“But you probably don’t anymore.”
“No, I do. Same situations as you, I bet.”
“Huh. What are you up to now?”
“Home on the computer.”
“Where’s Aaron?”
“Home on his computer. What do you want, Craig?”
I take a breath. “Nia, you remember the party that we had when we all figured out we got into Executive Pre-Professional?”
“Yeahhhh . . .”
“When you came to that party, did you know you were going to hook up with Aaron?”
“Craig, we’re not talking about this.”
“Please, c’mon, I have to know if I had a shot.”
“We’re not.”
“Please. Pretend I’m dying.”
“God. You are so melodramatic.”
“Heh. Yeah.”
“I wore my green dress to that party, I remember that.”
“I remember too!”
“And Aaron was very nice to me.”
“He sat next to you in Scrabble.”
“And I already knew he liked me. But I had been putting off getting involved with anyone until I knew about high school, because I didn’t want it to distract me. And you and Aaron, you were like, in the running. You both talked to me. But you had that mole on your chin.”
“What?”
“Remember, the big hairy one? It was all pockmarked and gross.”
“I didn’t have any mole! “
“Craig, I’m joking.”
“Oh, right, duh.” We both laugh. Hers is full, mine empty.
“You promise not to take this the wrong way, Craig?”
“Sure,” I lie.
“If you had made a move, I would probably have, you know, gone along. But you didn’t.”
Death.
“See, it works out, though. Now we’re friends, and we can talk about stuff like this.”
“Sure, we can talk.”
Death.“Believe me, I get sick of talking with Aaron.”
“Why?”
“He’s always talking about himself and his problems. Like you. You’re both self-centered. Only, you have a low opinion of yourself, so it’s tolerable. He has a really high opinion of himself. It’s a pain.”
“Thanks, Nia, you’re very sweet.”
“You know I try.”
“What if I tried now?” I ask. Nothing to lose.
“To what?”
“You know. What if I just came over and said screw it and stayed outside until you came out and grabbed you and kissed you?”
“Ha! You’d never do it.”
“What if I did?”
“I’d smap you.”
“You’d smap me.”
“Yeah. Remember that? That was so funny.”
I switch phones from ear to ear.
“Well, I just wanted to clear that up.” I smile. And that’s true. I don’t want to leave loose ends. I want to know where I stand. I don’t stand anywhere with Nia, really, not more than friends. I missed an opportunity with her, but that’s okay, I’ve missed many. I have a lot of regrets.
“I’m worried about you, Craig,” she says.
“What?”
“Don’t do anything stupid, okay?”
“I won’t,” I tell her, and that’s not a lie. What I’m doing makes a lot of sense.
“Call me if you think you’re going to do anything stupid.”
“Bye, Nia,” I say. And I mouth into the phone, I love you, in case some of her cells pick up on the vibrations and it serves me well in the next life. If there is one. If there is a next life, I hope it’s in the past; I don’t think the future will be any more handleable.
“Bye, Craig.”
I click END. I think it’s a little harsh how the END button is red.
fifteen
I’m pretty stupid for thinking I could get any sleep tonight. Once I turn off the lights and put the cup aside, I get the Not-Sleeping Feeling—it’s kind of like feeling the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse rear up in your brain and put some ropes around it and pull it toward the front of your skull. They say, No way, dude! Who did you think you were fooling! You think you were going to wake up at three in the morning and throw yourself off the Brooklyn Bridge without staying up all night? Give us a little credit!
My mind starts the Cycling. I know it’s going to be the worst that it’s ever been. Over and over again, a cycling of tasks, of failures, of problems. I’m young, but I’m already screwing up my life. I’m smart but not enough—just smart enough to have problems. Not smart enough to get good grades. Not smart enough to have a girlfriend. Girls think I’m weird. I don’t like to spend money. Every time I spend it, I feel as if I’m being raped. I don’t like to smoke pot, but then I do smoke it and I get depressed. I haven’t done enough with my life. I don’t play sports. I quit Tae Bo. I’m not involved in any social causes. My one friend is a screwup—a genius blessed with the most beautiful girl in the world, and he doesn’t even know it. There’s so much more for me to be doing. I should be a success and I’m not and other people—younger people— are. Younger people than me are on TV and getting paid and winning scholarships and getting their lives in order. I’m still a nobody. When am I going to not be a nobody?
The thoughts trail one another in my brain, running from the back up to the front and dripping down again under my chin: I’m no one; I’ll never make it in my life; I’m about to get revealed as a fake, I’ve already been revealed as a fake but I don’t know it yet; I know I’m a fake and pretend not to. All the good thoughts—the normal ones, the ones that have occasionally surfaced since last fall— scramble out the front of my brain in terror of what lives in my neck and spine. This is the worst it’ll ever be.
My homework swims in front of my closed eyes— the Intro to Wall Street stock-picking game, the Inca history paper, the ding-dong math test—they appear as if on a gravestone. They’ll all be over soon.
Mom climbs into bed next to me. That means it’s still early. Not even eleven. It’s going to be such a long night. Jordan, the dog who should be dead, climbs into bed with her and I put my hand on him, try to feel his warmth and take comfort from it. He barks at me.
I turn on my stomach. My sweat drenches my pillow. I turn over on my back. It drenches it in the other direction. I turn on my side like a baby. Do babies sweat? How about in the womb, do you sweat in there? This night will never end. Mom stirs.
“Craig, are you still up?”
“Yes.”
“It’s twelve-thirty. Do you want cereal? Some times a bowl of cereal will just knock you out.”
“Sure.”
“Cheerios?”
I think I can handle Cheerios. Mom gets up and gets them for me. The bowl is heaping and I tackle it with the ferocity that I think a last meal deserves—shoving it all in me as if it owes me loot. I’m not going to throw this up.
Mom starts breathing regularly next to me. I start to think practically about how I’m going to handle this. I’m taking my bike, I know that. That’s one thing I’ll miss: riding around Brooklyn on the weekends like a maniac, dodging cars and trucks and vans with pipes sticking out of them, meeting Ronny and then locking the bikes up by the subway station to go to Aaron’s house. Riding a bike is pure and simple—Ronny says he thinks it’s mankind’s greatest invention, and although I thought that was stupid at first, these days I’m not so sure. Mom won’t let me take the bike to school so I’ve never ridden over a bridge—this’ll be the first time. I don’t think I’ll wear my helmet.
I’ll take the bike, and it’ll be a warm spring night. I’ll speed up Flatbush Avenue—the artery of fat Brooklyn—right to the Brooklyn entrance of the bridge, with the potholes and cops stationed all night. They won’t look at me twice—what, it’s illegal, a kid biking over a bridge? I’ll go up the ramp and get right to the middle, where I was before, and then I’ll walk out over the roadway and take one last look at the Verrazano Bridge.
What am I
going to do about my bike, though? If I lock it up, it’ll just stay there at the side of the bridge, as evidence, and they’ll clip the lock or saw through the chain after a while. It’s an expensive chain! But if I don’t lock it up, someone’ll take it quickly—it’s a good bike, a Raleigh—and there won’t be any evidence that I was ever even there.
I can’t lose the bike, I decide. I’ll take the key with me when I go down, and Mom and Dad will know, then, where I’ve gone. The cops will find the bike and tell them. It’ll be harsh, but at least they’ll know. It’ll be better than not leaving anything.
What time is it? Time has stopped for me. Since I can’t sleep and I’m still sweating, I decide I can try something to knock myself out: push-ups. I don’t want to go to sleep, I just want to exhaust myself and rest a little bit so I can make the trip at the appropriate time, in an hour or so. I prop myself up in bed in proper push-up position, which is also proper sex position, I realize, and I haven’t even had sex—I’m going to die a virgin. Does that mean I go to heaven? No, according to the Bible, suicide is a sin and I go straight to hell, what a gyp.
I learned push-ups in Tae Bo. I’m good at them. I can do them on my fingers and my fists, as well as my palms. Here, next to my mom, in a scene that would look very weird if you filmed it from the side, I start to do them up and down—one, two, three … I move very, very slowly so as not to wake Mom up—she’s a heavy sleeper and doesn’t notice my exercises; her head is turned in the opposite direction. When I get to ten push-ups I start counting down: Five, four, three . . . until I finish at fifteen. I collapse in bed.
I’m so weak from holding down nothing but Cheerios in the last twenty-four hours, I’m beat. I’m cracked from fifteen push-ups. But I feel something in the bed. I feel my heart beating. It’s beating against the mattress, amplified, resounding not only in the bed but in my body. I feel it in my feet, my legs, my stomach, my arms. Beating everywhere.
I get on my palms again. One, two, three . . . My arms burn. My neck crinks; a bed isn’t the best place to do push-ups; you tend to sink in. This set is tougher than the last. But when I get to fifteen I keep going, to twenty. I strain and hold back a grunt on the final one and discharge myself to the mattress.
Badoom. Badoom. Badoom.
My heart is ramming now. It’s beating everywhere. It hits all the spots in my body, and I feel the blood pressuring through me, my wrists, my fingers, my neck. It wants to do this, to badoom away all the time. It’s such a silly little thing, the heart.
Badoom.
It feels good, the way it cleans me.
Badoom.
Screw it. I want my heart.
I want my heart but my brain is acting up.
I want to live but I want to die. What do I do?
I get out of bed, glance at the clock. It’s 5:07. I don’t know how I got through the night. My heart radiates badoom, so I stand and shuffle into the living room and pick a book off my parents’shelf.
It’s called How to Survive the Loss of a Love; it has a pink and green cover. It’s sold like two million copies; it’s one of these psychology books that people everywhere buy to get through break-ups. My mom bought it when her dad died and raved about how good it was. She showed the cover to me.
I looked at it just to see what it was about, and the first chapter said, “If you feel like harming yourself right now, turn to page 20.” And I thought that was pretty silly, like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, so I turned to page 20, and right there it said to call your local suicide hotline, because suicidal thoughts were a medical situation and you needed medical help right away.
Now, in the dark, I open How to Survive the Loss of a Love to page 20.
“Every municipality has a suicide hotline, and they’re listed right in the government services section of the yellow pages,” it says.
Okay. I go into the kitchen and open up the yellow pages.
It’s a pain in the ass to find those government listings. I thought they were marked with green pages, but the green pages turn out to be a restaurant guide. The government listings are in blue at the front, but it’s all phone numbers for where to get your car if it’s towed, what to do if your block has a rat problem . . . Ah, here, health. Posion control, emergency, mental health. There are a bunch of numbers. The first one says “suicide” near it. It’s a local number, and I call.
I stand in the living room with my hand in my pants as the phone rings.
sixteen
“Hello.”
“Hi, is this the Suicide Hotline?”
“This is the Brooklyn Anxiety Management Center.”
“Oh, um . . .”
“We work with the Samaritans. We handle New York Suicide Hotline calls when they overflow. This is Keith speaking.”
“So the Suicide Hotline is too busy right now?”
“Yes—it’s Friday night. This is our busiest time.”
Great. I’m common even in suicide.
“What seems to, ah, be the problem?”
“I really, just… I’m very depressed and I want to kill myself.”
“Uh-huh. What’s your name?”
“Ah . . .” Need-a-fake-name, need-a-fake-name: “Scott.”
“And how old are you, Scott?”
“Fifteen.”
“And why do you want to kill yourself?”
“I’m clinically depressed, you know. I mean, I’m not just . . . down or whatever. I started this new school and I can’t handle it. It’s gotten to a point where it’s the worst it’s ever been and I just don’t want to deal with it anymore.”
“You say you’re clinically depressed. Are you taking medication?”
“I was taking Zoloft.”
“And what happened?”
“I stopped taking it.”
“Ah. That’s probably, you know, a bad idea.”
Keith sounds like he’s just getting started with this whole counseling thing. I picture a thin college-age guy with wire-rim glasses at a desk lit up with a small reading lamp, looking out the window, nodding at the good deeds he’s doing.
“A lot of people run into problems when they, y’know, stop taking their medication.”
“Well, whatever the reason, I just really can’t handle it right now.”
“Do you have a plan for how you would kill yourself?”
“Yes. I’d jump off the Brooklyn Bridge.”
I hear Keith typing something.
“Well, Scott, we aren’t the suicide hotline, but if you like, we have a five-step exercise for managing anxiety. Would you like to try it?”
“Um . . . sure.”
“Can you get a pen and a piece of paper?”
I go to the drawers in the dining room and get a pencil and paper. I take it to the bathroom and sit on the toilet with Keith. The light’s on.
“First, okay? Write down an event that happened to you. That you experienced.”
“Any event?”
“That’s right.”
“Okay …” I write on the piece of paper Ate pizza last week.
“Do you have it?” Keith asks.
“Yes.”
“Now, write down, ah, how you felt about that event.”
“Okay.” I write: Felt good, full.
“Now write down any ‘shoulds’or ‘woulds’that you felt about the event.”
“Like what?”
“Things that you regret about it, things that you feel would have made it go better.”
“Wait, uh, I don’t think I have the right kind of event.” I furiously erase my first statement, which is marked I. Instead of Ate pizza, I put down Threw up Mom’s squash and then for 2, I write Felt like I wanted to kill myself, all the while telling Keith to hold on, I messed up.
“Just put down ‘shoulds’and ‘woulds,’” he reassures me.
Well, I should have held down the squash and I would have been full if I had. I put that down.
“Now put down only what you actually had to do in the event.?
??
“What I had to do?”
“Right. Because there are no such things as shoulds and woulds in the universe.”
“There aren’t?” I’m starting to suspect Keith a bit. For someone in Anxiety Management, he’s giving me an exercise that is fairly confusing and anxiety-provoking.
“No,” he says. “There are only things that could have turned out differently. You don’t have any shoulds or woulds in your life, see? You only have things that could have gone a different way.”
“Ah.”
“You never know what truly would have happened if you had done your shoulds and woulds. Your life might have turned out worse, isn’t that possible?”
“I don’t see how it’s really possible, seeing as I’m on the phone with you.”
“What you really have in life are needs, and you only have three needs: food, water, and shelter.”
And air, I think. And friends. And money. And your mind.
“So the next step in the process is to put down only what you actually had to do in your event, and then compare it to the shoulds and woulds you assigned yourself.”
“How many steps are in this thing?”
“Five. The fifth is the most important. We’re at four.”
“You know, I really, um—” I look at the piece of paper, covered with half-erased scribblings about pizza and squash. “—I think I should talk to the Suicide Hotline people because I still feel really . . . bad.”
“All right,” Keith sighs.
I’m worried that he thinks he’s done a bad job, so I tell him: “It’s okay. You’ve been really helpful.”
“It’s tough with young people,” he says. “It’s just tough. Have you called 1-800-SUICIDE?”
1-800-SUICIDE! Of course! I should’ve known. This is America. Everyone has a 1-800 number.
“That’s Helpline, they’re national. Then there’s Local Suicide Watch …” Keith gives another number.
“Thanks.” I write them both down. “Thanks so much.”
“You’re welcome, Scott,” he says. I hit OFF— these are the first calls I’ve made not on the cell phone in a long time—and type in 1-800-SUICIDE.
It’s really convenient that suicide has seven letters, I think.