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Elf’s bedroom and knelt by her side. She asked me what I was doing there. I told her I was there to call a doctor. Mom might have made a promise not to call a doctor but I hadn’t. Our mother stayed in the dining room. She had her back to us. She couldn’t support one daughter’s idea over the other daughter’s idea, like any good mother, so she removed herself from the proceedings. I’m calling, I said. I’m sorry. Elf pleaded with me not to. She implored me. She put her hands together in supplication and begged. She promised to eat. Our mother stayed sitting at the dining room table. I told Elf the ambulance was on its way. The screen door was open and we could smell the lilacs. I won’t go, said Elf. You have to, I said. She called to our mom. Please tell her I won’t go. Our mother said nothing. She didn’t turn around. Please, said Elf. Please! She used what little strength she had left to give me the finger as the paramedics loaded her into the back of the ambulance.
    That was the first time I met Janice. I had been standing next to Elf’s stretcher in the emergency room. Her broken backpack hung on the IV unit next to her. I was sliding my hands back and forth on the steel railing that held her in and I was crying. Elf took my hand, weakly, like an old dying person, and looked deeply into my eyes.
    Yoli, she said, I hate you.
    I bent to kiss her and whispered that I knew that, I was aware of it. I hate you too, I said.
    It was the first time that we had sort of articulated our major problem. She wanted to die and I wanted her to live andwe were enemies who loved each other. We held each other tenderly, awkwardly, because she was in a bed attached to things.
    Janice—she had that furry creature hanging from her belt loop even then—tapped me on the shoulder and asked if she could talk to me for a minute. I told Elf I’d be right back and Janice and I walked over to a little beige family room and she passed me a box of Kleenex and told me that I had done the right thing by calling the ambulance and that Elf didn’t really hate me. That feeling can be broken down, she said. Right? Let’s consider the components. She hates that you saved her life. I know, I said, but thanks. Janice hugged me. A close, hard hug from a stranger is a potent thing. She left me alone in the beige room. I tore away at my fingernails and cuticles until I bled.
    When I went back to Elf she was still in Emergency. She told me she’d just overheard a great line, just great. What was it? I asked her. She quoted: We are very much amazed at what little intelligence there is to be found in Ms. Von R. Who said that? I asked her. She pointed at a doctor who was scribbling something at the circular desk in the middle of all the dying people. He was dressed like a ten-year-old in skater shorts and an oversized T-shirt like he’d just come from an audition for
Degrassi High
. Who the hell did he say that to? I asked. That other nurse, said Elf. He figures that because I’m not grateful for having my life saved I must be stupid. Asshole, I said, did he talk to you? Yeah, sort of, said Elf, it was more of an interrogation. C’mon Yolandi, you know how they are.
    Equating intelligence with the desire to live?
    Yeah, she said, or decency.
    This time her method wasn’t starving, it was pills. Elf had left a note, ripped from the same type of lined yellow legal pad she had used years ago to design her exceptional signature AMPS, expressing her hope that God would receive her, no time left for making one’s mark, and a list of names of all the people she loved. My mother read out the names to me over the phone. She told me that Elf had written them with a green marker. We were all there on the list. Please understand, she’d also written. Please let me go. I love you all. My mother told me there was some quote on the page as well, but she couldn’t make it out. Somebody named David Hume? she said. But she said it like
whom
which didn’t