My Heart and Other Black Holes (2 page)

Nothing scares me more than a failed attempt. The last thing I want is to end up in a wheelchair, eating pulverized food and being watched around the clock by some sassy nurse who has a not-so-secret obsession with cheesy reality TV.

And that’s why lately I’ve been eyeing the Suicide Partners section. I guess the way it works is you find some other sad excuse for a person who lives pretty nearby and you make your final plans with them. It’s like peer pressure suicide, and from what I gather, it’s pretty damn effective. Sign me up.

I scan some of the postings. None of them are a good fit for me. Either they’re way too far away (why do so many people in California want to blow their brains out? Isn’t living
by the ocean supposed to make you happy?) or they’re just the wrong demographic (I really don’t want to get mixed up with some adult who’s having marital troubles—stressed-out soccer moms are not for me).

I contemplate composing my own ad, but I’m not really sure what I’d say. Also, nothing seems sadder than reaching out, trying to find a partner, and then getting rejected. I look over my shoulder and see that Mr. Palmer is a few rows away. He’s massaging Tina Bart’s shoulders. He’s always massaging Tina Bart’s shoulders. Maybe he isn’t as happy with Mrs. Palmer as I thought.

Mr. Palmer catches me staring at him and shakes his head. Flashing him my sweetest grimace, I pick up the phone and dial the next number that’s on my log: Samuel Porter, who lives on Galveston Lane.

As I’m listening to the familiar ring of the phone, I hear my computer beep. Damn. I’m always forgetting to mute the volume.

Laura, the middle-aged lady who works next to me and wears lipstick that’s too bright for her jaundiced complexion, raises her eyebrow at me.

I shrug. “I think the software is updating,” I mouth to her.

She rolls her eyes at me. Laura, apparently, is a human bullshit detector.

Mr. Samuel Porter doesn’t answer his phone. Guess he’s
not craving piña coladas. I hang up the phone and click back to Smooth Passages. Looks like it beeped because someone posted a new message in the Suicide Partners forum. It’s titled “April 7th.” I open it:

I’ll admit I used to think this was stupid. The whole point of killing myself is so I can be alone forever so I never understood why I’d want to do it with someone else. But that’s changed now. I’m nervous I’ll chicken out at the last minute or something. There are other things, too, but I’d rather not get into that here.

I only have a few requirements. One, I don’t want to do it with anyone who has kids. That shit is too heavy for me. Two, you can’t live more than an hour away from me. I know this might be hard since I live in the middle of nowhere but for now I’m sticking to that. And three, we have to do it on April 7th. That date isn’t negotiable. Message me for more information.

—FrozenRobot

I check FrozenRobot’s stats and try not to judge the screen name. But, FrozenRobot, really? I understand that everyone on here is a little bit, okay, a lot emotional, but still. Have some dignity.

FrozenRobot is apparently a he. He’s seventeen, so only one year older than me. That’s fine. Oh, and he’s from Willis, Kentucky—that’s about fifteen minutes away.

A surge jolts through my bones and I vaguely remember that this is what excitement feels like. FrozenRobot has perfect timing. Maybe, for the first time in my life, I’m lucky. This must be a sign from the universe—if the only time you get lucky is when you’re planning your suicide, it’s definitely time to go.

I read the message again. April 7, that works for me. Today is March 12. I can maybe last another month or so, though lately each day feels like an eternity.

“Aysel,” Mr. Palmer says again.

“What?” I say, hardly paying any attention to him.

He walks so he can stand behind me and taps my computer screen. I try to minimize the window. “Look, I don’t care what you do in your free time but don’t bring it to work. Got it?” His voice sags like an old couch cushion. I’d feel bad for Mr. Palmer if I had any pity saved for anyone else but me.

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that Mr. Palmer isn’t familiar with Smooth Passages. He probably thinks I’m looking at some heavy metal fan site or something. Little does Mr. Palmer know, I like my music soft and instrumental. Didn’t his parents ever teach him not to buy into stereotypes? Just because I’m a sixteen-year-old girl with unruly curly hair who wears dark striped shirts every day doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate a nice violin solo or a smooth piano concerto.

Once Mr. Palmer walks away, I hear Laura scoff. “What?” I say.

“Don’t you have the internet at home?” Laura asks, frowning at me. She’s sipping the complimentary coffee, and the plastic mug’s rim is stained with her god-awful berry burst lipstick.

“Don’t you have a coffee maker at home?”

She shrugs, and just when I think the conversation is over, she says, “Work isn’t the place to be fishing for dates. Do that on your own time. You’re going to get the rest of us in trouble.”

“Right.” I look down at my keyboard. There’s no use explaining to Laura that I’m not searching for a date, or at least not that kind of date.

I stare at the pieces of cheese crackers that are stuck in the spaces between the F and G keys, and that’s when I decide—I’m going to message back FrozenRobot.

He and I have a date: April 7.

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 13

25 days left

T
he only class I really like is physics. I’m no science genius, but this is the one class that I think may have some answers to my questions. Ever since I was little, I’ve been fascinated by the way things work. I used to take apart my toys, studying how all the little pieces fit together. I would stare at the independent parts, picking up an arm of a doll (my half sister, Georgia, has never forgiven me for the autopsy I gave to her Prom Date Barbie) or the wheels of a car. Once, I dismantled my father’s alarm clock. He came in and found me sitting on the faded beige carpet, the batteries rolling around by my sneakers.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Breaking it so I can learn how to fix it.”

He put his hand on my shoulder—I remember his hands, big, with long thick fingers, the type of hands that make you feel both scared and safe at the same time—and said, “You know, Zellie, there are enough broken things in the world. You shouldn’t go around breaking things just for the fun of it.” The clock stayed dismantled for years, until I eventually threw it away.

Anyway, physics at least feels useful to me. Unlike English, where we’re reading poems by depressed poets. Not helpful. My teacher, Mrs. Marks, makes this big production out of trying to decode what the poets were saying. From my perspective, it’s pretty clear: I’m depressed and I want to die. It’s painful to watch all my classmates tear apart each line, looking for the significance. There’s no significance. Anyone who has actually been that sad can tell you that there’s nothing beautiful or literary or mysterious about depression.

Depression is like a heaviness that you can’t ever escape. It crushes down on you, making even the smallest things like tying your shoes or chewing on toast seem like a twenty-mile hike uphill. Depression is a part of you; it’s in your bones and your blood. If I know anything about it, this is what I know: It’s impossible to escape.

And I’m pretty sure I know a lot more than any of my classmates. Listening to them talk about it makes my skin
crawl. So for me, English class is like watching a group of blind squirrels try to find nuts. Mrs. Marks will say, “Let’s take a look at this line. Here the poet John Berryman says, ‘Life, friends, is boring.’ What do you think he meant by that?” My classmates all clamor, shouting out ridiculous things like “He didn’t have anyone to hang out with on Saturday night” or “Football season was over so there was nothing good to watch on TV.”

It takes all the restraint in the world not to stand up and scream, “He was fucking sad. That’s it. That’s the point. He knows that life is never going to get any different for him. That there’s no fixing him. It’s always going to be the same monotonous depressing bullshit. Boring, sad, boring, sad. He just wants it to be over.” But that would require me to talk in class, which would violate one of my personal rules. I don’t participate. Why? Because I’m fucking sad. Mrs. Marks sometimes gives me this look, like she knows that I know what John Berryman meant, but she never calls on me.

At least in physics my classmates aren’t desperately trying to make uncomplicated shit complicated. Nope, in physics, we’re all trying to make complicated things uncomplicated.

Mr. Scott writes an equation on the board. We’re learning about projectile motion. We’re studying the properties of an object in motion that’s under the influence of gravity only. There are all these variables like the angle the object is launched from and the initial velocity.

My eyes gloss over. Too many numbers. I start to daydream about gravity. Sometimes I wonder if gravity is the problem. It keeps us all grounded, gives us this false sense of stability when really we’re all just bodies in motion. Gravity keeps us from floating up into space, it keeps us from involuntarily crashing into one another. It saves the human race from being a big hot mess.

I wish gravity would go away and just let us all be a big mess.

Unfortunately, that’s not the answer to the question Mr. Scott is asking.

“Aysel, can you tell me the highest point the football reaches?”

I didn’t even know the object in the problem was a football. I give him a blank stare.

“Aysel,” Mr. Scott prompts. He pronounces my name in the accent he probably cultivated about a billion years ago when he took high school Spanish. The problem is my name isn’t a Latina one. It’s Turkish. You’d think Mr. Scott would’ve connected the dots by now.

“Uh,” I mumble.

“‘Uh’? Miss Seran, ‘uh’ is not a numerical answer.” Mr. Scott leans back against the whiteboard.

This makes the class laugh. Mr. Scott clears his throat, but it’s no use. He’s already lost control. I can hear their whispered insults, but it all sounds like a mumble of hisses to
me. And no matter what it is that they’re saying, it can’t be worse than what I imagine at night when I lie in bed wondering if it’s physically possible to claw away your own genetics.

The bell rings. Mr. Scott fumbles to assign us homework. Most everyone in the class leaves before they can write down the assignment. I stay seated and carefully jot it in my notebook. Mr. Scott gives me a sad smile and I wonder if he’s going to miss me when I’m gone.

Once the classroom is empty, I get up and leave. I walk down the hallway, my eyes glued to the dirty tiled floor. I force myself to pick up speed. The only thing worse than going to gym is being late for gym—I’m not really in the mood to run extra laps. Coach Summers is always talking about how running will strengthen our hearts so we can live longer. No extra laps for me, please.

This is my least favorite part of the day. And it’s not because I’m anticipating the horrors of sit-ups and dodge ball. No, I hate this part of the day because I have to pass by the memorial—the monolithic testament to my father’s crime.

I always try not to look, telling myself to keep my head down and turn the corner. But I can’t help it, I glance up and take it in. I feel my breath catch in my throat. There it is, the gleaming silver plaque, dedicated in memory of Timothy Jackson, former state champion in the 400-meter dash. The plaque is the size of a large serving dish, and it hangs on the
wall right outside the gym, reminding everyone that Timothy Jackson was going to be the first person from Langston to make the Olympics, but he died tragically at the age of eighteen.

What the plaque doesn’t say, but might as well, is that my father is the reason Timothy Jackson is dead. Yup, my dad is the stellar individual who slashed the Olympic dreams of the whole town. Every year on Timothy’s birthday, the news runs a special just to make sure no one forgets about him. It’s been three years since Timothy died, and believe me, no one is close to forgetting about it. Especially now, since Brian Jackson is about to qualify for the 400-meter dash. Yes, the exact same event. Brian’s trying to fulfill the dream his older brother was never able to attain—the local media can’t get enough of the story, my school’s hallways can’t get enough of the story.

I force my feet to move past the plaque and I walk into the gym, curling my hands into fists at my sides. As the sun glints off the polished wooden court, I wonder what my classmates are going to do with all their hate and anger and fear once they don’t have me here anymore.

I can’t wait until they don’t have me here anymore.

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 13

25 days left

W
hen I get home from school, I see Mom seated at the kitchen table. Our kitchen is narrow and tiny, and if I were to spread my arms out, I could touch each mint-colored side wall with the palms of my hands. Mom’s thumbing through bills, her neck craned in concentration, but when she hears the door, she turns to look at me. And there it is. The same facial expression she’s greeted me with for the past three years. It’s a cross between a wince and a frown.

Until three years ago, I used to spend the weeks with my dad and the weekends with my mom. But then after my dad
got locked away, Mom had no choice but to let me live with her and Steve.

Before my father’s crime, my mother used to look at me with a combination of love and longing, like I was a mirror into her past life, a bittersweet memory. Her dark almond eyes would glaze over, she’d tilt her head forward and her straight light brown hair would fall over her thin shoulders, and she’d squeeze my hands tightly, like if she gripped me hard enough, I’d transport her back in time. It was almost like I was her permanent bruise. Not a painful bruise, but a tender one made of melancholy memories.

I didn’t mind that. I secretly relished being the vehicle to her past life, her connection to Turkey and my father and her youth.

That all changed three years ago. Everything did. Now I live with her, Steve, Georgia, and Mike. She’d never say it, but I am an intruder in their happy home. An infestation. I’ve gone from being a bruise to an open festering wound. Evolution isn’t always a positive thing.