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"Wait."
“What?”
“I can’t do it.”
Andre Kriegman didn’t want to die. There were moments, of course, when school became almost too agonizing to bear or when he felt entirely too isolated from his peers, that perhaps he’d thought about it– but who hadn’t?
A beat, a trembling exhale.
“I just can’t do it.”
The brown-eyed boy was ten when he heard “Heil Kriegman” for the first time. His father had come to a parent-teacher conference and a boy in his class had overheard his accent. The off-putting, external bouts of anger that he had been exhibiting coupled with the fact that he was from Germany made him an easy target. It was worse when he attempted to stand up for himself. Andre saw their Nazi salutes in his sleep. Had they taken the time to question him, they would have learned that his mother was Jewish– that he felt sick to his stomach when they acknowledged him in that way because he felt he had let his mother down.
His mother, who promptly noticed how withdrawn he had become from his peers, gifted him something he’d been begging for since he was five– a small kitten he named Mel. She would become his only companion for a very long time.
"Andre."
Andre’s attention flickered back to the blonde boy that was kneeling beside him. The room was eerily quiet now, save for the incessant sirens of emergency vehicles and the persistent chatter of some woman on the phone nearby. Calvin’s voice was hastier than usual, almost domineering, and the brunette teetered between feeling frightened and aroused. Sure, Andre had learned a plethora of the deep, dark secrets that his best friend had buried inside, but he was seldom so vocal about them. He’d been incredibly loud since they’d rushed the school with literal guns blazing.
“I can’t.”
He repeated, lapping at his chapped lips in an attempt to wet the dryness in his mouth. There was a burning sensation trailing his throat– a red-hot branding iron to his larynx. Andre never cried, and he wouldn’t now, but still, bubbles of saline threatened to emerge from chocolate hues. He pushed them away.
“What’s the problem?”
“I just can’t do it”
There was more noise from the phone he’d acquired what could have been hours ago. A woman’s voice– calm, yet firm. Though, she seemed to be miles away, and Andre could only hear static as her words neglected to land. They traveled through one ear and out the other. He could only hear Calvin.
“You don’t have to think about it.”
Andre could’ve chuckled. His dry, monotonous laugh that only ever seemed to expel when his best friend had said something devoid of humor. How could he not think about it?
The brunet remembered the first real rush he’d felt whilst running. It was nearing the end of autumn, and it was entirely too cold for a boy of his age to be sprinting a track in nothing but shorts and an old t-shirt. He remembered the feeling of wind slapping his face and violently nipping at his nose and ears until they were rose-tinted. The way the saliva curdled up under his tongue until he was forced to spit alongside the rubber and polyurethane. He felt like he was flying– he would chase that high for the rest of his life.
Sometimes, he felt like he was born to run, and not just on the Iroquois High School track team. He had always been running. Away from his Germanic heritage, his peers, his parents. He would run away from his sexuality and from any hint of vulnerability. His legs seldom stopped moving.
And what was he doing now that the highly anticipated Zero Day had arrived? He had begun the day fully intending to flee the state with his best friend in tow– running from the responsibility of the massacre he’d created in the halls and the tear-stained cheeks of his senior class. Still, being on the run seemed preferable to..
"Andre!"
He felt goosebumps wrap around the skin on his arms as he was once again brought back to reality by Cal. If it had been anyone else he wouldn’t have been on his knees with a gun to his head. Truth be told, the blonde boy could have asked him to do anything in the world and he would have done it without question– and that included laying down his life. He couldn’t live in a world without Cal Gabriel. His angel on Earth.
“Alright.”
The single word left Andre’s half-parted lips before he could register he was speaking and it took him off-guard. Why was he agreeing to this? There were other options, right? They’d gone over the invasion plan a plethora of times, weighing the pros and the cons and calculating multiple backup plans in case something went awry. They’d mapped out every exit of the school, every corridor so they knew where to escape if the cops had breached the building early.They had a plan. How could they have ended up here?
“Give me a yes.”
“Yes.”
Andre choked out another shaky breath and allowed his eyes to flutter closed. If he had to guess, he would have estimated his heart rate to be tachycardic. It was clocking at least one hundred and forty beats per minute, and the dark-haired boy was hyper-aware of the pulses. He couldn’t do it. Not when his UConn acceptance letter was tucked neatly within the papers of his desk at home. He couldn’t take his life when he knew his parents would have been tuning into the local news station and were perhaps on their way to the school now. The idea that they would wait outside with trepidation when they realized their son was nowhere to be found. They would think he was a victim– and maybe he was.
“One…two..”
He couldn’t put a bullet in his brain when his cat was curled up on his bed awaiting his return from school as she did every day. Who would spoil her now? Would she think that he abandoned her? Do cats have the capacity to think about these things? What was the woman saying on the other end of the 911 call? Did she just say his name? What if–
“Wait!”
Andre said again, stalling. He could practically feel the unease and tension radiating from the boy on his left. Cal wanted to get it over with. How could Andre have been so blind? Had the boy that he’d spent all of his days with and devoted every ounce of his attention to really wanted to off himself so badly this whole time?
“One, two, three, go? Or one, two… go?” He pursed his lips, letting deep sigh come from his nose. “Like, one, two, three… go?”
“Do we shoot on four or do we shoot on three?”
“I’m thinking four”
“Everybody shoots on four, you know?”
“So it’s like one..two..three.. shoot?”
“Right, so it’s one..two..three bang”
“Not one, two, bang. Gotcha.”
Andre swallowed at the nothingness in his throat. He couldn’t keep putting it off any longer. Cal was counting on him and he was right all along. He wanted to die on his own terms. Being executed prematurely by police seemed like a rotten way to go.
“One…” Cal began again, his voice calmer than it had been moments ago. It brought Andre back to a state of tranquil for a moment.
So this was goodbye, then.
“Two…”
Goodbye to his mother, who had cradled Andre so delicately in her arms for as long as he let her– until he insisted that he was too old to be held. He wanted to be held now. She would have wrapped him in her warm embrace if he’d asked.
Goodbye to his father, who up until very recently had struggled with showing Andre how much he cared. The teenager knew he loved him, and yet, his father would still blame himself for not being more open about his feelings.
Goodbye to Mel, who protected him when he was afraid, who promised just a moment of solace in a childhood that was so full of cruelty.
Goodbye to UConn, and the future that he may have had if things had gone differently– if the world had been just a little bit kinder.
Goodbye to his favorite pair of black and white sneakers, the ones he wore on the school track as his legs carried him to the finish line of his two hundred meter sprints.
“Three…”
And goodbye Cal Gabriel, you beautiful boy. Had they been different people in a different time, perhaps they could have been happy together. Perhaps, if they were somewhere else, Andre would be granted the gift of seeing his crusted eyelids slowly part every morning. He would have, for the rest of his mortal life, watched Calvin’s porcelain fingers brush back his blonde hair. And maybe, if he were really lucky, Andre would have been able to tangle his own in the tresses that reminded him so much of sunshine.
Sunshine.
In fact, as Andre pressed his eyelids together one final time, he could have sworn that just out of his peripheral vision, the summer sun was waiting for him and spring was finally coming to an end.