Other than Charlotte herself, ironically.
She hadn’t been nice to me per se, but she smiled when we passed each other and once picked up a pen I’d dropped.
Her niceness was cruel. It gave me false hope, which was dangerous.
Staring past the rafters, she tucked her hands beneath her thighs. “I’m serious about this. I just… I don’t know… Wanna die on my terms, I guess? I can’t bear living without my parents. Then, there’s my sister. Leah. She works full time at a bodega to keep a roof over our heads and dropped out of college to raise me. She hasn’t even realized it’s my birthday today.”
“Happy Birthday,” I mumbled.
“Thanks.” She inched forward on the sloped shingles as if testing the waters before leaning back. “I wish I had cancer. Or some other grand battle. Dementia, stroke, organ failure. If I lose those fights, I’m brave. But the thing I’m battling is my mind. And if I lose, they’ll just call me weak.”
“It’s a good thing it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks once we’re dead.”
“When did you figure out you wanted to…” She jerked her thumb across her neck, then rolled it sideways, playing dead.
“After I realized I prefer my eyes closed than open.”
“Meaning…?”
“When I sleep, I dream. When I wake, the nightmare begins.”
“What’s the nightmare?”
When I didn’t answer immediately, she rolled her eyes and took something out of her pocket. She flicked it in my direction. I caught it.
It was a penny.
“A penny for your thoughts,” she offered.
“Fifty bucks would be more lucrative.”
“Life’s not about money.”
“Uncle Sam begs to differ. Welcome to America, baby.”
She laughed. “I’m broke.”
“That’s the rumor,” I confirmed.
I just wanted her to hate me like the rest of school, so she’d stop looking at me like I was fixable.
“Whatever. Don’t change the subject. Why do you want to jump?”
I decided to skip the social part of why I was here—the name-calling, the loneliness, the fights—and focus on what had thrown me over the edge tonight.
“I see your orphan status and raise you a fucked-up family situation with a side of broken legacy. My dad is novelist Terrence Marchetti. You know, The Imperfections.”
She couldn’t not know.
It’d released last month and already entered its third printing. Think Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas meets Trainspotting in a very dark alley.
The New York Times had named The Imperfections the biggest book of the decade before it even came out.
Three different adaptations in the works—film, television, and stage. Translated into fifty-two languages. Record for fastest-selling paperback in America.
Word around town was, it’d win the National Book Award this year.
I continued, trying to keep a monotone, “Mom was model Christie Bowman. You may remember she died of an overdose with her face smashed into a broken mirror from which she snorted cocaine in her family home.”
I didn’t mention I’d found her dead.
I didn’t mention all the blood.
I just didn’t.
Now it was Charlotte’s turn to look at me as if I’d fallen from the sky.
I soldiered through. “I have an older half-brother. Tate. From Dad’s eighties fling. He ripped me away from Dad on some bullshit excuse, and Dad is too frail to fight for custody.”
“For real?”
Her eyes were very big and very green, and I wanted to jump into them and run like they were a rural field.
Looking down, I nodded and pushed my ass up, suspended by my palms. “At least your sister took responsibility for you because you don’t have parents.”
This was not the victim Olympics, but it kinda was, seeing as, if one of us would be granted the right to die tonight, it needed to be me.
“I do have a parent,” I continued, “but my brother is keeping him away. I think it’s because Dad wasn’t there for Tate when he grew up. He got all fucked-up about it, and now he is punishing him through me.”
“He sounds like a real piece of work.”
I sat back down, wiped the roof grime on my hoodie, and nodded, realizing I probably looked too eager.
But no one, except maybe Dad, ever had anything negative to say about Tate, and this was Charlotte Richards, and she’d just called my brother a real piece of work.
“Tate’s a demon. I could’ve lived with Dad, transitioned to homeschool, gone on book tours around the world. I want to be a writer like him. But no, I have to go to this nightmare of a school and come home to nothing because Tate works eighty-hour weeks.”
“You said want.” She bit her lower lip. “Not wanted. Present tense.”
“So?”
“Bet your dad will be super bummed when he realizes you offed yourself.”
“Don’t try to convince me not to do it,” I warned.
“Why?”
“Because I’m going to.”
There was a pause, then she said, “I bet when you’re midair, you’ll regret it.”
I whipped my head her way. “What?”
Charlotte Richards, my eighth-grade crush, was telling me not to kill myself.
I didn’t even want to process that.
“When your body is no longer on this roof, you’re going to realize what a stupid mistake you’ve made. Not to mention, I don’t think we’ve thought this through all the way. It’s not that high. You can break your spine and spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair, drooling into your chest. You have too much to lose.”
“Are you high?”
But I was surprisingly and horrifyingly tempted.
More than anything, I didn’t want her to see me do it.
I don’t know.
What if I shit myself?
What if my head explodes?
I didn’t want her to remember me like that.
Totally. It’s going to ruin your chances of dating her from the grave.
“You have a family who loves you. A rich, famous father, and a dream to chase. Our circumstances are different. You have so much to live for.”
“But Tate—”
“He can’t keep you from your dad forever.” She shook her head. “I’m Charlotte, by the way.”
She stretched her hand toward me.
I didn’t take it.
Her presence had a presence, and she confused me. Then she said something that threw me off guard even more.
“We’re in the same class, I think.”
“You’ve noticed me?”
And the Most Pathetic Bastard Award goes to… me.
“Yeah. I saw you reading on your Kindle during lunch like some kind of animal.” She took a paperback out of the back pocket of her skirt. I couldn’t see what it was in the dark, but she slapped it on my thigh. “I think you’ll like this book. It’s about sadness, madness, and dissatisfaction. It’s about us.”
I knew his name, too.
Kellan Marchetti.
He was the son of America’s newly minted literary legend. I’d googled Kellan first thing after I arrived at St. Paul.