Suicide Notes

held second period in the gym, and Jeff is in the nuthouse.”
“They’ll be told that you’re going to be out for some time,” Cat Poop
said. “That’s all.”
“Great,” I said. “And here I thought I’d found the perfect way to get out
of that algebra test.”
“As I told you earlier,” Cat Poop continued, “you’ll participate in group
sessions, as well as individual sessions with me.”
“Are those supervised too?” I asked him. “I mean, what if you try to,
you know, touch me inappropriately or something?”
Cat Poop stopped and turned to me. He handed me a sheet of paper.
“Here’s your schedule for today. You have some free time now. I suggest
you spend it getting to know the other people here.”
“Sure,” I told him as I folded up my schedule without looking at it.
“They seem like swell kids.”
“Give them a chance,” he said. “You might be surprised.”
“I’ll take your word on that,” I said. “You know, if this whole shrink
thing doesn’t work out, you should look into getting a job at Disneyland.
You’re good at this guide thing. You’d rock the safari ride.”
“I’ll see you later this afternoon for our session,” he said, without
missing a beat. “My office is at the end of the other hallway off the lounge.
One of the nurses will bring you down there.”
After he was gone, I unfolded the schedule and looked at it. My therapy
session was scheduled for three thirty. I looked at the clock on the wall. It
was only twelve thirty, which meant I had three hours to kill before the

---

Amazing Cat Poop tried to open up my head and see what was inside. Three
hours to spend doing nothing.
“I have arts and crafts at one o’ clock.”
I looked up and saw Sadie standing by me. She waved her sheet.
“Maybe I can make my dad that wallet he’s always wanted.”
“I was kind of hoping for archery,” I told her. “But I think I’m stuck
with nature trail and capture the flag.”
She laughed. “Welcome to Camp Meds,” she said. “Where the campers
are crazy and the counselors want you to take drugs.”
“Yeah, well, this camper isn’t sticking around long,” I told her,
crumpling up my schedule.
“How’s that?” she said. “You have a plan or something?”
“Sure,” I said, throwing the ball of paper into a trash can. “And it’s
really simple—I’m not crazy.”
Sadie laughed again. “Right,” she said. “None of us are.”
“I’m serious,” I said.
“So am I,” she told me. “You think I’m nuts?”
“You’re here, aren’t you?”
She nodded. “And so are you. You think you’re the only mistake
they’ve made?”
I looked at her face. She seemed totally serious. Then I remembered
what she’d said in group about trying to drown herself. She was crazy all
right, and the last thing I needed was more crazy.
“I’ve got to go to the bathroom,” I said. “I’ll see you later.”

---

Day 04
Here are the basic facts. My name is Jeff. I’m fifteen. I have a sister named
Amanda who’s thirteen, my parents are still married to each other, and all
four of us live in a perfectly nice house in a perfectly nice neighborhood in
a perfectly nice city that’s exactly like a billion other cities. My parents
have never beaten us, I’ve never been molested by a priest, I don’t hate the
other kids at my school any more than is normal for a kid my age, I don’t
listen to death metal, have an obsession with violent video games, or cut the
heads off small animals for fun.
That’s pretty much everything I told Cat Poop in our session today,
which is a lot more than I told him yesterday, when I basically sat silent in
the chair across from him until he told me I could go. Today, though, he
tapped his pencil against the pad of paper he was holding and just stared at
me. Apparently that’s what therapists do to get you to open up. The thing is,
it works. The longer he stared at me, the more I wanted to talk, if only to
make him stop tapping.
I didn’t want to talk about me, though, so I talked about everyone else in
the group and how weird they were. This was after our second group
session, in which I learned that Alice chews her hair, Juliet still loves Bone,
and Bone still loves his shoes. Very deep stuff.
“I don’t belong here,” I informed Cat Poop, thinking maybe this just
hadn’t occurred to him. “These people are seriously demented. It’s not good
for me to be around them. I might catch something.”
He didn’t answer me for a minute. He just kept tapping—tap, tap, tap,
tap, tap—until finally I told him if he didn’t stop I was going to grab the
pencil and stab myself in the throat. Then he put the pencil in his pocket.
“Why don’t you think you belong here?” he asked.
“Why do you think I do?” I said.
He started with the staring thing again but didn’t answer me. It’s
amazing how that guy can go forever without blinking. I tried not to blink
either, but my eyes got really dry. Finally I started talking again.

---

“Are you a real doctor?” I asked him. “I mean, with a diploma and
everything?”
“I’m a psychiatrist,” he said.
“So you’re not really a doctor,” I said.
“A psychiatrist is also a medical doctor,” he told me. “A psychologist
isn’t.”
“So what you’re saying is that you think you’re better than a
psychologist,” I said. “That’s not very nice. I mean, I bet they worked hard
too.”
“They’re two very different things,” he said.
“Where did you go to school?” I asked. “A real college or one of those
schools in the Caribbean?” I heard somewhere that people who can’t get
into real medical schools all go to the Caribbean, where apparently all you
have to do is drink fruity drinks and sit on the beach for four years and they
give you a diploma.
“I did my undergraduate work at the University of Chicago and got my
doctorate at the University of Toronto.”
“Canada,” I said. “So you did have to go to a foreign country.” I shook
my head like this was a big disappointment. “I’m sorry, doc, I’m just not
comfortable with your credentials. I think I need a second opinion.”
“I’ve been working with young people for ten years,” Cat Poop said. “I
assure you that I’m quite qualified to help you.”
“Ten years?” I said. I was kind of surprised. I didn’t think he was that
old. “What’d you do, start college when you were nine? Or by ‘working
with young people,’ do you mean you were a camp counselor or
something?”
I thought maybe he’d tell me how old he is, but he went back to staring.
I looked around the office, ignoring him. Besides his desk, there’s a couch
and another chair besides the one I was sitting in. And they’re not the
plastic kind we have in the lounge; they’re real leather ones that don’t make
your butt hurt. There’s a bookcase with a bunch of boring-looking books in
it, and a plant with pink flowers on top of it. On one of the walls there’s a
painting of a black-and-white dog holding a dead bird in its mouth.
He also has a window, and it doesn’t have wire in it. I guess they’re not
afraid the shrinks will jump out. I thought about trying it, but we’re on the

---

fourth floor, and I’m pretty sure I’d break my leg if I did. Then I’d be crazy
and in a cast, which is kind of overdoing it a little.
“I’m not like them,” I said when I got tired of looking at his office.
“Not like who?” he asked, as if he’d already forgotten what we were
talking about.
“Them,” I said, waving my hands around. “The rest of the group. I
mean, seriously, look at them. They’re crazy.”
“Why do you say that?”
I held up one finger. “One tried to barbeque a guy,” I said. I kept going,
holding up another finger for each person I ticked off. “One is in love with
another one who doesn’t seem to know who she is or where he is, and one,”
I concluded, pointing a final finger in the air, “threw herself into a lake for
no reason.”
“And you feel that you’re different from them?” he said.
“Um, yeah,” I told him. “Don’t you?”
“Tell me about your family,” he said.
Like I said, my family is totally normal. Well, as normal as most
families are, which means that sometimes we fight about stuff but the rest
of the time we get along. We’re so boring that I almost wanted to make up a
bunch of drama to tell Cat Poop, like that my mother locks my sister and
me in the cellar when we complain about what she made for dinner, or that
my father pressures me to be the best at everything. But my dad always says
he was never good at math either, and that my As in English more than
make up for my Cs in trigonometry. And my mom usually picks up dinner
at China Dragon or South of the Border because when she tries to cook the
stove catches on fire, so dinner at our house is never a problem.
“They’re great,” is what I said to Cat Poop. “Everything is totally
great.”
“Then why did you try to kill yourself?”
The guy has a one-track mind, and it’s getting on my nerves. I waited a
long time, to make him think I was seriously considering the question. Then
I sighed. “Okay,” I said. “I guess I can tell you.”
Cat Poop straightened up a little in his chair. He took the pencil out
again and held it over the pad, like he had to be ready to write down every
single word of a historic speech or something.

---

“I did it because . . .” I hesitated, blinking and sniffing a little, like I
might start to cry at any second. “I did it because . . . because I couldn’t
stand to live in the same world as Paris Hilton.”
I waited for him to yell at me, but he just sat in his chair, scribbling on
the pad. After a minute he looked up at me. “Somehow, I doubt Ms. Hilton
is responsible for your troubles. As annoying as she may be, she has not, as
far as I know, been responsible for any deaths. So why don’t you just tell
me the real reason?”
“There is no reason,” I said. I was getting angry because he wasn’t
listening to me. “I just did it. I’m a teenager. We get bored and do stupid
stuff. Now I’m over it and I want to go home.”
He looked at his watch and said we were done for the day. I just wanted
to get out of there, so when he told me they were taking me off one of my
drugs and that I might feel a little out of it tonight I just nodded and walked
out without looking at him.
Sure enough, when Goody gave me my afternoon paper cup of happy
tablets, one of the blue ones was gone. For a couple of hours I was okay.
Then I started feeling a little tired, and now I feel like someone kicked me
in the head a few thousand times.
It’s a really crappy feeling to realize that your entire outlook on your life
can be controlled by some little pill that looks like a Pez, and that some
weird combination of drugs can make your brain think it’s on a holiday
somewhere really sweet when actually you’re standing naked in the middle
of the school cafeteria while everyone takes pictures of you.
Metaphorically. Or whatever.

---

Day 05
I woke up in the middle of the night feeling like crap. I’d been having one
of those bad dreams that seem to go on and on but where nothing really
happens. In mine I was running through this big house being chased by
something. I kept going up staircases and down hallways, looking for a way
out. The whole time, whatever was chasing me was close enough that I
could hear it breathing, but far enough away that I couldn’t see what it was.
The house seemed to be nothing but hallways and stairs. No rooms.
There was nowhere to hide. All I could do was keep running. Finally, I ran
up a narrow staircase and came to a door. The Chasing Thing was right
behind me, scratching at the stairs as it climbed. Its breathing got louder and
louder, and all I wanted to do was get away from it before I saw its face.
But the doorknob kept turning in my hand, going around and around and
around.
Then something clicked in the lock, and I pulled the door open. I ran
inside, but there was no room there. There was just blackness. And then I
fell. It was like the floor just melted, and I was falling so fast that I couldn’t
even scream. Everything was black and cold, and the wind was shrieking in
my head.
Then I woke up and I was staring at the Devil’s face grinning down at
me from the ceiling.
I tried to go back to sleep, but my mind was racing racing racing. Only I
wasn’t really thinking about anything specific. It was just this stream of
words and half thoughts, like there were a thousand different channels in
my brain and someone was flipping through them one after the next. I kept
thinking about nothing until I was sure that if I stayed in my room for
another minute I really would go crazy. So I got up and went into the
common room. One of the night nurses, whose name I think is Nurse Moon
(okay, maybe it’s not, but I don’t know her real name) was sitting at the
desk that’s against the wall that faces the hallway. She was doing a
crossword puzzle.

---

“Do you need something?” she asked me. She sounded irritated, like I’d
interrupted her attempt to figure out 32 Down.
I shook my head. “I just want to sit,” I told her.
She nodded at the couch. I hadn’t noticed when I came in, but Sadie was
already curled up on it, watching something on television. The light
flickered on her face, but no sound was coming out of the TV. She’s such a
freak.
When Sadie saw me, she patted the couch beside her. “Sit,” she said.
I sat down next to her, not because she told me to, but because I didn’t
want to go back to my room. She was watching some black-and-white
movie where a woman and a man were standing in an old-fashioned living
room. The woman seemed upset, and the man was trying not to look at her.
“What do you mean you’re leaving, Reginald?” Sadie said in a sad little
voice.
I looked at her, wondering what she was talking about. She stared
straight ahead.
“I told you, Daphne, I’m going to Peru to search for the lost city of
Quezelacutan,” she said, her voice suddenly low and angry.
I turned back to the screen, and realized that she was making up
dialogue for the movie. As the woman threw herself at the man and grabbed
his arm Sadie said, “Take me with you!” She made sobbing sounds. I
couldn’t help but laugh a little.
“Shh,” said Sadie. “This is a drama. You can’t laugh.”
“Sorry,” I said.
“You be Reginald,” said Sadie.
“That’s okay,” I said. “This is your show.”
“Don’t be a jerk,” said Sadie. “Just do it.”
I didn’t feel like arguing, so I played along. In the film, the man was
trying to pry the woman off him. “I can’t take you to Peru, Daphne,” I said
quickly, trying to think. “There’s no room on the boat.”
“But I’m small,” Sadie said. “And I don’t eat much. Look how skinny I
am.”
“No, Daphne,” I answered. “Peru is no place for a woman, even a
skinny one. You’ll get malaria and die.”
“But I speak Peruvian!” Sadie exclaimed. “I learned it at Miss
Piffingham’s School for Girls.”

---

Reginald conveniently looked excited. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?” I
said.
“There’s a lot about me you don’t know, Reginald,” said Sadie as the
woman in the movie let go of the man and put her hands on her hips.
The movie went to a commercial. Sadie looked at me and grinned. I
shook my head. “You’re really nuts,” I said.
“It’s fun, isn’t it?” Sadie said. “I do it all the time. Usually my stories
are better than the real ones. At least I think so. I never actually listen to the
real ones. But I’m pretty sure mine are better.” She looked back at the TV.
“Couldn’t sleep, huh?”
I nodded. “It feels like there are twenty-three people living in my head,”
I told her.
“Only twenty-three?” Sadie said. “Lucky you.” She looked over at
Nurse Moon, then leaned toward me. “They took you off the Wonder
Drug,” she whispered.
“The what?”
“The Wonder Drug. It’s what they put you on when you come in, so that
you don’t freak out or try to hurt yourself. Once they’re pretty sure you
won’t, they take you off it. You must have been a good boy. I was on it for a
whole week.”
“I wish I was still on it,” I said. “This sucks.”
“This is the part where they try to make you remember,” said Sadie. She
looked at my wrists. “Is it working?”
Without realizing it, I’d pushed one sleeve of my pajamas up and was
rubbing the gauze that circled my wrist. I stopped, and let the sleeve fall
back where it was.
“It will go away,” Sadie told me, turning back to the television. “The
stuff in your head. Little by little.”
I didn’t respond. I just sat and watched the television. “Do you
remember?” I asked after a while.
Sadie nodded. “I wanted to float away,” she said, her voice sounding all
dreamy. “I was sure I could breathe underwater if I tried hard enough. Like
a mermaid.”
“But did you really want to die?” I asked.
She laughed. “Maybe. Maybe not. It didn’t matter. And then he jumped
in and saved me, anyway.” She looked at me with her blue eyes. “Who

---

saved you?”
I shrugged. “The paramedics, I guess.”
Sadie shook her head. “No, they just did the work. Someone else had to
save you first. Who called them?”
“My parents,” I said.
“Then that’s who saved you,” said Sadie.
I hadn’t thought about it like that. But she was right. Only was it really
saving? Wasn’t it more like butting in? I was thinking about this when Sadie
said, “So, why did you do it?”
I shrugged. Even though we’d shared a little moment playing the movie
game, I didn’t want to talk too much. Besides, there wasn’t really anything
to say.
“It’s okay,” she said. “You don’t have to tell me. Let’s just watch TV.”
And that’s what we did, with the sound off and not talking. After a while
I realized that I was really tired. I said good night to Sadie and went back to
my own room.
I’ve been thinking about Sadie, though, and how she maybe tried to
drown herself. And here’s what I’m wondering: How come someone always
saves the people who try to kill themselves and then makes them tell
everyone how sorry they are for ruining their evenings? I keep feeling like
everyone wants me to apologize for something. But I’m not going to. I
don’t have anything to apologize for. They’re the ones who screwed
everything up. Not me.
I didn’t ask to be saved.

---

Day 06
When I was in seventh grade I had a pen pal as part of our social studies
class. I guess the idea was that if we got to know kids in other parts of the
world, we’d see that we’re all the same and none of us would want to bomb
each other when we grew up to be the presidents of our countries. Anyway,
I got this girl who was part of a Masai tribe in Kenya. I didn’t even know
they got mail out there. I wrote her this letter about how I liked to
skateboard and paint and listen to Thieving Magpies and Fun While It
Lasted. She wrote me back saying her family lived in a mud hut, raised
cows, and drank their blood mixed with milk, and that on Sundays they
walked fifteen miles to a village to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer and E.R.
on someone’s TV. That’s how she learned English.
She sent me a picture of herself with her body all covered in red mud,
and asked me if everyone in America had swimming pools and blonde hair.
I remember thinking the stamps on her letters were the most beautiful
things I’d ever seen, and I made up a lot of stuff about myself because I
thought she was so interesting and I was so boring. I told her my father was
a famous explorer and that we went to Broadway plays all the time because
my mother was in them. We wrote to each other for almost the whole
school year. I forget which of us didn’t answer back first. Probably me. I
think I ran out of lies to tell her.
I was thinking about that today during my session with Cat Poop.
Because basically he was trying to get me to tell him stuff about myself and
I was making up a bunch of lies. I turned it into kind of a game. The Lying
Game.
“You’ve been here almost a week,” he said. “How are you feeling about
it?”
“Oh,” I said. “I really like it.”
He pushed his glasses up his nose, which I realize now is something he
does when he gets either nervous or excited. “You do?” he asked.
I nodded. “Absolutely. It’s totally a four-star place you’ve got here. I’d
knock it up to five stars, but the pool is a little cool for my liking and the

---

room service was kind of slow bringing me my club sandwich. Not that I’m
complaining. I just thought you should know.”
Cat Poop set his notepad down. “Jeff,” he said. “The only way this is
going to work is if you start talking to me.”
“I am talking,” I reminded him. “See my mouth moving and the words
coming out? That’s called talking.”
“You’re a smart young man,” he said. “It’s too bad you can’t turn some
of that intelligence on yourself.”
I knew what he was getting at. He was using that reverse-psychology
thing, trying to get me to do something by saying he didn’t think I could do
it. It’s totally Psych 101, and I couldn’t believe he thought I would go for it.
So I decided to have some real fun.
“You’re right,” I said, trying to sound like I meant it, which was harder
than you might think. “I guess I’m just scared.”
Cat Poop picked up the notebook again. His finger went right for his
glasses, and I could tell he thought we were having a breakthrough. “What
are you scared of?” he asked me.
I sighed really deeply, like it was totally hard for me to let my feelings
out. “Everything,” I told him. “I’m scared of everything.”
That really got him going. His pencil flew across the paper, and he was
nodding like crazy. “What are you most afraid of?” he said.
“I guess being alone,” I said. “You know, having no one understand
me.”
He looked up. “You think no one understands you?”
“People think they do,” I said, “but they don’t. There’s this whole
different me in here, and nobody sees it.” I touched my chest and kind of
sighed.
The look on his face was priceless. I wish I’d had a camera. He totally
bought the whole thing. He didn’t know I was basically acting out a scene
from a made-for-TV movie I’d seen once. Although in fairness to me, I was
putting in some of my own stuff. I mean, I didn’t totally rip off The