The Bridge Between Life and Death

The Bridge Between Life and Death

Lana sat crouched on the edge of her bathtub, left arm extended, right arm hovering above the left, clutching a razor blade with tight, rigid fingers. She was going to do it; she was going to end it all.

She took three slow, deep breaths and touched the cold metal to her skin. Applying a light amount of pressure, she knew it would work. The blade was sharp, her skin was vulnerable.

On the floor next to the tub was the dismantled razor in a puddle of salty tears. More tears streamed down her cheeks, leaving a shinning path of misery. Her eyes held a look of defeat.

Lana thought back to the month before this moment. It was been the worst of her life, no exceptions, no ties. Just thinking about it brought a new gush of tears to her already sopping, blurred, and burning eyes, one of emotional pain and pure humiliation.

It occurred to her then that she probably should have done things differently. No kidding, haha. Lana bit down on her lip and willed herself to lower her arm. She didn’t want to remember anymore.

There were some many places that could be considered the beginning of it all, but only one that was the actually starting to her problems. It had happened one afternoon at school.

Lana was sitting in the grass, alone, finishing her lunch and deciding who to match against whom. When she came to her decision she pulled her shoulder length golden locks back into a rough ponytail and stood up, brushing the grass off her backside.

She looked around with eyes narrowed against the bright sun. Back then she couldn’t risk being seen with any of her “friends”. Neither of her two “friend” groups knew she was “friends” with the other and she wanted to keep it that way. Luckily, none were near.

“Friend” wasn’t the right word, not for what they were to her, but as they believed that she was that to them, it was the term she used.

The warm breeze lifted her bangs and then dropped them in front of her eyes. Sweeping them back, she stretched, crumpled her brown paper lunch bag into a tight ball and heaving it over her shoulder, past the fence and into the parking lot beyond. As she had expected, the bell rang the next moment.

Lana crossed the field and entered the school with the large mob clustered there, pushing, mumbling complaints and groans, all trying to get through the door at once but slowly.

Of course she came up with perfect excuses not to hang around with any of her “friends” at lunch or other breaks long ago. Lana was a wonderfully skilled liar. Her “friends” ate up her stories and excuses like candy. No one questioned Lana; she was always in control and that was how she liked it.

If her “friends” knew what she was doing, though, everything would come crashing down. But that wasn’t going to happen.

At her locker, Lana quietly and inconspicuously flagged down Grace Summers with her pale grey eyes. Grace was very easy to manipulate and wouldn’t stand for anyone talking trash about her. She wouldn’t back down from a fight.

“Grace Summers, you won’t believe what I heard,” she said smugly, checking that nobody from her other “friend” group was around, or anyone that could tip on of them off.

“What?” Grace was very nosey; she would die before she let everyone find out a piece of juicy gossip before her.

“Kristy Hatfield, you know that red-head with the glasses from the Loser Clique?” (This was how they referred to Lana’s other group of “friends”) “She got dumped by Justin Reynolds two nights ago, right? Well guess who he’s already dating now?”

Grace leaned closer excitedly.

“Who?”

“Fiona Smith!” Lana said gleefully, smirking. “But the person who told me is one of the only one that knows right now.”

Both groups knew better than to ask who she had just learned such things from.

“Are you serious?” Grace squealed. “That absolute cow?”

“Which one? Fiona or Kristy?” Lana replied, laughing.

Later that night found Lana at Kristy’s house while Kristy cried into her pillow.

“He promised that we would get married some day!” Kristy wailed dramatically. She thrust her hand towards Lana’s face and cried, “Look! He gave me a promise ring and everything!” She took a huge, shaking breath. “And now everyone knows about him and Fiona because of that horse-faced, excuse for a human, bitch Grace Summers!”

“I know, I know,” Lana consoled her. She wore a truly convincing look of pity but underneath it she was rolling her eyes; Kristy was so naïve. Lana was beginning to tingle with that familiar feeling of a building fight.

Lana enjoyed fights greatly, the flying fists, the handfuls of hair, the enraged screams. They gave her life excitement and made her feel in control. And that indescribable feeling, like being tense and at the same time relaxed.

It wasn’t just random people that she matched together for a fight either.

Back in elementary school, both “friend” groups had been just one large one composed of about twenty-something girls. When they reached junior high, there was a quite split. Lana couldn’t even recall the reason behind the dividing of the group anymore. But one thing was for certain: Lana wasn’t responsible for the split, but she was to blame for the fact that now, at the end of their last junior year, both sides were now mortal enemies. And both believed that she hated the other along with them.

To an outsider, Lana’s life choices may have looked confusing, pointless, cruel, and simply stupid. Looking back, Lana could now see that this was true.

The split was where Lana first discovered her love of chaos. The tension in the air sent shivers of pleasure down Lana’s spine. While the other girls cried, complained, and moaned about how life was unfair and not all friends were trustworthy, she kept mostly quiet. It greatly annoyed her to hear their babbling and while she could do nothing about it herself, that didn’t mean she couldn’t influence someone else to do her bidding.

As she had secretly remained neutral, she was able to play both sides. When one person was agitating her, Lana would set her up against someone who in no way matched her strength just to see her get beat up.

But most of the time, she matched people fairly.

Because she knew everybody, what they loved, hated, feared, their deepest secrets, she was able to set up a kind of tournament of sorts. She would pick two people to set up against each other and see who came out on top. The winner then went head to head with the winner of a previous fight, always someone from the opposite side.

And even after three years of this process, nobody had figured this out.

So after leaking Kristy’s secret to Grace, it was time to spill one of Grace’s secrets to Kristy.

“This’ll cheer you up at least,” Lana assured, “Grace Summers, who you now know is the one behind your misery, has something you can get back at her with.”

Kristy’s tear blurred eyes widened as Lana revealed Grace’s embarrassing secret.

“No way!”

Lana nodded triumphantly.

“Heard it from a reliable source.”

Kristy’s eyes narrowed and her lip curled with dark delight. Revenge.

Lana was successful again.

“You!” Grace shrieked, pointing at Kristy from down the hall. Kristy froze in her tracks. “I’m gonna tear your head off!” She flung her books aside and pelted down the hall.

Kristy tried to flee but crashed to the ground as Grace tackled her.

“Get’er offa me!” Kristy screamed frantically, but it was too late, she had to fight for herself.

As Lana predicted, Grace beat Kristy by far, but not before Kristy got some good hits in. Grace and Kristy were hauled down to the principal’s office to be berated for their actions, Grace with a busted lip, Kristy with a magnificent black eye. Neither would mention Lana’s name, of that she was confident.

About a week later, Lana entered the large brick building that was her school to find everyone giggling. True they were not pointing at her, or looking at her, or even mentioning her name, but Lana had a feeling that she had to do with their amusement.

But the day went pretty normal, that is until she reached her locker to deposit her books before lunch. When she opened her locker door, a piece of paper torn from notebook fluttered out and landed face down on the floor in front of her feet. Lana picked it up and, filled with curiosity and apprehension, turned it over.

She froze. Her fingers went slack and the paper drifted back to the floor, the sound of it brushing against the tiles echoing fiercely in her ears. She couldn’t breath. She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t even think.

In large letters cut from magazines, the words “BED WETTERS ANONYMOUS” were splashed haphazardly across the page. And even though she was fifteen, Lana still had a little issue with bed wetting.

“How?” she breathed through clenched teeth as the giggling intensified.

People were looking now, and pointing. Everybody knew.

Lana suddenly found her voice, screaming, “Shut up! Shut up, shut up, shut up!” She stamped her foot. Tears began to cloud her vision. “It’s not true, they lied to you!”

She spun around, chest heaving, mouth dry. They kept laughing. Even her gift of falsehood couldn’t aid her now. They all knew the truth.

It wasn’t too traumatic of an embarrassment as it would lose humor eventually, but Lana had always been an over-reactor and whatever toughness she usually feigned, she was easily embarrassed. And everybody knew her secret.

She couldn’t face the rest of the day. She took off down the hallway and skidded to a halt in front of the school’s payphone. It took her three attempts to dial the right number when she tried to phone home because her fingers were shaking so badly. When her mother picked up she shrieked into the phone, “Come get me, come get me now!”

Shocked, her mother obeyed without question. Lana spent the day crying, screaming, outraged and confused. She spent the night on the phone with every “friend” she could think of.

Their answers to her main question were all the same, variations of: “I’m so sorry to hear that, I have no idea what kind of monster would blab someone’s most embarrassing secrets to everyone.”

At the time, Lana didn’t catch the irony.

She got nowhere with her persistent, angry, and panicked demands for information. All she had managed to achieve was unhelpful and unwanted words of sympathy and “comfort”. Finally, she gave up.

Three days passed and the laughter began to disperse. On the forth day, however, a fresh wave of hilarity broke out. Somehow everyone now knew that she had a crusted collection of green-yellow mucus, courtesy of a once runny nose, coating the bottom of her bedrooms desk’s chair.

Everywhere she went she heard the jeering calls of “nose picker!”, “green gold miner!” and “slime fingers!” The harsh, stinging words hit her like physical blows, over and over again as they echoed around her in the corridor.

Lana was determined to keep her face impassive and went through the day fighting back tears. By the time she got home she could no longer hold back the flood of misery. At night the taunts still haunted her.

The next morning, Lana ate her breakfast quietly. She was half hoping her mother would inquire into her daughter’s troubles, half dreading it. Her mother, however, seemed to feel that she had bigger things to be concerned with than high school drama. Lana went out the door without a word.

Although the laughter followed her through the school, no new secret had been spilled, which raised Lana’s self-confidence slightly.

I can do this, she told herself, I just need to be strong.

Ignoring the sneering faces, Lana went about the rest of the day with her head held high. When she got home, it occurred to her that something else was off, other than some unknown person revealing all her secrets. Why would everyone be laughing at her face? Surely there had to be people who didn’t give a damn about her and couldn’t be bothered to do more than just have a chuckle and forget about it. Something else was going on.

Of course the thing that bothered her the most was the fact that she had no idea who was behind everything. She had already ruled out and of her “friends”. She had told her secrets to both groups; only one group knew about the chair, and the other knew about the bed wetting. Lana never spent the night at anyone’s house and never shared a room, let alone a bed, with anyone when they stayed at her house. Still, one of them found out and told the rest of that group, but no one else.

The rest of the week went by okay. Lana endured the slowly dying giggles until they were almost entirely gone. When she looked back now, she realised that maybe her schoolmates had simply been lulling her into a false sense of security.

By the following Monday, Lana was once again horrified, confused, furious, and once again, the laughingstock of the school. It had been slipped that she had once soiled herself while on a rollercoaster. She could have dealt with it if it had happened when she was a little kid, but as it had happened barely a year ago when she was fourteen, it was still pretty fresh in her memory.

And in the minds of everybody who attended school with her as well.

The stress she felt was enormous. All week it took her hours to finally fall into a restless sleep at night, from which she was awoken from by her haunting dreams. The taunts were lasting longer this time as they now had three things to make fun of her with.

Another whole week passed without anything new. The one after that was, if possible, even worst than the last.

Lana was approached innocently by many different people. At first she foolishly expected an apology. She was wrong.

“You are a two faced bitch.”

Stunned, Lana stood where she was, breathing quick and shallow breaths. She heard it all day in varying tones and sentences. She sought out anyone from either “friend” group but couldn’t find any. It was the very end of the day before she saw any sign of hope, but it was to be the biggest shock and pain yet.

She rushed forward to meet the large group of people, full of familiar faces, walking toward her. She realised too late that it was composed of both “friend” groups.

Melinda Rogers and Bree Mahoney stepped forward once the small crowd had come to a halt in front of her. Both girls were from different groups.

“You may be wondering why everybody knows your secrets,” Mel said, falsely sweet. “We’ve come to fill you in.

“You may or may not have caught on that everybody is laughing, whether they know you personally or not. Well, they were informed of your previous doings.”

“Wh-what?” Lana stammered.

“Oh we found out what you were doing right after the Kristy-Grace fight.” said Bree scathingly.

“I - I don’t know what your-”

“Don’t try to play dumb now,” someone snapped. Lana didn’t catch who it was.

“Lana, we know what you were doing, we found out. It may surprise you, but we aren’t stupid. You were swapping our secrets around and getting us in fights,” said Mel, still falsely sweet, but her voice had an icy edge to it now. “So we told everybody in the whole school what you were doing. We thought that was punishment enough at first. I mean, if we made everybody know the real you then ditched you, you wouldn’t have any friends, ever.”

“But then we realised we could torment you further, get back at you.” said Bree.

“So we blabbed some of your most embarrassing secrets to everyone, and once they knew what filth you really were, they took pleasure in harassing you.” Mel’s voice couldn’t possibly get any sweeter, yet no colder either.

“We gave you our friendship, you gave us crap,” said Bree, “Well, we’re giving it back. Enjoy your life alone, bitch.”

Every single one of them spat on the ground at her feet, causing Lana to jump back to avoid the gobs of saliva. They walked away, some looking back, most laughing.

Presently, Lana threw the razor down to cover her face with her hands. She couldn’t slice her wrist open, she couldn’t stomach it. So what could she do? Sleeping pills? No, she couldn’t trust them to cause an overdose. What about fire? No, that would hurt more than cutting.

Then it hit her; it was so easy, so perfect. And it would feel like flying. She would throw herself off the nearest large bridge.

Twenty minutes later, Lana got off her bike, letting it fall on the sidewalk at the edge of the road with a screech and clatter. Cars rushed by her she walked forward onto the bridge but she took no notice. She could barely feel her feet carrying her along. She seemed to have gone numb inside. She didn’t look around as she climbed up over the railing and peered down. Water gushed and flowed quietly some thirty to fifty feet below her. A car honked, someone had spotted her. She heard a car door slam, hurried footsteps hitting the pavement, and a shout. She didn’t hear the words though.

She closed her eyes, gripping the railing and letting herself lean forward.

“I deserve this,” she whispered.

She let go of the rail, thinking as she did so, I’m sorry.