Jayden felt his lungs shivering every time he breathed. He couldn’t stop staring, and he knew the look on his face couldn’t be helping with how Darren much feel just saying all of that, but…
Really? Darren was…depressed? Darren? Of the sarcastic violin and the fear of hairdressers and the complete, blind ignorance of just how hot he looked in his hand-me-down leather jacket? What did Darren have to be depressed about? He had parents and a crazy brother and he was attractive and smart and could play the violin like a maestro, and probably the piano too, if he sat down and did it seriously…
And yet he was sitting opposite Jayden in this coffee shop saying he was suicidal and that he lay awake at night wanting to die. How was that even possible?
“I don’t…I don’t get it,” Jayden breathed. “How can you…?”
“I don’t know,” Darren snapped, throwing up his hands. “Don’t you think I know how stupid it is?”
Jayden scrambled for some sense to it. Darren had nothing to be depressed about. Darren didn’t know why he was depressed. What the hell was going on, then? “Do you…I mean…pills? A counsellor?”
“No.” Darren’s mouth twisted again, but not in the half-smile that Jayden liked. “My parents don’t know. Not really. We don’t talk about this kind of stuff. Father doesn’t exactly buy into depression as a real thing.”
Jayden winced. “So, um…I’m sorry,” he fumbled out, “but I just…why? I can’t…why?”
Darren pushed the pieces of shredded cup label into a tiny pile. “I don’t know,” he admitted. He looked wounded, somehow. He looked suddenly shy, in a way that was deeply unsettling. “I’m fucked up in the head and I don’t know why, and…I know it’s stupid, Jayden, believe me, I fucking know. And I’ve tried to get over it, I’m still trying, but it’s not working.”
“So…”
“Look, I’m just saying…This,” Darren waved a hand between them, “isn’t going to be fun. I’m not going to be fun. Maybe every now and then I’ll be in the right place in my head to have silly dates out and go to parties with you, but there’s going to be days when I don’t want to know either of us exist, and there’s going to be days when I’m too tired to play because I’ve been up all night destroying my room, and…and I can’t promise…I can’t promise that I won’t. You know. Stop.”
Jayden’s breath caught. “Stop, as in…”
“As in, chapel, Friday morning, flowers to Granelli and Sons.”
The flippancy was out of place. They were out of place. Sitting in this sunlit coffee shop talking about this. They should have met, had coffee, checked on the cinema listings on Darren’s phone, picked a stupid film, and gone on a proper date. Right now, Jayden should be working up the nerve to hold Darren’s hand in the dark, and then getting blindsided when Darren read his mind and did it for him. They shouldn’t be here, talking about this.
He swallowed and dropped his gaze to the table.
“I…” he said.
He didn’t know if he could handle this.
“I get it.” Darren shrugged, but his face was loose as if all the strings holding him up had been cut. “If this is too heavy. I do get it, you shouldn’t have to deal with this kind of shit. Not a month in with your first boyfriend. I’m not going to throw this coffee in your face if you want out.”
“I…” Jayden bit his lip. He couldn’t just dump him because he had problems. What kind of person did that?
But then, he wasn’t sure he could handle…that. Depression. Suicide. What if Darren killed himself? Jayden could barely handle being shoved into walls and locked into the bathrooms at school. How was he supposed to handle Darren having…being like that? What was he meant to do? What could he do?
“I need to think about it,” he found himself saying, and Darren nodded. Jayden felt like an absolute bastard.
“Okay. I’ll leave you to it,” he said, sweeping the dearly departed label onto the floor and standing, one hand already back in his jacket pocket. “Let me know, whatever. And I really do understand if you decide you can’t deal with this shit.”
“Don’t be so nice about it,” Jayden said numbly and Darren shrugged. It hurt worse if Darren was nice about it.
“Why not?” he asked. “I get it. It’s not like I can handle it either.”
And then he was gone—and Jayden didn’t know what to do.
Chapter 12
Jayden was picking the label off his cup and shredding it into little pieces.
He was beyond nervous. He had spent the whole of yesterday evening scouring the internet about depression, and…
And it was awful.
Jayden never had met anyone with depression before. He heard about the odd famous suicide in the news, and the people who threw themselves under trains and buggered up the transport system for hours, and there was that godawful poster of a crying woman in the nurse’s office at school with the number for The Samaritans on the bottom, but that was about all. He hadn’t known where to begin.
The Wikipedia page, for once, hadn’t really helped. Nor had the NHS website because he didn’t know the first thing about any kind of depression, so how was he to know whether Darren had manic depression or clinical depression or bipolar disorder or what? He didn’t even know if he’d tried to ever commit…well. The Wikipedia page was a mile long and full of things Jayden didn’t understand, and the NHS had been bare and unhelpful and just littered with if you ever feel depressed, talk to your GP immediately…
A lot of pages talked about medication, but Jayden didn’t know if Darren took any. Some of them talked about counselling, and Darren had said he wasn't seeing one. He didn’t seem the type anyway. And Jayden didn’t know what cognitive behaviour therapy was meant to mean, and he knew nothing about Darren’s family, so he didn’t know what his support network consisted of. He didn’t even really know if it existed.
A lot of websites talked about causes, but Jayden didn’t know that either. They were maybe a bit more helpful, maybe. Some of them said how depression could be chemical, things going wrong in the brain, so maybe that was it. Maybe that was why Darren was depressed when, really, he didn’t have a lot to be depressed about. Or maybe he did have something to be depressed about, and he just hadn’t told Jayden. Did that mean he would grow out of it, like some of the pages promised teenagers did? Or did he mean he was just going to get worse and eventually…
The worst of it…
The worst of it was the amount of pages that said there was nothing to be done but to ‘support the patient.’ How? None of them had said how Jayden was supposed to support him, or how he was supposed to make him feel better. Not even suggestions. Some of them even outright said there was nothing he could do, and how could that be right? How could there be nothing? How could there be not one single thing that would…help? Even a little? Even for just a few minutes, take Darren’s mind off it, or make him happy, or…?
Because he was, that was the bit that Jayden couldn’t wrap his head around. He wasn’t like one of those stupid emo kids that hung out around the back of the bike sheds and boasted on Facebook about cutting themselves. He didn’t wear stupid black band shirts and cut his hair in a style designed to half-blind himself for one. He was happy sometimes, Jayden knew he was, the way he’d mess about on the piano in the theatre storeroom and bash out Irish folk music or funny versions of sitcom songs. The way he took the piss out of his teachers, especially the way Mr. Weber would conduct an orchestra like he was trying to guide a jumbo jet in to land. The way he laughed sometimes, and his whole face would just light up from the inside, those amazing pale green eyes suddenly warm and welcoming and…
How could that face be made by someone who was depressed? How was Darren capable of being depressed and being so happy at the same time? He couldn’t. Which meant he wasn’t depressed all the time, and yet the internet said there was nothing Jayden could to make him happy all the time instead?
How was that right?
And did that mean th
ere’d be times—Darren had called them ‘bad days’—when there’d be nothing Jayden could do at all? Would there be times when Darren wanted to…wanted to hurt himself or kill himself, and there’d be nothing Jayden could do?
They were…he was Darren’s boyfriend. Surely that had to mean something? Surely he had to mean something, mean enough to Darren to stop him? Right?
Only he’d heard of people who had whole families who’d killed themselves, so…
What if Darren killed himself? What if he got a phone call one day from his family that he’d killed himself? Or what if he didn’t, because Darren didn’t tell people anything, and he found out in the local paper or from one of the other orchestra kids or…what then?
He tried to imagine it, but couldn’t quite get his mind to grasp how that would feel. Awful, certainly. Horrible and awful and painful—but it was just academic, he couldn’t really imagine it. How he would react, how he would cope, what it would be like. People just…people didn’t kill themselves. It all boiled right back down to that. Jayden couldn’t imagine being unhappy enough to want to kill himself.
He understood sadness. He understood anger. He understood coming home from school and wishing the day had never happened. He understood being lonely, and not fitting in, and having nobody to talk to, because Darren had plugged so many of those gaps, before they’d ever even kissed. But he didn’t understand wanting to actually die because of it. He didn’t…
He didn’t know where the hell Darren was coming from.
But…Darren didn’t either. He’d said he didn’t know. He’d agreed that he didn’t have things to be depressed about, not really. Okay, Jayden got the impression that Darren’s parents were pretty intense, high-pressure ambition freaks, but it wasn’t like Darren was thick or useless. He was amazing at the violin, even if he didn’t seem to like it very much, and he was just as good at the piano, at least to Jayden’s untrained ears, and Jayden had seen him doing his maths homework and he wasn’t stupid. He was what every parent wanted, surely? Mum was always bragging to her mates at Stars about how Jayden was doing with his scriptwriting and his schoolwork, so why wouldn’t Darren’s?
Jayden didn’t get it.
And as long as he didn’t, how was he supposed to handle…this? How was he supposed to deal with a boyfriend who might go off and jump off the canal bridge at any minute? What if they argued? What if he blew Darren off to spend time with Charley? What about the annual trip to Penzance in August with Mum and Dad?
Jayden couldn’t do it. Which was why he was sitting in a coffee shop shredding a paper label. He’d invited Darren out, and he was going to break it off. Hopefully they could still be friends, even though Jayden mentally cringed at the stupid phrase, but he didn’t want to lose Darren entirely. He just couldn’t handle…that. That was too much. He was sixteen and he had exams and…he couldn’t be handling that too.
But this was going to hurt. He didn’t want to do it. He felt awful already. Who did that? Who dumped someone because they were ill?
He was distracted from his circular thoughts by his phone, and Darren’s lack of English. Sry, runin l8 bloody weir!!
Jayden didn’t know who ‘Weir’ was, but he presumed Darren’s violin teacher. He’d had a practice lesson that morning and had spent most of Friday night spamming Jayden with texts that turned technical music terminology into insults. For someone who could barely write English, he was quite creative, really.
Do you want a large latte again? he replied. I’m buying. It seemed only fair.
not gna say no ;)
It gave him something to do for a few minutes, and a new label to shred; the barista gave him a funny look, but declined to comment. Thankfully. Jayden was beginning to feel twitchy with…with…impending doom. Stupid phrase, but it worked. Oh God, what was he going to say?
And then Darren arrived and Jayden was momentarily distracted.
He had a thin, worn-down dark green hat with earflaps. Like the Russian ones, but less fluffy. And his hair was escaping around the edges in a squashed sort of halo of dark brown, and he was flushed because it was really windy outside and he had a folder clutched to his chest that was puking sheet music everywhere and he looked…
Jayden swallowed. Focus, he told himself sternly. Just keep focus.
“Sorry,” Darren said and dropped the leaking folder onto the table. “Woman just won’t shut up. She wants me to try a new piece.”
“Vivaldi?”
“Thankfully, no,” Darren drawled, tugging off the hat—the curls exploded into static-laden life—and wrapping both hands around the paper cup Jayden pushed towards him. “God, that’s better. Thanks. And no—Tartini, actually.”
Jayden had never heard of him.
“He did a piece that has a shit-ton of trills…”—Jayden didn’t know what they were either—”…and she’s decided it’s time I learned it.”
“Do you…want to?” Jayden tried delicately. Darren hated Vivaldi. Sometimes, Jayden thought he hated the violin too. He certainly didn’t like it, and Jayden had never seen him look happy while he played. Not like the piano. He just looked…sombre and stiff and…
Depressed, his brain supplied.
Darren shrugged. “Mm. It’s an interesting one. Sounds good, when it’s done properly, it’s a decent piece. Tartini’s more…varied than Vivaldi, so I don’t mind. But frankly, I think she’s ahead of herself. I’ve only just mastered doing one or two trills in a piece, not a few million.”
“I have no idea what a trill is,” Jayden confessed.
“I’ll send you a recording,” Darren replied promptly. “Anyway. Lesson aside. How are you?”
Jayden pinked. “Um. I’m okay,” he said awkwardly. Part of his brain urged him to just say it, just open up the conversation and say it, and the other part…
The other part wanted to just carry on, because Darren was flushed and ruffled and amazing and talking about music like it was the most natural thing in the world to talk about and…attractive. Stupidly attractive, like he’d been from the very first day Jayden had met him. Even if he’d held a bow to his throat and been kind of rude. And blunt.
And okay he was still kind of rude and kind of blunt, but…
“Are you ready for the play?” he asked instead.
Darren grimaced. “Don’t remind me.”
It opened Friday night, and Jayden was looking forward to it. He always watched the opening nights, because they were the rawest and best performances for learning where he needed to adjust the script for next time. Darren didn’t seem so keen.
“You agreed,” Jayden reminded him.
“Yeah and never again,” Darren returned. “I don’t do acting.”
“Why not? You’re good at it. Well, snarky acting,” Jayden allowed. It was the only thing the role called for beyond improvised string music.
“I don’t do standing up in front of hundreds of people and getting stared at,” Darren said flatly.
“…You’re in an orchestra. You’ve done recitals.”
“And nobody gives two shits about you when you’re playing,” Darren pointed out. “It’s about the music, not the musician. Acting? People are watching. Friday? They will be watching me. And I get stage fright.”
“Really?”
“Don’t give me that look.”
“Sorry, but,” Jayden had to smile, “I just can’t imagine you getting stage fright. You’re so…”
“Good at covering up the fear,” Darren finished.
“Confident,” Jayden corrected.
“See previous answer.”
Was that it? Was it all just a mask that Darren wore? The thought hurt, in a way, because Jayden knew that he’d seen past that front sometimes, and his heart clenched at the idea of Darren hiding anything. Darren was amazing. He shouldn’t have to hide things, he should just be all out there and happy with everything he did.
But Jayden wasn’t a little kid anymore. He knew nothing was ever that simple.
; “Hey, hello?”
“Sorry.” He jumped when Darren tapped the back of his hand. “Sorry, um…thinking.”
“About what?”
Now. Do it now. Do it now, get it over with, let Darren walk away. Now, now, now.
Then Darren raised his eyebrows, rotated his wrist to prompt Jayden to speak, and looked so…calm and expectant and…and…okay. He looked okay. He was half-smiling, he was chatty (for Darren), he was fine. And Jayden’s heart was straining towards him. He wanted to hold his hand, wanted to kiss him, wanted to…
Wanted to forget the whole stupid idea. Wanted to be with him, no matter what. Wanted to watch him be amazing on Friday night and know that they were together, that Jayden had some claim to him.
“Nothing,” he said and pushed his worries away. “Friday. You’ll be great. I promise.”
Chapter 13
The play ran for a week, and it opened on a Friday night. Darren had made his excuses—not, he suspected, that Father had paid much attention to the blatant lie—and it had only occurred to him exactly why he had avoided drama since he was about eight.
Namely: he was petrified.
In a way, it was oddly preferable. It had been…a bad week. He’d woken on Monday with that crushing weight on his chest, and even Jayden had picked up on it, watching him throughout Thursday’s dress rehearsal with a pinched, anxious expression. So to be feeling anything at all was definitely preferable to that odd, bleeding-out lethargy, but…
But then the feeling was sheer terror.
Scott laughed at him for it. Darren had been performing music on stage since he was eight years old and had never felt fear then. But acting on stage was something entirely different. The only time he’d get attention was if he fucked up, and Darren had been too good for too long to fuck up in a recital. Acting…acting was something else entirely.
In short: god-fucking-damn Jayden and his flustered enthusiasm for this poncing about onstage crap. Darren was going to kill him.
“Hey.”
And speak of the devil.
Jayden didn’t act, as far as he’d told Darren. An ironically similar case of stage fright. “Nobody pays any attention to the playwright,” he’d said. “And you know, a whole audience just staring at you—I couldn’t.”
Vivaldi in the Dark Page 10