In life, Samantha had been small and unassuming, a person who gravitated toward the background. But in death she was a shining star. Everyone spoke well of her. Everyone cried for her. They all cared.

I’ve wondered lately if that was what started Ty’s fascination in his own death. He saw how everyone that one afternoon in the church, in the graveyard, loved Samantha Sullivan.

It was only a few weeks later that he took the Advil.

Maybe he didn’t mean to die. I mean, he took the pills practically under Mom’s nose. Who does that unless you want to get caught? To get saved? Maybe he was like everybody else. He just wanted to be loved. But then after he swallowed the pills he went down into his bedroom and went to sleep. Something must have changed in those moments after he took the Advil.

There were other factors, too. A few days after Samantha’s death a football player at UNL killed himself in the empty locker room after a game, an overdose of some kind of over-the-counter drug. It was all over the news. That same summer a meth head died in what the press called “suicide by police.” He pretended he had a gun, and they shot him.

There were all kinds of places where the idea might have taken root: that scene in the Twilight series when Edward tries to kill himself when he think he’s lost Bella, because yes, that’s a perfectly reasonable response if you can’t be with the person you love: just die. Or the casual way people roll off the phrase I’m killing myself doing (fill in the blank). Or Dr. Kevorkian, or the death penalty, or the news, which is always spewing out some kind of terrible story about a crazy person with a gun and a death wish. Or Romeo and Juliet in English class or It’s Kind of a Funny Story or a collection of poems by Sylvia Plath on Mom’s bookshelf, from her college days, where she had underlined the lines:

Dying

Is an art, like everything else.

I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.

I do it so it feels real.

There’s death all around us. Everywhere we look. 1.8 people kill themselves every second.

We just don’t pay attention. Until we do.

26.

GOING BACK TO SCHOOL ON MONDAY IS ROUGH.

Even the bus ride is unbearable. Everybody wants to stare at the-girl-whose-brother-died, who must be extra fragile now because someone else is dead. It’s how they treated me when I came back after Christmas break—like I’ve got a grief bomb strapped to my chest, liable to go off at any second. They either approach me carefully to attempt to defuse it, or they run for cover.

Plus, it’s St. Patrick’s Day, which makes the whole thing super awkward. Nobody’s wearing green, I notice.

Fun times.

I look for Damian in the halls before class. I can’t stop thinking about his voice when he was telling me that Patrick was dead. “He was my friend,” he said. Now he’s the only one of the three amigos left standing. But I don’t spot him. Of course, he’s easy to miss when he’s trying not to be seen. Invisibility is his superpower, after all.

“If I disappeared one day, really disappeared and never came back, they wouldn’t even notice.” That’s what he said to me that day in the gym.

And I said, “I see you.”

That’s what I have to do. He needs me to see him.

I cyberstalked Damian a bit over the weekend, to figure out how I might best do that—be his friend—and this is what I’ve gleaned from his internet activity so far:

He’s into photography, especially black-and-white candids, photos taken when the subject didn’t know there was a camera. I already knew that.

He likes to read. I already knew that, too.

What I didn’t know is that Damian likes to read everything he can get his hands on: science fiction and fantasy and horror, but also books like Marley & Me and The Kite Runner and books about Descartes and Kant and Jung. He’s really into philosophy. He describes himself as a “philosopher poet” on his various online profiles, and I don’t know if this is simply an attempt to pick up girls, but that’s the term he uses.

Philosopher.

Poet.

Which is great and all, except three days ago he posted this poem:

A white bone picked clean

by the carrion few

who will never know

the pain that I do

I worry that he could be the next domino to fall. He could be trembling on the brink of Ty’s oblivion, about to step off into the abyss. I don’t know. I don’t know how to make things better for him.

But I’m going to try.

I find him at lunchtime. He’s sitting at a table in the corner of the cafeteria, all alone, glumly picking at a pile of soggy french fries.

“So,” I say, sliding into a chair across from him like it’s what I do every day. “I want to talk about Heart of Darkness. I thought it was so interesting, the way Conrad explores how a person chooses between two different kinds of evil. So relevant, don’t you think?”

Thank you, CliffsNotes.

Damian’s face brightens, and he says, “I know. I think he was writing about the absurdity of it all. I mean, how can there be such a thing as insanity in a world that’s already gone insane?”

“I know!” I agree enthusiastically. “So,” I add, “I was wondering if you could give me some reading recommendations now that I’m done with Conrad. I really liked that one. What else could I try?”

His eyebrows come together thoughtfully, considering what I might like.

“Have you read Kafka?” he asks after a minute.