But again, I can’t say that. I can’t do that. Can’t do anything that I want to right now, not when my friends believe that things are finally getting better, that I’m finally getting better. I know what they’re thinking, know they’re figuring that hell week—the one week a year where I totally lose my shit—is just about over and it’s time for me to get back to normal.
These days I know what they’re thinking as well as they do, and I’ve spent the last few years trying to live up to their expectations of me because it’s easier. And because it works, makes me look like I’m not so fucking broken.
Lately, though, I feel like living down to their fears instead. Everything would be so much easier. Because the truth is, I’m not getting any better. I’m just getting good at hiding how fucked up I am, for whatever that’s worth. Or at least I was. Funny how Ophelia, who’s only known me a week, seems to see me more clearly than my closest friends do. She sees right through the act I’ve spent years perfecting.
Because that thought gets me by the throat, I try to pretend it away. Or, if I can’t actually make it disappear, at least ignore it.
The trail I’m on narrows suddenly, and still I hike up it a few hundred more feet, taking a path only a mountain goat could easily follow. I slip and slide a few times as my boots lose traction, knock my shoulder hard against a tree, bang a knee on some large rocks. But the pain does it for me—it always has—and I work through it. Press on.
By the time I get to a decent-sized plateau I’m huffing and puffing, and I pause for a minute to catch my breath. As I do, a strong gale comes tearing across the terrain, rattling branches and bending some of the younger trees nearly to the ground. I brace for it, head down, shoulders hunched, feet firmly grounded, and still it almost levels me.
I fight to stay on my feet—I hate getting knocked around by anything but my own stupidity—and keep climbing when I succeed.
I don’t know where I’m going. Don’t know where I am or even where I’ve been. I know only that I don’t want to be who I am, what I am, one second longer.
I veer off the trail I know—it’s too easy, gives me too much time to think—and start climbing a sheer rock wall that is almost completely vertical. It’s a stupid move—there aren’t a lot of handholds and the ones I do find are slippery with ice and snow—but I don’t give a shit.
I slip a few times on my way up, end up clinging to the cliff with nothing but my fingertips and my will more times than I can count. This was a stupid idea, and for a second, just a second, I think about going back down. But I’m at that weird spot where I’m a little more than halfway up and it’s easier and safer now to keep climbing instead of turning back.
So that’s what I do, one perilous handhold at a time. I climb and climb and climb.
I’m only a few feet from the top, balanced precariously on a narrow shelf, when disaster strikes. I’m standing on my toes, pulling myself up with my left hand as I search for a place to put my right, when the chunk of ice I’m holding on to breaks off and crashes to the ground. I start to fall, and somehow—I don’t know how—I manage to find a handhold for my right hand.
But I’ve slipped down a few feet, and no matter how hard I try to find purchase for my boots, there isn’t anything. Just a sheer, slick wall of ice covering the mountain and making it impossible for my feet to do anything but slip and slide across it.
Which means I’ve got nothing to stand on.
Which means the only thing standing between me and a thirty-foot drop to the hard, bumpy plateau below is the precarious grip my half-frozen fingers have on one icy rock.
The thought doesn’t scare me nearly as much as it should.
Still, the human body’s fight for self-preservation isn’t easily ignored. My heart is beating like the drums in a rock-and-roll anthem, adrenaline racing through my system. The whole fight-or-flight thing is totally kicking in, only I’ve got no one to fight and nowhere to run. I spend a few desperate seconds searching for another hold for my left hand—something, anything I can grab on to. But even as I’m doing it, even as I’m frantically looking for a way to stay alive, it occurs to me how easy things would be if I don’t find one.
How easy they would be if I just stop fighting.
I’m tired. I’m so goddamn tired of fighting. And I don’t have to be. I could just stop right here. Right now.
I’ve told myself a million times that if I could just curl up and die, I would. I’ve held my father’s gun to my head, boarded down the most dangerous slopes I could find, driven way too fast down deserted roads on the ice in my SUV or on my bike. I’ve spent years playing Russian roulette with my life, doing the stupidest shit imaginable in an effort to just wipe myself out without actually committing suicide. Without taking the selfish way out.
So maybe this is it. Maybe all that shit has finally caught up to me and this is my moment. The one fucking situation I just can’t escape from.
It seems so easy, so perfect.
Especially since I don’t really have to do anything. I could just hang here a little while, let gravity do its thing. Nobody would know. Nobody but me, and I’m sure as shit not telling anyone.
My hand slips a little more, and I let it. I take a deep breath, close my eyes, will myself to just let go.
But Ophelia’s face flashes in front of my eyes, and my fingers refuse to budge. And I can’t make them. Can’t will them to no matter how much I want to. Suicide is a coward’s way out, and that’s one thing—maybe the only thing—I’m not. I’m an asshole, a loser, a careless, reckless freak who doesn’t give two shits about himself or anyone else, but I am not a coward.
Besides, killing myself is way too easy, and if there’s one thing I don’t deserve, it’s to get off easy. Not when April never had that option.
An image of her—of my sweet, adorable little sister in her powder-pink dress and tap shoes—dances in front of my eyes, so real that I swear I could touch it. But it’s just a mirage, just a hope that will never be realized, and I shove it down deep inside me, where it can fester some more.
My fingers are cramping up, and I know that in a minute, two at the outside, the choice is going to be out of my hands. Literally.
Fuck it. I reach out my left hand, skim it quickly over the rocks. I finally find a little indention about two feet above my head. It’s not much, but it’s slanted down and I can get fairly decent purchase with three of my fingers. So that’s what I do as I bend my knees and pull my feet up a few inches to try and find a place to rest them, too.
I encounter a tiny shelf a few inches to my right, put my foot on it, and push up as hard as I can. Then I reach up, find another handhold, and pull. Hands, feet. Hands, feet.
I do this three more times before I get to the top of the cliff. I pull myself over and collapse on the snow-covered ground. I turn my head, draw deep breaths into my lungs as the adrenaline finally stops rocketing through my veins, then roll over and stare up at the sky.