you, know you have my forgiveness, and I feel no anger towards you.”
She lifted her body from the dirty pillows, her hair sticking to her forehead as she shifted. Her hair was longer than the last time I had run my fingers through it.
She stared blankly at me. Her cheeks had hollowed out from accidental starvation. This wasn’t the Hana I had known during my thirteen years of living in the white brick house next to hers. She shifted her arms in an attempt to put them around me, and as I drifted out of reach, her tears paused.
“I love you.”
“I love you more.”
Her blue eyes peered into mine as if she was looking at me for the first time.
“You have to let your guilt go. You didn’t fire the shot that killed me. It’s okay to be sad, but it’s not okay to be so debilitatingly empty that you can’t function. Let me go. It’s okay.”
“I can’t,” Hana sobbed. “What if I forget? What if I never find someone who knows me the way you do?” Her voice shook in a haunting vibrato as she realized I was really gone.
“You won’t forget. I know you won’t. But you have to live. You have to be able to function.
If you don’t, I’ll die a second time. But I’ll only die a second time in your world. I’ll die with the memories you have of us.” I didn’t want to tell her that leaving her world was my biggest fear. I knew I had died in other peoples’, but I didn’t really care. Hana’s world was my favorite. I loved the constant state of well-being, the constants of her world when she wasn’t dying in her own way.
“How do I know this isn’t a dream?”
“I’m real,” I whispered to her. She didn’t believe me, but it was true. “I’ll always be right here, forever and always.”
“I won’t forget,” She murmured delicately.
“I know you won’t.” She wiped her tears as I repeated my consolations until she knew that just because she couldn’t see me didn’t mean I didn’t exist. As she renounced her guilt and fears, I knew I had to go. When I left her for the final time, I knew I wasn’t dying forgotten.
I was dying loved.