There was never really a time in my life where I completely understood the contemplation of suicide. It seemed like a given. It seemed to me that anyone would understand the stupidity and the selfishness of the matter.

And then there was Jewel.

We sat on her bed awkwardly refusing to make eye contact. She rubbed the ear of her stuffed pig as I twisted my ring around my finger, the only physical thing I had left of my mother.

“So, what? What do you want me to do?”

She snuffed out a laugh, “I don’t want you to do anything.”

I looked up and she kept her head down. I didn’t know what to say to make the situation any better.
My mind quickly took me back to the month before, the last day of school for the year. We had been sitting on her back porch when she lit a celebratory joint and said, “I’m glad that’s over for a while. That place makes me want to kill myself.”
I suddenly felt guilty because I had laughed, and she had laughed, and it was all just a joke to us. Except it wasn’t.
“Have you talked to Bonnie about it?”
She looked up and laughed in my face. “Are you crazy?”
“What’s the worst that she’d do?”
“I don’t know, and I’m not willing to find out.”
And then I said the worst possible thing that you can say to someone who felt like Jewel felt. I looked right at her and said, “You need help.”
She looked at me, disgusted. “I’m not crazy.”
“Well you sure aren’t thinking right.”
I watched her roll her eyes and she sighed. “This is why I shouldn’t have said anything. No one understands and everyone thinks I’m some kind of lunatic.”
I left her house that night hoping I hadn’t made things worse, but at the same time knowing that I had. And much like my best friend was contemplating suicide, I was contemplating who to tell, if anyone at all.

Jewel had never really had it much harder than the rest of us in Hardly. She was just like everyone else with divorced parents and an alcoholic father that she lived with and a stepmom who everyone loved except Jewel. And, just like the rest of us, she felt like she was better than this town and she was running away the day she turned eighteen.

So I didn’t understand what made her think she was so special that she just needed to die. There was nothing significantly damaging that went on in her life. She was never beat, she wasn’t abandoned and left on someone’s doorstep as a baby, and she wasn’t a six hundred pound 16 year old that smelled like cats and was the laughing stock of the whole school.
And like most misunderstanding people, I labeled Jewel as crazy and decided that this was all a phase and she just needed to get out of it and get over herself.

She spent most of her summer at my house. We would sit on the bed listening to music and talking about her boyfriend and my lack of a boyfriend and watching stupid movies about rednecks and romance. She’d still laugh the way she did before. She laughed at everything and her laugh was loud and girlie.
Sometimes she would bring Allie over and we’d drink and they’d smoke. I never did because I didn’t like the taste, and they teased me about it.
As school inched forward, I watched the bags under her eyes grow darker and her face become thinner. I keep thinking that maybe when school started back, things would get better for her. She would see all of her friends and they’d show her love and she’d feel like she did before. I didn’t expect her to feel perfect, but I expected her to feel better.

Every day that we spent together, we drove to the gas station to get giant sodas and hot dogs. Taking into consideration that our town was small, I didn’t think much about it when the scrawny cashier knew us by name. Jewel and I always made fun of his brown mustache and the way that he looked at us when we walked in.

“He’s such a pedophile,” Jewel would say. “And he’s probably, what? Forty? And he still has acne like that?”

“That’s so mean!”

“Your laughter says different.”

One day on our way from the gas station, something brown and white darted in front of our car. Jewel swerved to miss it, but hadn’t reacted quickly enough and hit it. When she saw that it was a dog, she quickly jumped out of the car and ran to it. There were cars honking at her as she squatted down in the middle of the road and tried picking the bleeding dog up. It yelped and she called me over for help.

I ran over, embarrassed to be in the street with everyone yelling and saying to get out of the way. We picked the dog up together and set it in the back seat of her car.

The dog was big, and it hadn’t been run over, only hit, so the damage wasn’t too terribly bad. I called my stepmother and we had taken him to the vet meeting her there. His leg was put in a cast and a cone on his head. They sewed up a few wounds and gave us antibiotics to feed him. He had two broken ribs, but there was nothing really they could do about it.


Jewel cried like a baby the whole time.

“It’s okay,” the vet laughed, “He’s fine. Everyone gets a little injured sometimes. The hardest part is recovering. He didn’t have a collar, is he yours?”

We shook our heads and explained the situation.

“Well, I would suggest putting some ads up and give it about a week. If no one responds, keep him. He seems friendly, but he looks to me like a stray.”

I could feel my stepmother’s disapproving look behind me.

“What kind of dog is it?” Jewel pet the dog gently on the neck just below the cone.

“It looks to me like a boxer and a great Dane mix.”

“That explains the size,” my stepmother said.

“You’ve been saying you want a dog,” I said to Jewel.

She laughed, “Be careful what you wish for.”

We took the dog home and I kept it at my house in my room. We had named it Icarus. It seemed to me that the dog had tried to do something great and almost impossible, like Icarus, and he failed, like Icarus.

Every morning we had to feed the dog his antibiotics, which was easier said than done, and I had to walk him before school started. It was as good for me as it was for him. It kept my mind off of things to have something to take care of. Between the dog and school, I didn’t have time to worry about anything else.

Jewel sat on my bed petting Icarus and listening to Neil Young. She listened to that a lot lately, and whenever this one song would come on she just cried. I asked her why one day and pointed out that the song wasn’t even that good, that almost no one knew it and I didn’t even understand what it was about.

She said, “Like me.”

I just rolled my eyes and went on doing what I was doing. I never listened to her when she got like that. It wasn’t that I didn’t care. It was more that I cared too much and if I listened to her talk that way I would worry too much and I’d drive myself just as crazy as she was.

Maybe that was where I went wrong.

The weeks went by slowly until Halloween. I was having a party and almost no one was there. That’s how it usually worked for me. I sat around waiting on Jewel to show up. I kept checking my phone and calling her. I got nothing. I figured she was busy with Allie and Allie’s party, which, really, wouldn’t have surprised me if she had ditched me for that. And I wouldn’t have blamed her.

Everyone was gone by eleven, and my parents were home from their party by eleven thirty. They weren’t expected to be home until two or three.

I had been sitting on the couch watching TV when they came in. They walked over to me and kissed me on the head asking me if my party was fun and who showed up. I lied and doubled my guest list so they wouldn’t know that I was really the loser that I was. They smiled and nodded and my stepmother’s eyes teared up and touched my face.

“What’s wrong?”

“We’re just so glad to have you.”

She turned the TV off and sent me to bed saying that we were going to go do something fun the next day and I needed to rest.

I lied in bed that night listening to my parents walk around. They didn’t speak or laugh like they usually did. My stepmother didn’t turn any music on and my father wasn’t watching TV. The only sounds were clanking of glasses and footsteps, which meant they were drinking, and by their silence and my stepmother’s sobs, they weren’t celebrating.

I tried calling Jewel again even though I could take a pretty good guess as to what she was doing. I could picture her sitting on Allie’s back porch with her boyfriend sharing a beer and passing a joint. That’s all she did anymore; smoke, drink, have sex, and cry. I had gotten to the point where I was fed up with her. She had become my obnoxious older sister, the kind that you see on sitcoms that everyone laughs at and secretly wishes to be.
But if I were to be honest with myself, I would admit that if I looked the way Jewel did with her hazelnut brown hair and her big blue eyes, and if my parents didn’t care what I did like Jewel’s parents didn’t care, and if I had a boyfriend as attractive as John, I would be doing all the same things.

With Icarus by my side and my mother’s ring gripping my finger, I slowly drifted to sleep.

My phone buzzed. My phone had buzzed at least thirty times before it woke me up. I figured it was Jewel, probably drunk, probably needing a ride home. I ignored it. It kept buzzing over and over, so I finally picked it up off the floor.

I had fifteen missed calls, forty social networking alerts, and twenty text. I checked the time. It was only six in the morning.

My eyes were hazy and I couldn’t exactly read everything. I scrolled through and picked up certain words and phrases. I kept seeing, “Sorry for your loss.” I didn’t know what loss anyone was talking about.

I shuffled into my parent’s room to find their bed made just as it had been the previous morning. They hadn’t gone to bed.
I could hear Icarus’s unclipped nails pattering behind me on the hardwood floor. I loved that sound. It gave me a secure feeling, like someone was always looking out for me.

I slid down the steps and into the kitchen. It was empty. My parents were sitting up on the couch watching the news. I wondered if that’s what they had been doing all night.

My stepmother’s hand was over her mouth and my fathers face in his hands, his shoulders shaking. I made a crackling noise with my throat to get someone’s attention. Janet looked back at me, her eyes swollen and filled with tears.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispered.

I watched the news. They were pulling a little blue car out of the water. As they zoomed in I saw an Alabama tag and a Grateful Dead bumper sticker on the back of the car.

I knew then.

I felt my locked knees very suddenly give out. I fell to the floor sitting on my legs. I couldn’t see through my tears, but I could make out Icarus’s bulky shape and I pulled him close to me. I felt sort of bad for using the dog as a guilt towel, something to soak it all up for me. And I really felt bad for crushing him the way I was. But at the same time I knew that he was about all I had left in the world and I wasn’t going to let him go.

I heard Janet whimper as my father went outside and slammed the door shut.
After a few minutes I soaked up my tears and stopped sobbing enough to ask what had happened. Janet said that Jewel was coming home from a party and she was drunk. She was driving and ran off the road into the lake.

I cried even harder now.

“There’s nothing anyone could have really done,” Janet lied.

“Are you sure she was drunk?”

“That’s what they’re saying.”

Jewel was dead and as I cried tears of sorrow for myself, I felt at peace knowing that she had finally gotten what she wanted and maybe she would be happy now.