“Life,” Pandora used to say, “is a box.” And she wouldn’t say anything beyond that, would just pop whatever food she was holding into her mouth and chew away, her eyes alight with whatever mysterious thoughts were running through her head. The rest of us, the three of us who couldn’t see into that looped and jumbled mind, we would look at each other and one by one, shrug and look away. It wasn’t in our nature to question Pandora and her ability to pull philosophical thoughts from midair and never explain them. It wasn’t in our nature to question anything Pandora said, really. Pandora was unique, a person all her own. As if her name didn’t suggest that. She rarely smiled, and when she did, it seemed like a brittle branch trying to bloom in winter. Her smile never stood a fighting chance against the darkness she saw in people and in the world. We never knew why she hung around with us. We used to tease her, call her a masochist, glutton for punishment. Our minds weren’t nimble and quicksilver, like hers, and she always saw the befuddled glances we threw at each other when she went on one of her weird mind paths on candles and mazes and boxes and how they related to who we were, what we were, what we were doomed to be. She was Pandora. We just accepted it, and for whatever reason, she accepted us.

Pandora had lots of theories. Pandora could sit perfectly still for hours, just staring at the space in front of us, while the rest of us would watch movies or play card games or eat White Castle until we were sick. And while we were groaning on the floor of Keisha’s living room, Pandora would just snap out of it and ask if we ever had contemplated infinity, or something random like that. We tried to humor her, but she knew that was all it was. But in the end, at the end of everything, Pandora would just nod gravely and speak her oft-repeated philosophy- “Life,” came the grim condemnation for our souls, or at least, that’s how it felt, “is a box.”

The teachers never really understood Pandora, not really. They could recognize that she was brilliant. Anyone who sat still and listened long enough could recognize that. And teachers never sat still and they never listened, but Pandora could write great papers, and it was there job to check them. But she couldn’t spell to save her life, and she always failed her tests, and the days that she turned in her homework were worthy of parades. She confused them, and they punished her with bad grades for being too otherworldly to focus on the stupid tasks they assigned us in class. Teachers like to think that students never catch onto them, but we do. We recognize that all they want from us is mediocrity, not brilliance. Whenever confronted with it, they never know what to do. Maddy wasn’t brilliant, and she said so herself, but she had the best grades of all of us. Because Maddy wasn’t brilliant, but she sure knew how to play the game. Give just enough of what they want, but not enough to look really intelligent, and that was a sure fire A. Keisha was an “average” student, meaning she was probably smarter than half of the kids in the school. And Pandora was sent to all the remedial classes and had to take a class of special ed every day. It was a waste. Teachers never understood her.

And it was sad, because it wasn’t like her parents really understood her either. Her father was a businessman and true to the cliché, he was rarely home. Her mother was an alcoholic, or at least Keisha, Maddy and I thought so. Pale wispy woman who always had a bottle in hand. She didn’t seem violent, though, more maudlin than anything, so we never said anything. The only thing Pandora seemed to care about in her family was her brother, Icarus. She used to give him her pathetic smile, something we could never coax out of her. He was vague and kind of blurry, but he was Pandora’s reality, so we included him in some things, like movies that didn’t involve excessive swearing or any sexual references. Maddy used to joke that we couldn’t let him watch Disney, then, but Pandora would look at her and say, “Disney movies teach us what the world is really like.” And because Pandora said it, we watched every Disney movie ever made and spent the next week wondering if all our mothers were evil and if we were destined to rely on a man for the rest of our lives, even if we really did save the day. The answer was depressing.

Keisha was probably the closest to Pandora. Not because she was a great intellectual, but because she had patience and preferred to sit in silence. Keisha was very emotional and preferred to be quiet so that she didn’t find something terribly sad and start crying. Pandora would pat her on the hand when she did start to cry about some tragedy or another, and remind her, “Life doesn’t always have to be this way. You just have to escape it all.” Pandora talked like that a lot. She was always talking of some escape or another.

It was probably why the principal hated her. There’s only so many times you can put a person in detention for skipping school. And the principal, for all her shortcomings, recognized that suspension would just give Pandora exactly what she wanted. I overheard the principal tell our English teacher once that Pandora was like a little baby bird she had found by the sidewalk one day. “It had been so eager to fly that it had fallen and broken its neck,” the principal had said, and they had both shaken their heads slowly, sadly. I didn’t know what they meant. Maddy suggested that Pandora wanted to take up flight school, and that’s what they meant, but we ignored her. Maddy wasn’t very smart, and she knew it.

Our sophomore year of high school, Pandora started seeing a shrink and taking antidepressants. That was the year she started smoking, too. The three of us would hang around with her in the parking lot while she polished off three, four, five cigarettes during lunch. We didn’t smoke, and Keisha and I found the smoke repulsive, but if Pandora needed it, we weren’t going to deny her. We’d sit on the hood and trunk of Keisha’s car and talk about whatever while Pandora puffed away. When we saw her hands shake, we’d look away and give Pandora a little bit of privacy to put herself together. On the days that she cried, we’d crawl over to where she was sitting and hold her hand or touch her head. We didn’t ask why she cried. We all knew, in a way. The world wasn’t meant for someone like Pandora.

Pandora told us that her shrink thought she was messed up and needed to be in a proper mental institution, a place where she could get the help she needed. Part of me wanted to agree with her shrink, because there were only so many ways to watch a person self-destruct, and there’s a lot of warning signs in someone who never smiles, but the loyal part of me won out and I agreed with Maddy and Keisha that we would never let that happen. We talked about escape plans. It perked Pandora up considerably, talking about escaping, but only we could tell. It wasn’t like she ever smiled to let us know things were all right. It was subtle signs- the tilt of her head followed by a slight twitch in the left hand. Or letting her hair fall over her face. Or hmming to herself and starting to ramble about boxes and mazes and subliminal messages. It was a sign that everything was ok.

Pandora wasn’t always the greatest of friends. She never remembered birthdays, and if she saw you crying, she was just as likely to tell you to get over it as comfort you with an awkward hand pat or hug. She wasn’t a talker, even when she rambled, because that was always to herself, never a conversation. She hated music and we would never play it around her, and she wasn’t overly fond of movies, though she tolerated them for the subliminal messages. She didn’t call you on the phone often, and when she did, she would just ask you not to talk and just breathe for a while. It was awkward and a guessing game to spend time with Pandora, but always, it was worth it. Because her eyes always reflected a certain relief and a certain desperation and a certain bewilderment at having friends.

When Pandora ran away from home, she called all of us, and we snuck out of our homes to meet her in our favorite park. She wasn’t wearing the right clothes for the time of the year, and was sweating and crying and talking to herself when we found her. Keisha pulled her into a hug and cried with her and Maddy jumped around and watched for people coming. I whispered things into Pandora’s ear. I think they were comforting, but she wasn’t hearing them. She just kept wailing into Keisha’s shoulder, “I can’t get out! I keep trying and I can’t do it, and nothing I do helps!” I asked her what she was talking about and she looked at me, and I knew. It was her box. I cursed God for his boxes and held her hand while she sobbed, and finally, at four am, coaxed her back home. Her mother was passed out on the couch and Icarus was waiting for her, slightly blurry around the edges, but there for her. He was always there for her.

Pandora wasn’t the greatest of friends, but it was easy to love her. We had met her in middle school, all of us individually, and she had pulled us together as friends. Otherwise we would have never met. There was really only one thing the three of us had in common, and that was a protective streak and a desire to protect Pandora. She hadn’t started out paranoid and delusional. She had just started out as weird. And once you got used to weird, it wasn’t hard to get used to paranoid and delusional. When she started crying in the middle of class, our sophomore year, and bit the teacher who tried to get her out of her desk, we stood and defended her from the teacher and from the incoming shrinks. When her wisp of a mother came in to take her home, we went with her, and lay on the floor and let her ramble at us while her mother drank long draws from a green bottle and threw up in the hallway, crying and talking to herself just as Pandora would in her most foggy days. We liked to think that it was us that kept Pandora out of a mental home, but we knew it was her mother, and her refusal to sign the papers to send her only daughter away.

The first time she tried to kill herself, she was with us, and we got her to the hospital in time. It was a cut on the wrist, and it was the wrong way, but she still bled. She dragged a rock across her wrist and whispered to herself, “Life is a box. I can’t get out. Why can’t I get out? I just want out, I just want out.” Keisha called an ambulance and Maddy pressed her shirt to the bloody cut. We told the paramedics that it was an accident. They believed us.

She got better after that. She stopped talking to herself, and she offered us her pathetic smile at our lame jokes. She started getting better grades, and did her homework. She called us on the phone and would actually talk to us. She never spoke of her box again.

When Pandora killed herself on a sunny Sunday, I would have liked to say that we were surprised, but we weren’t. Not really. Normal was normal for me, Maddy and Keisha, but normal was a cry for help from Pandora. She took a bunch of her antidepressants and then swallowed bleach. I’m told it’s a painful way to die. I don’t know. It was ruled suicide. Keisha, Maddy and I knew that it was us that had killed her. We sat in the second row at her funeral. Her mother, father and brother were in the first. Her mother stared blankly ahead, and her father looked impatiently at his watch from time to time. Icarus didn’t cry, but he looked a little blurrier around the edges. He was the only one who deserved to sit in the front row. He had tried to protect her too.

We sat through the entire funeral, and as I held Keisha and Maddy’s hands, I wondered if Pandora was finally smiling a real smile. If she was looking down at us and trying hard to tell us that she was finally free of the box. Then Keisha leaned over and tried not to cry anymore, biting down fiercely on her lip and closing her eyes, and Maddy breathed heavily into my shoulder, and I didn’t wonder about Pandora anymore. Because Pandora was finally free, and we had only just begun.