If You’re Reading This I’m Dead

Niall left for Arizona a week after he was cleared of being a suspect. He wanted to get an early start on his program, cuz he knew the Basses looked favorably upon those with ambition. That was three years ago. He’s in law school now to spite his parents, who were psychologists, and expected he’d be the same. As persons who practiced the social sciences, the Wolff-Hunters have no choice but believe everyone to be redeemable— no matter how damaged, or what they’d done. But there was one fundamental truth they couldn’t deny, despite their hard-set belief; for facts are facts and cannot change. They’re soulless demons with empty cavities where their beating hearts should lie. Dear Riley, don’t you know it? All good lawyers, go to Hell.

“Hey new kid,” smirks the richest. The veins in his white neck match the ones in his arms, strained and visible. His blue eyes as dark and royal as the blazers the four of them own, his canine tooth perfectly pointed, biting down onto his dark salmon lip as he smirks. He runs his hand, big enough to palm a bull, through the mess of his chocolate curls as he leans against the coil of the banister. “Tell me,” he says. “What is that on my shoe?”

I set my eyes on the droplet, almost minuscule, floating above where his middle toe should be, on his muted black Oxford. I look up again, at each of them.

Eli’s teeth are perfect. He stands against the other half of the banister, with his arms folded over his chest; his sweater bloody red and wool, the sleeves pulled almost to his elbow, with the white of his button down poking out. He smiles his perfect teeth between his dark brown lips; his golden brown skin shines under the fluorescents, and his hair cut close to a buzz, with patterned lines cut beside his ear. His hazel eyes dart back and forth, from me, to him, then the shoe.

Noah just visited his family in Colombia, yet his skin’s whiter than when he left. His Irish genes at their finest, and he had his mother to thank. He stands against the brick wall with his head down, pretending he doesn’t like the game.

And then there’s Niall.

“Lake doesn’t talk much,” Niall says, taking me under his arm. “Come on, Lance,” he calls to the richest. He squints his eye, so green as Mary Jane, and stifles his own rising smirk. “Why don’t you cut the kid some slack?”

His shaggy blonde hair bobbles when he points his head to the man on the ground, shaking on his knees in front of Lance. A clear drop falls onto the hardwood floor, and the guy’s shoulders begin to tremor, like turbulence on a plane. “I. . . “ he stammers. “I. . . “

“It’s blood,” I say, answering the earlier question.

By the time Niall got out of class, the worst of it was halfway over. We saw Lance slap the kid a couple times, before his prey, fell on his knees in front of him. Or I saw it at least, and Niall was still consumed, by the idea of what Wolfie said. Dear Riley, it’s almost funny. Now I know where you learned impossible truths.

“By a show of hands,” Wolfie said when the lecture began. Her voice soared across the rounded walls of the lecture hall, and coiled around the ears of all so enchanted by her.

It was easy to be enchanted by Wolfie. She was Diahann Carroll on her worst of days, and something otherworldly on her best. Today she wore glasses as if she’s lady Clark Kent, and a canyon-brown turtleneck that fit her too well. Her brown skin’s perfect and even, and her plump lips wore dark cherry lipsticks, and her black hair was slicked back into a French roll. Her dark-berry nails fingered the lettering of her name plaque, Dr. Jane Wolff, rolling round the ‘O’ over and over again.

“By a show of hands,” she called. “Who did last night’s reading?”

Of everyone to raise their hand, only one spoke out of turn. “If you’re going to assign material,” said the blonde, with waves down her back, and a red mouth as cocky as all get out. “You should at least check it for accuracy; the article got everything wrong.”

Wolfie tried not to smirk, and that’s how I knew who the speaker was. Niall said Alondria gets away with everything, when Wolfie’s in town.

“To whom it may concern,” Alondria recited, the prayer we’ve all memorized, hand to chest, as if we owed this pledge, allegiance. “The entire course of a human life can be altered forever, by a single moment in time. For many of us, these moments become the spark that teach us who we are to be. I guess we don’t all get lucky.”

On August 9th, 9:30 p.m. Andy and I parked in front of Diver’s Canyon, and swallowed two bullets between us. Should we have survived, on August 10, 11:15 p.m. we leapt from the 30th floor of St. Joseph’s hospital. I know that it’s selfish. But if you’re reading this—.

“The last diary entry,” Niall called out of turn, leaning back in his lecture seat. “Most frequently headlined, If You’re Reading This I’m Dead. The only problem is—.”

The existence of impossible truths.

Best defined, phenomenons which logically present as otherwise unreal, yet are believed

wholeheartedly right and true by the majority, and therefore may very well be so. You once explained to me, Riley, the reality of impossible truths. You said that there were millions hidden out there for us to find; so far I believe in six. Number One, God. Number Two, Ghosts. Number Three, love. And Number Four. . .

“We don’t have tragedies in Hazel Grove,” Niall announced to the class of native Arizonans, none the wiser of the place we call home, on those old Michigan roads.

We don’t have tragedies in Hazel Grove— not usually. But my, when we do, they’re incredible.They found the girl dead with a hole in her chest in the passenger seat of Andrew Montgomery’s ’84 hatchback Camaro. They found Andy shot dead with the gun in his hand. . . Most people believe if they’d found the diary, they could’ve saved them before they died. It was written on the pages, the note, before the detectives ripped it from the journal as evidence, and the media released into the wild, so to think it the ability to save ’em wasn’t so far a grasp. The mystery was eventually solved, after a month-long hunt for the whys, led to the letter, and everyone accepted it as truth. But what everybody forgot was—.

“She has a birth mark on her left shoulder,” Niall said. “The corpse didn’t. If she really ever died, it wasn’t in that car.”

Their eyes locked onto him, like archers to a target. They watched him as though someone would

rip their irises out of their scleras if they turned away. Then suddenly, the looking was over. Old news, now.

“Aunt Wolfie,” Niall called when the lecture was done, approaching the Professor. The other kids dart past us, fleeting through the double cedar doors of the lecture hall, and I noticed it again, that this place looks like a prep school. Everyone around us wore a quarter zip and khakis, or the women wore solid kilts, or tartan skirts. We imagined university to be a whole new world when we were in St. Bart’s. This place is Catholic school kids with bigger dicks now, chasing copies of their father’s business degrees.

“That’s Professor Aunt Wolfie to you, Mister,” she smiled, tugging Niall by his cheek. Despite being the whitest man on the planet, the straight-haired, green-eyed, Niall James Wolff-Hunter, Wolfie’s Black, adopted into the family when she was seven and loved ever since. She always thought it was a little funny. Being the Black Wolff, instead of the sheep. “Hello, Lakeland,” Wolfie smiled to me. “Niall didn’t tell me you were—.”

“Only for a month,” Niall interjected. “The university hired his paper to run a story about the club. He’s staying with me till December, to get an inside look at things. And to catch up of course,” he smirked at me, stealing me under his wing. “So, about the paper—.”

“No extensions,” she said, already knowing. “Not that you should need one, Mr. Red, as

obsessed as you are with this case.”

“I could crack it, if I could get my hands on her diary,” Niall muttered. If you let Wolfie’s eyes tell it, she could’ve sworn he was still a kid. They were always the closest, when we were growing up. She’d watch him when his parents were away, and they’d play games based on all the stories she’d read him. Little Red was their favorite. Niall won’t ever admit he wasn’t born a genius and figured it out in his own— but he’s got a way of understanding the parts of people no one really does, and Aunt Wolfie taught him everything he knows. Really, if anyone ever truly knew you at all, Riley, I think it was because of Niall. In turn I think that really means, you have Aunt Wolfie to thank.

“No extensions,” Wolfie said, tapping his nose. “How’s the internship; have you heard anything back?”

“The Basses,” Niall said, without detail. Still, she knew. “I thought Lance wasn’t interested?”

“He wasn’t,” Niall conceded. “But it is a good opportunity, and it would look good in any application. Naturally, he went after it.”

Impossible truth, Number Five. Friendship Amongst Peers.

“That’s a shame then,” Wolfie said. “Especially when only one of you, would ever need an application.”

He shrugged his shoulders then, and told her we’d better be going. She wished us goodbye, and he rambled on to me, all the spots we’d go on campus, and the people we’d meet. He rambled whenever there was something gnawing at his mind that he didn’t want to acknowledge, but he’d stare ahead in a tunnel, and wouldn’t take in anything else. I’d already met The Royals by then, last night when I’d gotten into town. They promised to take me out, and show me the parts of life I could never put in writing. I had the mind to tell them I wasn’t interested in what their kind did, that would swear them to eternal secrecy; then I heard a figment of you, screaming in my ear.

Suddenly we were upon the rest of them. Eli and Noah smug in their places. Lance slapping the kid to the ground, the kid he’d already beaten to the state of bleeding, trembling at his feet. “It’s blood,” I told him.

“It’s blood,” Lance says, a laugh trapping itself in his Adam’s apple.

“You know who designed these shoes, new kid?” he asks. I stare at him, without answering. I never humor a question, I’m already aware the asker doesn’t expect an answer to.

“Of course you don’t,” he smiles, tucking his chin to his chest. “You wouldn’t, would you? Have you ever heard of, Nibaldo Montoya? Oh, of course you haven’t. You know he summers in India to handpick a Nelore calf, and he raises it to maturity, feeding it the best, nurturing it to his best— you know, he’ll get a bitch or a bull even, to make sure it’s well-fucked. And then, one day, he shoots the fucker between the eye, and skins it for the leather. He makes one pair of shoes a year.”

I watch him with open eyes, but I don’t speak. By his smile, I’m sure I’ve done all I was supposed to. He turns his attention from me, back to the trembling kid on his knees. “Lick it up.”

My eyes flicker to Niall, and I wait to see a break in his expression. They set their gaze upon the others, questioning if their smiles would come to die. They glanced at the richest, to see if he was joking. And then the trembling man flattened his palms against the cold floor, and rolled his tongue over his bottom lip. He licked off the blood, and waited with his head down for further instruction. And Lance smirked at Niall, a knowing look between them, before they all turned their separate ways.

“You can’t let stuff like that get to you, Duke,” Niall says, bringing me into the office. He told me he’d show me the library, but when we got here, we walked past all the books, and he took me to their private office on the second floor, and locked the door behind us. He set down the skeleton key, only members of the Trinity Graduate University, President’s Club, could ever receive a copy of, onto the closest desk to the door. The room is small, but everything fits. Two dark suede couches face one another in the center of the layout, and the walls have bookshelves built within them, filled with encyclopedias, and yearbooks, and atlas. The ceiling lights hang down, stained glass chandeliers, that shine a dim yellow— the real light comes from the massive windows, letting in the sun.

“He paid that kid well enough to write the paper,” Niall says. “He had to argue tooth and nail with the professor, to get him to raise the B to an A-.”

“I’m sure he only does it for fun,” he goes on, when I don’t answer. “Everyone knows he’ll work for his dad when this is over, and then he’ll inherit the firm, then the university.”

The Basses acquired Trinity Grad. thirty years ago, when Arthur Bass announced himself the first man to acquire one trillion dollars in his bank account, let alone the assets that combined to build his net worth. It was a gift to himself to celebrate all his hard work and success, his Alma mater, that one day he’ll pass to his one and only heir. I always wondered why Lance even bothered with school, when Niall told me who his classmates were. I’m sure daddy’s trillions didn’t care, whether or not he had a degree, and I’m sure he didn’t actually intend to practice law. Then again, I suppose to question it, would be to wonder why the rich did anything.

“God,” Niall scoffs, coming closer to me. My open eyes set on him, but my lips never part. “What have you done to yourself?” he asks, rolling his fingers through my neon red hair. I nearly fear the dye will stain his palms.

Then suddenly his hands are locked into the back of my hair, and he’s pulling me in deep, forcing my lips to his. I take his face in my hands, and pull him in closer to me, our noses locked against each other, his breath on my lips, and my chin. I lick his bottom lip from corner to corner,before taking it between my teeth. He moans into my mouth before his tongue is set on mine, swirling like whirlpools, fighting for the lead. I feel his fingers go for my belt buckle; my pants tightening at the zipper, and I can feel his smirk on my lips. And just when he’s got the buckle undone—

Beep. Beep. Beep.

“Shit,” Niall swears, pushing me off of him. He smiles at me, as he takes two steps back, and rolls his hands through his sweaty hair. “I promised a friend I’d loan them something. In fact,” he says, digging through the books on the shelves, before he pulling out the one he needs, “here it goes, right there. I’m gonna run and give this to them— stay here, I’ll be back in twenty.”

When he fixes his clothes, and finds himself presentable, he leaves me here alone with nothing, but the dust fairies twinkling in the light, and the books.

Twenty minutes.

I rush to the first of the bookshelves, and I tear through the books, searching for a sign of something. The musk of the old books fills the air, and the grit and grime of the dust I’d dragged rests between my fingernails. I open the drawers and the cabinets, and pull open the desk drawer, and drag my hands under the bottom,of the desk. I go for the vents— I pull the desk chair over to the vent above the furthest bookshelf, and I latch my hands around the grates— when suddenly the door handle begins to turn.

“What are you doing here, new kid?”

I stare up at Eli from where I sit on the couch. I eye the disheveled books, and pray he doesn’t notice. That or the chair I’d thrown back to the opposite side of the room.

“Niall was right,” he says. “You don’t talk much at all.”

He took the couch opposite of mine, and laid straight out, resting his head on the armrest. He took a sofa cushion, and set it over his face like an eye mask, and folded his hands like a corpse over his pelvis, and crossed his legs. I feel my heart beat in my throat.

Dear Riley. I wish you didn’t make it so everyone and their mother hated you, and you have no right to resent me for that. When you left our town, you shook its grounds, and you never looked back to aide in the mess you made. Riley, we loved you like the day is long, and if you needed help, we would’ve given you everything, and that’s the part I’ll never understand. You knew what we would’ve done for you. What we would’ve gone through for you, if you needed it. Maybe we didn’t know you in full, and maybe we never did. But you knew us, inside and out. Riley, I know somehow you must think we failed you, and maybe that is why you passed us the blame. But my dearest, Riley—

“What were you looking for, anyway?” Eli asks, from under the pillow.

Impossible truth, Number Six.

It’s not our fault you died.