Michael Ford - Suicide Notes

“Don’t listen to her,” Sadie said. “My guess is that she’s the next to go.” She gave Juliet a look. “How’s it going to happen, Juliet?” she asked. “How are you going to go?”

Juliet stood up and slammed her chair against the table. As she stormed off, Sadie and Bone laughed. After a second, I did too.

“That chick is out there,” said Bone.

“Seriously,” Sadie agreed. “I wonder what she’s in here for. That whole bulimia story was a crock.”

“She told me,” Bone said. “I guess she thought it might make me love her or something if she shared.” He rolled his eyes.

“So?” Sadie said. “Out with it already. What’s little Miss Juliet’s curse?”

“She’s a junkie,” said Bone.

“Get out,” Sadie exclaimed.

Bone nodded. “No, she is. She was all into heroin and stuff. I guess she ODed a couple of times.”

“Wow,” Sadie said. “I’m actually kind of impressed. I thought for sure she’d be into something really girly, like cutting herself.” Then she looked at me and said, “No offense.”

“I didn’t realize there was a ranking,” I said.

Sadie frowned. “What do you mean?”

“A ranking,” I said. “You know, what’s crazier than what.”

“Oh, sure there is,” Sadie said. She sat back in her chair. “First you have your generic depressives. They’re a dime a dozen and usually really boring. Then you’ve got the bulimics and the anorexics. They’re slightly more interesting, although usually they’re just girls with nothing better to do. Then you start getting into the good stuff: the arsonists, the schizophrenics, the manic-depressives. You can never quite tell what those will do. And then you’ve got the junkies. They’re completely tragic, because chances are they’re just going to go right back on the stuff when they get out of here.”

“So junkies are at the top of the crazy chain,” I said.

Sadie shook her head. “Uh-uh,” she said. “Suicides are.”

I looked at her. “Why?”

“Anyone can be crazy,” she answered. “That’s usually just because there’s something screwed up in your wiring, you know? But suicide is a whole different thing. I mean, how much do you have to hate yourself to want to just wipe yourself out?”

“Maybe that’s just about wiring, too,” I suggested.

“I guess sometimes,” Sadie agreed. “But sometimes it’s more than that.”

“I don’t know,” Bone said. “I don’t see anything so special about wanting to kill yourself.” When we didn’t say anything, he looked up at us. “Not that I’ve ever tried it. I’m just saying.”

“You’re just saying that because you’ve never tried it,” Sadie said. She was quiet for a minute, and her eyes got this faraway look in them, like she was remembering something wonderful. “You don’t know what it feels like,” she continued. “You don’t know what it’s like to make that decision—to go from thinking about it to doing it. Most people can’t do it.”

“So you’re saying you should get first prize because you did it?” Bone said. He laughed. “You’re crazy.”

Sadie looked at him. “That’s exactly what I am,” she said, then laughed. “But I’ll have to share that prize with Jeff.”

She looked at me. “What?” I said.

“You win, too,” she said. “You tried to kill yourself, too.”

I knew everyone had been thinking that. I mean, how could they not, what with the bandages and everything? But hearing Sadie say it out loud was kind of a shock. I shook my head. “I just did something stupid.”

Sadie turned away. “Sure you did,” she said.

I couldn’t tell if she was making fun of me or not. I sort of don’t think she was. And I don’t think she wants to share her prize with me. She wants to be Queen Whack-job around here. Or maybe she knows that I’m not like her and the rest of them.

I’m not one of her ten little soldier boys.

One day later and we’re back to five. It’s like there’s a line of crazies outside, and as one of us leaves they let in another one. Like at those supposedly cool clubs where some idiot in sunglasses stands at the door with a list while a bunch of posers beg him to let them in. But he only picks the really beautiful people. In this case, I guess he’d be picking the unbeautiful people.

Anyway, there are five of us again. Well, maybe four and a half.

I’ll explain. This morning at group there was a new person with us. A girl. At first I thought she was, like, seven or eight, but it turns out she’s twelve. She’s so small and skinny, though, that she looks like a little kid.

Her name is Martha. She sat in her chair hugging a stuffed rabbit. Her arms were wrapped around its middle and her chin rested between its long, floppy ears. She didn’t say a word the entire time. Cat Poop told us her name, but that was about it.

I asked him about her later, though, during our session.

“Can’t she talk?”

“She can talk,” he said. “She just doesn’t at the moment.”

“Why?” I asked him.

“You know I can’t discuss her case with you,” Cat Poop said.

“Come on,” I prodded him. “How am I supposed to make her feel like one of the family if I don’t know anything about her?”

“I notice you’ve been spending a lot of time with Sadie,” he said.

“What do you guys do, spy on us all the time?” I asked. “Or do the nurses secretly film us? Does Nurse Goody have a camera hidden in her hair?”

“Do you feel like we spy on you?” he countered.

This is another therapist trick, answering your question with a question, so that you have to keep talking. I decided to throw it back at him, so I asked, “Why, do you think I feel like you spy on us all the time?”

Cat Poop actually smiled a little when I did that. “You know we don’t,” he said. “We keep an eye on you, but we don’t spy.”

“That’s big of you,” I said. “It’s not like there’s much we can do around here, though.”

“You seem angry today,” he said, ignoring the fact that I was being a smart-ass. “Are you angry?”

Once he asked, I realized that I was angry. I hadn’t really noticed, but I was. And now I was even more angry because he’d realized it before I had.

“I’m fine,” I said.

We sat there for a while with neither of us saying anything. I figured I could probably go the whole session that way, but Cat Poop had other ideas.

“Does Sadie remind you of someone?” he asked me. “Maybe a friend?”

I knew what he was getting at. He wanted to know about Allie. I could have kicked myself for ever having mentioned her around him.

“She’s nothing like Allie,” I said, just to let him know I knew what he was hinting around about.

“How is she different?” he said.

“Well, for one thing, Allie isn’t locked up in a psych ward,” I suggested.

“Is that the only difference?” asked Cat Poop.

“You think I’m in here because of Allie, don’t you?” I said.

“I think you’re in here because you hurt yourself,” he said.

“But you think I did it because of Allie.”

“Did you?”

“No,” I said.

“Are the two of you close?”

“Can’t we talk about my dysfunctional family dynamics?” I suggested. “Or my fear of intimacy?”

“Is Allie your girlfriend?” he asked.

“Can we please stop talking about Allie?” I practically shouted. “Jesus, can’t you just get over that?”

Cat Poop wrote something down on his stupid pad. I thought maybe he’d finally given up on the Allie questions, but he wasn’t done yet.

“Have you and Allie been sexually intimate?”