Password Protected

Our year in Tulsa, Oklahoma was my senior year of high school. We'd moved there to be near the Southwestern Regional Medical Center for my brother's treatments, and Mama decided I could try taking classes online instead of joining a new school. She never figured out that Thomas and I would chat with each other over the internet during the hours I was supposed to be studying in the public library, and he was supposed to be resting. I wasn't highly motivated to complete my studies.

One night Thomas and I were watching an episode of Glee. It was in its first season that summer, and I was debating whether or not I liked it so I pressured him into watching it with me to get his opinion. Halfway through the second song, he lost interest. “Did you finish that essay yet?” he asked.

“What essay?”

“Your history essay. Isn't it due tomorrow?”

I shrugged and turned the volume up, but he became angry as suddenly as the summer showers we used to have in Florida. “Julia, why haven't you been doing your homework? Mom's worried that you're not going to graduate.”

“Look, you get to take time off while you're getting better so don't even try to lecture me about my schoolwork, kid.” My sharp words glanced off of him like the nerf darts he used to shoot at me when we played cops and robbers.

“I wish I could keep up. I'm going to be at least a year behind, Jules. At least.”

I'd rolled my eyes. “Exactly, so it's not very fair of me to continue without you, right?”

He punched me in the arm. “It's not very fair of you to use me as an excuse for your laziness.”

“It's not very fair that you're sick.” I hate to admit it now, but I full-on pouted, arms crossed, chin tucked in an effort to hide my tears from him. I'd sworn to myself that I was going to be tough for him, but as usual my kid brother had to teach me what it meant to be strong. It started when we were in elementary school and he broke his arm. I'd been the one crying, and he'd calmly sought our mom.

He'd never known how to react when I got upset, so he laughed it off. “Sick of musicals. How many more episodes are you going to make me watch?”

“All of them.” In the end, he'd finished the season with me and I'd finished high school. I'm not sure he really paid any attention to the actual show, since he usually had his laptop open on his knees. I wondered on occasion if social networking was not somewhat to blame for Thomas's failure to make new friends in Tulsa. He was in constant contact with everyone from home, so he never bothered to branch out. Then again, he didn't have much opportunity in between chemo sessions for football games and parties. Some days he was too exhausted even to type his own password in. I started answering emails and Facebook messages for him after the second month of treatments, carefully recording his dictations, even mimicking the smiley faces he liked to use.

I would scroll through the newsfeed and read statuses to him. “Do you know this woman? She said, 'Finally got that long-awaited raise!' with three exclamation points. 'Celebratory glass of wine with the hubby!' ” I turned the screen for Thomas to see from where he was propped in the recliner.

“Not sure who she is. Can you like the status anyway?”

The next was similarly ecstatic. It read, “Diploma? Check.” 37 people had already liked it, so we had to be original. I typed, “Congrats! Got a job yet?” I already knew he did because his status a few weeks before had announced it, but part of our Facebook policy was to never admit to knowing any information unless there was proof we'd read it in the form of a “like” or a comment. It was the same principle my brother had employed when he pretended not to have eavesdropped on my phone conversations unless he had something to add to the discussion. This invasion of my privacy used to be my greatest sorrow in middle school.

Thomas lost interest so I scrolled through the updates on my own, pausing to look at a picture of a hand. Or rather, I was looking at the diamond decorating the fourth finger. The photo was captioned “He proposed!” The first comment underneath was “And she said yes!” Others had posted things like “Omigawd, look at that rock!”, “So cute!”, “So when's the big date, gorgeous?” and “Y'all are precious!” There were seventy-five similar responses beneath these. I quit reading.

A red flag appeared at the top of the page to notify me that my brother's best friend from middle school, Alex, had added four new photos to his album Family. For old times' sake, I rifled through them and discovered that he was now an uncle. Apparently, he'd also broken his leg falling off of a ladder the past weekend while hanging Christmas lights. His wall was decorated with well wishes and encouragement, seasoned with jokes about his mishap. I added a generic, “Man, that sucks. Maybe Santa can bring you a better sense of balance.” It seemed like something Thomas would say.

My dad came in while I was responding to some messages from Thomas's high school friends. My brother had chosen not to broadcast his disease to them, so they thought the reason we'd moved was for my dad's job. Which I guess wasn't a lie as much as it was an exaggeration. Dad's a piano tuner, so he can find work almost anywhere. It took a long time for people to learn your name, though, and in the meantime the only parttime work he could find was as a bus driver for the local school district. That year was when he first started balding. Thomas liked to joke that Dad was just trying to make him feel better about the effects of his chemo treatment on his own hair.

“What are you kids up to? Oh, he's asleep.”

“Yup.”

He leaned over the back of the coach to see my computer screen. I automatically tilted it to obscure it from his view, not because I had anything to hide but because his curiousity about my activities irritated me. “My Face?”

“It's Facebook, Dad.”

He laughed. “I can't keep all those websites straight.”

“If you get an account like Thomas keeps telling you to, you might could build up your clientel a little bit. Network, you know?”

“Maybe I'm old-fashioned but I don't know about advertising your life on the internet like that. Seems tacky. A bit like proposing on the big screen at a baseball game, right?” He winked at me. It was something Mama had never let him live down.

I shrugged. “Maybe.”

~~~

Thomas made Mama tell me when he decided to stop receiving treatments. She tried to explain that he wasn't improving, and the treatments just made him feel worse. He'd talked about it with my parents, with the doctors, with everyone but me. He wanted to have as normal a life as possible.

What about as long of a life as possible? That was the question I kept repeating to myself as I furiously fled the house, as I sped down the highway in my dad's jeep, as I sat in the parking lot of a long-abandoned gas station and sobbed against the steering wheel, as I pulled back into the garage late that night. Only Mama was still awake, and she met me at the door to wrap her arms around me.

“Oh, Jules.”

“He can't give up.”

“He's not, sweetheart. He's teaching us what it means to be strong.”

Thomas and I only talked about it once. I was half-heartedly working through some homework when he called my name. I expected him to ask me to check his Facebook, because it had been at least a week since we'd responded to his friends, but instead he said, “Can you read to me?”

“Sure.” My eyes flitted to the book in his hands. It was a leather-bound Bible that I didn't even know we owned. “You want me to read that?”

He lifted an eyebrow at me like he always did when he was amused at my reactions. “I have to believe in something, don't I?” I didn't return his smile.

“Where should I start?”

“I think there's a Thomas in there somewhere. Start with him.” I ended up having to google it because I had no idea there was a story about doubting Thomas, and if I had known I wouldn't have been able to find it. We'd been to Mass on and off as kids but neither of us had paid attention, and we never had First Communion or Confirmation. My parents had outgrown their religious phase by then.

I finished reading and found my brother watching me. “Aren't you scared?” I regretted the words before I'd even finished asking them. I thought he would laugh the question away but he thought about it, gazing at the ceiling.

“Yeah. Sometimes. Mostly I try not to think about it. It doesn't seem possible, that this could end. You know?”

I knew.

~~

Even a week after his funeral, it didn't seem possible. That there could be an end to my brother. His room looked exactly like it did while he was still living in it, his bed still unmade. I sat on the floor and leaned against it, closing my eyes and focusing on the smell of his pillow. Sweat and his shampoo.

As the light outside faded and the room grew darker, I noticed a pulsing green light on his desk. We'd never bothered to turn his laptop off. I crawled through the dark to see what he had left unfinished, but there were no windows open. The emptiness was too much, so I opened an internet browser and found myself staring at the Facebook login page.

What could it hurt?

I typed his password in. He had three unanswered messages from friends back home ignorant of his death. Reading through the cheerful messages I felt oddly comforted. They asked mundane things, like “Have you seen that new movie yet?” or “How's school going, man?”

I began to sort through his newsfeed, to check up on the people we used to stalk together. There was a status update about the foreclosure of someone's home. I found a note written by a friend who'd married young addressed to her ex-husband, posted for public viewing as though it were a work of art in a museum. Yet another announced that they had just been diagnosed with cancer, and invoked prayer from their friends. The day Thomas was diagnosed with leukemia was the second worst day of my life. I didn't take the time to read everything on the woman's wall. It would be too familiar.

Somewhere around two a.m. I stumbled upon the introduction to a very long suicide note someone I barely knew had posted. They'd actually created an event for anyone who wanted to witness the planned overdosage. It was to take place next week. On the one hand, I was horrified by the mental state of this stranger. The rejections he'd faced, the fear of failure that plagued him after he lost his job for the second time, the prospect of years alone. On the other hand, I felt mildly irritated that he'd passed his burden on to me. It seemed selfish, to impose your problems like that. Don't people have enough to worry about?

I declined the invitation, but read through some of the responses others had plastered onto the event wall. “Chin up. Tomorrow will be better.” “Don't give up on life! It's a precious gift. Don't waste it.” Some had posted Bible verses, others had shared core tenets from other religions. “Desire is what causes pain. If you can rid yourself of desire, you won't feel that pain anymore. Then you will reach the supreme state of being: nothingness.”

If I were planning on killing myself, these posts wouldn't have changed my mind. I think I might have chosen to move the date a few days earlier to give people less time to type useless Hallmark movie lines on my wall. But there were other comments, too. Things like “It's about time” and “Got any extra meds for me?” Someone had even offered to video the death and upload it later for those who couldn't make it.

There is such a thing as going too far. I closed the entire window and shoved back from the desk, plunged into darkness again. Goosebumps spread up my arms like a coffee stain infecting fabric. This person might be dead in a few days and there was little I could do to stop him. He might kill himself, and I'd know about it beforehand. By typing a few characters into a text box, I could interact with someone miles away and influence a life or death decision. Would I be responsible?

What was wrong with them, encouraging someone to kill themselves? Who thought it was even a little bit okay to film the event? And what kind of moron thought the cheerful tone of their brief post could preserve someone's life? Nothing I had done, none of the effort my parents made, none of the doctors and the latest technology had been enough to save my brother's life. How foolish to think that a semi-colon and a right parenthesis could inspire hope.

Words, words, words. He would get them as a reward for his end. Words graffitied on his wall, plastered like paper maché. Thin and fragile, glued on by sticky chubby fingers. More words than Thomas's obituary in the newspaper was worth. Four hundred and fifty characters. That was all that summed up his life, his death. Not fair. I wanted to scream it.

And no one reads newspapers anyway, these days. That was why his friends kept writing to him, oblivious. It was Thomas who had taught me the possibility of the internet, of constructing truth. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy. False beliefs are true in their consequences. He fabricated an alternate life in which he wasn't sick. He'd protected his friends from the truth. He'd taught me what it meant to be strong: to create your own reality.

As I calmed down, I woke Thomas's laptop up again and reopened the message from his friend, Alex. I'd been my brother's secretary of sorts all this time. Couldn’t I continue my job? No, I should. It was my duty. So I began typing a response. It was the only way I knew to repay my brother for the possibilities he'd taught me. I could prolong his existence by creating a new reality in which he'd lived the life that was taken from him, in which he grew up and finished high school and started dating. I could do what the Southwestern Regional Medical Center couldn't do, what all the dreamers who chased after the fountain of youth had never figured out. I could make my brother immortal.