*this was one of the stories I wrote in Fiction writing class 2017.
Sick is the new black.
Not the kind of sickness that makes you drink Robitussin or Aspirin. Not the kind that makes you sit on the toilet for hours with both ends of your body emptying the contents of last night's dinner down the bowl. I'm talking about the hard core kind of sick. The one that starts eating up some pathetic teenage kid in the head and dumps him straight into the loony bin where he'd love to stay.
I live in a world where the sick part of getting sick is not the sickness itself but wanting to get sick. People wear sickness like a pair of trendy boots. They wear it on their faces like make up. They slap it over their skin like some cheap perfume that has to be reapplied every hour.
It's sickening. It's sickening the way these kids show off their sicknesses.
One minute there's Johnny Appleseed on top of a building that's low enough to see the tears streaking down his face, screaming "Fuck this goddam world!" and the next, he's plummeting towards the busy sidewalk, knees first. I can see the headlines now, alright: MENTALLY TROUBLED TEEN---AND HIS TRAGIC STORY, coming up next here on ABC news. Stay tuned, America.
Every night there's a story. A sad, depressing story of necks squashed by ropes, of wrists slashed by knives, of intestines dissolved by bleach. Take anything from my garage, my kitchen, my laundry room and it turns into a murder weapon in the hands of some sixteen-year-old who hates her parents and wants to kill herself because they don't understand whatever it is she's going through.
Every damn house I walk by, I can smell their tears and feel their fabricated despair. Every house blasts the same depressing Radiohead song over and over again, singing 'I'm a creep; I'm a weirdo; what the fuck am I doing here?
Well you know what the secret to happiness is, kids? If you don't want to be sad, don't fucking listen to sad songs!
*
The thing is, people are not supposed to die wanting to die. Truth be told, these kids never do. The moment they cut a little too deep, their hearts start panicking.
"Holy shit!" they'd pant and before they can convince themselves not to do it, they've got their other hand putting pressure on the gash on their arm that's starting to drip like a leaky faucet onto their mom's favorite bathroom tiles.
The moment the heels of their shoes leave the stool, the last thing their thoughts scream is, "Fuck!", like they accidentally did something bad.
And it's bad. It gets real bad afterward, for them and for those family members or relatives or whoever else they got away from.
And it gets real busy for me.
If there's one thing parents can't stand, it's not knowing why their precious child decided to empty a bullet in his brain because obviously they were raised never to be like that! And my job is to figure out why they did it.
I get about three calls per week from distraught parents sobbing and screaming into my right ear, asking me to clear up the shrouded question of why their children killed themselves. Of course, since I got my good eye on that shiny black vintage 1967 Chevy Impala that I can't afford, I grudgingly accept their case for the decent money they're offering me. Usually eight hundred bucks. On a good week I make about $2400.
These parents pay a crap load to know about their kids. It makes me wonder whether or not they realize that it should've been free.
*
The first call of the week is from a single mom. Let's call her Ms. Davis. Long story short, her son OD'd. Fifteen years old. Ten bottles. Gummy vitamins.
