Before You Knew My Name by Jacqueline Bublitz (books to read for teens txt) 📕

a place where women walk alone at night, and talk to strangers on the street, and only avoid certain places. That girl, the one they marched for, won’t be forgotten, but her murder will stop being a fresh wound, eventually. It will settle on the city like a small, ugly scar.

Then, when it happens again, the city will be tired. No one will march this time, or shout in the streets; their anger will be jaded, quiet. Flowers will be laid, and candles lit, but the death of another bright young girl will come more like a reminder from now on, an alarm clock ringing.

The city was already weary when her body was found.

Time and again they will come with their flowers and candles. From Mexico City to Madrid to Melbourne and Manila, these cities will be bone tired as they watch the flowers wilt and the candles burn down.

Here lies the pain of another woman, another community, the flowers and the candles say.

There is silence for a time.

And then the alarm sounds out again.

SIXTEEN

WHEN HE WAS THERE ON THE GROUND DYING, DEATH DID not feel like he thought it would. In fact, it didn’t feel like anything at all. Time-stamps across his movements that night show two and a half hours passed between him leaving the restaurant to the west of Central Park, and his bloody, confused stumble into a bodega on the other side, where the terrified clerk used Josh’s own phone to call an ambulance. He remembers the sharp pain of coming to in the park, the disorientation of tree roots and rocks and dirt at eye level, and the outline of a bicycle wheel, strangely twisted. He remembers how the pain came flooding in as he looked at that circle of spokes, a dam opening, nerves gushing. Soon, his arms were burning, and his legs were bright red flames. He could taste blood, see it, and though he couldn’t make his arms reach up, he knew there was something wrong with his head, something exposed and broken. Before that—there had been nothing. Up to two hours of black, as he lay on a dirt path and his upturned bicycle wheel stopped spinning and lights went out in apartments on both sides of the park. Phones were turned to silent, laptops were clicked shut; neighbours and his wife on East 97th rolled over to face their bedroom walls. All that time, he was gone.

As Josh recounts the story of his bike accident for Ruby, a muscle in his jaw twitches, betraying his impassive tone. She has been listening intently, can almost see the dirt and the tree roots and the upside-down, spinning wheel. What she cannot see, the way I can, is the man he was in the minutes, seconds, before the accident, how much lighter he was than the man telling his story now. Physically, yes, but something else, too. Josh’s heaviness comes from the way his body let him down after the fall, the way it refused to hold him up. With a fractured C3 vertebra—he places Ruby’s hand against the back of his neck, helps her fingers feel the grooves—he was kept in a brace for six weeks, had to be fed like a baby, have his ass wiped by a roster of nurses, remember how to walk on his own. It does something to your sense of location within your body, spending all those days and nights lying on your back, staring at the pock-marked ceiling of a hospital room. It changes you, when you find yourself so utterly reliant on strangers to take care of your most basic needs.

He had, until the accident, somewhat thought he was invincible.

(You’d be surprised at how many people think this way.)

They are holding their first official Death Club meeting as a foursome at Gramercy Tavern—‘Farm to table is very New York!’ Lennie declared when choosing the restaurant—where Ruby has found she needs to query many of the ingredients on the menu.

‘They don’t have nice restaurants in Melbourne?’ Sue had commented when Ruby asked to be reminded what arugula was. Ruby soon learns this seemingly taciturn woman is an avid solo traveller, considers Melbourne to be one of her favourite culinary cities, and was merely teasing her. Never sure how to respond to ribbing (she has often wondered if there isn’t a touch of casual cruelty in it), Ruby was grateful when Lennie suddenly tapped on her glass with a fork, making a show of calling the meeting to order.

Death Club, it turns out, is surprisingly easy to navigate. Once you get past the awkwardness of hellos, where to sit, what seasonal salad to order. Though Lennie was the official host, their newest member was granted the opening question of the night.

‘Any question about death you want to ask, it’s yours, Ruby.’

Nervous as she was, she immediately knew what she wanted to discuss.

Do you think people know when they die? As it happens. Are they aware?

(What she’s really asking: Do those of us who die so violently get spared the knowing of it? This is something she can’t stop thinking about.)

As soon as Ruby set down her question, something changed in the others, an immediate orientation toward her. Josh responded first, admitting his own experiences had made him wonder about this very thing. Did he die that night in the park, when his bike hit a tree root, and his neck broke as he hit the ground? Or did he nearly die, which isn’t the same thing at all. When he thinks back, he can only remember the nothingness of those hours he lay broken and bloody in the dirt. There was no light to walk toward, no grandfather telling him it wasn’t his time. No tunnels or feelings of peace, just a silent, black expanse he felt tethered to. A dark place to which he often, inadvertently, returns.

‘The thing is, once you start losing blood supply to the brain,’ he is saying