by JJ Strong
My backpack lay on the floor next to my desk. I had a test in French the next day and another in chemistry the day after that, neither of which had I even begun to study for. I had history homework. I was supposed to read five chapters of The Red Badge of Courage for English, but I hadn’t even read the five previous chapters that were due the week before. I felt hot. I grabbed the backpack, tore at the zipper, emptied its contents onto the desk, then shoved everything—books, notebooks, pens, pencils, a calculator, a stapler, a lamp, et cetera—off the desk and onto the floor. I shouted, “Fuck you,” at my backpack before flinging it across the room. I thought, Fuck Amherst, and fuck Dartmouth, and fuck the whole stupid thing. I almost cried again but decided that twice in one day was enough, so I held back the tears and just lay in bed staring at the ceiling in silence.
Hours passed. The day grew late. I cleaned up the books and everything else I had knocked off the desk. The room became darker and darker until finally it was night and I could hardly see beyond my own hands.
I went downstairs. The kitchen was empty and dark. I poked around the house—Dad in the dining room, bent over bills, loose sheets of paper fanning out around his laptop like colorless flower petals. Somewhere in there was his cherished newspaper article. Ray’s door was shut. Mom’s room was dark but for the arrhythmic blinking of a television light.
I stepped back into my room, turned on the light, locked the door, put the Shakira CD on repeat, slipped into a ratty pair of Chuck Taylors, stepped out the window, and scooted carefully down the slick roof.
Across the yard.
Over the fence.
Through the woods.
Into the darkness . . .
Cullen
AFTER BRIELLE LEFT ME ALONE in the basement, I spent much of the night going through closets while Nana slept upstairs. My initial plan was to go on a trash binge. It was just like my move to the basement—my head was crowded, and I needed a distraction.
But when I started examining all the trinkets, bric-a-brac, empty picture frames, chipped and cracked Hummel statuettes . . . I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of any of it. I emptied the living room closet, inspecting moth-eaten blankets, throw rugs, faded, tattered tapestries, and then, when I was done, instead of chucking everything into the enormous garbage bag I had prepared for the mass disposal, I put it all back exactly as I had found it. In a shoe box under the coffee table, I found a picture of Nana with my dad when he was a little boy. Nana sat in a folding chair by an aboveground pool wearing a big, beautiful pair of sunglasses, and Dad stood beside her in the grass, sporting tri-colored bathing trunks. His hair was wet, and his teeth were stained red from an ice pop melting in his hand. He was little-kid skinny—you could count every rib.
I sat on the floor with my back against the couch and tried not to think about all the people who were gone. I hated my father when he died. He was supposed to take care of me, and he didn’t. In time that feeling had grown duller, but it never went away. He wasn’t a bad guy before the accident. He drank a lot of beer, but so did Mom. There were always parties in the backyard on summer weekends, and at night when I went to bed and the adults were still partying, sometimes it was hard to differentiate between the shouts of joy and shouts of anger. But we had fun. I remember one Fourth of July when Dad and Cousin Sal came back from New York with a garbage bag filled with firecrackers and Dad and I spent the whole afternoon blowing holes in the lawn with M-80s while everyone else was busy talking and barbecuing on the deck.
I felt thoroughly fucking exhausted thinking about all this, mostly because I couldn’t shake the feeling that the unspoken agreement I’d made with Ray and Amir was that I was supposed to take care of them. And just like Dad, I’d failed.
The house was so quiet. I was about to turn on the television just to hear the sounds of one of Nana’s shows when the doorbell rang again. Brielle had come back—this second appearance of the day just as miraculous and welcome as the first one.
She and I sat on the couch. I still held the picture of Dad in my hand, and when she took it from me, her eyes went soft for a moment, but then she steeled herself in preparation for the following line of questioning:
“I need to know something.”
“Okay.”
“I need to know what’s real for you.”
“What do you mean?”
She placed the picture on the coffee table. “You know what I mean. Most people steal a car because they actually need a car.”
“I guess.”
“Most people have a girlfriend because they actually like that person.”
“I do like you. I . . . love you.”
“But how do I know? How am I supposed to know that, Cullen? You live on this, like, plane where nothing is real. It’s like your life is a movie. You’re writing it, and directing it, and watching it, but you’re not actually living it.”
“It’s all real. Isn’t it? I love you, Brielle.”
She put her chin in her hand and sighed.
“I mean, how does anyone know?” I said. “You just have to decide. One way or another you have to decide if you trust me.”
“Yeah.” She said it softly, almost a whisper—not exactly a resounding signal of faith.
And then, in the next moment, I had a sudden, God-awful realization. The mention of the stolen car sparked something horrifying in my memory. Just like that. Boom. It hit me.
Gripped with a sudden, insane panic, my face all at once flooded with a terrible heat, I hurried to the front door and opened it to feel the cold air.
“What is it?” Brielle said.
“Jesus Christ.”
“Cullen, what?”
“What’s the date?”
“The date? I don’t know. The tenth?”
“Oh fuck. Oh Jesus Christ.”
She was standing now, moving over to me.
“Cullen, what is it?
“My court date.”
“Oh my God. You missed it?”
For weeks I’d ignored the doom. Before Christmas break the disciplinary board at St. John’s had met with me to discuss the grand theft auto charges and the possibility of the school doling out their own punishment in addition to whatever criminal mess was around the corner. At the time, I was just happy to get out of that room and away from those nasty-eyed teachers, which is what they never realize with kids like me. The threats don’t matter until they become real. Moment to moment, we think only about wriggling out of any particular situation. I’d gotten phone messages from a public defender who assured me he’d have no trouble getting the charge reduced to joyriding, but I’d ignored them all. I could say that I didn’t care, but that’s not totally true. I was, in truth, so terrified of what would happen that I couldn’t face it. Like not going to the doctor when you know it’s something bad.
“What are you going to do?”
I shook my head. I couldn’t even think about it. Brielle was back. She’d offered up a chance for me to save Ray from himself—something I hadn’t done for Amir. So what my missed court date really meant was that in order to have any chance at rescuing the O’Dells from their burning building, I would have to haul ass.
Ray
AFTER MY OUTBURST AT AMIR’S MASS, I met with Dad, Monsignor Murphy, and the dean of men. Time off from school was discussed, but it was decided I’d be better off in class. Getting back to work, moving on from the grief, all that stuff. As the meeting progressed, and more potential penalties were proposed and dispensed with, it became clear they weren’t going to dole out any official discipline at all. I was bereaved. I was troubled. I was a young man in need of help, not a scolding. They insisted that I meet with a guidance counselor once a week; I negotiated my way into a meeting with Father Joe, who wasn’t a counselor but who, we all agreed, could provide equally useful services.
So on Monday I was back at school like every
thing was normal. But it wasn’t normal. Because I wasn’t a real person anymore. I was temporary—counting down the days until I would, once and for all, disappear completely.
I opened my locker that morning to find St. Peter gone, replaced by a black-and-white picture of a dead woman lying on top of a dented car. It was weirdly similar to the Caravaggio: The woman’s head was at the bottom of the image, her bare feet elevated and perfectly crossed, like they’d been nailed in place. Her face was perfect—still and clean and white even while everything else around her had been destroyed. She’d jumped from some great height onto the car—that much was clear. The hardest part of the photo to look at was her hands. She wore white gloves, and one hand was still wrapped around her necklace.
A caption at the bottom: “The Most Beautiful Suicide: The body of twenty-three-year-old Evelyn McHale rests atop a crumpled limousine minutes after she jumped to her death from the Empire State Building, May 1, 1947. TIME magazine.”
I searched the hall for Cullen. Obviously this was his work, and obviously he’d be lurking around some corner, secretly trying to catch my reaction. But it was two minutes before class started; the place was jammed with kids.
I stared at the picture again. That hand on the necklace. Her grip on it, even in death, was tense—one look at the knuckles and you could transform the whole peaceful pose into an image of the fall: her face twisted, warped, and screaming like crazy; her legs flailing, kicking at air like they thought it was water and they could swim her back to the top.
Nick arrived at his locker next to mine. He was all business, digging out books like he didn’t even see me. My locker door was half-open, so I could frame him and the Most Beautiful Suicide in the same view.
All last week, in the halls and in the locker room, Nick had ignored me. He felt bad for me, I guess. Or maybe he just didn’t care about me anymore. Maybe he had other things to worry about. I wanted to ask him about that day in Father Joe’s office. What are you afraid of, Nick O’Dwyer? What makes you cry? What makes you so angry? What makes you, deep down in a place you would never want to admit exists, just like me? I asked Father Joe about it one day, but all he’d said was “You never know what people have going on at home.” Which was true enough, but it didn’t exactly tell me why a guy as tough and mean and strong as Nick O’Dwyer would be reduced to tears. In the end, Nick was the bully, and I was the bullied. I’d never know more about him than he knew about me.
I decided in that moment that I missed the old Nick. That I didn’t like him ignoring me. And if I was serious about killing myself—and I was—I needed him to continue contributing to the pathetic catastrophe that was my stupid life.
I removed the Most Beautiful Suicide from my locker door.
“Hey.” I crumpled the paper and tossed it at the side of Nick’s head. “Hey, shithead.”
He slammed his locker shut and glared at me.
I grinned. “Want to smack me in the nuts today?”
“What?”
“You haven’t done it in a while. I thought maybe you’d want to get a hand in there. They’re available, if you do.”
“The hell’s your deal, man? It’s like you want to get your ass kicked.”
“Would it matter?” I asked him. “If I did?”
“You’re a cancer, O’Dell. You know that? World just turns to shit everywhere you go.”
This was more like it.
“Maybe I’ll grab your balls.” I reached for his crotch as he tried to remove himself from what, from his perspective, must have been a pretty unwelcome twist in our relationship. “Is that what you’ve been waiting for all this time?”
“The fuck, man?” He slapped my hands away, and when I reached again he snatched my wrist and pinched the bones together. Instant, blinding pain.
“There’s my boy!”
Nick and I turned to see Roman dancing like some prehistoric, flightless bird through the mass of students, a full head taller than everyone else. Arms flailing, he skipped into the space between Nick and me, breaking the grip on my wrist, bouncing Nick away from the lockers.
“Better watch your ass!” Roman’s voice carried all the way down the hallway. “My boy O’Dell is one bad-ass dude!”
He acted like he didn’t even know Nick was there. Maybe he didn’t. But his arrival, a tornado of limbs and bony angles, had removed Nick from the scene. Made him an inconsequential bystander to Roman’s antics. Nick moved on to class without another glance my way.
I had algebra in the opposite direction, and Roman bounced along with me as I went. “That was some hilarious shit the other day.”
“What?”
“At mass!” He flung open the door to the stairwell so it slammed with such force against the wall I thought the glass pane would shatter. He wore his collar popped and shirt untucked—small acts of rebellion at St. John’s that exasperated the faculty, who were always having to remind him, Thank you, Mr. Calvecchio, the dress code applies to you too. Underclassmen cleared out of his way as we walked downstairs.
“No joke,” he was telling me. “That was hands down the best shit I ever saw in that auditorium.”
What could I say? That it wasn’t meant to be funny? That I really was going to kill myself? That, even if he didn’t know it, he was laughing at me, not with me?
With another violent tossing of the door we exited the stairwell and emerged into the first-floor hallway. “I got German with Nazi Gerber. Where you headed?”
“Uh . . .” I pointed to the right. “Algebra II.”
“As a freshman?”
“Yeah.”
“Shit, man! You ain’t just crazy, you’re crazy smart too. You got Joyner?”
“Yeah.”
“Hate that fucker. Thinks he’s the shit.”
I tried to laugh agreeably—I struggled with algebra, but Mr. Joyner was all right.
“I fingered his daughter one time, though.”
I stammered out some combination of half words that didn’t make any sense, with a lot of umms and ohs thrown in.
“She’s on the soccer team at Franklin Academy? Defense?” He laughed his stoner laugh—high and nasally—and then said quietly, like he was in confession, “Fucking bomb-ass thunder thighs, dude.” His eyes went big, and he made a “shh” motion. And then, loudly again, “I know you know what I’m talking about! Anyway, I’ll catch up to you later. We’ll hang with Cullen or something.”
He moved down the hallway, bouncy and jostling, announcing his presence to all he passed, leaving me too stunned to nod or say goodbye or offer a wave, unable as I was to shake off one lingering, perplexing, yet strangely invigorating thought:
Roman Calvecchio wanted to hang out with me?
* * *
The one big mistake I made during this time, in terms of avoiding major obstacles to ending my own life, was asking to meet with Father Joe instead of the guidance counselor. The counselor was some guy I’d met once during the first week of school. He hardly knew me at all, and I thought at the time that if I were sentenced to meeting someone once a week, I might as well see a familiar face. But pretty soon I saw that meeting with the counselor would have been much easier. He no doubt would have worked through a checklist of generic questions, and I could have recited generic answers, and he would have dispelled generic advice. Boring, sure, but pretty much painless.
Father Joe knew me too well. He insisted on pushing and prodding and poking. Trying to get to the root of my behavior. He asked about Amir. He asked about God. He asked about Nick O’Dwyer—a situation he knew about because Dad had reported it to the school, at which point I went back on my word to Dad and denied the whole thing, and when they asked, Well, then how did you get the bruises? I just told them, I forget, and none of the adults involved were exactly thrilled about this stance, but there was nothing they could do about it.
He tal
ked about infinity.
“Give me an example,” Father Joe said, “of infinity.”
I didn’t know where this was going. I didn’t care. I was wasting the minutes. Counting down until the end of everything. “I don’t know,” I said. “Space?”
“Space. What space?”
“Like, outer space?”
“Okay, good. So, in outer space, the universe extends to infinity. Is that right?”
“I don’t know. Is it?”
“There are different theories,” he admitted. “But that’s a decent guess, don’t you think?”
I shrugged.
“Stand up.”
I moved slowly, begrudgingly.
“Come on, up, up, up.”
He shoved the coffee table away from the front of the couch. We stood five feet apart.
“I saw this in a movie once,” he said. “I won’t make you do it, because I had a cheesesteak with onions for lunch and my breath is poisonous, but imagine you and I each take a step to halve the distance between us. Okay?”
I nodded.
“And then imagine we halve the distance between that new distance. And halve that one. And so on. Moving in ever smaller, infinitesimal distances. What would happen eventually?”
“We’d bump into each other.”
“In reality. But theoretically, imagine we can move in those infinitesimal distances. What would happen?”
I was dreaming about those generic counselor questions.
“I don’t know,” I said. “What would happen?”
“Theoretically, we could just keep halving the distance between us, right? Forever?”
“Sure.”
“So right now, in this room, between you and me, there is an infinite amount of space. You and I are literally separated by infinity.”
