“No. Thank you. Thank you a lot,” Aaron’s dad says, and he gives her a thumbs-up and walks away.
“Your dad is awesome,” Tillie says when Aaron comes back and hands her a peach can of seltzer. It says PAMPLEMOUSSE on it, which she knows means grapefruit in French.
Aaron swigs his coconut LaCroix. “He is kinda okay, isn’t he?”
“I’m jealous.”
“I wish I could make your thing better. Your thing with your dad. He sounds sucky.”
“He really is. Do you know he just sat there? I, like, sobbed, and you know what he said?”
“What?”
“Nothing. Not a word.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah.”
“So what are you gonna do about it? You did amazing with the girl and with the guy who shall not be named. What about your dad?”
Tillie pinches the flesh of her right oblique between her left thumb and forefinger. “I don’t think there’s anything to be done. That’s just who he is. I could disown him, I guess. Or I could—I don’t know. Ugh. I’m so tired of having to do everything, you know? I just want it to be wireless.”
“Wireless?”
“Yeah. Like here’s how things work. You plug it in, the battery charges, and then your phone can run the app. And you need the app to run. The app may save your life, or make your day okay. But it doesn’t just happen, you know. I have to plug it in. I plug it in, and then things happen.”
The weirdest thing occurs then. She starts to feel tears rolling down her cheeks and she just lets them. She had no idea. That she felt so strongly. About wires.
“I just want things to happen without me, you know?”
“Wow,” Aaron says.
“Especially with my dad, you know? He should know. He should be different but he just isn’t. And that’s … sad, I guess.”
“It is.”
Tillie wipes her eyes. “I just think it’s his move.”
“How’s that working so far?”
“How’s what working?”
“Waiting for your dad to do something you want him to do?”
Tillie bites her lip, hard.
“I hate you, you know.”
“I hate you, too.”
“How can you be so smart about my shit, and so dumb about your own shit?”
Aaron rolls backward on his spine like some sort of yoga thing, then rolls up into a seated position. “It’s a gift,” he says.
Her parents and Britt are asleep, so Tillie is extra quiet when she gets home after hanging out first with Aaron, then with Molly.
It’s new, this thing of her being out late at night. Being with multiple friends. She can’t even count the number of nights she spent alone at home, and in just a couple weeks, everything’s changed.
She smiles. She thinks of Aaron, who is a real, true friend already. She thinks of Molly. They laughed a lot tonight. It was a little surreal. Amir, with whom she has major baggage, but also? They’re gonna be okay. She’s gonna be okay. And just thinking that makes her feel proud of herself. She’s brave. Very.
She takes chocolate hearts out of a plastic bag. She hopes her dad focuses on the message rather than the chocolate itself, because this is a CVS special, and she’s pretty sure they’re leftovers from Valentine’s Day, which was more than two months ago.
Tillie grabs a Post-it and a pen, and she writes, in her fanciest cursive:
She thinks about his silence earlier. And how wrong that was. And also, how that’s not her. She won’t be good at this and it’s gonna hurt, if he’s going to continue to act this way. And that’s how you get hurt. Opening your heart allows you to get hurt. But it’s also who she is.
So she places the chocolate hearts wrapped in red tinfoil in the shape of a big heart. Underneath, she signs her name.
As she turns off the lights and gets into bed, she prays that her dad will see the message and understand where it comes from. She prays he still has enough feeling in his closed heart to take that in.
CHAPTER 13D: MAY 4
The only way his dad would allow Aaron to go to the talent show is if either he went or Tillie went. Or both. Aaron decided on Tillie.
It’s weird being on the Fieldston campus for the first time in more than a week and it’s not even a school day. He feels like one of those jock kids who has a football game on Saturday and plays in it despite having too much of a cold to hit classes on Friday.
“This is posh,” Tillie says as they get out of the Uber and walk up the driveway toward the main building.
“Is it? More posh than Spence? Really?”
“Well … it’s more outdoorsy. More suburban, I guess. I’m kinda jealous. Must be nice to sit out on the picnic tables and eat lunch. Can you do that?”
“Sure, if you want to watch Archie and Veronica swap spit while you eat gluten-free pizza,” he says, and Tillie smirks as they head on to the theater.
Aaron’s still scheduled to sing, but, yeah. No. At one moment in the Uber, he had this thought: What if I just decide to sing at the last moment? He knows Tillie thinks it’s a bad idea, but what if this one time—
No. That time is over for him now. Not singing, necessarily. He may sing again at some point. What’s over is the fantasy world of him becoming a star. He’s just not star material. It hurts to think about, but all Aaron’s ever gonna be, musically or otherwise, is Aaron.
Tillie says that’s not such a bad thing.
So Aaron goes up to Sasha Turner, who holds the clipboard with all the acts, and he says, “Hey, Sasha.”
Her eyes light up. “Oh my gosh, Aaron! I wasn’t sure if you were going to—”
“I’m not,” he says. “I’m not ready. It’s like I’ve grown up, in a way, this whole experience—”
“Okay,” she says, cutting him off. “Sorry. Swamped.”
He nods and walks away, and as he does so, he grins a bit.
Yes, he’s still a little Aaron-ish, he guesses. And maybe that’s not such a terrible thing.
“So are you ready for this awful show?” he asks, and Tillie nods.
“You know, a talent show was where I did my thing about Amir.”
“Well, now that I’ve seen him—”
“Nope. Stop.”
He grins to tell her he’s kidding. Which he really is. He gets it now. Amir is off-limits and always will be.
“So how’s Daddy?” Aaron asks as they sit in their seats, exaggerating the length of the A sound in between the D’s.
“He’s fine. It’s all just … fine.”
Tillie still doesn’t really want to talk much about that. On Monday morning, she woke up and her dad was in the kitchen getting coffee, and she peeked her head in and he noticed and turned. He smiled at her.
“You’re a really special person, Tillie,” he said.
Her shoulders lifted. She put her head down and adjusted her mouth so that the smile wasn’t too eager.
“Sometimes a person—me in this case—is an asshole. I don’t know why I am. And then there are people like you. You shouldn’t have to do that.”
He went back to making his coffee and she stood there, unsure what to say, not wanting to upset this delicate balance that had suddenly been struck.
But then he grabbed his coffee and smiled at her as he brushed by her, reaching back one hand to tickle the small of her back, which is an old thing he used to do.
That was it. No further conversation. Not that day, not the next, not since.
She wasn’t sure if the cold war was over, if this was just … business as usual between her and her dad.
And somehow, it actually did bother her less now. The simple words he said to her had done something, at least.
“What’s it like to be back?” Tillie asks Aaron instead.
Aaron smiles gently, knowing he’s hit a spot Tillie can’t talk about yet.
“Fucking weird,” he says. “In fact, you wanna …”
He stands and walks toward the exit. The show’s about to start, a
nd Tillie doesn’t understand, but she follows him, in case he’s not okay, in case it was, as she thought, too soon to come back. Too loaded because of the talent show and him not singing.
Outside, he runs to a picnic table. She chases him, a little worried. He lies down on the table and pats the space next to him.
“Okay,” she says, and she climbs up and puts her head next to his, her body in the opposite direction, so that their heads are touching.
“I’ve always wanted to do this,” he says.
“Flame out and get depressed and miss school and come back for a talent show and not sing in it?”
He blows a raspberry. “I’ve always wanted to lie like this, on this table, and look up at the underside of this tree, with a friend. But I’ve never really had a friend I would trust enough to ask, who wouldn’t blow me off or reject me.”
“Aw,” she says quietly, her body heating up from the compliment.
“And here you go and besmirch me, just when I’m being emotional, and nice, and it’s just too much …”
He makes sure his tone shows her that he knows he’s doing that thing, where he acts all emotional. It’s because of all they’ve been through. She knows it. She does it, too, sometimes. Melodrama is easier than constant real emotion.
Tillie stares up at the tree and thinks of branches. The interconnectedness of them all, and the base, the tree, as their source. How one decision, one branch, may seem disconnected from the others but they’re all banded together. And one seemingly simple decision leads to another, and on, and how glad she is that she didn’t jump that day. If she’d jumped, she’d never have had … this. An odd moment of serenity under a tree that she’ll probably always remember. And Aaron. And everything. She’d never have learned that she’s stronger than she thought.
“I’ve decided to paint my room,” Tillie says.
“Yeah? What color?”
“I dunno yet. It’s pink, and that’s over.”
“You want help?”
“Sure,” she says, and they enjoy the night air, the faint sounds of talent show wafting in the breeze. “This is kinda fun.”
“Yup.”
She asks, “Do you like it?”
He takes the question to mean more than it means, because that’s what Aaron does, often. He thinks: Do I like what’s just happened, these last few weeks? All the shit I’ve gone through—we have—he corrects himself. No, of course not. He’s still not quite right in the head. But he’s better. Better than he was, that’s for sure. And he has Tillie. And she has him, and she’s definitely better. And that’s big.
He turns his head to the side and kisses, and even though the kiss lands above her head, he knows she feels it. “I like it a whole great deal,” he says.
AUTHOR’S NOTE AND RESOURCES
While on tour a few years ago, I got reprimanded. It was one of the first times I had spoken about suicide publicly, and despite the fact that the organization knew I was there representing The Trevor Project, I got called into an office by the person in charge of the youth group after my talk.
She told me it was deeply irresponsible of me to talk about suicide to young LGBTQIA+ people. That I may have done significant damage by doing so.
I was taken aback. In the end, we agreed to disagree, and we parted on less-than-pleasant terms. As I drove away, I wondered: Had I, in fact, done something irresponsible? Might I have, unknowingly, contributed to a teenager’s downward spiral by discussing my own battle with severe depression, my suicide attempt at twenty-seven, and my gratitude that I got a second chance at life?
In the end, I’ll say two things: One, I am not a trained counselor and I don’t have all the answers, so anything is possible; I could be wrong. That said, to my innermost self I believe that person was wrong. I know she had the young people of that organization’s best interests at heart, but I think she was incorrect about the impact of a person talking about depression and suicide to teens.
My strong belief is that talking about suicide does not, in general, lead young people to kill themselves. In fact, we need to talk MORE about suicide, to demystify it. We need to discuss the feelings of despair and depression, as well as the entirety of suicide, including the impacts. Including the alternatives. The discussion needs to be a complete one. In talking about suicide, we must be careful not to glamorize it. Not to create fantasies or magical thinking about suicide as some sort of answer to anyone’s struggles.
This book is my attempt at a complete discussion of suicide. To show, as objectively as possible in a fictional environment, all the possibilities for two young people who are struggling with suicidal ideation. What might happen if they jump, and what might happen if they don’t. The potential impacts on people we know as well as on people we don’t know. I know when I was at my lowest, I believed that if I were to not be alive anymore, no one would care.
That’s the thing about depression: It makes our brains lie to us. I believed that it wouldn’t matter if I were here or not, and I don’t imagine anyone could have convinced me otherwise. Looking back now, I realize with a sense of wonder that the world would be different if I had not lived past twenty-seven. For one thing, this book in your hands would not be here.
This is known as the butterfly effect, and it’s rather hard, in a moment of severe depression, to think about the impacts of your absence, and how they might compound over time. At twenty-seven, I could not have understood what it would have meant for me to die by suicide.
For those of you who struggle with depression, sadness, feelings of deep despair: You are not alone. You are never alone. There are no new feelings in the world. If you are feeling it, someone else has felt it before, and somebody else is probably feeling it right now.
If you are feeling depressed and hopeless, I beg of you: Talk about it! DO NOT keep it to yourself. Depression loves to linger in the dark and silent, and it is most dangerous there. Find a person who feels safe to talk to, at home or at school. A parent, a teacher, a counselor, a friend. If no such person exists, know that resources exist. I am including some of them below.
If a friend or loved one tells you that they’re depressed, listen to them. It can be easy to pass off depression as a phase, or something to “get over.” For someone with chemical depression, this is not how it works. Professional help is often needed. I’ve sat with teens from across the country, and the stories I’ve heard have chilled me. One young person told their father they were struggling. He responded, “You have nothing to be depressed about.”
This is a fundamental misunderstanding about how depression works. It can be about something, but also it can be about nothing. For some, it’s a disability at the neurotransmitter level, and being told to not feel the way we feel is a very hopeless feeling indeed. Or worse than that. Denial of depression often leads to untreated depression, which can be deadly.
Last but most crucially: You matter. You really, really matter. We want you here. The world wants you here, even when it feels like the opposite is true. It took me so many years to understand that I matter, and I’m extremely grateful that I stayed around long enough to learn that lesson.
RESOURCES:
If you or a loved one is experiencing suicidal thoughts, it is crucial that you get help immediately. There are many helplines you can call, and there may be one in your area that you can find online. Nationally in the United States, you can call 1-800-SUICIDE or 1-800-273-TALK. Either will put you in contact with a trained volunteer who will understand what you’re going through, will listen to you, and will offer resources about how to get help. These are available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. If you prefer to communicate via chat, you can go to imalive.org and chat with a trained volunteer at any time. In Canada you can call 1-833-456-4566, text 45645, or go to crisisservicescanada.ca. You can also call the Association québécoise de prévention du suicide at 1-866-277-3553 or Kids Help Phone at 1-800-668-6868 or kidshelpphone.ca.
LGBTQIA+ youth are particularly
prone to suicidal ideation. According to a 2016 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, LGB youth are almost five times as likely to have attempted suicide compared to heterosexual youth. The statistics are even more devastating for transgender youth. According to a 2015 study by the National Center for Transgender Equality, 40 percent of transgender adults have attempted suicide, and 92 percent of those questioned reported a suicide attempt before the age of 25. If you identify as LGBTQIA+ and are under 25, check out thetrevorproject.org. The organization offers a national hotline at 1-866-488-7386, and also offers options at its website for instant messaging (TrevorChat), over text messaging (TrevorText), and a social networking site for LGBTQIA+ under the age of 25 (TrevorSpace). If you’re concerned about an LGBTQIA+ friend, check out The Trevor Project’s resource page for tips on helping a friend who is struggling:
thetrevorproject.org/resources/preventing-suicide/
A quick note on the importance of allies to LGBTQIA+ youth: According to a 2019 study by The Trevor Project, LGBTQIA+ youth with at least one accepting adult in their lives were 40 percent less likely to report a suicide attempt in the previous year. For resources on how to be an ally to LGBTQIA+ youth, check out:
engage.youth.gov/resources/being-ally-lgbt-people
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writing this book was an overwhelming process, and as I sit here, trying to figure out whom to thank, it feels similarly daunting. It took more than two years to write this, and during that time countless people helped me.
First, I feel the need to thank the people who were there for me when I almost didn’t make it. I will start there. Thanks to Rhonda Ross, Brigit Beyea, Sonia Pinto-Torres, Adam Strassburg, Joanna Gajewski, Telisa Fowlkes, Josh Singer, Alain Silverio, Ratiya Ruangsuwana, Jebeze Alexander, Vagnes De La Rosa, Terry Mullane, Justin Blake, Peter Flamm, Samera Nasereddin, Eliza Mason, and the rest of my incredible support system back when I was a teenager. Without you, I’m not here anymore. That’s just a fact.
Thanks to my chosen family in the present. You know who you are, and I would feel terrible if I left out any names. Special thanks to Lisa McMann, who is always there for me. I love you.
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