Here is what happened:
On the eighth of August in the year 2010, a nineteen-year-old college student flips her car on the stretch of road that the church ladies always said would “kill someone one’uh these days.” The roof of the car collapses her skull; the steering wheel turns her chest into a cavity. In my grandmother’s kitchen, my grandfather sits at her dinner table, cheek resting on a clenched white fist; this is the first time, I realize, that I’ve seen the two of them in the same room together. “She’s still in the car,” my grandfather is saying. “They can’t get her out. She’s still in that car.”
It is August of 2010 and in three days – or is it four? – I will be turning thirteen. I don’t remember leaving that house; I don’t remember the days that followed her death, either. I must have seen her younger sister, at some point. We must have gone to their house bearing buckets of fried chicken and deep glass casserole dishes, a traditional Southern grieving ritual. I like to think that she and I embraced, that we cried into each other’s shoulders, finding comfort in each other in the way only kin can. But Madison and I frequently hurt each other in the way only kin can. This is all wishful thinking, anyway, because all I can remember is my uncle, her father, sitting at their kitchen table with a phone in hand, and Madison, standing at the door, peering out the glass frame and saying, “Taylor should be home any minute.”
Here’s what I remember:
A pale, doughy, swollen face. Perhaps the inside of the casket was pillowy; and maybe those pillows were white. Did she wear that blue shirt in the photograph that I’ll stare at for ages, memorizing a face I’ll forget anyway? I blink and she’s wearing her Walmart uniform. She’s wearing her prom dress. She’s wearing her sister’s prom dress, the one Madison made out of duct tape a year after Taylor’s death. No, that’s wrong – she made that dress the year before. No – but does it matter? I’m moving on. It’s ten o’clock in the morning and I turned thirteen an hour ago. No – it’s ten o’clock in the morning and I won’t turn thirteen for another twenty-three hours. I turn thirteen at her graveside, not at her wake; the distinction between funeral and wake is often lost on me, anyhow. I construct and reconstruct my memory the way a child mashes pots of Play-Doh into a single psychedelic ball. But I remember that face, permanently scratched into the skin behind my eyelids. It’s one of those things I can’t shake.
Here’s what I’ve been told:
Taylor made Honor Roll. Taylor played the clarinet. Taylor was Gifted and Talented. Taylor had piercings and tattoos only in tasteful places; but maybe that would have changed as she grew into her rebellions. She had a poster in her bedroom that said, “well behaved women rarely make history.” She idolized Marilyn Monroe and was afraid of large dogs. Her natural mean streak made her affections all the more valuable; when she said that she loved someone, they knew that she wasn’t just saying it. Taylor would never just say something, you know. Taylor should have been as close to perfect as our family gets.
The anomaly of her sexuality – that was the catch.
A girl named Mandy calls me a dyke on my way to the computer lab between classes.
She thinks I don’t hear her; she’s talking about me, not to me, and our eyes lock only after the slur has left her lips. I’m walking with my friend, likely also implicated in my dykedom, but I don’t remember how I felt in that moment. Did my stomach twist with the realization that I was being gossiped about? Did I think it was funny, already confident in my sexuality and the throes of discovering my gender identity? I don’t remember. What I do remember is recounting the story to my grandmother in the backseat of her car. Madison sits in the front seat and I think she doesn’t hear me; since the death of her sister, she’s spent her time getting lost in her own world. Once she told me It’s like I dreamed her; do you think maybe she was all a dream? I was too young to know that I should have been worried.
The next day in the computer room I find Mandy crying among a cluster of sympathetic girls. She tells me that Madison threatened to fuckin’ kill her, bitch, if I ever hear you say that about my cousin like it’s a bad thing again. She says, “I didn’t call you nothin’, I swear I didn’t say nothin’ about you,” and I tell her that I know she did, but it didn’t matter. I tell her that Madison’s usually too high to do anything to her; she was just talking, not serious, wouldn’t actually hurt her. Mandy sniffles.
“I’m not kiddin’,” Madison shouts from the doorway. She’d followed me to my classroom, and I hadn’t realized. “I’ll fucking kill you.”
Mandy cries all over again.
In her own way, Madison was protecting me.
Mandy and her friends were of a number of other students – boys and girls alike – who took it upon themselves to warn me of Taylor’s eternal damnation. In the lunchroom, a girl grabs me by the arm while I dump my tray into the garbage can and lets me know that she’s sorry, but I needed to know that gay people were going to hell. The underlying implication was clear: my cousin was damned for her decision to kiss another girl, and I would be joining her if I strayed from the path of heterosexual righteousness.
My particular brand of queerness was and is not identical to Taylor’s; or maybe it would have been. Perhaps her identity would have changed as she aged; perhaps she would not have been queer at all, a suggestion some who knew her have taken as gospel. Still, it would have been nice to have an older gay cousin to look up to, or at least a family member who was sympathetic to my struggles as a sexually confused transgender teen. Rural queer teenagers don’t often have the luxury of community; I knew approximately one lesbian growing up, a kindly pediatrician who owned several horses and diagnosed me with ADHD. She was plagued with accusations of inappropriate behavior that I never experienced; mothers did not want her taking their daughters’ blood pressure. The few other queer teenagers in my high school I found too flamboyant for my shy childhood self, or, in some cases, too predatory; I was not about to build a community with the girl who groped me in the lunch line, or the boy who insisted I stroke his balls in the stairwell one afternoon. The straight kids bullied the queers, and the queers in turn bullied weaker queers. Some of us want to eliminate the weakness we find in ourselves by first destroying it in other people.
Taylor had never been like that. At least, I hope she hadn’t.
I smoke these things to keep myself from killing myself and everyone in this building.
That was the answer Madison gave to the chemistry teacher when he asked her why she smoked cigarettes at her age, and that was the answer that earned her a trip to The Ridge Behavioral Health System, a mental health clinic in Lexington, Kentucky that seemed to specialize in teenagers who were too sick for school, but not quite violent enough for juvie. Madison had found herself in the center of that sweet spot. She was gone anywhere between a few days to a week and a half; in my memory, her absence was a blip. She was gone, and then she was back, telling stories about the other patients she’d met in the hospital. Kids with bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, and one exceptionally nervous boy with schizophrenia who the other patients seemed afraid of, but Madison quite liked. Madison wasn’t one to judge; she was always telling me that I was too stiff, too judgmental, that I needed to learn to let people be people. She was the type to befriend wayward schizophrenics.
She pauses in her tale and glances back at me. “I think you would’ve liked it there.”
She overdoses; she gets her stomach pumped, she gets better.
She overdoses, she gets better. She overdoses, she gets better. She does this two, three times in as many years; the first time, she wakes up to a doctor asking her why and answers that she wanted to see her sister. That might have earned her another trip to The Ridge; perhaps they settled for counseling that time.
I asked her about her answer one night while we were both staying with our grandmother. I was angry and a little jealous; she was the only one between us who was brave enough to make her suicide a reality. The other students had gotten to me, what with all their going-to-hell talk, and I was afraid of what lie on the other side of life; still kind of am. But Madison assured me that it wasn’t a suicide; that she had woken up and forgotten, for a blessed moment, that her sister had died almost a year ago and that she was merely requesting to see her. I didn’t believe her then, and I’m not sure what to think now.
Please tell me you’re awake. ):
The message sits in my inbox. I type a response. Backspace. Type another. Backspace. Decide on a simple yeah and hope for the best. Madison responds quickly; we exchange messages all night long and fall asleep after a few hours of finding comfort in each other’s grief.
Wouldn’t it be nice, if it happened that way?
Here is what happened:
A seventeen-year-old girl refuses hospitalization for her apparent flu symptoms until she can no longer speak her refusal. She is groggy, she is slow, she is unresponsive; and her father loads her into his car and drives her to the hospital. She dies in the backseat the way most addicts do: quietly, between one breath and the next.
I am fifteen years old, walking down the hallway of Monticello High. The final bell will ring in a few moments and I have no idea why my mother has called me out of class. In my memory the hallway telescopes outwards and I never quite reach my destination, but that doesn’t matter; she’s already gone.
Her wake I remember in glimpses and starts.
Our older cousin bending over her corpse and pressing a kiss into her cold forehead. Madison’s lips, blue and bruised around the edges of her mouth, evidence that someone, somewhere, had tried to save her. I was shocked that the second hand on the clock in the funeral home kept ticking; I felt as though time should have stopped the moment she died, given us all the time and space to collect our thoughts, our feelings, our wits. They close the casket before the public are allowed into the parlor and I am relieved; I don’t want anybody to see her like this. I write her a note and leave it in the casket; I don’t remember what was written.
From here on, everything will feel like her doing. Monticello High will close its doors the next year and I’ll blame her. A boy she’d casually dated will drown himself in Lake Cumberland and I’ll blame her. A cousin on my mother’s side of the family will overdose again and again, and I’ll blame her. My anger cannot hurt her anymore, and it makes me angrier and angrier still.
I never give psychiatrists the answers they’re looking for.
They ask me, any history of sexual assault? Rape? Molestation? Technically, yes – in middle school I was assaulted in the lunch line by a high school student, an older girl whose blonde hair was dyed orange halfway down her roots. But I never mention this; I always forget, and it doesn’t seem important, anyhow. It’s not why we’re here. Any history of abuse? Neglect? That depends on your definition; I always say no. History of mental illness? I tell them about my great-grandmother, a woman with diagnosed dementia who once chased her son-in-law out of her house with a knife at four o’clock in the morning. Drug abuse? Alcohol abuse? I might talk about my glass-eyed alcoholic great-grandfather, who was so dependent on the substance he died of withdrawal. Here I might mention my cousins and their drug dependency, but never anyone by name. Any childhood trauma? And that’s where I balk. Does it count as trauma? Does it count as childhood? I tell them anyway, and the reaction is always the same: I’m sorry that happened to you.
I never tell them what they want to hear; everything comes up just a little short. My trauma is not traumatic enough. My assault was not dramatic enough. Alcohol abuse and drug dependency always happened around me, a specter of disorder that haunted only the corners of my life. I hear the real question at the heart of these interrogations: What made you this way? Who made you this way? And I don’t know why it’s me they’re always asking.
To be clear:
I’m not suggesting that their deaths caused my mental illness. Stress and environmental factors are among the vague conditions believed to cause schizoaffective disorder. But so are genetic factors and complications during pregnancy, and I was a breech baby. (Please don’t try to build a metaphor out of that, something about being born upside down. Technically, I was born sideways, carved out of my mother in a C-section birth. The doctors told her she wouldn’t feel a thing; she tells me that she felt everything.)
What I can tell you is this: I started manifesting symptoms late in high school, early in undergraduate, although some of my symptoms I’ve always had. I’ve always heard music in water, which isn’t nearly as romantic as some might think; imagine hearing Britney Spears when the toilet flushed. I’ve heard voices that had nothing important to say and I’ve seen shadowy figures that were mostly content to stay in my periphery. I thought I was just seeing things. I thought that my mind was playing tricks. I never thought that there was something wrong, not even when I was huddled on my twin bed in my college dorm room, sobbing into my pillows because the stuffed bear my parents had bought me for Valentine’s Day that year wouldn’t stop laughing.
I received a gentle diagnosis almost four years later, in a therapist’s office in Knoxville, Tennessee. I’d been in what they called active psychosis for about a month and a half at that point, in which I believed that a man was living in the small attic space in my apartment, who liked to come down from his perch while I slept at night and touch my things. (If you laugh, does that make you cruel? I’m asking because I don’t know.) I stopped sleeping at night. I took up permanent residency in my apartment’s living room, where I could keep an eye on the attic door from the far corner of my couch. Two realities had converged within me, one in which I understood there to be a man living in my attic, and one in which I understood the impossibility of such things. Anxiety was a beanstalk that took root in my stomach and coiled through my lungs. I could feel my heart beating in the tips of my fingers, deep within my ears, in the muscles of my calves, and felt like prey. I lived like this for a month before a friend convinced me to contact a therapist that specialized in psychotic disorders, anxiety disorders, and drug dependency. At the very least, I thought, she could help me process what happened to Madison.
The therapist gave me a diagnosis of schizophrenia that very quickly turned into schizoaffective disorder once she learned of my persistent and recurring depressive episodes. I asked her if she was certain that it wasn’t obsessive compulsive disorder, or something else more seemingly palatable than the diagnosis she’d given me; she told me that she was positive, and on the way back home I thought of Madison.
Every once in a while, something will happen that is so significant that I will have an overwhelming urge to tell her about it, and I forget that she’s not around to hear me. I graduated college and wished that I could find her face in the crowd of onlookers; I received an acceptance to graduate school and felt the need to call her. I was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, depressive type, and she was the only person I wanted to talk to about it. As if she hasn’t been dead since 2012.
Memory loss is a well-known symptom of schizoaffective disorder.
I became aware of my memory loss some time in college, when I would wander around campus in the middle of the night and discover that hours had passed, entire swatches of time I couldn’t recollect. I would repeat conversations with friends. I would erase lectures I’d sat through only hours before. But the most significant losses were the ones I didn’t notice until somebody began a sentence with “Do you remember…” and I’d realized that I didn’t. I did not remember the time my friend and I held hands at the top of the Ferris wheel at the county fair. I did not remember our conversation in Gatlinburg on the balcony, where we both cried quietly while our friends got drunker and drunker in the Econolodge. I did not remember the time my cousins and I took a trip to Pigeon Forge, and I watched Madison ride the go-karts until well past our childhood bedtimes. I don’t remember, and I feel like I’ve lost part of myself too – what is a human if not a collection of memories, of experiences?
Did Taylor have freckles? Did Madison have dimples? I do not remember the sounds of their voices. The shapes of their faces. And I wonder if maybe it’s better this way, to have forgotten. Sometimes, when I speak of them or think about them, I find myself crying even when I don’t feel any pain; it’s like a reflex. An instinct. The grief persists even though I no longer know what precisely it is that I’m missing. My body understands the correct response even if my brain doesn’t feel the pain.
Neither one of us were perfect.
I think it must have been a year after her sister died, and we’re standing on our grandmother’s porch while she smokes and argues with her boyfriend. He’s high on the other end of her cell phone and insisting that the Titanic was an inside job. I can’t remember his rationale. Madison takes a long drag on a cigarette, hisses out the smoke between tightly pressed lips. Nah, Nah, she says. It wasn’t an inside job. It was the Japs; the damn Japs.
I’m annoyed with her; annoyed at her casual racism, which I was just growing conscious of, annoyed at her smoking habit, how she’d blow smoke in my face just to watch my nose scrunch, annoyed at her worse habits, including her addict boyfriend she won’t dump. It was easy to hate Madison back then. Her life was falling apart but she always seemed affected by an easygoingness, assured that everything was going to work out for her in the end. I’d never considered then that she must’ve been rattled with insecurities and anxieties, that she was grieving in a way different than my own. At fourteen years old I couldn’t understand her appetite for Triple Cs and marijuana; those were just the things she told me about. I expressed my grief in less obvious ways; I gnawed at the skin on my arms until the flesh was tender to the touch. I knocked my head against walls. I tore open scabs just to watch myself bleed again. Madison was running from her pain, and I couldn’t get enough.
Her boyfriend insists again on his Titanic conspiracy. Madison crows about the Japanese. And for a moment, I let myself hate them both.
I left a notebook binder in the basement biology classroom.
Madison’s sitting in the desk with my binder underneath her folded arms, and she watches me come into the room. I tell her, thank you for taking care of it. The binder passes from her hands to mine. She doesn’t speak. She only watches.
This memory sticks with me even when all others have faded. Why? It must have been weeks, maybe even days, before her death, and to this day I’m haunted by emptiness I saw in her face, the curated blankness behind her eyes when I took the binder from her hands and thanked her for keeping it safe. I couldn’t read her face in that moment, and, unnerved, I left the classroom with my binder tucked underneath my arm. She might have been high. She might have been tired. She might have been nursing a wound too deep for any salve I could offer.
I don’t know. I’ll never know.
“Text me when you wear your Pikachu shirt next,” she says. “I’ll wear mine, and we’ll match.”
This is how it really happened:
She messages me on Facebook, and maybe she catches me on a bad night. Maybe I’m still embittered by her expressions of grief, the way her hurt causes me hurt, too. Or maybe I just didn’t check my inbox.
Please tell me you’re awake, and I don’t answer. Not that night, not the next day. I’ll discover this message almost a year after in my Facebook inbox, and I do not remember ever receiving it.
For years I’ll think that I could’ve saved her life. Today I still kind of do.
Do you think she killed herself?
Do you?
My dreams are not memories.
It’s a COVID summer and my dreams are glimpses into my psyche. In one I am chased through a building by a flying saucer on my way to sit for the ACT. In another, my medieval literature professor asks that we take a break from Beowulf to watch his son’s debut performance in Dracula, and his son’s eyes are beady and black, pressed with crow’s feet. Frequently I wake up with no memory of my dream, but with wetness underneath my eyelids, and I know I’m better off not knowing.
One night I dream that the bus drivers for Monticello Independent Schools are revolting against unfair work conditions, against low wages, against students hocking spitballs at the back of their heads; take your pick. Their buses are parked in a semi-circle outside of the high school’s entrance, and she emerges from one of the buses with her hands gripped around the straps of a backpack. Her lips move but there is no sound, because I do not remember the timbre of her voice. She’s seventeen and I’m fifteen years old again, rushing forward and grabbing her hands away from her backpack and clasping them into mine.
My eyes open to the darkness of my childhood bedroom, where I’m quarantining with my immunocompromised mother and my father, and I tell myself that the skin beneath my eyes is wet only with sweat.
Do you want to remember?
I am asked this by therapists, by friends, by family members concerned with my lack of gleeful reminiscing at holiday gatherings. The answer is no; I’m really quite sure that I don’t. My mind is protecting me for a reason; something dark must be looming beneath all that murk, something that will come if I go calling for it. There are some doors, my mother says, that can’t be shut once opened. Some days, I can make my peace with that.
My therapist would like for me to unwind my trauma –unspool, unravel, undo. I tell her that there is nothing to unwind; I’m not traumatized. I tell myself that nothing bad happened to me; it just happened around me, like how lightning strikes are not malicious acts of God, but accidental acts of an unconscious nature. There is nobody to blame. I was not victimized, so I have no clear right to the language of trauma. This is what I tell myself on the days I cannot admit to being damaged in some way that very well may be irreparable. But the grief remains still, a small crack inside of me that yawns into an abyss only during those moments of paralyzing clarity.
But what would it matter if I did remember everything? If I could perfectly reconstruct them, their faces, their voices, the smell of cigarettes mixed with scented lotions? Taylor will always be nineteen. Madison will always be seventeen.
Do you expect me to make sense of things at the end?
Two teenaged girls died; I understand why you might want to make it make sense. It’s been a little over a decade since my cousin flipped her car on that road, a little less than a decade since her sister overdosed in the backseat of her father’s truck, and I still don’t understand how we live in a world where children can die.
As for myself, I worry that I’ve grown into a person my cousins wouldn’t recognize. I am no longer religious, and I certainly don’t fear God, although I believe that if he’s out there, he could surely understand why. I am afflicted with a condition that will never be cured, only managed with a roulette of medications. It isn’t fair to say that I am not the gender I used to be so much as I am not the gender they understood me to be, wrong as though it may have been. I wish that I had been brave enough to come out to Madison. I have spent a great deal of my young adult life searching for the familial acceptance that very well may have died in 2012. Maybe she wouldn’t have accepted me at all.
But what do we do with the dead if not idolize?
The halls of Monticello High are blue and white.
The lockers are a darker blue; one is dented from the time a boy slammed a gay student’s head into metal, hissing fuckin’ faggot into his ear. I know that the tiles were patterned but can’t remember the design. My mother has called me out of class and I don’t know why. The clock ticks closer to the final bell.
I don’t suspect what waits for me in the principal’s office.
She was dying in the backseat of her father’s truck while I configured equations in high school algebra.
I’ve already taken my first steps into a life without her and have no idea.
The hallways of Monticello High telescope outward.
Blake Kinnett is a transgender author from the Appalachian mountains in southern Kentucky.