Chapter Sixteen

After we had all taken our showers we met back in the boys' room to play with a deck of cards the nurse with the dark brown hair had given us. Other kids were walking around, hanging out in each other's rooms and speaking with the nurses. I sat with my back to the door so I could get out quickly if my anxiety became too much. I was feeling more comfortable with the group, but I would never again let my guard down.

We played poker for a while, a few of us learning the game since we hadn't ever played before. No one talked about the events of the morning. It was something private that we had experienced and as long as ears that didn't belong to our group were around, we wouldn't speak of it. We couldn't miss the way other kids looked at us as they passed by. I wasn't sure what they were there for, but I knew their reasons must be different than ours. They seemed more settled in, with some sort of inherent understanding that they were here for a while, while our group felt temporary, transient.

A voice from the PA system let us know it was almost time to shut off the lights for the night. Ken didn't hesitate to move himself closer to his bed. It would take him longer to get settled, given his cast and the wheelchair. He seemed determined to do it without any help. He pulled himself onto his bed, a task that was a lot harder than it sounded. We all knew he didn't want to ask for any more help. Maybe there was a part of him that felt like he should be punished for what he'd done. Once his rear was on the edge of the twin mattress, he was able to lift his casted leg onto the bed. The stark white cast reminded me of the time I broke my arm as a child. I must have been about eight at the time. By the next day at school there wasn't a space left on my cast after my classmates and friends had signed it. His cast was noticeably clear of signatures and encouraging messages.

He folded the pillow so his head was slightly elevated. Even though he was almost too big for that little bed, he looked like a child in it. I remembered the bridge we had passed in his hometown and the way he had been seen as a legend and celebrity. I wished I could give him a small taste of that again, because I knew that he was lying there wishing all this was behind him. We'd all fallen from some sort of pedestal when we decided to try and take our own lives, but his was clearly so much higher than ours and his fall so much bigger.

He pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket and unfolded it. We'd seen the list of groups that were meeting this week on the table near the cafeteria. He read the list and I wondered if he'd considered stopping in to one of the groups.

"What's that?" Damien asked when he lifted himself up from the floor. His hair was still wet from his shower.

"It's nothing," Ken answered, folding the paper back into a small rectangle and shoving it into his pocket. Damien glanced over at him as he pulled back the sheets on his own bed.

"How long are you going to have to wear that cast?" he asked, changing the subject.

"I don't know. I have an appointment with the orthopedic surgeon in a few days." Ken shut his eyes. I suspected he wasn't being honest with the staff about how much pain he was in. Maybe the throbbing gave him something to concentrate on other than the mess he'd left behind. If he could concentrate on the way he felt his pulse pounding up against the pressure of the cast, he wouldn't have to sit with the knowledge that he'd only made a bigger problem out of something that already felt immeasurable.

Damien took off his glasses and set them on the bedside table. "How bad is your vision?" Ken asked quietly. Damien took a large breath as if quickly trying to decide if Ken would use the information against him in some way. Guys like Ken were always hard on kids like him. They had something to prove. They wanted their friends to know how strong and intimidating they were and smaller, less aggressive boys like Damien were an easy target. Something about Ken must have communicated that he wasn't in the best frame of mind to harass anyone.

"Legally blind without my glasses." He reached for the bed just as the voice from the speaker gave us a final five-minute warning. "It feels so belittling to have no say in deciding when to turn the lights off. Maybe this is going to be our new life. If you can't do things right, you lose the right to do anything." He sounded irritated. "A few months ago it would have made me irrationally angry. I'd have done the research to find out my rights and then I would have built an impenetrable argument for why I should have the freedom to make that choice for myself. I just can't bring myself to care anymore—not just about this but about anything."

I stood up and leaned back against the wall. Damien hadn't said much about anything up to this point and I wasn't about to leave when he was finally letting us in. He sighed and then continued, "Choosing to die was not a decision I just came up with one day. I'm never impulsive. The idea sort of moved in like a thick fog and settled in the valleys of my mind. It stayed there, trapped between all the mountains of bad experiences that had taken form over the years. You could even say it started more as a curiosity. What is the most common way to take your life? What was it like to die? I did some research. In the beginning I would use my research as a way to feel control after a particularly hard day, but over time it almost became an obsession. Once I saw how easy it would be, I didn't see the point in doing anything else. Why work on math homework when it was never going to matter? Once I chose the date, I felt like the fog was clearing."

"Did you ever feel guilty?" Ken asked from his bed, his eyes still staring at the ceiling.

"Guilt is ugly and uncomfortable, but I'd choose it over humiliation and isolation any day, and in the end that's exactly what I did," Damien answered honestly.

"I was almost blind, too," Ken admitted.

"Was?" Damien asked.

"My dad thought wearing contacts would get in the way of playing football. We waited for my vision to be stable for a few years and then he made me get Lasik surgery to correct it." Ken was hard to read. From the outside he was intimidating based on his size alone, but the tightness of his voice gave away the emotion behind his words. Talking about his father was difficult for him.

Damien turned his head in his direction even though he'd let us know he wouldn't be able to see him. "You let some doctor shoot lasers into your eyes? I've looked up the surgery myself. I thought maybe if I didn't wear such big glasses things would be easier and I wouldn't have to get them replaced each time some asshole thought it would be funny to break them. Maybe my nose wouldn't have been broken when I took that punch if the hard frames weren't there to crush the bones underneath. But in the end, the risks were just too scary."

I'm sure there wasn't a kid who had made it to our age without being bullied at least once, so when Damien shared his story we could all empathize with that feeling of helplessness. The torment I'd experienced over the last few months felt raw and torn inside me. If there had been a procedure I could undergo to remove what was eating at me, I would have done it in a heartbeat. That's why I also knew how devastating it would be to feel like that fix was unavailable. For me it was because it hadn't been invented yet and most likely never would, and for Damien it was because he knew too much and that knowledge became a crippling fear of the cure.

Ken laughed softly. "I'm not even going to pretend I had a say in the matter. No one tells my father anything."

Damien nodded in the dark. Big intimidating people made little intimidating people. No doubt Ken's father was a scary guy, as well.

"Did it hurt?" Damien asked.

"No. It made me anxious, though. I had a panic attack in the surgery room."

Damien appeared taken off-guard by the words. "Do you get those often?" he asked as if carefully opening a door to a world he didn't know existed.

"Yeah. I've been anxious for as long as I can remember. I threw up the first three weeks of kindergarten. Everyone told me it would get better as I got older, but I still throw up before every game and sweat buckets when I have to speak in front of a group of more than two people. It's fucking embarrassing. Bet you didn't expect that, huh?" Ken asked.

"No. I didn't think guys like you got anxious."

"What's a 'guy like me'?" Ken didn't sound angry, just curious. It almost sounded like a challenge.

"You're tall and buff. You say what's on your mind and clearly play an aggressive sport. My experience with guys like you isn't pleasant. Guys like you like to show guys like me who's in charge. They like to take everything said to them as an insult and escalate words into fists."

"I know a lot of guys like that," Ken agreed. "But I'm not one of them." He didn't bother to elaborate but we could hear in his voice that he was telling the truth.

"Sorry, man," Damien offered.

"You don't have to apologize. We don't really know anything about each other except what we're assuming based on appearances."

"I have anxiety, too." Damien shared. "I don't know how long I've had it. I just remember feeling like I was having a heart attack in fifth grade. Maybe it's something I was born with." He paused, perhaps trying to think back on when it had all started. "Maybe it's my survival instinct going haywire." No one could blame him after what he'd been through.

"Survival instinct?" Ken said the words like he was trying them on for size. "It feels like the exact opposite when it's happening. I fucking hate it. My hands get shaky and my mouth gets dry. I can't concentrate. All I can think about is getting out of whatever it is I'm having to do or wherever I have to be."

"It's your fight, flight, or freeze response. The pounding heart and shallow breathing will help you run. Not being able to think is actually an adaptive behavior. Your brain doesn't want you doing advanced mathematical equations. It wants you to get the fuck away from whatever it is that's a threat." Damien turned so he was facing Ken.

In the hall I could hear the sounds of earlier growing quiet. Kids were in their rooms for the night and I knew we didn't have much longer before we would be shooed away into our room. But right then I felt something I hadn't felt in a long time. I felt like I belonged. I felt like maybe there were other kids having just as shitty a life as I was having. There is more than one crappy hand that can be dealt from this deck of cards we call life.

"For real?" Ken asked.

"For real."

"If you didn't have anxiety do you think you'd take that pill?" The conversation suddenly became very serious again. The room was quiet as Damien thought of his answer. Everything about the experience today gave him the right to say no. No one would judge him for it or think any less of him for that choice. It was something we were all struggling with.

Aideen and Shima had almost seemed possessed. They'd been trapped in a world they couldn't get out of. But maybe that wasn't much different than our situation right now. In the end, they had both seemed different. With all the bullying, maybe Damien wanted to be different. Maybe he wouldn't feel as lonely. What if the pill was the answer?

"Maybe. If it made you more like your father, would you?" Damien asked.

"Maybe," Ken answered.