Constance killed herself, we were told one black Monday morning in the early November of our high school junior year. She had slit her wrists while she was showering, the police had said. But her brother had told us secretly that she had passed out at the sight of her own blood and ended up drowning in the inch or so of water that pooled at the head of the bathtub…
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Constance had always been afraid of blood.
Her brother had been the one to finally pick the lock on the door; he was the only one home that afternoon. She was just lying there, her blonde hair stained with the red of her blood, her head half-submerged and her lips a filmy blue.
Her parents wanted it ruled an accidental death, saying that their daughter had been very happy with her life. She was doing well enough in school, she had told them, and she had developed us as her group of friends.
Constance sometimes hung out with us on weekends when someone threw a party or planned dinner-and-a-movie.
She had been dating what her parents considered a very nice young man. Michael was a senior and he seemed to love her very much. But her parents didn’t have to see the heartbreak on his face when he found out Constance had killed herself while getting ready to see him.
Michael had given her a flower once a week since they had been dating and Constance had dried them all in her room. When we went over to look through her belongings, to have something to remember her by, the flowers were still there. The were hung upside-down in a neat little row like a rainbow that sprung from one corner of the room to the other.
All counted, there were fourteen flowers.
Constance and Michael seemed like a perfect, happy couple. She cared for him a lot. I mean, we all could see that she might even have been on the verge of loving him. At one point, there had been a buzz of a rumor that she had given up her virginity to him, but none of us really cared to know if that was true or not. As far as we were concerned, Constance was pleased with her romantic entanglements and she never even gave another boy a sideways glance.
She was a very pretty girl for all of her lack of boyfriends beforehand. There were many admirers, and a few among us had even had a crush on her at one point or another. She wasn’t tall. She wasn’t thin, either. She had a nice full figure, but she never showed it off. Usually, Constance came to class in jeans hidden beneath a long sleeved shirt that she always left untucked.
Her hair, though. That was her beauty, and she knew it. It was perfectly blonde, like girls out in California who have been going to beaches since they’ve been breathing. Long, silky, luxurious. Constance put all her vanity into her hair. She once told us that she washed it twice a day, brushing it out with a soft-bristle brush.
She had mentioned wanting to be a hair stylist, if even just to be able to know how to do more elaborate styles in her own hair. Buns, braids, up-dos, twists, Constance loved the way she felt when her hair looked its best. For a while, she started doing tutorials, posting them online and getting a little following. None of us really watched them, so we don’t know when she stopped.
Her brother had said to us, as the last bell for class rang and he had to walk away, that the worst thing about Constance killing herself in the shower was the way her hair looked. She would have been so embarrassed and felt awful if she had only seen it.
We stood in a huddle group long after the late bell rang, consoling one another and trying to make sense of Constance.
She had been happy, hadn’t she? She loved her job at the daycare center, caring for the children whose parents had to work until five every evening. She had been accepted to intern at Lady Looks, the local hair salon, only a few weeks before. Wasn’t everything looking up for her?
One of us mentioned Constance’s rocky past and a visible guilt hung in the air.
At a coed sleepover that summer, we were playing a rigorous five-hour set of Truth or Dare. She hated the thought of looking like a fool, and was well-known to pick Truth ninety percent of the time. The other ten percent of the time, when she actually picked Dare, was when the potential Dare-giver was no great creative master of ridicule.
On a Truth, she had told us about a time she had ran away from home. She was eleven. It was over a bad report card and had been for a few days. Grades were very important to Constance, it seemed.
But then we got to thinking: it wasn’t that Constance felt a great need for perfect or even passing grades, it was that her parents had pushed her hard her whole life, to strive harder than she was capable of doing.
On more than one occasion, Constance had been known to cry on one of our shoulders over a barely-failing 63% on a math test or a D on an English project. She’d whisper between muffled sobs, “They’re going to kill me. I just know it.”
Try as she might, Constance had no real knack for working hard on things that didn’t hold her interest. She’d much rather have been creating hair fashions or studying the latest video editing software than learning about Chaucer and quadratic formulas. She saw no real future in playing volleyball for forty-five minutes when in a year she would be spending those forty-five minutes talking to us during break period. There was no point to studying art when that time could have been used to research victory roll or make-up tips.
“The world has turned life into a waste,” we had once heard her say. “People make kids learn things that they won’t use, or don’t want to learn. They just end up wasting their time while other more important things get neglected.”
She smiled and flipped a strand of golden hair back from out of her eyes.
“If the school systems asked us what we wanted to do with our time, assuming we didn’t waste it completely, the world might be a better place. And maybe if our parents asked us how we were feeling once in a while, maybe we wouldn’t be inclined to brush them off when we had something we wanted to say to them.”
There she grumbled.
“It’s as if they don’t even understand or remember what it’s like to have been a kid in school! The pressures, they seem foreign to them. As if… as if all the memories went out of them when diapers and bananas replaced evening gowns and white wine.”
Not that any of us had evening gowns or white wine in our lives, but we knew what she meant.
She had been happy, we kept telling ourselves.
The local and school newspapers reinforced this idea, as well. The good die young; the happy die tragic. What was with all that bull? Why were we swallowing it?
Couldn’t we take a moment, think a bit outside of the box? It was possible for people to be feeling one way and acting another. It was completely possible that Constance had fallen far away from herself, from us, from everything that she loved.
Why hadn’t we seen it? Why did we let ourselves be fooled by the smile and the flip of her hair?