The Bridge

by Bill Konigsberg

  “What about me?”

  Sarah pursed her lips.

  That ought to have been enough, but it wasn’t. Nothing was ever enough for him, and he hated himself for it.

  “What? Did I, like, suck?” he persisted. “I don’t care. You can tell me.”

  Sarah took a deep breath and tapped her fingers against the window.

  “I thought you were not great,” she said. “Your voice is just okay. I thought you kind of knew that. Sorry. I’m just being honest.”

  He laughed. He always laughed when his feelings were hurt. Also because it was a pile-on, and maybe she didn’t know it, but it was, and he was thinking, Great. Awesome. Thank you, Sarah. I cannot take a single thing more. Thanks a lot.

  But instead he said, “Yeah. I know. I kinda sucked.”

  Sarah looked relieved. “For what it’s worth, I thought almost everyone was really bad.”

  It wasn’t worth much, and when he stood to get off at the George Washington Bridge stop, he expected someone would ask why he was getting off there when he lived a hundred blocks south, but no one did. As he climbed the steps to the street, he thought: No one can ever know that this was the last straw. That I killed myself because Sarah Palmer didn’t like me in Rent. That’s too pathetic, even for me.

  It wasn’t just that, though. It was a lot of stuff.

  It was that he was tired of being so deeply sick of himself and his stupid brain.

  It was that he was tired of always fucking up.

  It was that he couldn’t see this ever changing.

  It was that the world ignored him so much that he figured it wouldn’t make a difference if one day he didn’t show up to life.

  It was that he even sucked at the things he thought he was good at.

  Witness the severely underwhelming performance of the video he’d posted last night on YouTube. Insignificant, but symbolic in its insignificance. “Walking Alone” was the track, and while he’d recorded it, he’d had a sense that this was the one where it all came together. The lyrics were real and he felt them deep inside. Maybe it was a little retro … but people liked retro, right? It was going to be his breakthrough on Spotify, make the Viral 50. He felt it in his bones.

  He’d come up with the lyrics in a fit of inspiration.

  There were times when his lyrics stabbed him in the gut. He’d come to know that feeling, when he wrote something that begged to be heard by others. He’d come to understand that those moments were real, and that’s why out of his maybe two hundred songs, he’d written music for only twelve.

  This was one of those.

  He opened GarageBand and in about an hour he came up with the music. He banged out a slow, somber dirge of a melody on the electric piano, and then he slowed down a retro beat from 120 bpm to 75, and the resulting sound was—haunting. He added a bass track that looped, and then his vocals. His singing, people said, was like Bob Dylan’s. (He knew this meant it wasn’t naturally pretty, but gritty was good to a lot of people, so it was good enough for him.) There was a yearning in the vocals that made his stomach buzz because people would hear it, and they’d just get it. They’d get him. They’d admire him.

  It was one of Dad’s late nights at Montefiore, so a long chat in his bedroom and a sharing of the new music wasn’t in the cards, and this one needed to be heard immediately. So he got on his YouTube channel and played it, and then came up with the genius idea to record a harmony and sing the vocals live. That’s the one he published, and then he sent out an email to every single person he knew, telling them he had recorded his best song ever.

  This was how it worked. This was how you went Viral 50. You made a good song, you got people talking about it on YouTube, you paid to send it off to Spotify, you caught the attention of an influential playlist maker, and bam! You’re Ed Sheeran.

  Then he waited. Hours. Seventy-four people on his email list. The number of plays? Six. Four or five of them were his, he was pretty sure.

  Out of seventy-four people, maybe one or two people had clicked play. And not a single comment or like.

  Was he that bad? What did everyone else know about him that he didn’t know? No comments or likes cut him from the inside, pierced his organs and hollowed him out until he was utterly cored.

  He remembers how he lay there last night, and he found a spot on his bedroom wall and he stared at it, the beige wall, so plain, so I-need-something-to-change-but-nothing-ever-does. He stared and he stared, thinking, This isn’t normal. Because he hadn’t ever stared at a spot before for hours, and if he could have moved, he would have gone online and searched staring at a spot on the wall for hours, but he couldn’t actually move. When his father came home and stopped by his open doorway, Aaron closed his eyes and pretended to be asleep with the lights on, and then, when Dad turned the lights out, he opened his eyes again, staring back at that same spot he could no longer see, and he wondered whether anyone would miss him if he just disappeared from the world.

  “Aar—?” his dad says now.

  “Wha— Yeah.”

  “Where are you, Aaron Boroff?”

  He pastes a smile on his face. One that even he’d believe. He’s that good an actor.

  “Bermuda,” he says. “Sorry, thinking of something funny.”

  Dad smiles. “Okay. You’re sure you’re all right?”

  Aaron cocks his head and looks at his dad out of the side of his eye. Dad laughs. “Okay. Just checking. Sleep tight?”

  “Bedbugs, you’d better not bite or there will be hell to pay,” Aaron says.

  Dad laughs again, hugs him, kisses him on the top of the head, and goes to his bedroom.

  Aaron is left alone, wondering how on earth his father would have reacted had Aaron been the one to jump.

  CHAPTER 2A: APRIL 18

  The news finally comes through overnight. When Aaron checks his phone after he wakes up, there it is on the Daily News website.

  Private School Girl Jumps from Bridge

  An Upper East Side private school girl was pronounced dead after she apparently jumped from the George Washington Bridge on Wednesday afternoon.

  The body of the 17-year-old girl was found on Wednesday evening in the Hudson River close to the bridge, authorities said. The injuries were consistent with someone who had jumped from a high distance.

  Port Authority police are notifying the family. The teenager’s name has not been disclosed.

  In the first four months of this year, there have been eleven suicides at the bridge. Seven of those have been teenagers.

  Simultaneously numb and peeved by the lack of information, Aaron tries Heavy.com, because they tend to sometimes go further than the traditional news sites in terms of publishing information, and he needs her name. There’s been nothing in the last twenty-four hours about a jumper. He tries Twitter, typing in the names of various private schools and the word suicide. Once he types Spence, a post comes up from fifteen minutes earlier.

  LYT @lyt_tenor

  It was a Spence girl who committed suicide. omg I didn’t know her! Tillie something?

  And then a response:

  MoseDuBose @mosedubose

  @lyt_tenor That’s seriously fukked up. Don’t know her

  Aaron types in Tillie Spence suicide, and a bunch of tweets come up.

  SammiLovesLemons @SammiQ10028

  Omg Spence people. Tillie Stanley suicide. Poor Molly This is gonna kill her I can’t even

  And then there’s this response:

  Natasha Out! @mikedropnatNYC

  @SammiQ10028 did you really just gloss over the fact that Tillie is dead and worry about fucking Molly Tobin, aka the reason why? You are literally the worst person.

  Followed by this:

  SammiLovesLemons @SammiQ10028

  @mikedropnatNYC First off RIP Tillie Stanley. Second no one is talking to you. Ever. Remember that.

  Followed by this:

  Natasha Out! @mikedropnatNYC

  @SammiQ10028 This. This is a lovely example o
f just the kind of online bullying that killed Tillie, so … congratulations on that. #worldsworstperson

  SammiLovesLemons @SammiQ10028

  @mikedropnatNYC so you calling me the world’s worst person isn’t online bullying but what I said is? Because I have friends and you don’t? #wrongpersonjumped

  Aaron closes his eyes. Tillie Stanley. He didn’t see her up close, but she didn’t look like a Tillie Stanley. Could it have been another jumper? He types Tillie’s full name into Google Images and one of the photos that comes up is of three teenage girls at a formal dance or a gala of some sort. One is Black and has a large smile. Another is white, short, and skinny with pale blond hair. The third is Asian, short and wide, and she looks like she’s been caught mid-sentence, because her mouth is half-open. Aaron’s heart crashes into his stomach as he realizes it’s the third girl. He stares into her eyes and mouths, Sorry, Tillie Stanley, rest in peace. Why why why didn’t he just—say something? Go over to her? Stop being so damn selfish all the time. He’s so selfish, so useless.

  His father knocks on the door with his usual knock-pause-knock-knock-pause-knock-knock-knock rhythm.

  “How’s Aaron?”

  Aaron groans. It’s like he’s on autopilot. This is the role he plays. Tired, lazy teenager. But his heart isn’t in it today.

  “You almost ready for school?”

  “Yes,” Aaron says, remembering he did zero homework yesterday, because, well. “Coming.”

  It’s silent on the other side of the door, and he doesn’t hear footsteps walking away.

  Aaron gets up, lunges into his open closet, and puts on a tattered gray robe he sometimes wears. He opens the door.

  “Morning, Father dearest,” he says.

  His dad wrinkles his nose and lunges his face forward to sniff. “Aaron. You gotta wash that. Immediately. Or burn it. I think I need to get another Magda, don’t I?”

  “I can do laundry, Dad.”

  “You can, yes. But you don’t. And I’m sorry. Not the way to greet a day. I apologize. Good morning, dearest son.”

  Aaron bows respectfully. Inside his rib cage is the remnant of what he just read, but he pushes it down, caches it in his gut, along with all the other stuff from yesterday.

  His dad is regarding him with much the same expression he had last night. “I swear that something’s not right. Are you depressed, bud? You know you can tell me, right? That I would do anything, anytime, anyhow, to help you? That I’d stop the world for you?”

  “Yeah,” Aaron says. “You’d stop the world. I know.”

  It’s the word. Depression. He gets it, that less than twenty-four hours ago he nearly died. But the word doesn’t feel … apt. Insofar as depression means sad, it’s kind of like, yeah. He has sadness. But also he has happiness, at random moments, and silliness, most of the time, and weirdness, just about always. His feelings are his. They don’t fit in a box and have a tidy label. A lot of things could happen and he’d feel better. Like if people commented on his songs, or laughed when he said things. He’s experienced it. One laugh, and then the rib crush? It’s like it never existed. That’s not depressed; that’s Aaron-esque, he guesses. Anyway, depression is interior. He knows that from his dad. This thing is just—his life is broken. Not his brain.

  His dad is studying him like he’s a science project, perhaps something he’s grown in a petri dish.

  “I got my eye on you, mister,” he says.

  Aaron closes his left eye and squints his right. “And I got my eye on you, madame.”

  His dad smirks and rolls his eyes. “Breakfast?”

  “Cinnamon toast up. Orange juice, two small ice cubes. The round kind.”

  His dad bows, which Aaron knows is a tribute to one of Aaron’s signature moves. “Showerup. And burn that robe, okay? I love you?”

  Aaron laughs. If there’s one thing in the world that’s not in question, it’s his dad’s love.

  “And you I love?” he says back, à la Yoda, and his dad smirks again and leaves him alone with his thoughts and his odiferous robe.

  In the shower his brain does its Aaron thing, skipping from one random thought to another, which is why he’ll never be a scientist or a doctor or a lawyer or anyone who needs to have cogent, normal, focused thoughts. He thinks about Tillie Stanley, and a shiver runs through him despite the piping hot water running down his back, so his brain switches over to Mr. O’Mahoney from middle school, who still is and will always be his go-to, and his butt in gray coach’s shorts, and Avenue Q, and today is a new day, and he’s gonna push all the awful down, and no one will ever, ever know about yesterday, and thank god he didn’t succeed, and simultaneously he wishes he did, because he didn’t do his creative writing assignment and Ms. Hooper will give disappointed face, which is his least favorite Hooper expression, and Mr. O’Mahoney, bending down to pick up a soccer ball, and good god, man, they should sculpt that thing out of marble and make a monument, and is he ever going to have actual sex, and soap! He’s standing there, wet-but-soapless. How is it he sometimes forgets the soap, that might be a slight issue if he ever does want to have actual sex, and is it possible that Evan Hanson is gay? Not Evan Hansen from the show. Real Evan Hanson from school. Can you imagine having a name and then suddenly your name is a show and the rest of your life, every time you meet someone, it’s like, Are you Evan Hansen from the show? He would change it. He would totally, totally change it, and but so anyhow Evan Hanson, senior, sometimes theater-doer, and that taxi ride to the west side from Cecil’s party together and it was so awkward and so delicious and maybe touched by a little sexual tension? Hard to know, hard to know. But Tillie, Tillie Stanley falling, what’s next, what happens after? His mother—what would she have thought if he had—would she have thought it was her fault? His dad definitely should know it wasn’t—

  There’s a knock on the bathroom door, and he comes to, realizing he has no idea how long he’s been standing there getting pelted by water.

  “You okay in there?”

  “Uh, yeah. Peachy!”

  “There’s cinnamon toast up, getting soggy.”

  “Okay!”

  Aaron finishes up. He tries to focus. But every time he does, he returns to the photo of Tillie, playing in his mind.

  So he unfocuses again.

  Across town, Winnie and Frank Stanley sit on a couch in their living room, motionless.

  Winnie feels like the police cut her midsection open and pulled out her organs one at a time with their news, saving her heart for last. She isn’t sure a time will come when she’ll be able to get up from this couch. She may live here now.

  Frank is silent. No surprise there.

  For his part, Frank holds his breath. He ignores the devastation lodged in his torso, the wreckage that is his throat and neck, and he refuses to breathe. He has to get out of here. As soon as he can.

  Britt is in her room, staring at her phone, which isn’t on. Maybe if she keeps staring, the world will rewind to before the police came. Before this thing. Which doesn’t make sense. She wants her dad to come in and tell her it isn’t true. It’s just a bad joke. A prank. She wants her mom to make it go away.

  Nobody comes by. She keeps staring at the blank screen.

  On the subway, Aaron sits next to Topher Flaherty, who goes on and on about Nimbus and Rage, the Flower, and some rave he went to that interests Aaron not in the least. Sarah gets on at Eighty-Sixth and sits on the other side of him.

  “Hey, did you do Spanish?” she asks.

  Aaron shakes his head, forcing his brain to forget what she said yesterday about him in Rent.

  “Shit,” she says. “What, were you, like, gaming all night?”

  He scratches his nose. “Something like that.”

  “Maybe Ms. Higuera won’t check today.”

  “I hope she wears something floral, is all I know.”

  Sarah laughs. “I think there’s a decent chance of that.”

  “Maybe it’s the trend in old people? To have b
ig orange and pink lilies instead of breasts?”

  Sarah laughs again. “Probably.”

  “I’m considering a line of clothing for boys, pants where the crotch is a huge tulip.”

  “Put your tulips on my crotch,” Topher says, and Sarah and Aaron stare at him like, Did you just say that?

  As they get closer to 242nd, the row across from Aaron fills up with Fieldstonians, kids he likes. Vonte Mendoza. Emily Claiborne. Jebeze. And he smiles, feeling a little at home for the moment, and utterly free of the hollowness in his gut. When it’s gone, it’s kind of hard to imagine it was ever there in the first place.

  Getting off the subway and waiting for the shuttle bus to school is always kind of sobering, because almost all the other students take a private bus from Manhattan. His dad can’t swing it financially. The kids are too nice to openly look down on a scholarship kid, but he feels the separation nonetheless. He’s a subway kid.

  The streets of the Van Cortlandt Park area and its elevated subway tracks covered in graffiti and its pizzerias and smoke shops quickly morph into the quiet, tree-lined suburban streets of Riverdale, and then here he is: another day at one of the most expensive private schools in the country.

  One time over the summer after ninth grade, when he was out at his mom’s place on Cape Cod—Sandwich, not a Hyannis mansion or anything like that—she paged through his yearbook and shook her head.

  “All the kids look like models. How do you even cope?”

  “Um,” Aaron said, screwing up his face.

  “Oh, honey,” his mom replied. “You’re nice-looking, too. I just mean. These kids are all so gorgeous!”

  “I know you think you just made it better, but you kind of didn’t,” he said, and she dismissed him with a wave of her hand.

  As he walks the quad toward the main building, this disparity morphs and multiplies in the fun-house mirror of his brain. The only reason they live in a nice apartment on Seventy-Eighth and Riverside overlooking the Hudson River is that his grandmother willed it to his dad when she died, back when Aaron was ten. The only reason he’s at the most expensive private school in the country is that his dad pulled strings and got him a nearly full scholarship. He’s not fabulous, he doesn’t really belong there, and he’s not good enough, and he’s an idiot dork moron geek loser sad clown bad bad bad.