“That’s the last thing I want right now.” I don’t add the obvious, that we just got jumped together and my father killed himself. “We need to talk to the girls soon. I need you, uh . . . I need us to figure this out. I can’t have something else going wrong right now.”

“This is shitty timing, I know, but I actually can’t break up with Nicole, Aaron. Everything between us has been a slip. Look at everything that’s happened to you alone . . . You get why nothing else can go down between us, right?”

This is one of those times where you swear you have to be sleeping and living a nightmare because it’s so impossible that your life can only be a string of bad things until you’re completely abandoned.

“You can’t do this,” I say. “I told my mother about you. My father killed himself because of us. We got jumped on the train because of who we are.”

Collin keeps pacing and refuses to look me in the eye. “We chose to be the wrong people. It just can’t work. Nicole’s pregnant and I was trying to talk her into not keeping the kid before I told you, but she is, so I gotta be a man again.”

Another bad thing but not unexpected, that was always a risk. “So you knocked her up, whatever. That doesn’t make you straight and you’re never going to be—”

“It’s not happening, Aaron.” He walks to the fence. I expect him to come back like he’s still pacing, but he just crouches down and leaves without another word.

Something snaps in my head and I’m fighting back tears.

I slipped too.

Whatever, I have a girlfriend too.

I don’t need him.

(AGE SIXTEEN—APRIL, THREE MONTHS AGO)

I know Dad killed himself because of me.

Mom thinks that his recent jail stint tipped him over the edge, that his many chemical imbalances caught up with him.

Now I keep searching for happiness so I don’t end up like he did.

I learn about this town called Happy in Texas and think about how that must be the greatest place to live.

I teach myself how to say and read and write happy in Spanish, German, Italian, and even Japanese but I would have to draw that last one out.

I discover the happiest animal in the world, the quokka. He’s a cheeky little bastard that’s always smiling.

But it’s not enough.

The memories are still rattling around my head, twisting into me like a knife. I don’t want to wait around to see what comes next for me in this tragic story I’m living. I open up one of my father’s unused razors and cut into my wrist like he did, slit in a curve until it smiles so everyone will know I died for happiness.

I was expecting relief but instead it’s the saddest pain I’ve ever experienced. I never once stop feeling empty or unworthy of anyone’s rescue, not even when the thin line on my wrist makes everything go red.

I don’t want to die and I didn’t.

I spent a few days at the hospital where I met with this therapist, Dr. Slattery, who was the worst. I thought it was just me who couldn’t stand him, but I read his reviews online and saw I wasn’t the only one who thought the man was a joke:

“Dr. Slattery drove me crazier.”

“Dr. Slattery wouldn’t shut up about his own problems!”

And on and on.

Genevieve is taking much better care of me than that clown did. My mom finally let me out from under her watch, and Eric’s watch, too—both of them missing a lot of work as I stayed home from school. They let me out to celebrate my one-year anniversary with Genevieve.

She must’ve thought we’d run around the city having fun to keep my mind off of things, but instead I’m stretched out on her couch crying with my head on her lap because of all the pain I can’t reach. Pain someone else can remove.

“I don’t see how a Leteo procedure would really help you,” Genevieve says. “When my mother died, it was brutal, and—”

She doesn’t understand. She didn’t have to find whatever was left of her mother’s body on the plane’s crash site like I had to find my father dead in the bathtub. “I would forget finding him. That’s gotta be fucked up enough for Leteo to scrub out.”

“Yeah . . .” Genevieve says, crying too. “It’s gotta be.”

The TV’s volume is raised high so Genevieve’s dad can’t hear me cry. I’m not embarrassed, but I think it makes him uncomfortable. A commercial for this new movie, The Final Chase, comes on and it’s like a punch in the gut when I think about all the new movies I won’t see with Collin, all the comics we won’t read together, and how he’s basically acting like I never happened.

He’s undoing himself and I need to do the same.

(AGE SIXTEEN—MAY, TWO MONTHS AGO)

After an hour with Dr. Slattery, where I cried and cried out of frustration, I decide I want to spend some time outside—even if it means my mom has to sit out here with me. There’s a moving truck parked in front of Building 135. When I go to check out the new neighbor, I see Kyle wheeling a shopping cart of boxes into the back of the truck. I still half expect to find Kenneth right behind him, minding his own business.

One of the boxes falls out of the shopping cart. I pick it up and hand it over to Kyle, who won’t look me in the eyes. “Going somewhere?”

Kyle nods and drops the box into the truck.

“Where?”

“Doesn’t matter. Just can’t be here anymore.”

Brendan, Baby Freddy, Nolan, and Fat-Dave all come over. Brendan nods at me while everyone else looks at my bandaged wrist. He looks into the truck, sits down on the ramp, and asks, “What’s up, guys?”

“Kyle’s moving,” I say, throwing him under the bus because I’d really like an afternoon off from talking about my problems. “He won’t tell me where.”

“Because where I’m fucking going doesn’t fucking matter! I can’t go to Good Food’s anymore without Mohad calling me Kenneth. I can’t play Skelzies with you guys without making tops for Kenneth he’ll never use. I can’t even look at you, Aaron, because you get to live after trying to throw away your life and meanwhile Kenneth is nothing but bones by this point.”

Kyle’s parents come out of the lobby, and he snatches a box from his mother and throws it over Brendan’s head into the truck; we hear something shatter. “Just forget about me.” He heads back into the building and we all go into the third court before he comes back out.

Baby Freddy says, “That was awkward.”