Silver Lining

A story I made up for a contest here on Writer's Cafe.

     Nobody expected Colin to kill himself.

 

     That he managed to take Principal Monroe with him was nothing more than a fluke.  I couldn't be happier.

 

     Not about Colin's death.  But if your best friend since the second grade decides to hang himself from the school roof, the best way to cope with the tragedy is to find a silver lining.  That the biggest cocksucker to ever suck a c**k followed him to the afterlife is practically golden. 

 

     I hope I don't sound glib.  Colin was my hetero life mate.  "My brother from another mother" is what I believe the cool kids are saying.  Any words I pin to this page will fail to convey my sorrow.  So if you really want to know how I feel about his death, talk to me after class.  Or look up the tribute video Laurie and Junkman and I posted on Youtube.  But I'm not writing this to mourn.  Your syllabus asked us to write a paper about a life changing event, and while I'm sure you'll enjoy my roommate's paper about the wounded sea turtle that led him to marine biology, I can think of no bigger event than these twin deaths. 

 

     You may have guessed, from the fact that I referred to "the cool kids" as a seperate entity, that Colin and I weren't exactly popular.  As far as social conventions go, this is true.  But since you don't know me, maybe you won't be so quick to assume that Colin's suicide was a byproduct of his love of comic books, or his inability to shoot a basketball.  We had our share of friends.  We weren't lonely, or out of touch with reality.  That's what my mom assumed, along with the majority of our church community.  If Rudolph Monroe's passing was Colin's gift, the year Laurie, Junkman, and I spent talking to a shrink was his final joke.  Colin was one of the world's biggest believers that no one is actually crazy until a psychiatrist gives them a bottle of pills and a permission slip. 

 

     So I'm fortunate, then, that his punchline fell flat.  I only lied once, on a question about smoking pot, and yet I left the sessions with a clean bill of mental health.  Junkman still has sessions with the doctor, but his mom is even more protective than mine. 

 

     I digress.

 

     I'm already telling you about how we all wound up, but I haven't even covered how we got there.  Laurie was Colin's girlfriend.  She loved him wholly, and he loved her in kind.  Try as I might to deny it, I loved her too.  But as I said, Colin and I were brothers.  I loved him even more.  He knew my feelings.  We had no secrets we would not share with each other, even ackward ones like this.  Which is why Colin bore no jealousy.  He trusted me and even took my love for her as vindication that we weren't growing apart.  "We still share the same immaculate tastes", is how he put it. 

 

     But early into the fall of his death, I broke our sacred trust.  Laurie had a secret, something dark and terrible she needed to share, but she didn't want Colin to know.  So I took on her secret, and it became our secret. 

 

     Her father was abusing her, he had been since she was ten.  I wanted to kill him.  I didn't have the balls.  Even though I loved her, I don't think I could actually bring myself to actually snuff out somebody's life.  So I did what I thought any good friend would do.  I tried to convince her to get help.  But she'd tried twice before, and didn't think she could handle being brushed off again.  When your dad is the school principal, no one wants to believe you.  

 

     So now you know why I'm able to take some comfort in my friend's death.  A few others do, but not many.  Even they don't know the details.  Only myself, Laurie, Junkman, and now you.  

 

     The first person Laurie had tried to tell was our school guidance counselor.  He took the complaint to her father.  Laurie was grounded for failing Spanish, and the b*****d just convinced him it was an imaginative act of revenge.  It wasn't hard.  Mr. Davidson wanted to be convinced.  He nodded his head, went back to his office, and told Laurie to stop wasting his time.  Then he went to his house and disowned his gay son.  Some counselor.  Life at home got worse.  

 

     It wasn't any better at the police station.  The problem with small town living is that everyone had a relative in law enforcement.  Hers refused to believe his own brother would force his daughter to go down on him at gunpoint while he dressed up in Mexican wrestling masks and other fanciful costumes.  She even got a lecture about wasting police resources.  

 

     The other person who knew all of this was Laurie's mom, but she devoutly refused to acknowledge the problem.  To acknowledge it would destroy her, and she was willing to let it destroy Laurie instead.  But it didn't.  She was too strong.  She had picked up her mother's weakness for standing up to him though.  She wouldn't run away.  She wouldn't try and tell any more adults.  Most of all, she wouldn't tell Colin.  I tried to convince her, but she would just say that telling me was the first step and change the subject.  

 

     Once I knew Laurie's situation, we were linked.  With each new atrocity, I was her only place of refuge.  Like I said earlier, Colin was never a naturally jealous person.  But after a few months of me sneaking off for private conversations with his girlfriend, it did look suspicous.  To complicate things, they had gotten to a place in their relationship where sex had begun to come up.  It wasn't just that she didn't want to have it, it was that she wouldn't tell him why.  Laurie's always been outspoken, and everyone knew she had little regard for the sanctity of premarital chastity.  So what was he supposed to think?

 

     I noticed his growing tension around me, and insisted Laurie tell him.  It was three days before Thanksgiving.  She went home that evening and wrote everything down in a letter.  The next day when she gave it to him she wept.  He tried to open it then, but she wouldn't let him read it in front of her.  She said later that she went into the prop room for the theater department and balled up on the floor behind a rack of Shakespearean costumes and sobbed.  Meanwhile, Colin, who would never leave a theater without watching all the credits in case he might miss something, who searched his CDs religiously for hidden songs, never read the letter.  As I learned that evening in an angry, rambling message on my parent's voicemail, he assumed it was a break-up letter.  It was an arrow in his heart.  Colin didn't think love was truly love unless it sang to and stung the heart like Romeo and Juliet.  While I sat in Calculus watching Billy Spuziak drawing a penis on the back of some sleeping kid's neck with a sharpie, Colin was plotting his death.  He sent Laurie a slide show of their memories, and headed for the roof.  

 

     He didn't make it there unseen.  After she had finished crying, Laurie went to the teacher's lounge to make some copies for English, and ran into her father.  They had an argument that had ended with her telling him about the letter.  He'd spent the morning hunting for Colin so he could destroy it, and caught sight of him as he headed up the service ladder.  The rest of the details were filled in for me by Junkman, who was on the roof of the gym trying to write a story for Hustler when he noticed Colin on top of the academic building.  He'd already made the noose.  Junkman called out to him, but his voice was lost to the wind.  Or maybe Colin was just a man on a mission.  He had it around his neck when Principal Monroe came on the roof and started to yell at him.  No one knows what he said, but it must have alerted Colin to his error.  With one hand he opened the letter.  He couldn't have had time to read it all, but he must have read enough.  Laurie's dad tried to grab it from him, but Colin hooked his fingers into his mouth and jumped backwards from the roof.  

 

     Colin died instantly.  Principal Monroe had six hours to contemplate his karma before he passed on.  

 

    Our hearts broke with Colin's death.  But as the sting began to lessen, Laurie realized she was free.  Our friend wasn't just another wasted youth.  He was a martyr.  With her father dead, Laurie moved into a place of her own.  She was still kind enough to let her mother save face.  Junkman had retrieved the damning letter before the police had arrived, and despite the bitter irony that it made her dad look like he died trying to rescue Colin, Laurie burned it in the woods.  

 

    Colin didn't have to die.  His last hours were reckless, possibly even stupid.  But his final decision was fearless.  It was this aspect of his death that changed my life.  We take so much for granted, but one act can change everything.  There's no reason not to risk failing.  

 

     That's why I'm here in your writing class rather than in computers or finance like the rest of the kids from chess club.  That's why I'm at a better school than my parents could afford, even though it meant a terrifying summer on a crabbing boat and the promise of at least one more.  Most importantly, it's how I managed to ask Laurie on a date six months after the funeral.  We're expecting our first child in October.  A boy.  His name is Colin.        

Reviews

[Jered]

I love that your stories leave me thinking. This is one of the big things I look for in stories (movies, novels, short stories, etc.). I like how you gave the reader the ending, and made the process of getting there the real story.

[CharlieO]

This is a fantastic write - even though it was a little dark throughout there was some hope at the end. One of the best writes I have read on this site.
It was easy to sympathise with your characters throughout - this was largely due to the interesting way you chose to narrate the story - it was much more personal - the narrator appears to be writing/recounting his story to the reader and the reader only.
I liked the interlinking of the characters fate - and how these links were revealed slowly.
Congrats on this enjoyable write.

[Inda Lauryn]

This is an amazing story, exceptionally written. The characters are awesome and it is easy to either empathize or sympathize with them. The writing style is original and although poignant has a bite and wit. This is definitely one of my favorites. I hope you continue to write stories. You have a unique and eloquent voice.