This is possibly the most deeply personal story I have ever written. Although the specifics have been greatly changed in this story for more dramatic effect, I could have easily been Deirdre. It was a Friday night in the winter of my senior year in high school, and I felt ready to just take a couple of bottles of random pills and die; things had been piling up and my parents and I had been fighting. I couldn't summon up the willpower to kill myself. That night, my parents told me that they had been withholding the acceptance letter from the program I really wanted to get into. And I wondered then, and I wondered later, what would have happened if I had done it? I would never have known.

 

Deirdre met her own eyes in the mirror. As a rule, she wasn’t fond of them; of all the things she abhorred, her own image was the worst. She hated seeing herself- the unfashionably rosy cheeks, the acne scars along forehead, nose and chin, the thick eyebrows and sparse eyelashes, the deep bags under the plain brown eyes, the tangled shit-brown hair and the obnoxiously snub nose all served to remind her that she was not one of the elite. The hatred of her physical form continued all the way down, from the short nails and the bitten cuticles to the thick neck, the overlarge breasts, the constant thick dark hair on the rough-skinned arms and fatty legs, and the ass the size of Texas. Yet sullenly she looked at herself, reminding herself of why and how she had come to this place at this time.

She was, in the parlance of her classmates, a fuck-up. Even her guidance counselor had said as much during one of the few timees he had managed to trick her into his office. ‘Deirdre, you have so much potential, stop wasting it by doing this to yourself!’ he had protested. She had tuned him out until that point, having heard the same words from her parents, her teachers, and the guidance counselors at all her schools, even from the shrink her parents had sent her to when they had come out of their own belligerent little world. Those innocuous words that she knew he had spoken to almost every student that had come through his door- they had struck a chord deep down inside. This was her own fault. All of it was her own fault.

She frustrated and exasperated her teachers in turns, and had ever since junior high school. That word potential always kept coming up: ‘you have so much potential, Deirdre!’ ‘I wish you’d live up to your potential, Deirdre!’ Comments like that had followed her through her C+ academic career. She had shown flashes of brillance in some reports and projects, but most of the time she couldn't work up the interest to even do homework or take notes. Unbeknownst to her, when her parents had actually known about parent-teacher conferences, her English teacher in junior year had taken both O’Neills by the collar, pulled them to her, and yelled, ‘This girl could be an honor student, but she’s barely passing! Why? DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!’

Of course they hadn’t. They never did. When she was thirteen, she had started to withdraw into herself, insulating herself from the bitter fights and recriminations that her parents would toss at each other night after night. They had been too busy hating each other to love her the way they meant to, and so they had tacitly given her the kind of privacy she had desired. She hadn’t wanted to hear her father screaming that her mother was an extravagant, wasteful, scheming, conniving bitch, nor had she wanted to hear her mother counter with accusations of adultery and substance abuse. Only the solitude of her sealed room and the loudest music she could find at the highest possible volume could protect her from the storm. And whenever they all had contact, inevitably Deirdre was drawn into the backbiting and quarreling until she could no longer stand it and fled from the sound of her father’s taunts that she was the only reason that her parents were still in the same home.

Maybe understanding friends could have helped her see that it wasn’t her fault at all, that it was just her parents being completely incompatible with each other. But she couldn’t find friends like that. They didn’t exist in her social orbit. As her intelligence developed, she recognized that the friends she clung to from childhood were not true friends at all. They all thought they were just because they were available if she wanted to catch a movie or gossip in the locker room. They were shallow, vain, self-centered, all longing to make it to the social big time and desperately reinventing themselves every day to achieve that dream. If she had dared to broach the subject, they would have run; the only thing that even kept them hanging out with her was the cold hard truth that no one else would put up with them. Deirdre was safe, because she was so desperate for human companionship that she would put up with anyone. Only when she suffered heartbreak did she realize that pop culture held a bigger place in their lives than she did. She cut herself off from them and from all other intimate contact then, unwilling to enter into a relationship of any nature.

Not only her friends had betrayed her, but the boy she had been foolish enough to love. She had given him her heart, revealed all of her secrets, let him into the depths of her darkness, hoping that he would be the one to take her out of those depths. And then she discovered that he was only using her as an ego boost while he was openly in a relationship with another girl- something that her friends would have told her about had they been true. That treason had soured her permanently on the concept of love- of any sort, even self-love.

Deep down inside, she believed that it was a lack in herself that had caused all this to happen- that the guidance counselor had been right and that it was all her own fault. She wasn’t good enough to keep a man. She wasn’t worthy of friends. She wasn’t even deserving of her parents’ love and devotion. It was no wonder that she had fallen into eating disorders, binging on chocolate every day and then purging it before her parents came home. At some point- she couldn’t even remember when- keeping the chocolate had become her salvation, and she had gained weight quickly. A corset and a minimizer in the back of her underwear drawer had kept her parents from noticing.

Once upon a time, she had had dreams. She had wanted to be a lawyer on the side of truth, justice, and the American way. Sometimes she had dreamed of being the first female president of the United States. She had wanted to make a difference in the world. Her mother had told her, when her mother was still paying attention, to use her life to make the world a better place, and she had taken that advice to heart. And she had had more immediate fantasies: to win a spot on the debate team in her last year of high school, to get into the pre-law program at Columbia, to visit her cousin Robyn in Massachusetts over the summer… her godparents had put up the funding, and her parents hadn’t put up a fuss. Those little things had once provided a drive for her to go on when she could find no other reason. As the world ground her down, though, that drive had slowed, faded, flickered into virtual nothingness. Her spot on the debate team had been given to a freshman, Robyn had abruptly changed her mind about their summer plans, and she hadn’t heard from Columbia; she knew that that was usually a bad sign. There was nothing left for her to dream about.

Which was why she had cut class to be home several hours before her parents and was standing in the bathroom with a bottle of sleeping pills in her hand, taking one last look at the visage that had caused so much misery. “Well, Ma, you always said to make the world a better place,” she snarled in a bitter, crackling voice. “Hope this does the trick.” With that, she uncapped the bottle. She hesitated for a moment. Could she do this? Was it worth it? Then the moment of indecision passed. In two handfuls, she downed the pills. As an afterthought, she washed them down with Nyquil. Before the drugs could take effect, she stripped off her pants and wrapped a towel around her nether regions; she had read enough about death that she knew what happened to bodily waste, and she didn’t want to muss her pants in case they were given away.

She stumbled into her bed, wrapped the blankets around herself, and quickly fell into the last sleep.

 

Renee O’Neill couldn’t have been happier. She was almost certain to get a promotion at her company, Sean had finally agreed to give up the other woman in exchange for her giving up most of her major credit cards, and she and Deirdre had actually exchanged civil words that morning. There was a bounce in her step as she walked down the street, a sparkle in her amber eyes as she tossed her rich chestnut hair. She was a big woman, but she wore it with pride, challenging the world to try to bring her down with it. She hummed a happy song as she unlocked the door. Tonight would be the perfect night to spring her dual surprises on Sean and Deirdre. It had taken almost five years, but there was finally peace in the quarrelsome Irish household.

There was a light on in Deirdre’s room, and the door hung ajar. Renee tiptoed in. “Hey, Dee, I’ve got a surprise for you,” she said. There was no response. Renee continued on anyway. “This came in a few days ago, but we were both very angry at you and decided to keep it for a while. So congratulations.” But as she came to her daughter’s side and shook her shoulder, it was all she could do to keep from screaming. Deirdre’s skin was cold to the touch… Renee reached tremulously towards Deirdre’s wrist, but jerked her hand back. Her daughter was too cold, and her skin too pale, for her to be merely sleeping, and she didn’t want to confirm the truth.

Numbness spread blessedly over Renee’s mind. For a couple of moments she wouldn’t have to think about the horror she had just encountered. She dropped everything she had been holding and went at a dead run into the bedroom. Her fingers trembling, she dialed her husband’s office number. “Sean?”

“Renee? What’s the matter? You sound awful!”

“It’s about Deirdre. She’s- she-” The words would not come.

“I’m coming, Renee.” Sean hung up. Fifteen minutes later, he had arrived and seen the bad news. Silently, he held his wife in his arms as they wept.

The letter that Renee had abandoned before still lay on the floor, disregarded by all. Half-unfolded, it silently mocked them. Only the beginning was visible: “Dear Deirdre,” it read. “We are thrilled to inform you that you have been accepted to Columbia University…”