You were so nervous your first day of senior year in high school.
You grew up in Pennsylvania and you had a steady group of close friends, but you were friendly with everyone in your grade and even the one lower when you had mixed classes, all in all, everyone enjoyed your company. You weren't super popular or on any sports teams, but you considered high school (grades 9-12, ages 14ish to 18ish) to be bittersweet. On one hand, you saw your friends every day, but on the other, you had to get up before the sun and you were flooded with homework. It had its ups and downs, but your older brother, Lewis, had looked out for you when you were a freshman (9th grade) and he was a senior (12th), so he was worried about your first days after he graduated. He always wanted you to have as much fun as possible and to never be bothered or bullied like he was growing up.
Your brother was always different, but no amount of doctors, psychiatrists, or counselors could figure him out.
Your mother did her best, always worrying about you two an unhealthy amount, and she would cry a lot when she thought you couldn't hear her, but she always provided more than you both needed. Being a single mom, it wasn't easy to balance work and kids and still have time for herself, but she made it look effortless most of the time. She'd be there for school events, parent-teacher meetings, and somehow be home by five every day to whip up something for dinner.
She didn't start crying late at night until you got into high school and Lewis had recently turned eighteen. You assumed, at the time because you were a kid, maybe she missed having your dad around, but he died when she was pregnant with you, so you figured it wouldn't have come up so much later if it was that, leaving you stumped.
One night, when Lewis went out to his friend's house, you heard her sobbing and you knew she thought you had gone to a friend's place too, so she thought she was alone. But your friend's parents said she couldn't have anyone over that night because her nan was staying the weekend and they'd have to reschedule the sleepover.
You felt so helpless, you stayed sat outside her door, hearing her sobs since they weren't as muffled as they usually were, and you didn't knock until you heard her say something about taking her kids away. Begging someone not to.
You panicked immediately, standing up and pounding your fist on the door, probably startling her, but you couldn't think about that right now, you were too scared.
She opened it and you wrapped your arms around her tightly, hugging her with everything you had, but then she pulled you off, almost angrily.
'What're you doing home?' She demanded and you hugged yourself, tears pricking your eyes.
'I – I heard you,' You sniffled out, scared shitless that you and Lewis were going to be taken away by something or someone and so utterly confused as to why your mom started crying herself to sleep nearly every night these days, 'And the sleepover was cancelled...I came to tell you, but then I...heard you crying and...'
'Go back to bed.'
Her voice was so cold, it sent a shiver of fear through you, and your mother was no longer someone who was warm and gave you cuddles when you found out Angelina Jolie was married, or Michael Keaton was too old for you. Or when you didn't get the new kid to like you right away, but it turned out he didn't speak English and you actually became best friends with him anyway – his name is Ralph, and he lives in Baltimore with his husband now.
She closed herself off after that night and soon, you'd do the same, just in a different way.
Besides Lewis, who constantly promised you he'd never leave, nobody else seemed to be a constant in your life in the coming months. You just began to see everyone different, like they weren't in your life to stick around, just there temporarily, and it hurt at first, but it didn't slow you down from loving them.
Because Lewis left.
You were coming home after your first day of twelfth grade and you were so relieved it was over, but excited to tell him all about it. How Mark got super buff and puberty must've hit him like a truck over the summer. About the girl from your English class smiling at you and man, girls are just so pretty, and they give you those butterflies way more than boys do. Or how you're thinking about joining the soccer team just because your new crush was going to be captain. But you really wanted to be in the AV club with the others because you could mess around with filming stupid videos – it just wasn't as cool on your phone.
But then you saw the police cars outside your house and your world got so much smaller, so much darker.
Your mom was wailing, sinking to the ground after they told her something at the door, and you stood on the sidewalk, next to the yard's gate, watching the scene unfold like it was an episode of Law and Order and not the worst thing imaginable happening in real life.
You heard the stories the next day as you numbly went down the hall or sat in class – the whispers, the looks, the pity.
You hated the pity.
You didn't want to talk to anyone, and Ralph was literally the only person to respect that.
But people, or high schoolers, can be vultures sometimes, hell, even the teachers were nosey fucks that harassed you, wanting to know the gruesome details and motives and reasons.
It made the paper – shit, you remember the day you found the article that everyone had been talking about and a week after your first day, it's like it happened all over again.
It wasn't front page news, but the correlation some reporter made between Lewis' suicide and your father's made it a bit more interesting to the public.
You were sick to your stomach.
Your mom would randomly show up, usually when she ran out of alcohol or just came home from work to hand you a bit of food, and sometimes she'd just hug you – hold you so tight you could barely breathe.
But it wasn't for you.
It was only for her.
She made you her rock when you needed one yourself, having just lost your closest friend, and it made you grow up so much faster than you should've. You were hardly eighteen when you moved away to uni in NYC, and she cried the week leading up to it. She begged you to stay, saying she could keep you safe, and you figured she was just paranoid about the 'dangers of the big city' or didn't want to be alone, but you had to go.
You would've suffocated if you hadn't.
Your dad was twenty-eight when she found him hanging in the basement of your old house.
Lewis was eighteen when she found him hanging in the basement of your old house.
It was never a home after that, and you couldn't go back – that basement door gave you crippling night terrors and almost drove you to hurting yourself just to put the pain somewhere else.
You drank, you smoked, you tried cocaine and pot, but you couldn't muffle the noises – everyone was so damn loud when you were at school, and when you got to uni, it slowed down, but if you let it, it would take over.
It felt like you've been battling something inside your head since you turned eighteen and you thought about that basement door often – leading to episodes or spinners until you felt like it could swallow you whole. When you teased the thoughts, the spinners, you could come up with a reason for these deaths in your family. Maybe all three of you had been battling with the same thing. Maybe your dad handled them for as long as he could and maybe they dragged Lewis down because he couldn't fight it.
And maybe you're next.
