The S(uicide) Word

blake gladly

It wasn't like I didn't know who Blake Gladly was. I did. She was a kind girl who always had a couple of boys on her tail. I guess she was kind of weird, at least that was what people started telling me after she died. I don't know. I just thought she was sweet. Blake wasn't cute; not in the traditional sense anyways. But she was beautiful with brown and blue kaleidoscope eyes. I'm sure I can only remember them so clearly because Johnnie made fun of them Freshman year for being so big, but I thought their size complimented her face.

She wasn't the kind of girl that you could describe very easily. She could have been white. She could have been Indian. She could have been Native American. Maybe she was all three. Her skin and hair were pretty much the exact same shade—like a mix of brown and tan I think. And her nose hooked at the bridge. She was tall enough, I remembered. Not short, not huge. But she mostly kept to herself and her friends. They were nice people, I guess. Most of them kept their heads shoved inside a book but they weren't awkward. Blake seemed to like them. I guess that's what matters in friends.

Blake herself was... different. She was eccentric; not just in the way she looked. If you could point out a hippie in a crowd today, Blake would probably have been. She was big into passivism; the type that cries when a teacher yells at her. She usually either wore her hair down or in a loosely woven braid at the base of her neck. And her clothes weren't weird but they weren't exactly in. She always wore flowy skirts and tops. They were pretty, really, but they weren't what everybody else wore.

The thing that really struck me about Blake wasn't something that I had realized until after she died and I was crying the bathroom.

Homeroom ended and Cathy tried rushing up to me, eyes big and buffy. She was a drama queen. She didn't know Blake and wanted attention. "Morgan," she blubbered shamelessly, "I can't believe—"

Polk Chester High School is in the middle of the city. By all means it isn't a good school but I would never call it bad. The building is beautiful; three stories high. It looks like something you'd find on a college campus from outside. But when you venture inside you might be able to feel the heat of tension that never goes away. It just gets worse and worse. And then something like this happens and shit just falls apart.

Blake's older brother caught my eye first when I looked away from Cathy. He's not hard to miss—a big looming head of salt and pepper hair layered on top of coffee skin. He didn't look great; bloodshot eyes and paled out skin. First I wondered why he was in school at all if his sister had died the night before but I tried to stop that thought when I remembered it was none of my business. He could have been collecting her things or maybe his homework or God knows what.

But I couldn't look away from him. He shared that hooked nose with Blake and their skin colors were the same. I wondered, if I stepped in closer to him, if his eyes would be the same pattern of kaleidoscope blue and brown. The blonde streaks in his hair were exactly the same shade as Blake's.

Cathy gaped at me, "Morgan, what the hell?" The tears were no longer evident on her face. I looked back at my friend but the tears were already building up behind my eyes.

"I have to go," I whispered, sniffling in and shoving past the crowd of students. When I looked back Blake's brother was gone but the emotions were not. I ran for the nearest girl's room, pushing the cheap wooden door aside and shoving through the crowd of girls brushing on their makeup. I ran into the handicap stall, falling with my back against the door and let the tears fall out.

I didn't really know Blake Gladly. I saw her in the hallways. She'd wave to me every once and a while, the sweet girl she was. We weren't friends. But it felt like an ulcer was opening up at the thought of her lively smile being lost forever.

And so that's when I realized the things that really struck me about Blake Gladly. It wasn't her eyes or her passivism or her unique ways of dressing.

It was the fact that she never even seemed sad. I knew kids that wanted to kill themselves. When they smiled it was like it hurt. Their wrists were covered in marks. Blake was nothing like this. Her smile was broad. She showed her wrists confidently because there was nothing to hide. Nobody disliked Blake. She was a beautiful girl who always had a couple of guys on her trail.

How could somebody like that want to kill themselves?