Kiss Her Goodbye

54

Hold on, Jessie.

He’s coming to get you.

…Jessie?

She struggled to open her eyes and peered into the darkness she’d grown so accustomed to.

Was that the angel’s voice she’d heard?

Had she finally come back?

The angel had left her a while ago, promising to return, but Jessie didn’t hold out much hope. She was too tired, too weak to believe anymore.

She couldn’t stay awake for more than a few seconds at a time. The cold and hunger and thirst that had consumed her those first few hours-or was it days? — had been replaced by numbness, and the places on her skin that had been rubbed raw by the duct tape no longer hurt.

The sound of the rain was long gone, leaving nothing to connect her to the real world but the hiss of air filling her nostrils.

Then that, too, had finally gone.

Every so often, that hiss had trickled to a stop, only to kick into gear again, pumping fresh new air.

But this last time, nothing…

Only silence.

And as that silence stretched out longer and longer, she began to realize that all that was left to her was the air in this box. Air that was thick with feces and urine and stale body odor.

Air that smelled like death.

Shaking her head from side to side, she had managed to dislodge the mask just enough to allow her to breathe. But each breath she took seemed harder than the one before it, and she knew it was only a matter of time before she’d be unable to fill her lungs.

Like the angel, Jessie Glass-Half-Full had abandoned her. And the funny thing was, she didn’t have enough energy to care.

She thought of her father, frantically searching for her. Thought of Mr. Ponytail’s wicked smile and Matt Weber’s championship rear end and her mother and Roger doing it in their hotel room in the Caymans-and it all seemed so distant to her. So silly.

So many things in her life seemed pointless now that she was about to take her last breath.

Had any of it even mattered?

She wanted to believe it had. Wanted to believe that she’d brought some happiness to the lives of those who had made her happy. Wanted to believe that she and her father would finally have patched things up…

But what she wanted and what she could have seemed to be two very different things.

And, in the end, maybe what she really wanted was simply to let go.

Her chest felt so tight. No matter how hard she tried, she just couldn’t get enough air and she knew that she would soon be leaving this darkness.

Don’t resist, she told herself. You have to let go now.

Say goodbye, Jessie.

Your time has come.