The History of Art

Chapter Fourteen - Josh's POV

            The morning Dana was supposed to “kill herself”, Luke and I booked it to her house. We slept in, surprisingly. I mean, we knew our friend was going to die and somehow we weren’t able to get ourselves up.

            When we got there it was already eight. We had missed the first bell at school and first period was already starting. Dana’s car was still in the driveway, Catholic bumper sticker and cross shaped air freshener in all. Since we knew her parents were on a business trip we broke open the door and climbed the stairs to her room. The door was partially open, but I couldn’t see anything.

            I used the tips of my fingers to push open the door and gasped. Nancy was lying in bed, in a matching set of bra and panties, with a gun in her mouth. Blood was still slowly leaking from her skull and pooling on the pillow below her head. She looked as though she had taken the gun while lying down, and directed it towards her throat.

            Luke walked over to her unusually messy desk and picked up a piece of folded paper. “Suicide letter.”

            “He made her write it. He had to have.”

            He started scanning the page and when his hands started to shake I grabbed one of his wrists and took the paper from him. “She’s gone now too. Only Taylor is left.”

            “And my family,” I whispered.

            I took out my phone to call 911 and sunk against the wall. Luke joined me and we sat there and waited for the paramedics to come. When they started knocking on the door Luke was the one to make his way downstairs and open it. They must have pushed by him because they got there a good thirty seconds before he did.

            We watched as one paramedic got sick in Dana’s waste basket and the other opened a window to let out the smell of blood and…sex. Art must have raped her before taking her life. I had also read her letter. She wouldn’t have had sex with Art if it would have saved her life. She was saving herself for marriage.

            I looked around the room and tried to remember how it looked clean.

            It was a small room, so it was very neat and tidy most of the time. She had her bed in the middle of the right hand wall with pink and white bedding and a couple of stuffed animals on it. Above the bed was that picture of all of us in my backyard that afternoon. It had a nice frame on it and there were cards and pictures from and of other people surround the frame. On either side of the twin bed she had windows with soft pink drapes that reached the floor. Her kitten loved playing with them.

            She had a tiny desk, big enough for a laptop and some papers, pencils, and a stapler, and a spinning pink chair. The desk was white, to continue with the theme of white furniture. Her laptop was a light blue with the Apple sign on it. She had a pencil cup with all her pens and pencils in it too.

            I had only been in her drawer once, but inside was a cross necklace, some awards she had won, and her brace from when she had developed tendinitis. I remembered that she still had to wear it when she typed for long periods of time.

            Above her desk were a crucifix and a picture of her family. She had a small closet, mainly filled with clothes and boxes. On that door she had a collage of actors and actresses from movies she liked that she had cut out from magazines.

            She also had a white dresser with a pink cloth covering it. Our friend had always been a fan of making sure that things matched, especially in her bedroom. On the dresser were a stack of her magazines, some perfume, her hairbrush, and her deodorant. She also had a box of jewelry sitting out and open on top of the dresser.

            Now when I looked at the room all I could see was dysfunction. Blood on the bed. Discarded papers on the floor. It was all too much.

            So eventually I left the house with Luke and got sick in the bushes. My stomach and throat were screaming in protest by the time I was done. “Why?” I whimpered.

            “It’s not your fault Josh,” Luke said quietly.

            “Of course it’s my fault!” I screamed. My throat burned as I did so, but I didn’t care. “I am letting them die one by fucking one! If I hadn’t left the group none of you would be dead! Actually, none of you would even know what this pain feels like if I hadn’t introduced myself to you that day.”

            I felt my stomach turn and spun around to dry heave in the mess of plants at the end of the driveway. There was nothing left in my stomach to puke up. I sat there and cried for what Luke told me later on was two hours. I lost all sense of time just lying there and feeling sorry for myself. But I had a right to feel sorry for myself. My life was falling apart and I hadn’t the slightest idea how to fix it in a way that no one else would die.