Not so hard. Watching the blood flow from her fingertips and the webs of her fingers into the sink she thought that after all she couldn’t die standing up. She turned from the sink holding her wrists aloft so the blood wouldn’t fall, but more did fall, spattering rapidly on the floor and on the pink rug. Her hands were numb. She thought of going to the tub and kneeling there and holding her hands under the faucet, but then she knew she couldn’t manage all that. She sat on the pink-clothed toilet seat and tried to reach the faucets on the sink. There was still not much pain except a weird dull ache in her upper arms. She felt as she had always supposed she would feel, that she was departing, dissipating, afraid and sorry but growing less so: lighter, lighter, lighter.

Her mother, coming back for her missal and her cigarettes, heard Kit fall in the bathroom upstairs, heard the tooth glass smash in the sink; when she pushed open the door her first thought was that her daughter’s wound had opened again, and that her hands were red with trying to stanch it.

10.

They were thin white lines, not noticeable really, almost indistinguishable from the creases of her wrists: some days she thought so, anyway. Other days she knew that everyone knew what they meant, and she tugged down the sleeves of her blouse, and folded her arms.

“If I ever try it again I’ll know better how,” she said to Jackie. “I got it down now.”

“Oh yes? Well I hope you won’t ever.”

“First thing,” she said. “You have to use a single-edge blade. They make them for tools and for art.”

“Okay.”

“The double-edge kind cut up your fingers. That was actually the most horrible part. You wouldn’t think so. But cutting my fingers was just…It said hey, you have a cut, stop, stop—and I almost did.”

“Uh-huh.” The day was bitter cold, a change in the weather. They sat in the lounge of her dorm, where men were admitted at certain hours, though it was empty now, gray dinnertime.

“And you don’t cut across,” she said. “Somehow you don’t think of this, but it’s like, of course.” She held her wrist. “It’s all bones and tendons, like a chicken leg. Probably all there just so it can’t be cut. So you have to cut down.” She showed him, a quick slash as though she struck a match there. But her hands shook a little.

“Down,” he said.

“And you have to have hot water, flowing water. You have to do all this in a bath, so you can keep your hands in the water even after you pass out.”

He said nothing. She could see he was appalled. She was appalled herself at the certainty of her knowledge. “Guess what else,” she said.

“Why don’t you just go ahead and say.”

“Rat poison,” she said. “A little rat poison makes you not clot. Which is why it kills rats. They bleed inside. But you take just a little.”

“I hope,” he said, “you’re planning to give me a long lead time on this. Let me know when the thought’s preying on your mind.”

She pressed her hands together to stop their trembling.

“I ain’t going to be much good at talking you out of anything you want to do,” he said. “But I want the chance to try.”

“What are you going to say?” she asked.

“Well sometimes, when in the past I’ve had these conversations, which isn’t so often…Once, anyway, I talked about breakfast.”

“Breakfast, huh.”

“Well when I get real depressed that’s what I think about,” he said. “Tomorrow’s another day, and you’re going to wake up and smell that coffee and there’s eggs and buttered toast. And you won’t want to miss that. And you just go on from there.” He laughed, and she was laughing already. “Really, really, that’s what I said.”

She hadn’t told him why she’d done it. They’d started talking about how many girls did. Boys too, she claimed, only you didn’t notice, or couldn’t tell: in a car, in a blind rage. And she’d shown him her wrists, the undersides, maps where the blue rivers ran.

“So here’s what I want to do,” she said. “I want to get drunk.”

“You do.” He’d asked her what she wanted to do that night, it was “late hours night” and they could be out together till midnight.

“I want to try it out.”

“What, you never did?”

“No,” she said. “Never did. I think it’s time.”

“Well, bad on me if I was to get you drunk,” he said. “A man’s not to do that, it’s not right.”

“I thought I’d get myself drunk,” she said. “You could just be there.”

“Sober as a judge.”

“That’s up to you.”

He shook his head in wonder. “Well. I suppose if you want to, you ought to get to. Got to be a first time.”

“Sure.”

She pulled on her leather jacket and he wound his long scarf around his neck and patted his blue navy watch cap in place. His Volkswagen was in the parking lot, ticketed. “There’s company I wouldn’t recommend you try this with,” he said, pocketing the ticket and pulling his door closed. “But probably out t’my house you’d be as safe as anywhere.”

“That’s right. That’s what I thought too.”

“You’re pretty damn sure,” he said. “What makes you so sure?”

“Well, why’d you say it?”

They drove down into town. The VW’s little blades flailed against the icy rain. “First thing,” he said. “You got to decide what you’re going to get drunk on. That’s the big decision. Can’t be beer, you can’t get all that far on beer. Wine, you’ll fall asleep first.”

She pondered the question, or pretended to, having no criteria at all to go by. “Gin,” she said.

“Gin!”

Clearer than water, good medicine, with the branches of juniper pictured on the label, the dusky blue berries. How did they drown that blue in this transparency? Girls didn’t take Chemistry. In the car, she uncapped the bottle he bought her and inhaled it tentatively.

“Hey. Don’t you know it’s against the law in this state to carry an open bottle in a vee-hicle?”

“No, I didn’t,” she said. “So there.” The gin smelled gloriously harmful, weird, what would the word be, intoxicating.

At the house, Max and Rodger were reading the previous Sunday’s New York Times, acres of fine print, rattling the pages in disgust or glee.

“Gin?” Max asked in mild amazement.

“Gin,” Jackie said. “Now what have we got to mix it with?” He opened the little gray refrigerator and then the cupboards. Kit stroked the glass-ringed wooden kitchen table, liking this idea of living with other people’s old things, their mismatched chairs and swayback walnut beds and brass lamps with floral shades. It was like living in the woods, she thought, at once homey and strange, yours and not yours.

“You can’t drink gin without a mixer,” Max said. “You might not survive.”

“Well I’m not going all the way back to town to get something,” Jackie said. “’Sides I got no money left. This has become a rather expensive date, no offense. Oh here.” He pulled from the back of a cupboard a little envelope, and shook it. “Lemon Kool-Aid.”

Rodger’s mouth fell open and his tongue protruded, though he said nothing. In a plastic pitcher Jackie mixed the Kool-Aid. Kit sat with arms crossed, intent on her adventure. “We don’t have a lot of ice, either,” Jackie said. He pulled two metal trays from the icebox’s frozen heart. He found glasses, painted with daffodils and tulips, and filled them.

For many years after that night, Kit couldn’t drink gin again, though in time she learned to; Kool-Aid, never.