Twisted

My house was dark and quiet.
No dinner, no notes on the counter. Maybe my family had joined the witness-protection program in exchange for testifying about what a loser I was.
I stood in the shower until the water swirling around the drain wasn't black. Two of the bandages on my left forearm peeled off. I poured peroxide on the gaping cuts until they went numb.
When I went back down to the kitchen, I saw the thin line of light under the closed door to the basement. I filled a mixing bowl with an entire box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch and ate it with a serving spoon. The goal was to finished the cereal before falling asleep facedown in the milk.
After I put the bowl in the dishwasher, I opened the basement door. Dad was down there typing on his computer and talking to himself. The Eagles were playing low in the background.
"Elise?" Dad called. "Is someone there? Janet?"

---

There had actually been a time when Dad was cool. Like when I was in the third grade, when he was an accountant at a tiny hole-in-the-wall company. If you were going to make a documentary about our family, that would have been the year. Nobody had a shrink. Mom worked part-time at the school library and took photos for fun. Aaron only bit me if I made him really, really mad. And Dad and I won first place in the father/daughter knot-tying competition and the three-legged race at the Girl Scout Wilderness Weekend.
Those were the days.
Now he was a dragon hiding in the skin of a small man. In public, he’d act like a human being, all handshakes and “good to meet you” and grown-up bullshit about the stock market and going bald. In private, the skin slid off and all you saw were slime-colored scales and poisonous claws because a branch office was in trouble or new regulations were hurting the bottom line.

---

“Hello?” Dad demanded.
I closed the door.

---

Mom’s room was to the right at the top of the staircase. Dad’s was at the opposite end of the hall. Aaron and I were in the middle; his door closest to Mom’s, mine next to Dad’s.
I flopped on my stomach. My feet hung over the edge of the mattress.
It was the last Saturday night before my senior year of high school and I was alone in my room.
The curtains moved.
Kids were playing hockey in the street, yelling about fouls and do-overs and who had scored. Engines raced and tires peeled out a couple blocks away. Music came from open windows. The train whistle blew. If you took the train to Denver, you could pick up the Capitol Limited and ride to St. Louis, and from there, transfer to anywhere.
I rolled over onto my back and prayed again to every god I had ever heard of to let me die. Quick and painless. Please.
Death is funny, when you think about it. Everybody does it, but nobody knows how, exactly how. My grandpa McCready just wouldn’t die, no matter how sick he got. Grandma Ebben dropped dead in front of the canned vegetables at the Safeway.
Did they like it? Was it a relief?
I wasn’t supposed to think about that, but it was like gorn. The idea would sneak into my head and- boom- I was off. Like when they put me in the holding cell after they arrested me for the Foul Deed, and the guard came back and took the laces out of my Converse. And then the door locked and my Converse looked stupid and pathetic and I couldn’t walk in them. And I thought about it.
As soon as it started, I’d go: I’m not going to think about this. No matter what. I am thinking about something different now, thinking, thinking…
And the pictures would flash over and over in my mind like a demented video with no music, just bodies falling off bridges and planes flying into skyscrapers and fires and ropes and guns and driving very fast. Unbuckling my seat belt. Aiming for the cliff and the granite quarry. Stomping the accelerator. Passing ninety when I hit the edge. Flying, then plunging to the bottom, the car bouncing off the slabs of granite, spinning, crumpling. The explosion.
Thinking about death relaxed me, as usual.
My open cuts dripped on the sheets.
Gone.