Suicide Notes (13 page)

Day 31

If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be? Just one. It can be anything—a physical thing you wish you had or didn’t have, a talent you’d like to have, anything. But you only get one.

That was the question we talked about in group today. You’d think that we all would have picked something to do with why we’re here. But mostly we didn’t. Juliet said she wished she could play the cello, because she’d like to be able to make people feel the way she does when she hears someone play. Sadie said she wished she could talk to dead people. Rankin said he wished he could throw a perfect spiral pass. And I said I wished I wasn’t afraid of heights.

Later, in my one-on-one, Cat Poop asked me if I’d noticed anything different about what I’d said compared to what everyone else said. I thought for a minute but couldn’t come up with anything.

“You were the only one who said you wanted to get rid of something,” he told me. “Everyone else wanted to add something to themselves, but you wanted to give something up. Why did you say you’d like to get rid of your fear of heights?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It was just the first thing that came to me.”

It’s true, too. I am afraid of heights. I don’t even like going up in elevators past about six floors.

“What about that fear makes it the one thing you want to get rid of?” Cat Poop asked me.

I had to think about that for a while. Finally I said, “I guess because it keeps me from doing things I’d like to do.”

He asked me what kinds of things, and I told him I’ve always wanted to try skydiving, or maybe even bungee jumping. “But I’m afraid of heights,” I said. “So I can’t.”

“What is it about heights that you’re afraid of?” he asked me.

What a dumb question. Falling, of course. I’m afraid of falling. That’s probably why I dream about it a lot. Actually, what I said to the doc was that I’m afraid that suddenly I’ll have this uncontrollable urge to climb up on the railing of the bridge or run to the edge of the cliff or whatever and just throw myself off before anyone can stop me.

Cat Poop wrote something on his pad, which by now we all know means I’ve said something he thinks is interesting. This time I asked him why he thought my answer was worth writing down. Since it’s my life he’s dissecting, I figured I had the right to know.

“Why do you think you have this urge to jump?” he said, instead of answering my question.

“I guess because sometimes it’s nice to lose control,” I said after I’d thought about it. “I feel like I’m always trying to keep control of my life. Sometimes I’d like to be able to just let go and fall.”

“Even if it means you might get hurt?” he said.

“I don’t think about that,” I answered. “I just think about the falling, with no parachute or net or anything to catch me. I just think about falling, and it scares me.”

“How about falling in love?” he said. “Are you afraid of that?”

What, is love like the topic of the month around here or something? It sure didn’t take him long to get back to that subject. “I’m only fifteen,” I said.

“A lot of people fall in love for the first time around your age,” said Cat Poop.

“Why do you want to know?” I said. “Do you have a daughter you want to introduce me to or something?”

He pushed his glasses up his nose. “No,” he said. “I don’t.”

“What if you did?” I asked him. “Would you want her to date a guy like me?”

“That’s impossible to answer,” Cat Poop said. “I don’t have a daughter, so I don’t know how I would feel about her dating anyone. It’s purely hypothetical.”

“Well, purely hypothetically,” I said. “Would you want her to date someone like me? Someone who’d been in a place like this?”

Cat Poop scribbled something on his pad. “Are you afraid people won’t want to date you because you’ve been in here?” he asked me.

“I asked you first,” I said.

We stared at each other for a while. I guess we were having another game of Psycho Chicken. Anyway, Cat Poop blinked first this time. “I would want my daughter to date the person who made her the happiest,” he said.

“Even if that person was crazy?” I said. “Even if that person was like me?”

“If I remember correctly, you’ve spent a great deal of time telling me you
aren’t
crazy,” Cat Poop reminded me.

“I’m being hypothetical,” I said. “So, would you?”

He sighed. “I don’t know,” he said.

I laughed. “I didn’t think so,” I told him.

“Now answer my question,” Cat Poop said. “Are you afraid that no one will want to be with you if they know you’ve spent time here?”

“I don’t care what people think,” I told him.

“How about what
you
think?” he said.

“I haven’t given it a lot of thought,” I answered. “Let me get back to you.”

“How about Allie?” Cat Poop said. “Do you think she’ll still want to be friends with you?”

I didn’t know how to answer that one. Allie always said that we’d be best friends no matter what. Was that still true?

“You’d have to ask her,” I said.

He let me go after a few more minutes, and he didn’t bring up love again, which is really a relief, because I’m getting tired of that subject.

Getting back to the original question, the one about what I would change about myself, it’s not really my fear of heights that I’d change. I mean, it’s not like that’s keeping me from achieving my life’s dream of being a tightrope walker or anything. I think it’s funny that old Cat Poop got all excited about it, because really it was just something to say.

The truth is, I’d like to have a tail. Seriously. Not a dog tail or a pig tail or anything like that. I want a monkey tail. A long one that I could use to pick stuff up with and hang by. I think that would be completely cool.

Day 32

“What’s playing tonight on Nuthouse TV?” I asked Sadie.

As usual, we were in the lounge. Everyone else had gone to bed, even though it wasn’t all that late, and except for Moonie, we had the place to ourselves. It reminded me of how sometimes Allie and I stay up late watching movies. Well, how we used to.

Sadie flipped through the channels. “Um, we have a vampire movie, a documentary on whales, or the Home Shopping Network.”

“Definitely the Home Shopping Network,” I said.

Sadie settled on that channel. The host, a woman with big red hair and an even bigger smile, was showing off some ugly jewelry. She was holding up a ring with a giant fake diamond in it.

“And for only twenty-nine ninety-nine you can have this genuine artificial piece of crap that everyone will know isn’t real,” I said.

“No fair,” said Sadie. “You’re supposed to make up something completely different than what it really is.”

“That is completely different than what she’s really saying,” I argued. “She wants us to think that buying that ring will make our lives perfect.”

“Maybe it would,” Sadie suggested.

“Right,” I said, snorting.

“No, really,” Sadie said. “Maybe someone out there has been wanting a ring like that their whole life. Now they can get it for twenty-nine ninety-nine.”

“Plus shipping and handling,” I said. “What’s gotten into you?”

“I don’t know,” Sadie said. “I’m probably just premenstrual or something. It just kind of makes me sad to look at that ring and think that somewhere there’s this person who
has
to have it. And I really wish that ring
would
make that person’s life better.”

“Did you take all your meds today?” I asked her.

Sadie turned the TV off. “Let’s just talk,” she said.

“About what?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” said Sadie. “Me. You. Us. Anything.”

“I know what this is about,” I said. “Cat Poop got into your brain. He’s turned you into Therapy Girl.”

“Bite me,” Sadie said, slapping my leg. “Nobody
talks
around here,” she said. “We all pretend to, but we never really do.” She pointed to the television. “We’re like the people in there,” she said, like the TV was an apartment house or something. “We open our mouths, but nothing really comes out.”

I’d never heard her talk like this, and to tell the truth, it was a little freaky. I mean, I could always count on Sadie to be sarcastic and funny. Now she was going all Oprah on me.

“Come on,” Sadie said. “Tell me a secret.”

“Now we’re telling secrets?” I said. “What’s next, Spin the Bottle?”

“Tell me a secret,” she said again, poking her finger into my thigh to punctuate each word.

“Ow!” I said. “Okay. Okay. You win. I’ll tell you a secret.” Then, before I knew it, I blurted out, “I fooled around with Rankin.”

I couldn’t believe I’d said it. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t
want
to. I’d actually been thinking about telling her something about me and Allie. But that’s what came out. Afterward, I sat there wishing I could disappear.

“You fooled around with Rankin?” she said.

I almost told her I was kidding. I knew she would believe me if I laughed hard enough to prove it to her. But I didn’t. I just nodded. I couldn’t say anything. I mean, I’d just told her the worst thing I’d ever done in my entire life.

And do you know what she did? She rolled her eyes.

“You call that a secret?” she said.

“Um, yeah,” I said. “Don’t you?”

“Well, what do you mean you fooled around?”

“We . . .” I said, then stopped. “We just . . .” I almost told her about sucking Rankin’s dick. But I couldn’t. So I moved my hand up and down like I was, well, like I was doing what Rankin and I did. The first time.

“You guys jacked off together?” she guessed.

I nodded.

“Wow,” she said, and made her eyes really big. For a second I thought she was going to freak out on me, and I started to panic. Then she laughed. “Big news flash,” she said. “Guys whack off. Film at eleven.”

I didn’t know what to say. I thought she would at least be a little surprised. I know she thought me seeing Rankin playing with himself was nothing exciting, but this was different. Totally different. This was
me and Rankin
playing with
each other
. Here I was
totally
freaking out about what happened, and she was treating it like it was nothing. I almost felt like I should apologize for being so boring.

“I meant a secret about
you
,” Sadie said.

“That
was
about me!” I said.

“No,” said Sadie. “It was just something you did that you think people would be freaked out about if they knew. Trust me, everybody around here has done stuff way weirder than that.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Remember Alice?” said Sadie.

Like I could ever forget. I nodded.

“She used to catch flies—and
eat
them. And last time I was here there was this guy named Benny. He liked to hide things up his butt. Trust me, what you and Rankin did was so
not
secret-worthy.”

I looked at her while she waited for me to respond. “Sorry,” I said. “It’s all I’ve got.” Which wasn’t true, but for some reason I wanted to stop while I actually felt a little better. I was afraid if I told Sadie the rest, suddenly it wouldn’t be so “normal.”

“How about what happened between you and Allie?” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Come on,” Sadie said. “I know you did what you did because something happened between the two of you. So what was it? You can tell me. Since we’re sharing and everything.”

“There’s nothing to tell,” I said. To tell the truth, in a weird way I was kind of pissed off that she didn’t think the thing with Rankin was a real secret. I mean, even if it
wasn’t
a big deal, and even if I did feel a little better about it now, it was still a secret.

Sadie clearly wasn’t buying my cool act. “Yeah, there is,” she argued. “What? You slept with her and she freaked out? You and that Burke guy got into a fight over her? What was it?”

“I told you, it had nothing to do with her,” I said.

I thought she would push me some more, but she didn’t. She just looked at me for a long time. I looked right back at her. I’ve gotten pretty good at staring contests what with the doc and I having one practically every day. The trick is to sort of unfocus your eyes so that you’re looking at the person but not really
seeing
them. If you do it right, they can never tell.

That’s how I won the staring contest with Sadie. After a minute she just turned away and turned the TV back on. The sound was still off, so we sat and watched the host talk. Now she was pitching some fake pearl necklace.

Sadie was quiet for so long that I thought maybe she was pissed at me. I was just about to say something when she started talking again.

“Remember that Saturday morning cartoon show with all the superheroes?” she asked. “Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Superman?”

“Sure,” I said. “
Super Friends.
What about it?”

Sadie stared at the television. “They all looked like normal people until they turned into these other things, right? But it always turned out that they originally turned into superheroes when they were running from something they didn’t like about themselves. Like Batman fought the dark part of his soul by battling bad guys and all that.”

“I think Wonder Woman was just born Wonder Woman,” I argued. “And Superman was just Superman.”

“Okay,” Sadie said. “Bad examples. But think about the really interesting superheroes. Most of them were normal until they turned into something freaky. Like Wolverine. He was part of some experiment. And the guy who turned into the Hulk hated to do it because it meant he was mad. Plus, it hurt.”

“I guess so,” I admitted.

Sadie went on. “When I was a kid, I used to watch that show, sitting on the couch in my pajamas and wishing more than anything that one day I’d just change into this other person,” she said. “I thought that would explain everything. You know, about why I felt so different. Then I’d find out that my mother was really an alien or that I’d been bitten by a radioactive spider as a baby, and it would all be okay because I’d be able to fly and see through walls.”

She stopped talking and watched the TV some more. I thought that I should say something, but then she started talking again. “But it never happened,” she said. “I just went on being me my whole life, until one day I realized that all those superheroes were doing was fighting themselves, and that getting to breathe underwater or shoot fire from your fingers didn’t really make up for being screwed up in the first place. It was just the consolation prize—you got the great costume and the invisible jet for being a loser in everything else.”

She stared at the silent TV. Her expression was completely blank, as if her soul had just flown out of her body. It was actually kind of scary. “I guess I just want my invisible jet,” she said.