I die knowing no one knew the real me. - suicide note

1. Svengali's Blackmail

Heather Duke knew Veronica Sawyer was hot for creepy trenchcoat kid, but that just showed she had crappy taste. Heather Chandler wouldn't have approved of Veronica's choices, but Heather Chandler was gone now, wasn't she? And there was much rejoicing. Praise Jesus, hallelujah. God had listened to the desperate prayer that Heather Duke prayed every night on her knees with her sharp fingernails digging into her clenched palms. Please God, make Heather Chandler die. Please God, make Heather Chandler die. Please God, make Heather Chandler die.

Heather Duke breathed freely for the first time, ate a whole fried breaded chicken leg without vomiting, and appeared on so many TV shows that she didn't even have taped copies of all of them. Smile for the reporters and say the right things about her beautiful friendship with beautiful dead Heather, who was six feet underground and decaying into a stinking green-tinged skeleton and would never contradict her. No one else was stepping up, and Heather Duke did it a damn sight better than stupid pathetic Courtney, who'd wanted to be a Heather and never got there.

Veronica broke up with creepy trenchcoat kid and acted like a total pillowcase, had been acting like that since Heather died. Heather Duke figured she and Heather McNamara might just tacitly drop Veronica from their friendship and find someone more promising. Maybe Courtney, if she was willing to grovel enough. Heather Duke liked the idea of a constant refrain of 'Shut up, Courtney', just as Heather Chandler always told Heather to shut up.

Heather Duke took chemistry class with creepy trenchcoat kid, as well as with a whole bunch of other people, obviously. So when he bothered to come to class at all, she noticed him about as much as she did Anna Pennington or Stuart Meadows or any of the other losers in the class. He usually stayed in the back and never said anything. On his first day, he pulled a gun in the caf and shot blanks at Kurt and Ram and made them piss their pants in fright, which was pretty funny at the time because they were jerks, but Heather didn't really care. He was a greasy, unkempt, poorly dressed loser who was almost always alone. Now Kurt and Ram had joined Heather in the grave, and Heather Duke had more television interviews scheduled to talk about their tragic gay suicide pact and what a close friend she'd been to both of them.

But one day at the end of chem class, Heather saw creepy trenchcoat kid slip a piece of paper into her bag. He'd meant her to see it, looking insolently back at her before clumping out.

"Fuck," Heather whispered to herself, seeing a badly photocopied picture of herself and Martha Dumptruck together. It was proof that Heather had once voluntarily hung out with fat losers. On the back, the creepy trenchcoat kid had written a time and place to meet and discuss the rest of the pictures and the negatives.

"I'll give you a week's lunch money," she offered. Stupid shitty blackmail. Based on the way he dressed, a week's lunch money for her was probably the equivalent of a month for him.

He didn't want her money, he said. Briefly, Heather's mind flashed to somewhere more lurid - hell, no, greasebag, as if - and then he told her something that perhaps she'd known somewhere deep inside her all along. She listened to the creepy trenchcoat boy, and something compelling in his words overrode all her thoughts about his ugly look and sad loner ways. She listened to him talk. He spoke in a rough low hum like summer bees. His voice was as transfixing as black-eyed Svengali's mesmerism or a cobra charming a tailor-bird by its hooded dance, and he helped her.

It should never have been Heather Chandler to begin with, he said. It should have been Heather Duke all along. She had the strength to handle the pressure, and Heather Chandler was too weak. Westerburg High needed a strong leader, and she was that leader.

J.D. gave her a silken red scrunchie that slipped through Heather's hands like clean water. Like the red scrunchie Heather Chandler wore so many times, bouncing on her blonde curls like a crown.

Forget Moby-Dick. The white whale was done, and Heather Duke was red.

—

2. Social Invitation

"Hey. Heather Dee. I've been feeling lonely. A group of us are throwing a classic Remington party this Saturday. You want to come, be my date, bring a couple of friends?" David Harper asked her over the phone.

David was a Remington College man. Heather Chandler had treated him like her trophy boyfriend, a rich mature Remington sophomore, tall and dark and supposedly handsome. King David. A real prize. And didn't he know it too, something cold and bitter in Heather thought.

He needed comfort after Heather Chandler died. He needed someone super-sensitive and nice to him, he told Heather. So Heather Duke thought, that may as well be her.

Heather twirled the phone cord between her fingers. Remington parties were the height of popularity. Still, she shouldn't sound too eager. "Let me check my diary, David, I'm not sure," she said. "Okay - I think I can make it. Can you pick us up at seven?"

She didn't like that 'can you'. She should have said, 'Pick us up at seven and haul your ass pronto', or something Heather Chandler would have said. Next time. David laughed, and rang off.

It turned out Courtney's parents were idiots who'd planned some stupid family dinner with grandparents that Courtney couldn't get out of, or maybe even didn't want to. Stupid Courtney. She wasn't as interesting as Veronica had been, once. And Heather McNamara was a bit of a pillowcase about it - a lot of a pillowcase.

"I dated Ram, he killed himself the next day. What if that happens to one of the Remington guys?" Heather McNamara asked, wide-eyed and almost teary. "I don't really want to go. I feel sick."

"Are you a Heather or a loser?" Heather Duke demanded. "What else do you have on, cheer practice? Extra captaincy duties? Oh, yeah, they forgot to elect you as captain - sorry about that. I really need you there, Heather. You'd have done it for Heather."

The guilt about Heather Chandler seemed to get her on-side. Heather Duke made her promise to be there and moved on.

She was running out of names. Friends, David said. She'd promised him two. She'd look so sad and pathetic if she didn't have enough.

She walked into J.D. smoking out the back of the school. "Party, Saturday night," she said.

"Why on earth do you want ..." he began. The reaction was less tongue-bathingly grateful to be thrown a bone than she'd expected.

"My boyfriend David asked me to bring a couple of friends," she said. "He's from Remington College, you don't know him. It'll be very. Come."

It felt odd but right to talk about David as her college boyfriend. Heather supposed things weren't particularly serious with David, but other Westerburg girls would envy her and the high school boys would know she was with someone superior to them.

Hence, she and J.D. wound up in a thrift store.

"Since this is your dime not mine, I'm being generous," Heather said. "Besides, you really can find some decent things here." He rolled his eyes, reaching for a pair of black jeans. "No. It's like you're not even trying. Branch out into actual colours."

Heather cast a wistful eye over at the bookshelves. She didn't thrift-shop for clothes - she obviously didn't have to, and it would have earned her Heather Chandler's deep and eternal scorn - but she certainly thrift-shopped for out-of-print and rare books she hadn't read yet. There was Twain's Life on the Mississippi. Interesting - no. Heather Duke had places to go, and so much more to do with her time.

The sleeve of a red men's jacket caught her eye, buried under a pile of other things. Heather shook it out. Red pleather, looking like it had never been worn. She congratulated herself on her brilliant find. "Try this on. If the size is right, we'll coordinate around it."

A white Oxford shirt with gauntlet buttons, a bit of a preppy look to counterbalance the jacket, and actual trousers, albeit dark grey. The shirt was slightly too large, but it would work well enough. Heather saw J.D. had also managed to grab the Twain and a Thackeray, at some point where she hadn't been watching. She could certainly appreciate someone who could sling a good literary reference.

"No hair grease whatsoever," she lectured him as they walked out. "Washed and brushed only. And lose the earring. They'll think you're a faggot." She'd read a letter to the editor in Seventeen that one earring meant a guy was gay, although she couldn't remember if it was left or right. J.D. reached for a cigarette, lighting up already. "Better watch that as well. Smoking makes your teeth brown and smells like shit." Although David smoked too, so Heather guessed that was okay.

"Cool it on the fashion advice, Princess Grace," he warned.

"I'm helping you." Heather smiled up at him. "You'll have fun. It'll be very. There'll be alcohol and ... well, lots of alcohol, and conversation with intelligent people, at least some intelligent people - " Heather included both herself and J.D. in that subtotal. " - And people from Westerburg will think you're cool."

"I'm sure it'll be a life-altering epiphany," J.D. said dryly. But he was coming with her.

He'd used the blackmail like a little kid pulling pigtails, Heather thought as they walked together. It was just an excuse to get to know her, get to help her. He'd moved on from Veronica and it was Heather Duke he wanted now, which was fitting.

She found herself liking the idea of David meeting J.D., a lot. David was everything she should want, superior and successful and good-looking, and yet her skin crawled like she was covered with spiders when she was around him. J.D. was everything she didn't want, lonely and mediocre and ill-favored, but she could be alone with him. The modern version of a house-pet man, too shy to do anything but adore from afar and obey.

—

3. Damsel in Distress, or Distressing Damsel

J.D. was on time and Heather McNamara fashionably late to Heather Duke's house.

"Hi, Heather. God, Jesse James looks almost human," Heather McNamara complimented her work.

It didn't look like Heather McNamara herself had put in that much of an effort. A plain little black dress with yellow edging, flat-soled shoes, and purple tights. But that was a good thing. It made Heather Duke feel more confident in her red silk Japanese-inspired print, her new red knee-length skirt, and of course Heather's red scrunchie from J.D. She was dressed to the nines and knew it, and she liked the small excited flush in her cheeks she could see when she looked at her reflection in the mirror. She and J.D. looked coordinated, and Heather McNamara like the outsider. Watch out, Remington College, she promised herself. I'm coming to shine.

David's car drew up outside. Heather shooed her friends out to meet him. He looked somewhat taken aback to see J.D.

"Heather, sweetie, when you said you were bringing friends I kind of thought they'd be girls," David said.

Heather gave him a confident, attractive smile. "You should be more specific, then," she said. "I asked J.D. to wear a dress, but he declined ..." she joked.

"Thanks for the ride, David," J.D. drawled, trying to change the subject. Heather appreciated that he was putting in an effort to actually be social for once.

"That would be pretty funny," David said. "One time at orientation week, I wore a dress. It was wild." He laughed at his own you-had-to-be-there joke.

Heather sat in front with her college beau, in the best place. Heather McNamara and J.D. sat apart from each other in the back, not bothering to talk to each other. They reached David's frat house, and the Remington party was already in full swing.

David kept bringing Heather fresh drinks, chivalrous and attentive. Heather looked around at the college girls. Not one of them was as well dressed as she was, or even as Heather McNamara. David's friend Brad was talking to Heather, one hand on Heather's knee, though she looked kind of sad. Heather overheard a scrap of conversation between J.D. and a greasy-haired college girl in ugly brown overalls, something about some stupid obscure band Heather had never heard of. Some people liked to pretend they were into things that nobody else was in order to look cool.

"It's so hot in here. You're so hot tonight, babe," David said, leaning down and nuzzling Heather's neck. She shifted away from him. "Let's head outside."

The night was deliciously cool. Heather had a slight headache, and rubbed her forehead. The grass was poorly maintained, and overgrown trees hung down everywhere, shedding loose leaves over the yard. Couldn't they get a gardener in, at least like every month or so? It was darker the further they went out. David listened to Heather vent about how dumb Country Club Courtney was and made supportive mmms in the right places. Heather put her empty glass down on the little white garden table.

David wrapped his arms around her, hugging her close. How much did I have to drink? Heather thought. "What was in those drinks?" she asked David. He felt like the octopus she'd once dissected for biology lab, clammy and sticky. She was pretty sure she didn't want him all over her.

"Does it matter, babe? Come on, we're all alone out here." David kissed her more insistently, missing her mouth and landing on the underside of her chin. Heather felt like vomiting.

"That's enough. Leave me alone," Heather said. She felt limp and rubbery as she tried to get free.

"You don't mean it. You've been teasing all night," David said. He tripped and flopped down onto the ground, which wouldn't have been so bad if he hadn't taken Heather with him. I'm not getting grass stains on my new skirt. Fuck. Fuck you, David, Heather thought. This isn't fun any more. "Come on. Heather would have done it." He grabbed Heather's hand roughly, and forced it over the crotch of his pants. She was disgusted.

"Let me go," Heather asked again, or tried to. Her voice was slurring. I'm not that kind of girl. Maybe I wanted to be, but I can't be, she thought. She felt like she was covered by rats, drowning underneath a tide of a thousand cockroaches running over her body. David held her down. She felt the damp grass permanently staining her back. She'd have to throw out her shirt, a part of her thought. His breath smelt of beer. "Please," she asked insistently, like a stupid fat little kid trying to stop the others from surrounding her in a circle and throwing heavy wet wads of spitballs at her. She heard the sound of fabric tearing. Heather felt tears coming to her eyes, disgusting, humiliating tears. Her voice was on the verge of screaming and she wasn't speaking properly any more. She tried to whine and get away.

Then she saw a light in the garden, bobbing up and down.

"It's real dark out here," a man's voice drawled. The light kept moving. Heather blinked, and saw it was a large glass mug. The liquid inside it was on fire and burning bright. David backed off, a little. Heather saw J.D.'s face blur into a sudden clarity, behind the Molotov cocktail or whatever he thought he was drinking. "What's up, David?" He sounded so stupidly casual. "You play the alto sax, right? Cool. I'm a tenor myself, so I guess mine is bigger than yours." So pathetic. David groaned a little. Heather tried to get away from him.

"Anyway, I thought you should know," J.D.'s voice purred. "Looks like someone took your sax from your room and put it behind the pickup truck, and some drunk guys are taking bets on what'll happen when they run it over."

"Fuck, it's a Bundy," David said, and then he was off Heather and leaving her, and she could feel only the cold air on her skin and damn it it felt good. Clearly David cared more about the fucking saxophone than anything else. Heather clutched her knees to her chest, burying her face in them, curling up to protect herself in a ball and trying not to sob.

J.D. walked close to Heather, standing next to her, his flickering shadow looming above her. The knight who rescued the damsel from some nasty dragon always asked for a reward, she thought wildly. The thought was disgusting to her. Jesus help her, she was sobbing audibly, terrified childish noises ripping out of her mouth.

"Just to be crystal clear, there is absolutely nothing that I want from you." J.D.'s voice was taut, balanced on the edge of a knife, as if he were torn between two options that he considered both equally horrible.

Heather's strangled sobs started to turn into low chuckles. She laughed. "So you really are a faggot," she said, as vicious as a scorpion striking back at a frog. "Don't worry. As long as you're sensible, I won't tell."

She heard him sigh. "Your supposed friend Heather is passed out drunk in a sea of vomit on top of the frat boys' coats. If you're still capable of independent locomotion, better go call her a taxi."

Heather hoped her face appeared passably normal. She didn't meet anyone's eyes as she crept back into the house. Heather McNamara was where J.D. had said, smelling of the stream of vomit around her mouth. She was still fully dressed, with nothing worse than vomit on her purple stockings. Heather thought about taking some blackmail photographs of her - it was exactly the sort of thing Heather Chandler would have done - but instead she roughly grabbed Heather's shoulder and shook her until she woke up. She'd take Heather McNamara and leave her on the McNamaras' doorstep to face her parents ... and maybe she'd take her sweet time before telling Heather that nothing had actually happened.

A few days afterwards, Heather Duke answered her phone in her bedroom. "Hey, Heather," a croaky voice said, and she thought it a prank call. It sounded thin and torn, like an old man trying to speak through a mouth full of rusty nails. "I guess you were wondering what happened to me."

"Who?" Heather asked.

"Come on, it's me." The voice sounded even more desperate. "David."

"Oh, sorry," Heather said. She wasn't sorry, at all.

"I was pretty drunk and other stuff," David said. He sounded like he didn't even remember what the fuck had happened. "Where were you, babe?"

She didn't tell him. "How was the rest of the party, David?"

"It was awful. I don't blame you for bailing. Some idiot on 'shrooms in the kitchen poured vinegar into the bleach bottle." David coughed heavily. "We walked in there and didn't know what hit us. My chest started to hurt and I thought it was a heart attack at first. The doc said it was like chlorine gas, like World War One in there. My throat's still burning."

Combining hypochlorous acid such as that found in bleach with hydrochloric acid or an acetic acid such as vinegar yields chlorine gas. For example, HOCl + HCl leads to H2O + Cl2. You'd be able to figure it out if you ever took chemistry class or remembered it, jerk, Heather thought.

"Aww, that's rough, babe," Heather said, and hung up.

—

4. Pursuit of Literacy

Heather was supposed to go shoe shopping with Heather McNamara, but Heather sent her a message via Jenny Forbes that she wasn't going to be there. Perhaps, Heather Duke thought with a stab of grim satisfaction, she was going home to cry. Poor little Heather. Heather was a stupid fuck to call in to the Hot Probs radio show in the first place, and should have known her stupid problems would be used against her.

Most people hardly used the school library, and even when they did they necked, talked loudly at the desk, fought over the computer, photocopied Playboy, or worst of all popped disgusting used chewing gum all over the shelves. They did everything but read. Heather Duke was one of very few students who used the library for its intended purpose, and so she came here when she wanted to be alone. She took down a Hawthorne book and sat at her favorite chair, a green hard-backed one that was the least damaged and filthy of the available options.

Then she saw that she wasn't alone as she had wanted. How she loathed intruders. It was J.D., sitting almost hidden away between two bookshelves, his head in a book too. Based on the Volume I next to the gaping hole in the shelves, it looked like William Blake. An interestingly apocalyptic selection.

The last thing you wanted when you were reading was someone to lean over your shoulder, ask you what it was and what it was about, make some inane statement about how that sounded neat, and then talk to you about a vast plurality of irrelevant things. You just wanted people to leave you alone and let you read. So Heather didn't walk over to J.D. and he didn't walk over to her. Their eyes met for a moment, and then they looked back down at their reading material and didn't need to say anything.

She let her book wash over her. Not a great while ago, passing through the gate of dreams, I visited that region of the earth in which lies the famous City of Destruction ...

Heather thought about the copy of Moby-Dick that she didn't need any more. It might make a nice gift, to someone deserving who'd appreciate it.

—

5. Benevolent Aftermath

On the downside, Jason Dean probably blew himself up with a bomb while holding on to Heather's petition to get Big Fun to play at their prom, since the petition wasn't to be found anywhere. God, boys could be so messy. On the upside, there were plenty more cameras hovering around the school after the fourth Westerburg student suicide.

Heather was trying to decide what story to tell. Was it because J.D. was a faggot, like Kurt and Ram? Maybe she should have spelled it out for him in more detail when she gave him the book, reassured him that he might find a Queequeg of his own someday. Moby-Dick said outright that Ishmael and Queequeg were married to each other. But it might seem repetitive to have three gay kids killing themselves.

Or was it a secret unrequited love? For the first time, Heather regretted that she'd almost always made J.D. meet her in private only, as she worried that other students might think less of her for being around a loser. He had clearly long gotten over Veronica, and maybe he was in love with Heather from a distance but never confessed to her.

"Actually, Heather, I think I knew J.D. a lot better than you did," Veronica said. She'd been there at the time, walked away from the bombing covered in smoke and looking like hell. Then she had stolen Heather's red scrunchie from Heather and planted a filthy kiss on her cheek. Heather had to give Veronica credit that she had a pretty good story to sell to the networks.

"You have a choice, Heather," Veronica told her. "You can learn what it's like to have friends, real friends. Or you can keep running to the networks, keep stabbing people in the back until they get more than tired of your shit, and trade your fifteen minutes of fame for a life of complete loneliness, knowing that everyone is either afraid of you or absolutely can't stand you. I hope you choose friends."

Maybe it was the lingering effects of Heather's red scrunchie or maybe it was the way Veronica had started to carry herself like she could take on the world with determined joy, but Heather felt like it was time to go along with this new and surprisingly steel-spined Veronica. She'd missed the sharp bite of Veronica's piquant tongue about other people.

"You want to stay in, watch some movies with us?" Martha asked Heather. It looked like Martha was friends with Veronica and Heather McNamara now, which was kind of frightening.

"Sure," Heather said, faute de mieux.

Heather ate half a bag of hot salty popcorn and competed with Veronica over who could make the best cynical comments about the many flaws in the overly cheesy, bad movie. She vaguely remembered good times at camp long ago, where she had also made Martha laugh like this. Martha always had a sweet voice and melodious laugh. Heather McNamara painted her toenails first yellow, then green, and did Heather's hair for her. Instead of trying to cleave each other with edged weapons like the Heathers had always done before, the four girls acted kind and low-key. There was no pressure to act like you were someone else and pretend to be stronger. It was sort of nice.

Heather snuggled between Martha on one side and Veronica on the other, with Heather McNamara gently brushing her hair from behind. The movie's credits played on with a mellowed-out Doris Day tune.

Maybe, she thought, it had all happened for the best.

—

Note: Quote from Nathaniel Hawthorne's 'The Celestial Railroad'.