On the first day of high school, I received a concise letter from my best friend letting me know that I was no longer cool enough to be her friend. It read not unlike a letter of termination from a job, and I later learned that it had been generic because it had been sent to three other people. This left me relatively friendless, and in retrospect desperate to meet new people. Maybe that’s why when a girl two years older than me with a shaved head and drawn-on cat whiskers told me she knew me from somewhere in my second class of the day, we were immediately attached at the hip.
She was loud, vibrant, and probably the most fearless person I ever met. She was weird, make no mistake there - but her eccentricities only added to her charisma. She wore a Halloween costume corset half the time and sang show tunes out loud in the hallways. I’d always been a bit of a prude and she had told me stories about drinking and boys. I was absolutely transfixed.
Her name was Veronica. It wasn’t, but for the purpose of this story, it was. She got me hooked on musical theater and I began writing songs about her.
She was a firecracker. But with her high points, her beautiful unrestrained chaos, came equally intense lows. And as we grew closer, as she came to need me like I needed her, fourteen-year-old me was woefully unprepared to help her. How do you talk someone through a pregnancy scare when you’ve never had a boyfriend? How do you help with abusive parents or an alcohol addiction or an eating disorder when you’re just barely out of middle school? I didn’t stand a chance.
We went on a school field trip once and stopped at a restaurant on the way home. She ordered the smallest meal she could, and on the drive home, she admitted that if she’d been alone, she wouldn’t have eaten at all. I held her, crying, in my arms. She kissed me gently, still weeping. And I was afraid. So, so afraid of how that kiss had made me feel, terrified of being isolated by my peers. The next day I told my friends, and to avoid suspicion my comments bordered on homophobic. I’m not proud of this, but I was clinging desperately to the hope that separating her from me would drag my peers suspicions away. In doing so, I betrayed her at one of the worst times in her life. Our friendship recovered, but was never the same.
I watched her spiral in real time. Watched as happiness turned to mania and sadness turned to depression. When I was 15 and she was 17, she told me about coke binges, about self-harm, about sleeping with men just to feel something. At some point, she got a steady boyfriend. When she told me she was hitting him, that was the last straw. I told myself I wouldn’t be her friend anymore. She reached out to me repeatedly, and I stopped responding. She cut out her other friends, broke up with her boyfriend, and in early January she waited until her mom had left for work and hung herself.
At the time, I’d never been to a funeral. I don’t know how many I’ve been to now, but a crowd of actual children dressed in black and giving eulogies for another child is something that has burned itself into my memory. Her parents were there. One of them told us that her untimely death was inevitable, that by being her friend we’d simply bought them more time. I remember thinking that it was absolute bullshit. Each of us could’ve done something, had we reached out more, had we not betrayed her. I don’t even remember the school year after that. It’s a time in my life that is just gone. Vanished, like she did.
People look at you differently when you’re in mourning, act differently. Especially as a teenager in mourning. People I’d never spoken to reached out to give their condolences. Looking back I understand that it was what they thought I wanted, some kind of comfort, but I remember being frustrated by the attention and fake kinship. I remember wishing more than anything to be left alone, and I often retreated to the comfort of my bedroom just to avoid sympathy from anyone I knew. The isolation I felt was immeasurable.
Four months later, when I could speak her name without sobbing, I went back to my old notes. I went back to the ambitious musical my younger self had started writing, the one based on her. Starring her. That was the first night that it started. I had fallen asleep reading my old notes, and was shaken gently awake by Veronica.
She looked the same as I remembered her. Her dark shaved hair, her wild pale blue eyes. When I brought myself to look at her neck it looked exactly as it had in life, not a single scratch on her. I was, obviously, bewildered, but I ultimately realized that accepting that she was here left me a lot happier than questioning why she would be. She smiled at me, cold hand still resting on my shoulder.
“Write,” came a voice that sounded like wind. She hadn’t opened her mouth. Silently, she picked up a paper from the stack that surrounded me, and the voice came again.
“Write.” It was more forceful this time, more concrete. As if the first command had simply been to test her voice. And so I picked up a pencil and I did. The song I had been working on was incomplete. I added a verse. She stayed seated at the foot of my bed, watching, and still smiling. I tested our verses and choruses, made notes in the margins about characters and staging. I could swear that as I wrote, I could see her eyes glowing. When I finished the song, I went back to dreamless slumber, glancing every so often at the dead girl that sat still at the foot of my bed, still smiling.
I woke the next day feeling like I hadn’t slept at all, but this was nothing new. I hadn’t slept well in months. I went to school and dealt with the pitying stares of my peers. In my third period, when the teacher was droning on and I couldn’t bear to comprehend another word, I heard it again, clear as day.
“Write.”
I jolted upright. No one else seemed to notice the disembodied voice. But I realized that if this truly was Veronica, and what she really wanted was for me to write about her, I would oblige even if no one else heard her. I began the framework for a new song, a ballad for the character Veronica would’ve played. I wrote about her pain and found myself crying hot tears in class. The teacher gave me a glance that let me know they understood and dismissed me. After splashing some cold water in my face, I returned to class and paid attention to the lecture this time.
That night, she was there again when I fell asleep, but different. I couldn’t put my finger on it until I stood up to get my notebook and realized that she was taller than me by a good few inches. In life, she had been almost exactly my height. Maybe she had appeared as she wanted to look? But then why would she keep the shaved hair she hadn’t liked, or the body she so desperately wished to be smaller? I let it go, chalking it up to simple misremembering. I hadn’t stood next to her in months, so it made sense that little details could be wrong, like her eyes, just a shade too pale, or her hair a bit shorter than it had ever been. And that eerie smile… hers had always been warm, at least. In death, her smile was toothy and wide, unrelenting. A gesture of welcome with no goodwill behind it.
“Can anyone other than me see you?” I asked aloud. She was utterly silent.
“Is there any reason in particular you chose me?” I asked again.
“Write.” She commanded, and I obliged. I went back to the solo I’d been working on earlier and revised some lyrics. She seemed happy with this, eyes again seeming to glow as I fell back to sleep.
It continued on for months. Any spare moment, the second my attention was not on whatever was at hand I heard her. I trudged through junior year. I began to think of it as almost a gift. As someone who rarely has complete focus, the concept of a constant reminder to work on my project was all too enticing. I grew to appreciate her presence, feel almost comforted by it, and she grew in a different way. Every night she seemed taller. Proportionate still, but bigger and bigger, towering over me. She loomed at the edge of my bed, or sitting in the chair in the corner, or once hiding in my closet. She was omnipresent, and it was a welcome distraction from my grief.
Life continued on. I trudged through my junior year and wrote every night, never getting any amount of genuine sleep. I was sluggish in school, and my grades were suffering from sheer exhaustion. When I was nearly happy with my music and lyrics and characters, I compiled them into a notebook. I gave them to the woman who now took up a whole corner of my room, and she flipped through it with her comically large hands. When she was done, her unnerving smile faltered and finally split into an equally bizarre mask of sadness.
“Are you really sure you’re ready to be done?” Said the voice, Veronica’s stretched lips unmoving from her horrible frown. I realized, with a start, two things. The first was that if I stopped writing, I would stop seeing her. The second was that she was right: the plot was one that was well-written for a fourteen-year-old, but not by any means professional. It felt like a child’s story, oversimplified and dramatic without purpose. I looked up into her ice blue eyes - I didn’t remember them looking that cold in life - and took the notebook away, promising to do better.
The summer before my senior year, I started on a novel. It had similar characters to the musical, but the plot had been reworked into something that I thought seemed more articulate, more clear-cut. The night I told her that I was beginning it, her wide smile seemed even larger. I could practically feel her drinking in each word I wrote as her eyes glowed at the end of each night. Friends started asking why I was spending less time with them, and I had no way to tell them that my time was being taken up writing for my friend - to what end, I had no clue.
After 30,000 words, Veronica had to bend to fit in my bedroom. When she read my work at the end of each night her smile grew somehow wider, and at this point I felt that I could very easily fit in her wide, gaping mouth. It was grotesque in a way that was almost distracting, but her face remained beautiful. Just…wrong. No longer human. But I guess I never assumed the entity in my room was.
When I came to the final chapter, I showed her the printed out pages and she read them, sitting still for a solid hour. At the end, her even larger mouth made the disturbing grimace I remembered, and I knew what she was thinking. The writing had been good, but could always be better. The images in my head had been so clear it was easy to assume everyone understood them as I described, and I sometimes lacked the detail that made a story realistic. The dialogue had been edgy, and trying too hard to sound smart. When I thought about going back through, editing the hundreds of pages, a sting of pain filled me. I was so tired. I would have given anything to get a good night’s sleep. But I persisted, and continued to write for her.
At some point, I thought that maybe a book was the wrong format altogether. I found that dialogue without descriptions proved to be my strong suit, and I got into playwriting. I didn’t write the same fictionalized account of her life, filled with fantasy, but a realistic timeline of our friendship and her death. At this point I was in college. Each night, she filled my room, silent and smiling. Each night I wrote tributes for her. Each night I grew a little more afraid. The transformation had happened so slowly that it seemed natural, but she looked less and less human every day. Her eyes were blue dots in her head, her mouth an endlessly wide and toothy grin. Her face was poreless and smooth like a porcelain doll. It was disquieting, but she had motivated me to do some of my best work, and her story was the first thing I could focus on. Didn’t that give her some amount of credibility?
Halfway through the newest play, four years after her death, I couldn’t take it anymore. A long breaking point I know, but I was scared that if I took a night off she’d leave and wouldn’t come back. After four years, some rest would have been almost worth it. I bought a blindfold and noise cancelling headphones, and wrapped myself in a cocoon of blankets. I needed to get some sleep before it literally killed me, ominous writing deadlines be damned. The moment I drifted off I found myself in a beautiful park surrounded by trees. I looked up to find myself sitting on a bench next to a serene and very human looking Veronica.
The thing in my room looked clownish in comparison, a very poor replacement for her. She was warm to the touch, content and beautiful. She smiled and I had no idea how I could call the things cartoonish grimace a smile. I leaned in and finally hugged her.
I didn’t know where to begin now that she was finally here. I asked her if she was happy, and she reassured me that she was. I asked if she had seen what was going on in the world and she said she hadn’t. I asked her how that could be when she’d been in my room every night, and this gave her pause.
She looked at me in a way I’ll never forget - the same way my peers had looked at me whenever they saw me for the following year - pityingly.
“Listen to me,” she said. “Whatever has been visiting you is not me. I hold no grudge, keep no burden that I held in life. The thing that keeps you writing about your pain is not doing so to help me, but to feed on you. I do not want you to wallow, but to thrive.”
With that, she kissed my forehead and walked away. I knew that it was our final goodbye, and I made peace with it. A meaningful exit is not always a given, and until that point the only closure I’d received had been from the thing that haunted my room. The park melted away around me, and I opened my eyes to see the ghoulish portrait of Veronica making eye contact with me.
“Write.” The voice that was not Veronica’s roared, and one last time, I did. I told the story of Veronica and her beautiful impact on my life, of the sadness that followed, and of the thing that kept me wallowing in sadness and self-pity. When I was fully and completely done, I handed the thing the handwritten paper, and watched it read.
“Are you sure you want to end it here? Seems rather incomplete.” The voice was nothing like hers - how could I have possibly believed this lie? I knew the answer was simply that I had wanted to.
“Yes.” I said, simply.
“Pathetic!” It cried, ripping the paper in half, clearly vying for rewrites.
“I don’t care.” I said, “I’m going back to sleep.”
It looked at me with that drooping frown, practically melting off it’s face, and as I watched, it shrunk a foot.
“Poorly worded!” It said, it’s voice a bit more panicked. It shrank again.
“Bizarre! Just plain weird!” It shrank again.
“Don’t quit your day job!” It wailed, about my height at this point.
My silence was deafening. It shot downward, smaller and smaller as it’s insults grew into meaningless threats and eventually just screaming. When it was small enough, I crushed it under my notebook like a bug and swept the remains into the trash.
Veronica, the real Veronica, was dead. But wherever she was, she was at peace. When I was finally able to sleep, I’d see her every so often in dreams. She looked happier than she had in life. I truly hoped she’d meant what she had said about releasing her earthly burdens. When I finally found the distinction between wallowing and honoring, for once I found myself inspired to create something new.