Freshman year of college, I realized I would forever spend my life chasing redemption. Finals week came to a conclusion, the winter frost biting my cheeks until they turned a bright scarlet. The paper clenched between my fingers bore a capital A in red marker. It had taken me all semester to write it, the grade a culmination of an entire semester of effort.
I should have been happy.
I should have been a lot of things.
Instead, I walked like a hollowed-out tree, arms swaying with life, but inside a gaping cavity. Dad would have thrown a party and shouted my accomplishments until I hid my face into his side and begged him to stop embarrassing me.
Virginia would have scoffed at our loud, uncouth behavior, but when cocktail hour rolled around, she’d brag about my grades to her friends, tittering when one of them complained about their child’s failures.
With the essay clamped in my palms, the weight of loneliness struck me until I ran to the nearest trashcan and dry heaved. Nothing came out. A semester with minimal food had turned my corpse to skin and bones.
Spit flew past my lips. I fell to the concrete and leaned against the sticky can, trying to get ahold of myself. Magic words didn’t work. They evaded me, my brain suddenly feeling like a dangerous place to be trapped in.
Ironic that I sought reality on my phone, pulling up Instagram as if it was my sole tether to the real world. No new pictures from Reed. I talked to no one else. Told myself I needed no one else.
Pictures of book spines kept me company, my heart almost seizing at the incoming message alert.
“Die. Just die.”
I remembered the words, often rolling them around my tongue, feeling how they formed on my lips with so little effort.
I had gotten death threats in the past, but something about this one felt different.
Two words.
Just and die.
The threat shouldn’t have given me pause, not after the long paragraphs and soliloquies I had received, creative fantasies of my death that, honestly, deserved to be featured in some Chris Mooney thriller novel.
Blaming Reed seemed like the perfect route whenever I scrolled through a series of messages that should have struck me with their brutality but didn’t. I had never been a fan of social media, but one night, Reed had posted a picture of his lips locked with Basil’s, and I had caved to masochistic needs.
Basil had always been the one to post pictures of herself with Reed, captioned with hashtags like #Forever, #Soulmates, #DatingTheFootballCaptain, #QB1, and #MineAlways stamped on each one.
But Reed? His feed consisted of the three Fs—food, family, and football, an endeavor to impress college scouts with his dedication. Posting this picture equaled some stamp of approval, a sign of commitment I couldn’t ignore no matter how much I wanted to.
I stalked them both for months, following Reed and a few logophile accounts to cover the fact that I had opened a social media account for the sole purpose of stalking my best friend. I posted quotes twice a month, the occasional t-shirt, and one time, a potato from the garden in the shape of Abraham Lincoln’s head.
The day after the Eastridge Daily published an article on the F.B.I.-S.E.C. raid, I had woken to death threats scattered across my posts. They ebbed and spiked with the news cycles, reappearing each time something about the case came up.
When the site wrote about the lack of conclusive evidence, I laughed at the names people called my dad, Virginia, and me. Most of them didn’t even make sense, proof conspiracies about the case ran rampant or people just plain hated us.
Overprivileged red necks. (Virginia tossed a 14th century Ming dynasty vase against the butler’s pantry wall at that one.)
Succubi of the South. (Virginia dumped her fresh-squeezed kumquat juice into the pool and booked a four-hour-long, deep-tissue massage at an overnight spa.)
Stock Fraud Barbie. (Virginia legit flipped her shit, binge eating her way through a thousand grams of cheap carbs.)
By the time Hank Prescott had died and the threats grew to the worst they had ever been, I had long since abandoned checking my comments and messages. I still refused to delete my account or set it to private because it felt like admitting defeat.
Didn’t matter either way.
The threats didn’t get to me. Not until Hank died, and I had felt the real-world impact of Dad’s theft and the accusations finally held merit. Angus Bedford’s death came next, and that brought more nasty comments.
I accepted them all as my new normal, occasionally logging on to Insta and searching for pretty words to pass time. But this message took me by surprise. Not because I felt lonely but because her words felt lonelier.
DIE. JUST DIE.
The sender hadn’t bothered to put her feed on private or create a fake new profile like some of the others. It was so simple a threat on a rare moment the Winthrop family had left the news cycle, so it made me curious.
Demi Wilson.
18.
Dog lover.
Car lover.
People hater.
A kindred spirit.
I browsed her feed, learned her life, and found one picture I couldn’t forget.
She had her arm around Angus Bedford’s shoulders. They stood in front of a classic car with tools sprawled all over the floor. Rain plastered their hair to their foreheads, but it didn’t faze their goofy smiles.
The caption: I miss my dad something fierce on rainy days. #RIP
The next day, she apologized, told me she’d been drunk, and said she didn’t blame me for my dad’s mistakes. I messaged back a cheesy meme of two stick figure eggs hugging that read, “Apology Egg-ccepted.”
What I really wanted to say was—Forgiving others is a myth. The only prisoner freed when you forgive someone is you.
It didn’t matter if the Winthrop haters ever forgave me, because I would never forgive my family and the way I’d lived a life of privilege, oblivious to the sins that funded it.
I never talked to Demi again, but I checked on her like you would a wild animal in your backyard.
From afar.
Never speaking a word.
Just watching.
Waiting.
Wondering.
Months later, Demi posted her acceptance to Wilton University on her Insta feed. Two weeks later, she added to her Snap story when she received a full-ride scholarship from Wilton, then again when she got a C in Art History and it was rescinded.
I signed her change.org petition, which begged Wilton to change its mind. She had thirty-six signatures excluding my own, none of which did a thing. What she really needed was a wealthy father like mine, or at the very least, Angus Bedford, who had invested a decent chunk in Winthrop Textiles’s college fund before his death.
Each dollar put in would be matched by the company for use on college tuitions of employees and their families. When the company fell, so did the college fund.
My freshman year of college, I barely left my apartment, pigging out on packets of ramen I bought four for a buck at the dollar store down the block. My books landed on the iPhone Dad gifted me ages ago from my library scans. I paid my tuition and a small stipend with the crazy amounts of student loans I had taken out.
Virginia held my trust fund over my head, which meant I was broke, spending more money than I had each year, and taking out student loans to sustain the costs. Broke as I was, I couldn’t let Demi skip college.
I asked Dad’s old fixer to set up the anonymous scholarship fund and applied for a full-time job at the diner.
The double shifts gave me feet and back pain, but they didn’t kill me.
The inflexible work hours forced me to take classes I hated, but they didn’t kill me.
The extra responsibility racked me with anxiety, but it didn’t kill me.
The sleep deprivation made paying attention in class close to impossible, but it didn’t kill me.
The hunger pains bothered me, but they didn’t kill me.
At the end of the day, I didn’t regret paying for Demi.
It was the right thing to do.
I was a hollowed-out tree, long past death, and I had found a way to grow a leaf.
