Authors: Michael Thomas Ford
Suicide Notes (7 page)
Before my parents left yesterday they gave me a care package from my grandmother. Actually, they left it with Cat Poop, and he gave it to me today. They probably had to run it by the drug-sniffing dogs or something to make sure there was nothing in it I’m not supposed to have. Like my grandma would have stuck packets of heroin in there. Or porn.
Anyway, she sent me chocolate chip cookies, some peanut butter fudge, and a dollar. She always puts a dollar in when she sends me or my sister something—cards, letters, whatever. It must be an old lady thing to do. My dad says she always gave him and his brother a dollar when she wrote to them, too, until they had kids of their own. Now she sends us the dollars. I guess she figures my dad doesn’t need them.
I shared the cookies and fudge with everyone else, but only because I knew that otherwise I’d just eat it all and then feel sick. Besides, we had movie night tonight. They let us watch a DVD of a movie about this guy who spent every summer living with grizzly bears in Alaska. It’s a true story. Every year he hiked into the wilderness and followed the bears around until fall came and they went into hibernation. Until one year when a bear ate him.
You’d think it would be all sad, someone being eaten by a bear. The thing is, though, this guy really loved those bears. He loved everything about them, even when they did stuff that looked totally mean, like fight over food or kill a rival bear’s cubs. It was like they were his family, and he forgave them for their bear behavior because he knew they couldn’t help it. I think he probably even would have forgiven the bear that ate him.
They interviewed a lot of people in the movie, and most of them said they just couldn’t understand why this guy would want to spend so much time with bears. Some of them thought he believed he was a bear because he couldn’t handle who he really was. I think they’re wrong. I think he just loved being with the bears because they didn’t make him feel bad.
I mean, sure, this guy was a little nuts. You’d have to be to spend your whole life following bears around. But I get it, too. When he was with the bears, they didn’t care that he was kind of weird, or that he’d gotten into trouble for drinking too much and using drugs (which apparently he did a lot of). They didn’t ask him a bunch of stupid questions about how he felt, or why he did what he did. They just let him be who he was.
I guess if you think about it, it was kind of a strange movie for them to let us watch. But I think that a lot of us in here could relate to it. Juliet started to cry when they talked about how rangers shot the bear that ate the guy and then cut it open to make sure he was really inside. Personally, I think they killed the bear because they were afraid of it. That’s what people do, kill the things they’re afraid of.
Here’s what I think. One, people should figure out that if they go around bothering bears, chances are they’re going to end up bear snacks. Second, people suck.
There I go again, jumping from fudge to bears. I swear, sometimes it feels like there’s this monkey in my head who runs around turning the dials and changing channels on me. One minute I’m sitting around eating chocolate chip cookies and then all of a sudden I’m thinking about bears.
Like I said, though, I think a lot of us relate to those bears. We’re in here because someone—our parents, our doctors, the people who supposedly love us—are afraid of us. We’re in the Whack-job Zoo so that everyone can look at us without getting close enough to get hurt. Man, that’s messed up.
I wonder what Cat Poop would do if next time he starts nosing around in my brain, I just bite him?
Alert the media: Martha spoke to me today.
I was sitting with her on the couch, reading, and out of nowhere she put her hand on my wrist and said, “Frex.”
I was so shocked that I stopped reading and just looked at her. She touched my wrist again. “Frex,” she said, like she was telling me the name of something.
“Frex,” I said, and she nodded. Then she touched her chest and said it again.
At first I thought I should call for Cat Poop, but then I decided it might scare Martha if I got all excited. So I waited, and she rubbed her fingers along the cuts on one of my wrists. “Frex,” she said. “Frex.”
I didn’t know if she was talking about my wrist, my cut, or nothing in particular. It was sort of like a scene in one of those sci-fi movies where a human and an alien are trying to communicate and neither really knows what the other is saying. Like the alien says “Frex,” and the human doesn’t know if it means “Don’t worry, I won’t hurt you” or “I’ve laid an egg in your stomach and it’s about to hatch, so kiss your butt good-bye.”
Martha touched her chest again, where her heart is, and repeated herself a couple of times—“frex, frex, frex”—just like that. She said it almost like she was singing a song.
That’s when I got it. All of a sudden it made sense. She was talking about hurting. My scar and her heart. Whatever “frex” is to her, it means something that hurts. Who knows how she came up with that word. I guess it doesn’t really matter. It’s her word, and now I know what it means.
That’s all that happened. There wasn’t any big emotional scene or anything. Martha didn’t all of a sudden tell me her life story and solve the mystery of why she doesn’t talk. But it was kind of cool anyway.
Later on I told Cat Poop what had happened. I thought he’d jump up and down and push his glasses up, but he just smiled and nodded.
“Did you already know?” I asked him, but he shook his head.
“No,” he said. “You should be proud of yourself. She opened up to you.”
“Why should I feel proud?” I asked him. “I didn’t do anything. She’s the one who did the talking.”
“You let her know it was okay to tell you,” he said.
Whatever. I hate to rain on his parade, but I didn’t do anything. I’m not going to get all excited about her saying “frex.” I still don’t know why she would talk to me and not other people. But how weird is it that she made up that word? Frex. Hurt. I guess she was saying that her heart hurts because of what happened to her. I wonder if she’ll ever really be able to talk about it, or if she’s so inside herself that this is as good as it gets. Like Alice.
In other news, I forgot that Allie’s birthday was yesterday. Not that it’s really my fault. You don’t exactly keep track of the date so well around here. The days all kind of run into each other, like one big long one that never ends. But today I happened to look at the date on the newspaper at the nurses’ station and realized I’d missed Allie’s birthday. She turned sixteen. I’ll be sixteen this summer, so she’s got half a year on me. That never bothered her, though. She always called herself “the older woman.”
I wonder what she did for her birthday. Actually, I don’t wonder at all. I know what she did. She spent it with Burke. He’s her boyfriend. He probably took her to the movies or maybe out for pizza. I bet he bought her some stupid present she normally wouldn’t even like, and I bet she gushed over it like it was the best thing ever.
It makes me sick how she gets all stupid over him. She was never like that before. She never let a guy turn her into something she’s not. Then Burke came along and everything changed. Everything.
I don’t get how someone can become a different person overnight, but Allie did. It was like there was this whole other girl living inside of her, and one night that girl broke through and took over. One day we were doing everything together, and the next everything was over. She just threw it all away.
The worst part is, you know they’re not going to be together forever. I mean, come on, she’s fifteen. Okay, sixteen. Still. It’s not like they’re going to get married or anything. Even if they last a couple of years—which they won’t—she’ll go to one college and he’ll go to another, and pretty soon they’ll forget all about each other. That’s what always happens. That’s why teenage dating is so dumb, because it’s doomed to fail. You’d think people would have learned that by now, but I guess they haven’t. They go right on falling in love and thinking it’s going to survive high school. Allie and Burke, true love always.
Whatever.
Anyway, happy birthday, Allie. I hope it was a good one.
As Sadie says, “And then there were four.” Again.
Today in group Cat Poop announced that it was Bone’s last day in the program. When he said it, Juliet’s face kind of fell, but she didn’t say anything. I don’t think she’s been quite so excited about him since he made fun of Alice.
Good for Bone that he’s getting out, I guess. I know he’s a little scared about it, because he said so in group. I was really surprised that he said anything. I mean, we’ve talked some, but it’s not like he’s ever said very much about himself. But today he did.
It turns out his parents don’t want him to come home. They don’t think they can trust him not to get into trouble. As usual, he didn’t explain what kind of trouble he meant. But by now I’m used to not knowing anything about Bone, and I didn’t ask. Nobody did. I think we like that he’s our Mystery Man. It means we can make up whatever story we want about him.
Anyway, he’s going to stay with his older brother and his brother’s wife. They live in a little town somewhere in Arizona and own a gas station. Bone’s going to work at the gas station until he figures out what he wants to be when he grows up. That’s not what he’s afraid of, though. He’s afraid that people will find out about him being in a psychiatric hospital and think he’s some kind of criminal or something. He’s afraid they’ll tell their kids to stay away from him and cross the street when they see him. “Don’t talk to the crazy man, honey. He might bite you.”
Coming from someone covered in tattoos, this seemed a little strange. I mean, you can
see
tattoos. You can’t see crazy. If I was him, I’d be more worried about people thinking he was in a gang or something.
Later, after my session with Cat Poop, I went into the lounge. Bone was in there watching a talk show, one of those with a host so perky you want to slap her. The topic was people who wanted to make over their friends who they thought looked too weird.
One of the girls on the show wanted her sister to stop dressing like what she called a punk. She said people made fun of her when she went outside, and that people thought she was a Satan worshipper and stomped on kittens or something. The host kept frowning and shaking her head. Then they brought the girl out. She was totally Goth. Her hair was all black, and she had on pancake makeup and blood red lipstick. She was a little overweight, and she looked like Robert Smith from the Cure. I thought she was kind of cute.
As soon as she came out, the audience started booing, like she’d murdered her best friend or slept with her dad’s new wife. Then the host asked her why she dressed like she did, and she said, “Because I like to.” The audience booed again, and her sister screamed, “People think she’s a lesbian!” The Goth girl covered her face with her hands like she was all embarrassed.
Then they went to a commercial, and when they came back from telling us about how fresh we’d all feel if we used panty shields with wings, they’d done the makeovers. They hauled out all of these people whose friends thought they looked too strange, and now they all looked like they’d been trapped inside a J.Crew store for a night and come out different people.
They saved the Goth girl for last, and when they brought her out she was wearing this flowered dress and big dangly earrings and Mary Jane shoes. When her sister saw her, she started crying, and the audience gave her this standing ovation because she didn’t look freaky anymore. When she sat down, the host flashed this series of pictures of her, starting with her baby picture and going on up until high school. The audience oohed and aahed at how pretty she was as a little girl—all blonde curls and wide eyes. Then the last photo was of her all Gothed-out, and the audience hissed.
The Goth girl looked really unhappy, and the host asked her if she liked her new look. She said she hated it, and everyone got really angry, like they’d paid for the makeover themselves. Then this guy stood up and said, “I’d never ask you out looking the way you looked before.”
The girl looked at the guy for a minute, and then she said, “What makes you think I’d ever
want
someone like you to ask me out.” Then she turned to her sister and said, “So, now that I look like this, I’m okay? I’m not a freak because I look like you do? Well, you can go fuck yourself.” Only of course they bleeped out the good part because it’s daytime TV, and we all know that no one in America swears.
The guy she’d talked back to just stared at her like she’d kicked him in the balls, and her sister was crying her eyes out. The girl looked at them both and said, “What a bunch of losers.” Then she walked off the set. The host started smiling again, and they cut to a commercial for pork, the other white meat.
It was great. Bone and I were dying. Then Bone said, “Jesus Christ, people still think what you look like is who you are.”
I looked at the tattoos up and down his arms. I’d seen them before—you can’t miss them—but I’d never really
looked
at them. When I did, I saw that between the flaming skulls and hearts were the characters from
Alice in Wonderland
. He has the Red Queen and the Dormouse on one arm and the Mad Hatter and March Hare on the other one. One forearm has that picture of Alice with her neck all stretched out from eating the magic mushroom.
“Is that who you are?” I asked Bone, pointing to Alice.
He laughed. “No,” he said, “This is who I am.” He lifted his shirt, and on his back was the White Rabbit, wearing his waistcoat and looking at his watch. It was just like the illustration from the book. Only standing next to him, back-to-back, was another White Rabbit wearing a leather motorcycle jacket and boots and smoking a cigar.
“That’s me,” said Bone. “Always running. Always late. I had it put on my back because no one can see it unless I show it to them. The ones on the outside are for people to stare at. But I keep the one I really love hidden.”
“Why two of them?” I asked him.
“Yin and Yang,” he said. “Dark and light. One’s the good rabbit and one’s the naughty rabbit.”
“Which one is which?” I asked.
He laughed again. “Both,” he said. “It’s kind of a bipolar thing. Like me.” Then he got up and left before I could ask him anything else, just like the Rabbit does to Alice.
I sat there for a while thinking about the Goth girl. Actually, I was thinking about the opposite of her—how people think that if you look “normal,” then you are.
One time Allie and I skipped school and went to see this foreign film called
Los Diablos
, where these villagers found a glowing blue ball and peeled pieces off of it to see what was inside. Only the ball was really radioactive, and they all died from the poison. I think that’s what happens when you look too deep inside for the truth. The poison comes out, and you die, even though you have beautiful glowing pieces of blue truth in your fingers.
And anyway, the truth isn’t all that great. I mean, what’s the truth? Planes falling out of the sky. Buses blowing up and ripping little kids into millions of pieces. Twelve-year-olds raping people and then shooting them in the head so they can’t tell. I can’t watch the news anymore or look at the papers. It’s like whoever sits up there in Heaven has this big bag of really crappy stuff, and once or twice a day she or he reaches in and sprinkles a little bit of it over the world and it makes everything go crazy, like fairy dust that’s past its expiration date.
