And then it starts all over again: I am broken. I am a fraud. I am impossible to love.…
I am quiet at dinner, but after Tell me what you learned today, Decca, Tell me what you learned today, Theodore, my mother and Decca are quiet too. No one notices that I am busy thinking. We eat in silence, and afterward, I find the sleeping pills in my mom’s medicine cabinet. I take the whole bottle back to my room and drop half the contents down my throat and then, in the bathroom, bend over the sink, washing them down. Let’s see what Cesare Pavese felt. Let’s see if there’s any valiant acclamation to this. I stretch out on the floor of my closet, the bottle in my hand. I try to imagine my body shutting down, little by little, going totally numb. I almost feel the heaviness coming over me, even though I know it’s too fast.
I can barely lift my head, and my feet seem miles away. Stay here, the pills say. Don’t move. Let us do our work.
It’s this haze of blackness that settles over me, like a fog, only darker. My body is pressed down by the black and the fog, into the floor. There’s no acclamation here. This is what it feels like to be asleep.
I force myself up and drag myself into the bathroom, where I stick my finger down my throat and throw up. Nothing much comes out, even though I just ate. I try again and again, and then I pull on my sneakers and run. My limbs are heavy, and I am running through quicksand, but I am breathing and determined.
I run my regular nighttime route, down National Road all the way to the hospital, but instead of passing it, I run across the parking lot. I push my limbs through the doors of the emergency room and say to the first person I see, “I swallowed pills and can’t get them out of me. Get them out of me.”
She lays a hand on my arm and says something to a man behind me. Her voice is cool and calm, as if she is used to people running in wanting their stomachs pumped, and then a man and another woman are leading me to a room.
I go black then, but I wake up sometime later and I feel empty but awake, and a woman comes in and, as if she reads my mind, says, “You’re awake, good. We’re going to need you to fill out some paperwork. We checked you for ID, but you didn’t have any on you.” She hands me a clipboard, and my hand is shaking as I take it from her.
The form is blank except for my name and age. Josh Raymond, age 17. I start to shake harder, and then I realize I’m laughing. Good one, Finch. You’re not dead yet.
Fact: Most suicides occur between the hours of noon and six p.m.
Guys with tattoos are more likely to kill themselves with guns.
People with brown eyes are more likely to choose hanging or poison.
Coffee drinkers are less likely to commit suicide than non–coffee drinkers.
I wait till the nurse is gone and then put on my clothes and stroll out of the room and down the stairs and out the door. No need to stick around here anymore. The next thing they’ll do is send someone in to look at me and ask me questions. Somehow they’ll find my parents, but if they don’t, they’ll bring out a stack of forms and calls will be made, and before you know it, I won’t be allowed to leave. They almost get me, but I’m too quick for them.
I’m too weak to run, so I walk all the way home.
FINCH
Day 71
Life Is Life meets on the grounds of the arboretum in a nearby Ohio town, which shall remain nameless. This isn’t a nature class, but a support group for teens who are thinking about, or have attempted, or have survived, suicide. I found it on the internet.
I get into Little Bastard and drive to Ohio. I am tired. I am avoiding seeing Violet. It’s exhausting trying to even myself out and be careful around her, so careful, like I’m picking my way through a minefield, enemy soldiers on every side. Must not let her see. I’ve told her I’ve come down with some sort of bug and don’t want to get her sick.
The Life Is Life meeting takes place in a large room with wood paneling and radiators that jut out from the walls. We sit around two long tables pushed together, as if we’re going to be doing homework or taking tests. Two pitchers of water sit at either end, with brightly colored Dixie cups stacked up beside them. There are four plates of cookies.
The counselor is a guy named Demetrius, who is this very pale black guy with green eyes. For those of us who haven’t been here before, he tells us he’s getting his doctorate at the local college, and Life Is Life is in its twelfth year, even though he’s only been running it for the past eleven months. I want to ask what happened to the last counselor, but don’t in case it’s not a pretty story.
The kids file in, and they look just like the ones we have in Bartlett. I don’t recognize any of them, which is why I drove twenty-five miles to get here. Before I take my seat, one of the girls sidles up to me and says, “You are really tall.”
“I’m older than I look.”
She smiles in what she probably thinks is a seductive way, and I add, “Gigantism runs in my family. After high school, I’m required to join the circus because by the time I’m twenty the doctors predict I’ll be over seven feet.”
I want her to go away because I’m not here to make friends, and then she does. I sit and wait and wish I hadn’t come. Everyone is helping themselves to the cookies, which I don’t touch because I know each of those brands may or may not contain something disgusting called bone char, which is from the bones of animals, and then I can’t even look at the cookies or at the people eating them. I stare out the window, but the trees of the arboretum are thin and brown and dead, and so I keep my eyes on Demetrius, who sits in the middle where we can all see him.
He recites facts I already know about suicide and teenagers, and then we go around the room and say our names and how old we are and the thing we’ve been diagnosed with and if we’ve had any firsthand experience trying to kill ourselves. Then we say the phrase “________ is life,” as in whatever strikes us in that moment as something to celebrate, like “Basketball is life,” “School is life,” “Friends are life,” “Making out with my girlfriend is life.” Anything that reminds us how good it is to be alive.
A number of these kids have the slightly dull, vacant look of people on drugs, and I wonder what they’re taking to keep them here and breathing. One girl says, “Vampire Diaries is life,” and a couple of the other girls giggle. Another says, “My dog is life even when she’s eating my shoes.”