Page 9 of Darling Venom
I knew the most common suicide method was a firearm (fifty percent), and men were more likely to succeed in it.
Most importantly, I knew pretty, smart Charlotte didn’t really want to kill herself. She was having a moment, not a year.
I looked down at my future demise, then up again.
I’d come here to die because I wanted everyone from school to see. To scar them the way they’d scarred me, leaving an ugly dent inside them that couldn’t be covered with makeup.
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.
&n
