Without Merit(66)

“Almost time for dinna.”

I smile at his random accent slip. It hasn’t been happening as much as it did at the beginning of the week. He pulls my blanket over his lap and leans back against my headboard. “You’ve had a busy couple of days,” he says. “You probably needed the nap.”

I laugh halfheartedly. “In that case, I think we all needed a nap.” But as it stands, this wasn’t a nap. I’m just now waking up for the day, considering I stayed up most of the night last night pissed off at Sagan for what he said. I couldn’t sleep. I tossed and turned all night, throwing around all the excuses for why he’s wrong. I don’t even want to think about it again. I glance at Luck. He’s wearing his Starbucks uniform. He looks so strange in normal clothes.

“How do you like your new job?” I ask him.

“Great. Pretty sure any job I have from here on out will beat working on a cruise ship, though.” He pulls at a string on my blanket until it comes loose in his fingers. He puts the string in his mouth and eats it.

“Do you suffer from pica?”

“What’s that?”

“Never mind,” I say, shaking my head.

He pats my leg, and the room grows awkwardly quiet. I sigh. “Are you here to talk about why I swallowed twenty-eight pills?”

Luck shrugs and then says, “Actually, I was going to ask you if you want any beef jerky yet. I still have half a tub in my room.”

I laugh. “No, thanks. I’m good.”

“But since you brought it up . . . are you okay?”

I roll my eyes and drop my head against the headboard. “Yes,” I say, slightly annoyed. Not annoyed that he’s checking on me, but annoyed that my behavior this week is embarrassing and I just want to forget it but I have a feeling no one is going to allow that. Especially my father and Sagan.

“Why’d you do it?”

I shake my head. “I don’t know. I was just exhausted and over it. And drunk.”

He starts unraveling another thread and then spins it between his fingers. “I tried to kill myself once,” he says nonchalant. “Jumped off the deck of a cruise ship into the water. I thought it was high up enough that I would hit the water and it would knock me out and I’d drown peacefully.”

“Did you drown peacefully?”

He laughs.

I don’t know why I’m making light of what he’s telling me. I’ve never been good with serious conversations.

“I sprained my ankle and got fired. But a few weeks later I had a new fake ID and a job with a different cruise line, so the firing didn’t really teach me a lesson.”

“Why did you do it? Did you hate your life that much?”

Luck shrugs. “Not really. I was mostly indifferent. I worked eighteen-hour days. I was tired of the monotony. There wasn’t really anyone who would have missed me. So, one night I was standing on the deck, staring out over the water. I was thinking about what it would be like to jump and not have to get up and work the next morning. When the thought of death didn’t put fear into me, I just decided to go for it.” He pauses for a moment. “A friend of mine saw me do it and he reported it, so they threw me a life raft and had me back on the ship within the hour.”

“You got lucky.”

He nods and looks over at me. He’s unusually serious. “So did you, Merit. I mean, I know they were only placebo pills, but you didn’t know that at the time. And I don’t know many people who would stick their hand down someone’s throat and then sift through their vomit to count the number of pills they swallowed.”

I divert my eyes and look back down at my lap. It occurs to me that I haven’t once thanked Sagan for that. He saved my life, got covered in vomit, and then cleaned it up and watched over me all night. And I haven’t even told him thank you. Now I’m not so sure I even want to speak to him again.

“I did learn something from jumping off that ship,” Luck says. “I found out that depression doesn’t necessarily mean a person is miserable or suicidal all the time. Indifference is also a sign of depression.” He looks me in the eye. “That was a long time ago, but I still take medication for it every day.”

I’m shocked. Luck seems like one of the happiest people I know. And while I do appreciate what he’s trying to do, it’s also annoying as hell. “Are you trying to turn this into an after school special?”

He shakes his head. “Not at all. It’s just . . . I think we’re a lot alike. And as much as you want to believe that it was a drunken mistake . . .”

“It was,” I interrupt. “I never would have swallowed those pills if I hadn’t gotten drunk.”

He doesn’t look convinced by my statement. “If you weren’t intending to take them . . . why were you stealing them?”

His question silences me. I break eye contact with him. He’s wrong. I’m not depressed. It was an accident.

“I really didn’t come in here to say all that.” He leans forward and rests his elbows on his knees. “I think maybe I had too much caffeine at work today. I’m not usually this . . . sappy.”

“It’s probably the whole gay thing you’re experimenting with. It’s making you sentimental.”

He glances back at me and narrows his eyes. “You can’t make gay jokes, Merit. You aren’t gay.”