On Monday, Sam and I gave Nina the giant pile of papers upon reaching English class. She looked at them quizzically when we asked her to translate them, but sighed and said she would get back to us when it was finished.
The next day, Nina came to school with bags under her eyes and an impressive amount of knots in her hair. She handed Sam the original story and then handed the translated one on my desk. I stared at her.
“Nina… it was at least 30 written pages long… how did you do it that fast?” Sam said, nearly speechless.
“I stayed up all night translating it, with my knowledge and a French-English dictionary. You’re welcome. Oh, and also, one of you give me $3 for coffee.”
I handed her a 5-dollar bill and continued to gaze at what lay on my desk. Whatever was in there, it could solve what I had been spending countless nights pacing the corners of my room for.
The school day went by in a blur. Sam and I went to his house and sat on the couch in his basement, staring at the manuscript with wonder.
“Are you ready?” Sam asked as I opened to the first page of text that had been translated and typed by Nina.
We took turns reading, passing each page between us. We had started at around 5 pm and didn’t finish until 9:30, even though our eyes didn’t break away from the pages. We took our time reading; scared we would miss any hidden explanations to Nova’s death.
When we finished, we both sat, hunched over a pile of papers, stunned.
“Okay… so what do we know then?” Sam asked, trying to gather a conclusion from our reading.
“Well, it’s about a girl named Astraea. Who has 3 friends: Nicole, Lucas, and Stephen. She’s writing a story about herself, kind of like an autobiography but not really. Then she kills herself, leaving her story behind for her friends to find.”
Sam rubbed his eyes. “This sounds eerily like Nova’s life.”
“You’re right… The girl’s three friends are Nicole, Lucas, and Stephen. Same first letters as Nina, Logan, and Sam. The girl kills herself, like what we suspect Nova did.”
Sam flipped to one of the last pages, pointing his finger at the 3rd line. “And the girl left behind a mason jar filled with money. The money was for her friends to publish her book."
I thought back to prom night. “If this story is somewhat a mirror replica of Nova’s life, why would she want a book to be published about her? Nova told me on the night of prom that she didn’t want to be known for a specific reason. If we were to take the money that she left behind and do what the friends did in the novel, publish the book, we would be creating a fixed idea of Nova. The world would know her as a mysterious girl that killed herself.”
Sam flipped to another page in the book and I read it.
“I’m killing myself to remain a mystery. I want my death to be a mystery; I want people to ponder over my death, and even more than that, my existence. I want to live forever as a young girl with bright eyes and spontaneous dreams, I don’t want people to remember me as an aging woman with frail hands and a diminishing memory.”
“If Nova were to have a suicide note, it would be that.” I sighed.
“This is basically Nova explaining to us why she did it. Except she’s speaking in the form of a fictional character that she created of herself.” Sam looked up at me.
“What does Astraea mean?” I suddenly asked.
“How should I know?”
“It has to mean something.”
A quick Google search revealed that the word ‘Astraea’ meant ‘star’.
“The girl in the story’s name was Astraea. Astraea means star. A nova is a type of star.” Sam said after a couple moments.
I thought back to my father’s words from when I was 6. ‘Most stars fade over time. But others end in massive cosmic explosions. Supernovae’.
“Hmm…”
“What?” Sam asked.
“A nova is a star that brightens suddenly, but then slowly returns to its original brightness. A supernova ends in a massive cosmic explosion, unlike other stars that fade over time.”
I flipped through the pages of the story to the very front where the crippled up paper with the Kurt Cobain quote was taped .
“I don’t have the passion anymore, and so remember, it’s better to burn out than to fade away.”
I showed it to Sam.
“She didn’t want to fade over time, turning into some shriveled up grandma. She wanted to end her life in a massive way, like a supernova. Nova took fate into her own hands by becoming what her name meant, she essentially lived up to her name.” I was becoming more excited with each piece of information I linked together.
Sam and I sat in silence. We were both exhausted, but astounded. We had cracked the code. We had finally figured out the mystery that was Nova Williams.
