Original Story- How
Title- How
Rating- PG-13
Genre- slash, romance, angst, drama
Warnings- angst, attempted suicide, UNBETAED CONTENT
Summary- a boy looks back on the past few days, and the suicide attempt of a boy in his class.
A/N- I wrote this about a year ago, my first finished slash piece, and it's pretty sad, but the ending is happy, I promise!
How did this happen? It was all so fast…he came to school with a gun. They locked us all in the classrooms and the police came in. He must have gotten shot, or shot himself, because he ended up in the hospital.
We never talked much. He was in most of my classes, but I didn’t know much about him. He sat apart from everyone else. As far as I know, he didn’t have any friends. It wasn’t like he was bullied; just…no one ever paid attention to him.
Is that how it happened? He wanted to kill himself because nobody cared? Wanted to kill us, because we didn’t care? He was never close to anyone. But he never seemed depressed. Still, how would I know?
I never knew that much about him. Not enough to know if someone could have seen this coming. From what I know, he was just a lonely kid. He was smart, yeah. The only time he talked was when he was answering questions in class. But he wasn’t teased for being a nerd or anything. We’re in the same psychology class (what scheduling mistake landed me in psychology class, I have no idea), but he seemed sane; in fact, he was very insightful. The opinions he gave and complexity he showed shocked me (what teenager talks so insightfully about the meaning of life, the existence of a ‘higher power’, without reciting or paraphrasing something someone older and wiser said?). It was the only time I had any idea what he was thinking. But I never thought he was thinking of doing something like this.
How did this happen? It was all so fast. They locked us up in the classrooms, and the police came. It started like any other day. The day before was like any other day, and the day before that and the day before… The police came, and we could hear feet running. We couldn’t see anything, because the windows were covered in case he tried to get a shot at us. I never thought of him as the kind of person who would try to hurt people. He always seemed to care so much about everyone else. He cared to the point of forgetting himself. We couldn’t see anything, but we heard feet running. It was quiet for a while, then someone shouted; what they said, I’m not sure if it was unclear, or if I just don’t remember the words. Or if the gunfire drowned out the words. As soon as I heard the cry, I heard the gunshot, too. Then there was more running. Sirens, sirens, stomping feet, voices, so many voices, I don’t know what they were saying.
Then they were pulling us out of the rooms, and we were all in the halls, asking what was going on, what happened, what happened, the students and the teachers too, and no one was answering. The police in bulletproof vests were still milling about, shouting to each other, and they still weren’t telling us what was going on. I heard a squelching sort of noise and looked down, and there was a puddle of blood in the carpet, and all over my shoe, and I just felt sick, so sick, and the noise all seemed quieter as I stared at the blood, bright red and wet on my shoe and a purplish color on the navy carpet, and I doubled over and threw up. Me! I’m not some squeamish girl, I watch horror films and I’ve been hurt bad before; I can handle blood. One of the teachers helped me into the bathroom, and people backed away as I went past them. I leaned over the sink counter and spat into the sink and turned it on and splashed in on my face and drank it from my hands and washed my mouth out. I didn’t try to clean the blood of my shoe; didn’t even want to look at it.
I don’t know how long I was there. I don’t know when Mrs. De Laurence left, or how long she stayed. I don’t know what went on outside, but when I came out everyone was gone and the police were talking to the teachers and someone was cleaning up the blood and vomit. I guess I wasn’t the only one who felt sick.
My mom was waiting outside with the car, and we drove off. I didn’t bother getting my stuff. We didn’t talk. We didn’t talk. I never talked to him. I once asked him to borrow a pencil. Asked him what the homework was. Asked if I could borrow a dollar. I never returned it. I never returned it. I only talked to him if he had something I wanted. No, once I told him he did a good job on the speech he gave in class. And once he told me that he was impressed by something I’d said in class. I’d been stumbling over my words, trying to explain my opinion, trying to tell people about an issue that was important to me without letting them know it was, for fear of being mocked. He was impressed…by those words I didn’t understand even while I was saying them, he was impressed.
How did this happen? It was so fast. I don’t remember what happened after I got home. Don’t remember eating dinner, going to bed, falling asleep, waking up, going back to school. I was just there. We were sitting in our homerooms. Some people were talking quietly, just to talk, I guess, but most of us were quiet. A desk creaked when someone moved, and we all jumped. One at a time, they brought us all out, one at a time, and they had us talk to psychiatrists. No one talked about homework that had been due today, or tests we were supposed to take. Once someone got back from talking, they might just leave, or they’d come back in and sit with us. I decided I wanted to come back. Just to be with other people who had seen and heard what I’d seen and heard. Better than going home to talk about it or not talk about it with parents and siblings who hadn’t been there, or maybe worse to just sit alone while they went back to work and we just sat there not knowing what to do now.
The people who came back didn’t talk about what they’d talked about with the psychiatrists. They didn’t tell us what they’d been asked, or what they’d been told. They took us one at a time to talk to the psychiatrists, and they left us alone, without a teacher, but we didn’t talk. They took us one at a time. And they while Bobby was gone, they took me too. She told me her name, but I don’t remember it. She was a psychiatrist, and she’d bee talking to him. He was okay, he was in the hospital. He’d tried to kill himself, but he hadn’t succeeded.
How did this happen? It was so fast. I never realized what was coming. I don’t know where it came from. Or I didn’t, until that lady psychiatrist started talking. She told me that she’d been talking to him. She’d asked him why he’d done what he’d done, tried to do what he’d tried to do. And he told her, like she told me, that he’d fallen in love. Fallen for someone who never noticed him, for someone who would never accept his feelings. Someone who would hate him if he ever told them how he felt. He told her, as she told me, that he’d felt trapped. He hadn’t known what to do. He couldn’t confess, but he couldn’t live keeping it secret. He couldn’t live with rejection, but couldn’t do nothing. He couldn’t deal with it, and the emotional conflict put crazy ideas into his mind, ideas he felt guilty for now and knew were wrong. The idea that he could kill the person he loved and stop himself from having those feelings. But if he did that, the guilt would have been overwhelming. He hadn’t actually been thinking of what he was going to do. He’d just taken the gun and brought it to school. Whether or not he killed the person he loved, he planned to kill himself. And when she’d asked him who it was he loved…he’d said my name.
How did this happen? It was all so fast. The day before was normal. Then he’d come to school with a gun and shot himself. And the day after I learned that he loved me. Why hadn’t he just said so? We’d never really talked. Now he was in the hospital, and the woman was driving me to see him. Was this good for him? Would he be able to handle seeing me? Would I? I didn’t know.
She brought me to his room. I stood staring through the window. He was all alone in there. No family. No friends. Just like at school. And she was asking me if I could handle this. If I wanted to go in there or not. If I wanted someone with me. She didn’t say anything about him. She didn’t ask if I thought he could handle it, or say she knew he could. I didn’t ask. Maybe I should have, but I didn’t. I just told her I could handle it, and asked to be left alone while I decided, for real, if I could.
How did this happen? We’d never really talked. Why would he like someone like me? We’re total opposites. I’m cool; he’s invisible. I’m loud and obnoxious and shallow; he’s quiet, calm, and deep. I secretly admire him. No doubt he saw me as a shallow person not worth thinking of. I’d talked to him a couple times. Simple things. Nothing that would make him fall in love with me. So why did he? And still, he could have told me. We’d only talked a few times. He’d only come over and talked to me once. Maybe he’d felt he couldn’t approach me. He’d been afraid of rejection; the psychiatrist had told me that. But maybe he was also afraid of the confrontation, just a little bit. Maybe he wanted the confrontation to be on his terms. He wanted to be able to anticipate and control the outcome. And if he killed us both, or even just himself, he would be the one pulling the trigger. He would be the one in control. Maybe that would be better for him than allowing himself to be vulnerable. Allowing the outcome to be based on my answer rather than his actions.
Or maybe I was being stupid. One high school-level psychology class that a person sleeps through more often than not doesn’t qualify them to guess at a person’s motives for such unwarranted actions.
I looked back at him. He was staring at the ceiling, staring, staring. She’d told me that he hadn’t been thinking about what he was doing. He’d just had a thought and acted on it without thinking it through and wondering if it was a good thing to do. So maybe I was just thinking things to comfort myself, or they were just random thoughts that popped into my head. Maybe there were subconscious motives to his actions, and maybe they were similar to what I’d thought, but maybe I was guessing at things I had no right to. I hardly knew him; why should I dare to assume what he thinks?
God, I was feeling giddy. I didn’t know what to say or do when I went in there. I was working myself up and making myself nervous.
God, how did this happen? It was all so fast. The day before everything’s normal, and I come to school, thinking of him like I have for months, thinking of him, wondering if he ever thinks of me, at all, in any way. Then he comes to school with a gun and shoots himself, making me literally sick with worry. And the day after I get my answer: he loves me, and his fear of rejection had driven him to try to kill himself, and perhaps me as well.
How did this happen? How can I tell him… how can I tell him, I love him too? How can I tell him all his pain, all his fear, indecision, confusion, emotional turmoil, how can I tell him all that was for nothing? How?!
It didn’t matter how; I couldn’t put it off any longer. Taking a deep breath, I took the plunge and opened the door. “Hey… Dylan?”
“Tyler?”