Serious Moonlight(63)

Daniel pulled out his phone and began searching for something. When he found it, he handed his phone to me.

It was an article from the Seattle Times dated a year and a half ago: SUICIDE STILL A GROWING PROBLEM AMONG WASHINGTON STUDENTS.

The first paragraph of the article talked about a high school senior at Garfield High who’d tried to overdose and was found in the school library by a janitor. The janitor heard a suspicious noise: the boy, who was seizing after ingesting a large quantity of fluoxetine, had knocked over a bust of Shakespeare. If it weren’t for the intervention, the boy would have died. He was instead rushed to a local hospital and was “now recuperating at home with his family.”

“That was me,” Daniel said quietly. “Joseph at work? He was the janitor. He graduated the year before from another high school and had just started doing janitorial work at Garfield. And like the article says, if he hadn’t found me, I’d be dead.”

A terrible tightness gripped my chest.

This was . . .

Not what I expected.

Half my thoughts were scrambling to fit this into what I knew of Daniel, reversing and replaying bits of conversation. This never came up in my online searches for him. And of course it didn’t: he was an unnamed minor in this article. And I guess this wasn’t the thing he was going to plaster all over his social media accounts either.

I was lost for words.

“It was at the beginning of my senior year,” he explained. “I’d lost my hearing that summer and missed some school at the start of the year because of it. I got really depressed. My mom was worried and took me to our family doctor. Instead of referring me to someone, he just wrote me a prescription for an antidepressant and sent me on my way. Antidepressants take time to work, and they aren’t all alike. I didn’t understand that at the time. I was impatient and hurting, and I thought maybe I was just . . . unfixable.” He shifted in his seat and cleared his throat. “It just felt like I was living in a bubble, and that bubble just got smaller and smaller. It wasn’t until I started seeing a therapist afterward that things got better.”

“The monthly appointment you can’t miss,” I murmured.

He nodded slowly and rubbed the heels of his palms over his thighs several times, as if he were trying to summon the courage to speak again.

“Before it happened . . . I was having trouble adjusting to the hearing loss, I blew up at a teacher and got stuck in detention, and I’d just taken my SATs for the second time, and my scores were still terrible.” He stole a look at my face, blinking rapidly, but didn’t look me in the eye. “All that sounds flimsy now, but at the time? I was . . . in a bad place, mentally. I fell into a black hole. It’s hard to explain if you haven’t been in that state of mind. I don’t know. . . . It wasn’t a cry for help, or anything. I really thought I wanted to die.”

I never in a million years would have guessed this about him. He seemed so happy. So gregarious. So full of life—

But also hiding something. I thought back to when I’d searched for his Missed Connections ad and found the social media profile that said “Stop asking if I’m okay.” And when he offhandedly described himself as being “depressing” when he was talking about David Bowie’s music. The way he talked about the Houdini incident when we were playing Truth or Lie, and how I felt as if he weren’t telling me something. His monthly appointment that he said he couldn’t miss . . . and what happened at the Clue game.

“Those people who went to your school,” I said. “This is what they were talking about?”

He nodded. “Everyone talked about it. And the more they did, the crazier the stories got. I was my own urban legend. I heard I slit my wrists and bled all over the floor, and if you looked in a certain spot, you could still see the stain.”

I moaned, a little horrified. I could feel his leg anxiously shaking against my stool.

“Anyway, I’m not trying to make you feel sorry for me,” he said. “Things got better slowly. My mom moved us into cohousing with her parents and found me a good therapist. I had to try two more medications before we found one that’s been working for me. I mean, it’s a process. Compared to how I felt back then, I feel a gazillion times better, but I don’t want to . . . get into a bad place again. So, I still see Dr. Sanchez every month, just to make sure things are staying steady.”

“That’s your therapist?”

“Yeah. It’s just . . . ,” he started, and then hesitated, searching for the right words. “I know it’s a lot to process. I don’t need you to save me or anything. I’m doing good—really, I am. But this is part of my past, and I can’t erase it. I thought maybe I could. That first night at the diner? You didn’t know me, and that was kind of liberating. For a moment there I was someone else. I didn’t have to talk about my ear or the stupid shit I’d done, and here was this pretty girl with killer eyes who laughed at my jokes, and she liked me. . . .”

I still like you. I tried to say it out loud, but it got stuck in my throat.

“It felt so good to just act on instinct, to just . . . live. And then you showed up at the hotel, and suddenly it felt so much bigger.”

“Fate,” I said.

His eyes softened. “Fate. I got so wound up in it, so wound up in you, that I forgot again. Well, not forgot, exactly. I don’t know. I guess . . . I told myself that it didn’t matter. It was in my past. I was better. It was fine.” He sighed. “Seeing those kids at the Clue game? That made me realize that I can’t escape it. There will always be people who knew me before it happened, and some of them will be cool—like Joseph.”