Michael Ford: Suicide Notes

“I have arts and crafts at one o’ clock.”

I looked up and saw Sadie standing by me. She waved her sheet. “Maybe I can make my dad that wallet he’s always wanted.”

“I was kind of hoping for archery,” I told her. “But I think I’m stuck with nature trail and capture the flag.”

She laughed. “Welcome to Camp Meds,” she said. “Where the campers are crazy and the counselors want you to take drugs.”

“Yeah, well, this camper isn’t sticking around long,” I told her, crumpling up my schedule.

“How’s that?” she said. “You have a plan or something?”

“Sure,” I said, throwing the ball of paper into a trash can. “And it’s really simple—I’m not crazy.”

Sadie laughed again. “Right,” she said. “None of us are.”

“I’m serious,” I said.

“So am I,” she told me. “You think I’m nuts?”

“You’re here, aren’t you?”

She nodded. “And so are you. You think you’re the only mistake they’ve made?”

I looked at her face. She seemed totally serious. Then I remembered what she’d said in group about trying to drown herself. She was crazy all right, and the last thing I needed was more crazy.

“I’ve got to go to the bathroom,” I said. “I’ll see you later.”

Here are the basic facts. My name is Jeff. I’m fifteen. I have a sister named Amanda who’s thirteen, my parents are still married to each other, and all four of us live in a perfectly nice house in a perfectly nice neighborhood in a perfectly nice city that’s exactly like a billion other cities. My parents have never beaten us, I’ve never been molested by a priest, I don’t hate the other kids at my school any more than is normal for a kid my age, I don’t listen to death metal, have an obsession with violent video games, or cut the heads off small animals for fun.

That’s pretty much everything I told Cat Poop in our session today, which is a lot more than I told him yesterday, when I basically sat silent in the chair across from him until he told me I could go. Today, though, he tapped his pencil against the pad of paper he was holding and just stared at me. Apparently that’s what therapists do to get you to open up. The thing is, it works. The longer he stared at me, the more I wanted to talk, if only to make him stop tapping.

I didn’t want to talk about me, though, so I talked about everyone else in the group and how weird they were. This was after our second group session, in which I learned that Alice chews her hair, Juliet still loves Bone, and Bone still loves his shoes. Very deep stuff.

“I don’t belong here,” I informed Cat Poop, thinking maybe this just hadn’t occurred to him. “These people are seriously demented. It’s not good for me to be around them. I might catch something.”

He didn’t answer me for a minute. He just kept tapping—tap, tap, tap, tap, tap—until finally I told him if he didn’t stop I was going to grab the pencil and stab myself in the throat. Then he put the pencil in his pocket.

“Why don’t you think you belong here?” he asked.

“Why do you think I do ?” I said.

He started with the staring thing again but didn’t answer me. It’s amazing how that guy can go forever without blinking. I tried not to blink either, but my eyes got really dry. Finally I started talking again.

“Are you a real doctor?” I asked him. “I mean, with a diploma and everything?”

“I’m a psychiatrist,” he said.

“So you’re not really a doctor,” I said.

“A psychiatrist is also a medical doctor,” he told me. “A psychologist isn’t.”

“So what you’re saying is that you think you’re better than a psychologist,” I said. “That’s not very nice. I mean, I bet they worked hard too.”

“They’re two very different things,” he said.

“Where did you go to school?” I asked. “A real college or one of those schools in the Caribbean?” I heard somewhere that people who can’t get into real medical schools all go to the Caribbean, where apparently all you have to do is drink fruity drinks and sit on the beach for four years and they give you a diploma.

“I did my undergraduate work at the University of Chicago and got my doctorate at the University of Toronto.”

“Canada,” I said. “So you did have to go to a foreign country.” I shook my head like this was a big disappointment. “I’m sorry, doc, I’m just not comfortable with your credentials. I think I need a second opinion.”

“I’ve been working with young people for ten years,” Cat Poop said. “I assure you that I’m quite qualified to help you.”

“Ten years?” I said. I was kind of surprised. I didn’t think he was that old. “What’d you do, start college when you were nine? Or by ‘working with young people,’ do you mean you were a camp counselor or something?”

I thought maybe he’d tell me how old he is, but he went back to staring. I looked around the office, ignoring him. Besides his desk, there’s a couch and another chair besides the one I was sitting in. And they’re not the plastic kind we have in the lounge; they’re real leather ones that don’t make your butt hurt. There’s a bookcase with a bunch of boring-looking books in it, and a plant with pink flowers on top of it. On one of the walls there’s a painting of a black-and-white dog holding a dead bird in its mouth.

He also has a window, and it doesn’t have wire in it. I guess they’re not afraid the shrinks will jump out. I thought about trying it, but we’re on the fourth floor, and I’m pretty sure I’d break my leg if I did. Then I’d be crazy and in a cast, which is kind of overdoing it a little.

“I’m not like them,” I said when I got tired of looking at his office.

“Not like who?” he asked, as if he’d already forgotten what we were talking about.

“Them,” I said, waving my hands around. “The rest of the group. I mean, seriously, look at them. They’re crazy.”

“Why do you say that?”

I held up one finger. “One tried to barbeque a guy,” I said. I kept going, holding up another finger for each person I ticked off. “One is in love with another one who doesn’t seem to know who she is or where he is, and one,” I concluded, pointing a final finger in the air, “threw herself into a lake for no reason.”

“And you feel that you’re different from them?” he said.

“Um, yeah,” I told him. “Don’t you?”

“Tell me about your family,” he said.

Like I said, my family is totally normal. Well, as normal as most families are, which means that sometimes we fight about stuff but the rest of the time we get along. We’re so boring that I almost wanted to make up a bunch of drama to tell Cat Poop, like that my mother locks my sister and me in the cellar when we complain about what she made for dinner, or that my father pressures me to be the best at everything. But my dad always says he was never good at math either, and that my As in English more than make up for my Cs in trigonometry. And my mom usually picks up dinner at China Dragon or South of the Border because when she tries to cook the stove catches on fire, so dinner at our house is never a problem.

“They’re great,” is what I said to Cat Poop. “Everything is totally great.”

“Then why did you try to kill yourself?”

The guy has a one-track mind, and it’s getting on my nerves. I waited a long time, to make him think I was seriously considering the question. Then I sighed. “Okay,” I said. “I guess I can tell you.”

Cat Poop straightened up a little in his chair. He took the pencil out again and held it over the pad, like he had to be ready to write down every single word of a historic speech or something.