Charlie is crying. He microwaves old spaghetti and a Celeste frozen pizza, his childhood favorite. He starts a chicken pot pie but abandons it. He leaves a mess on the kitchen table.
Charlie walks into the den and wiggles the mouse to disable the screensaver. He opens Microsoft Word.
File: New
Save As:
5 Sterling
He was the one who had figured out how to get French accents into a document. His sister had been drawing them in with pen until he showed her the trick.
He begins.
He considers sparking his last Camel Light right there at the computer.
Absurd to bother to walk outside to light up when you’re about to do what you’re about to do.
He is crying. He is bothered and bolstered in tonight’s resolve as he types around the crack in the monitor that he’d inflicted via some projectile two days before.
Last resorts. Everyone’s blindness. The fucking void. He has his second-to-last beer as he types in their secret team language:
5 Sterling
Suicide by the tire swing
Oui, je vais me suicider. Je serai plus heureux autre part.
He does not print it. He closes Word and shuts down the computer.
He finishes his drink.
He walks to the backyard. He is crying. His phone rings again. It’s Roggenbuck. He’s wondering what time he’s coming to the party tonight, and is Lauren picking him up after her show? Yoh u waitin til then fella?
Alex calls.
Tina calls.
Lauren calls twice. They had plans, right?
Everyone leaves voicemails. He stares awhile at the screen.
He does not listen to them.
He puts his phone in his pocket and looks up at the thin plasticky-yellow braided synthetic rope dangling from that shitty little branch that is tied to the old pointless plastic and too-small tire swing that was never fun when they were little either.
Less so now.
A symbol, maybe. How many straws before?
He unties the stupid plastic tire that was never any fun and he looks around. There are logistical problems, and he is running out of time: someone might be home soon.
He runs to the pool house to find a ladder or some tools, his brain is firing strangely now. Lost thoughts. Jumbled conclusions. No conclusion. Conclusion.
He finds a good sturdy real rope and drags it into the foyer, tests the rungs on the stairs. It holds.
He pushes the handsome mahogany secretary’s desk toward the top landing. Where there will be no landing
He starts looping the very sturdy real rope from the poolhouse through the banister support, the third one from the top.
That fucking pole could have at least had the decency to snap in half.
He’s ready now. He understands the physics. He will succeed here tonight.
He pulls out his phone from his big puffy oversized coat pocket and records a new voicemail greeting, in a voice he does not recognize:
I have to go to bed now.
Sorry for bailing on everyone.
Peace.
He turns his phone power off.
Returns it to his coat pocket.
He stands on the desk and tightens the knot.
He is breathing hard now, hyperventilating, snot oozing down his face, can’t see straight, can’t think straight, can’t decide, oh my God, MAKE IT STOP
Choose Your Own Adventure
Page 37
Charlie jumps.
Page 22
He tests the rope again, takes a sharp inhale. As if he is about to hold his breath underwater. Maybe he is.
Charlie blinks. A black spider with a red hourglass on its back spins down and pauses right between his eyes.
Charlie SCREAMS and swats and nearly topples the handsome mahogany desk and smashes his head on the banister and pulls himself up with no air and gasping loosens the knot and escapes from the deadly arachnid, panting. Something new within him snaps. Maybe something old remembers.
He turns on his phone just as Lauren calls for the third time.
Yoh, Twenties. This is real bad.
She’s already on the way. Stay on the phone. Deploys Roggen to rush there ahead, he arrives in an inexplicable seven minutes. He must have been flying.
They meet him on the floor and sit together and draw up a plan. Lauren scribes. Roggen draws. Charlie almost laughs. They take him to the 24-hour dunkies and then to the old waterfall and he’s crying again. Charlie doesn’t cry in front of people. And the computer screen, and the drugs, and why the fuck was the desk in the foyer? Did you take out some poolhouse equipment? In the winter?
They already know what they don’t want to know they know. They are gentle, and they stumble, and they cry, but they are firm. His best friends do not abandon him.
Three hours later they are all tear-stained and snot-nosed and swollen-eyed and shaking and holding him at the emergency entrance. They will stay.
He will stay.
He will stay.
theme and variations 