Story of a Dead Girl

I’ve been following him.

I know, I know. I’m aware of how that sounds. It’s funny how one thing can feel like the only thing you want in the world, and once you have it, your mind moves on to something else.

The grass is always greener and all that, I suppose.

I didn’t know being dead would be so lonely. I felt like I was beat around by everyone I ever met my whole life. Except for Maddy, but then she was gone, too, and that’s when my heart cracked open. My one friend, gone because of some pill popping drunk that couldn’t own up to her mistakes.

Truly, Maddy was an angel. She smiled at me when no one else would, talked to me even though I was shy and weird and said the wrong things and had no concept of grace or social intelligence.

She’d stay with me in my parents’ dark, empty, silent house that scared me, wear my clothes to bed, tell me she used my toothbrush while giggling and say It’s like we kissed as I gagged next to her. She made me feel like I was in a club, the exclusive club you could only be a part of if you have a friend. 

I’d been raised in my parents’ world of tit for tat, and Maddy made me realize how good it felt when there were no conditions, no games designed to make my heart pound or stomach turn, no tests that, when you failed, no one loved you anymore.

So you can imagine my acute devastation when I learned a car crash, a hit and run, caused by a selfish and remorseless asshole, had taken her from me. 

Maddy and I met in school extracurriculars. The type of activity that someone in my family and someone in Maddy’s family—two different worlds, as my family would like to think, one rich and one poor—would come across each other.

I think when she first met me she just wanted to benefit from being friends with a rich girl. I could appreciate her opportunism, even as a young child, even before I understood what it meant to be opportunistic. And I didn’t have any friends, so I wasn’t exactly in a position to be particular. 

I think I grew on her. I don’t think I was anything like she expected. I still remember her surprised-and-then-wicked expression when I suggested she put seafood in her brother’s bedroom curtain rods after he made her cry, and her maniacal laughter a week later when she told me it had started to smell.

And the same could be said for her. My stepmom hated ‘the poors’ as she called them, and she told me Maddy and her family fit that description. Now that I’m older I know that wasn’t true, but how else can the slightly elevated feel wildly superior if not through lying to themselves?

All that being said, the first time my younger self walked into Maddy’s house, I truly expected to be walking into a dirt-floored shack. You can imagine my surprise when Maddy’s house was clean, warm, and inviting. Her mom cooked dinner and everyone sat down at the table together.

I could see the usual looks from her parents that I was used to. Polite, but suspicious. They’d met my stepmom before, so I wasn’t surprised. In fact, I was relieved they were still willing to be nice to me.

Her brother, possibly still mad over the seafood incident, was not. As soon as he sat down at the table, he started in on me. 

“Didn’t your mom get kicked out of Rainbow Room for being too drunk?” He asked me accusingly, staring straight across the table at me, not even paying attention to the plate of home cooked food that might as well have been gold to me.

“Matthew,” his mom gasped.

(Yes, Maddy and Matty, I know. Something about glass houses, but their parents seem like nice people otherwise, so I won’t overtly comment.)

“Yes,” I answered. Over the years, I’d watched my stepmom fist fight police officers. I’d watched her smash every dish, glass, and electronic in our house. I’d been in the backseat, terrified, as she drove me home with her eyes shut. After all this, if Matty thought I was going to shy away from admitting to something as innocuous as my stepmom being kicked out of some bullshit fundraiser, he wasn’t as smart as he clearly thought he was.

“And didn’t she go to jail for a DUI?”

“She was arrested but not convicted,” I told him, bored, the novelty of the event having been washed away after it happened a hundred times. "So no, she didn't go to jail."

“Well,” Maddy’s mom interrupted, “we don’t need to get into it, darling. It’s really not discussion for the dinner table, anyway.” She was uncomfortable, trying to shove a plate of green beans into Matty’s hands like that alone would change the subject.

“I don’t mind,” I said, and I looked him straight in the eye and shrugged. “Hit me. What else do you want to know?” 

Matty and Maddy made the same face when I was different from what they expected and they didn’t know how to respond.

Thankfully, I still get to see it sometimes. Matty can see me even though I’m dead. He’s the only one. 

We don't know what to do yet, about this condition, where he’s all I have. I know what he wants to do. I see it in his eyes when I sneak into his apartment. He’s not an obstinate, douchey teenager that wants to fight with me across the dinner table anymore. He’s an obstinate, douchey adult now, and he was the first person I told when I was dead.

I don’t know when I noticed the way he looked at me had softened, had heated, or when I started to linger longer in rooms that he was in. I don’t know when I would have talked to Maddy about it, or what she would have said about it. That part slices.

I don’t know what Matty thinks about the man I’ve been following. Maddy died about eighteen months ago. The first few months I think Matty and I were both numb. I remember thinking I felt normal, but now looking back and remembering those first few weeks, they are obscured by total darkness. 

When I told him this, he said he feels the same way.

I appreciate that he didn’t react the way his parents did after Maddy’s killer was never brought to trial. The driver was identified, but then someone in the police department lost the evidence. They couldn’t prosecute. The driver of the car that hit Maddy never even apologized.

I don’t think Maddy’s parents ever looked me in the eye after that day, which made it easier to skip the funeral, if easy is the right word. It helped me convince myself it would be better if I stayed away. It helped convince them they were right to hate me.

Unfortunately Matty was not so easily convinced and showed up to my cold empty house that day, practically frothing at the mouth, sick with rage. He found me lying in my bed for the fifth day in a row, in dirty clothes and dirty sheets with dirty hair, face swollen from crying and covered in scratches from holding onto myself tight enough to draw blood.

“Oh,” he said.

Such an inappropriate response, but also, what else could he say?

And then he collapsed next to me in the bed. We didn’t talk or touch. He laid on his back staring at the ceiling and I laid on my side staring at his shoulder. We both tried not to think about how Maddy was spending her first night in the ground. I think we both felt like we were next to a little piece of Maddy.

When I was much younger, another woman once called my stepmom a calculating shrew and it ended with a drunken, screaming fight between them. My stepmom was incensed by the insult, but I was confused. A calculating shrew sounded like a good thing. Fate is resourceful, and Maddy is—or was—an opportunist, but I wanted to be a calculating shrew.

So, in my efforts to live up to that goal, I decided I wanted to take out Maddy’s killer, since the justice system had not. And I would be willing to die in the process.

Maddy’s killer. The phrase still feels like missing a step or falling in a dream, my stomach bottoms out and my brain has to reset.

I told myself I was selfishly mining Matty’s attention for my own benefit, but I’m starting to think I was taking care of him too. I’d only experienced love once, so it was strange to feel the sensation of hurting when he was hurting, the wish that I could help alleviate some of his suffering by taking it on myself. I would have doubled my own hurt if Matty could have felt better. I’m not overly familiar with the concept, obviously, but I think that can be called love. 

Not that I would ever reveal any of this to Matty. I intended to sift through my feelings on my own. Why would I ever want to be in love with someone? I’d felt love once, with Maddy, a platonic but consuming love that crushed me into dust and left me where I am now. Something I never want to experience again. 

So now, with love knocking on my door yet again, the prospect is so terrifying it causes a rock in my stomach and my heart to pound so loud I feel it in my ears. How could I possibly be considering giving in to this feeling, so this love (said with as much disdain as can be mustered) might be given a chance to demolish me again? What would ever compel me to take that chance?

I don’t know, but it was that love that found me at the bottom of the ocean near my house. When my stepmom was so drunk she couldn’t walk, could barely keep her eyes open, when I saw her jingling her keys and stumbling towards the door, when I saw that no one had any intention of stopping her, I, a calculating shrew, asked, Can I have a ride?

Once in the car, she swerved all over the road. For a second I thought maybe she was the one trying to kill me. But eventually the sleeping pills I’d slipped in her many drinks got to working with the rest of the substances she’d indulged in, and she was asleep, to put it kindly.

And it was not long after that that my hand helped guide the car towards the edge of the road, sending it sailing past the guardrails and into the frigid water beneath.

Now we were both dead.

And before you think this is a story of a guilty conscience, a Telltale Heart of sorts, please spare me. My one regret is that she’d gotten too fucked up to be able to coherently answer me when I asked Are you sorry you killed Maddy? But, in reality, her answer wouldn’t have mattered. I just wanted her to know that I know. I wanted her to know that this was her paying for it. 

And when I showed up at Matty’s door, he knew too. I watched the realization cross his mind as clearly as if it were written on his forehead. His face was haggard, the skin under his eyes a dark blue, and he hugged my barely-dried clothes so tight I could barely breathe and said over and over again, Oh my god. Oh my god, I thought you were dead. They said you were dead.

So here we are, just a few months later, with me presumed dead and Maddy’s killer actually dead. Matty and I dance around each other, linked together by a love for Maddy and wedged apart by utter fear of giving in to our feelings and risk experiencing another crushing blow. When I loved Maddy, I didn’t know to fear losing her.

Now that I love Matty, I know to feel the fear. I don’t know which is better.

I’m not sure what we’ll do in the future. Despite being a calculating shrew, I never had much zeal for life, so, while lonely, the slow pace of being dead has been fairly pleasant. I read Matty’s college textbooks and go for walks. When the sun shines on my face, it feels like Maddy smiling at me.

Matty has been working and says he found someone that can get me a fake identity. He said maybe we can both get fakes and go someplace new. I think that sounds nice, in the future.

For now, I’d like to stay in the city where I grew up. My stepmom might have killed Maddy, but my dad’s deep pockets kept her family from getting justice. So for now, I’ll keep following him, and watching him, until opportunity strikes.