Page 74 of We Were Liars

MIRREN IS IN my room when I open the door. She is sitting at my desk with her hand on my laptop.

“I wonder if I could read the emails you sent me last year,” she says. “Do you have them on your computer?”

“Yeah.”

“I never read them,” she says. “At the start of the summer I pretended I did, but I never even opened them.”

“Why not?”

“I just didn’t,” she says. “I thought it didn’t matter, but now I think it does. And look!” She makes her voice light. “I even left the house to do it!”

I swallow as much anger as I can. “I understand not writing back, but why wouldn’t you even read my emails?”

“I know,” Mirren says. “It sucks and I’m a horrible wench. Please, will you let me read them now?”

I open the laptop. Do a search and find all the notes addressed to her.

There are twenty-eight. I read over her shoulder. Most of them are charming, darling emails from a person supposedly without headaches.

Mirren!

Tomorrow I leave for Europe with my cheating father, who is, as you know, also deeply boring. Wish me luck and know that I wish I were spending the summer on Beechwood with you. And Johnny. And even Gat.

I know, I know. I should be over it.

I am over it.

I am.

Off to Marbella to meet attractive Spanish boys, so there.

I wonder if I can make Dad eat the most disgusting foods of every country we visit, as penance for his running off to Colorado.

I bet I can. If he really loves me, he will eat frogs and kidneys and chocolate-covered ants.

/Cadence

THAT’S HOW MOST of them go. But a few of the emails are neither charming nor darling. Those ones are pitiful and true.

Mirren.

Vermont winter. Dark, dark.

Mummy keeps looking at me while I sleep.

My head hurts all the time. I don’t know what to do to make it stop.

The pills don’t work. Someone is splitting through the top of my head with an axe, a messy axe that won’t make a clean cut through my skull.

Whoever wields it has to hack away at my head, coming down over and over, but not always right in the same place. I have multiple wounds.

I dream sometimes that the person wielding the axe is Granddad.

Other times, the person is me.

Other times, the person is Gat.

Sorry to sound crazy. My hands are shaky as I type this and the screen is too bright.

I want to die, sometimes, my head hurts so much. I keep writing you all my brightest thoughts but I never say the dark ones, even though I think them all the time. So I am saying them now. Even if you do not answer, I will know somebody heard them, and that, at least, is something.

/Cadence

WE READ ALL twenty-eight emails. When she is finished, Mirren kisses me on the cheek. “I can’t even say sorry,” she tells me. “There is not even a Scrabble word for how bad I feel.”

Then she is gone.