The Red Thread (2 page)

“Hello.”

“Hello, Jess. How are you today?”

“Fine. Yourself?”

“Not bad.”

It’s the same monotonous routine that happens just about each day. When it’s time to close, I find Peter in his office passed out. I shake his shoulder, but he does not respond. I shake him harder, and he finally comes to. He tells me to fuck off, but after that he gets up, throws me the keys, and says not to fuck up before he leaves. I am probably better at closing down the shop than he is. I lock the doors and bring the shades down in the windows. I count the money in the cash register, only a little bit tempted to take some for myself, which I don’t. It’s normal. Who wouldn’t be tempted? It’s like the money is saying “Take me and run away.” It’s the little devil that sits on my shoulder. I do what any sane person would do: push the devil away and close the register.

The walk to my house is a short one. It’s a cold autumn night. It’s late October, a week and a half before Halloween, but you can feel the incoming winter. I zip up my sweatshirt and push the hood over my head. I put my hands in my pockets, and I keep my eyes cast toward the ground. The wind is bitter as it smacks me across the face, brutally reminding me I should drive to work. I do have my license. I just choose to walk. I hate driving, to be honest. Before anyone asks why, I have no reason. I just do. Walking allows me to keep my thoughts in order, which sometimes is a bad thing.

When I walk into my house, I hear my parents in the kitchen. Silence reigns, and as I enter the room, a thick, awkward air envelops each and every corner.

“Jess. You’re home,” my mother, Christine Holbrooke, greets a little too cheerfully. “I started dinner. It’s spaghetti, and I’m making meatballs as well. Your favorite.”

She’s a real June Cleaver.

“Thanks, Mom. I’ll be right back.”

“Take your time. Don’t rush. Dinner will be done in ten minutes.”

I turn around to head toward the staircase.

“Did you hear your mother?” And as usual, there’s my father, Holden Holbrooke, who feels the need to forever chime in. People always ask me, and yes Holden Holbrooke is really my father’s name. It’s quite unfortunate. Who would name their child that?

“Yes, sir.”

I continue up the stairs, and I lock my bedroom door behind me. I sigh as I take in my bedroom. Books overflow from the shelves, and piles upon piles rise high upon the walls. Posters and pictures, which I have printed from the Internet, are taped to the walls above my bed. They are of writers I look up to, musicians I adore, or even movies I love. A majority of the clutter on my wall is horror movies posters. My bedroom is, to put bluntly, perfect. I get to go to sleep every night with my favorite things looking over me as I look up to them.

I take my peacoat off and throw it over the back of my swivel chair, which sits in front of my laptop. I have spent many long and forlorn (my word of the day two months ago) hours in that area.

The smell of cooked pasta and meatballs drifts through my door, and the scent is just too strong for me to ignore any longer. My stomach growls, quite loudly I must say, and I don’t fight the hunger off any longer.

AT THE
table I sit next to my mother, as Dad sits on the other side. A fourth chair is at the table, but it lies empty. My older sister, Clara, always sits there, but she is away at college and excelling there. Last time we spoke, she had a 4.0 GPA. I told her I was proud of her, and I know my father is. He has always shown his favoritism toward her. Growing up, Clara was always
his
girl. Me… I was just there. I was the accident child. I know they won’t admit it, but it’s true. I’ve heard my parents talking late at night, when they thought I was asleep. At the time, they didn’t realize I didn’t really sleep.

People probably think this is part of the reason I’m depressed, but the truth is, I was depressed way before this. This was just another needle stuck in my flesh.

“Aren’t you going to eat, honey?”

I look up. I must have spaced out again. I look down at my food, which has gone uneaten. I take a bite, and it’s delicious, but sometimes no matter how hungry I am, I can’t bring myself to eat. I force a few bites down, though. I look up to see her compassionate smile… and I try to smile back. I really try, but sometimes it just hurts to smile.

“Are you in one
those
moods again?” Dad asks.

One of those moods.
I really fucking hate that phrase. Before my suicide attempt, every time I was upset, he always called it one of my moods. And every time he said that it just pissed me off more and more. He still hasn’t taken a hint that I really hate it when he says that. He acts like I can help the way I am. If it was that easy, then I wouldn’t be medicated more than a Beverly Hills housewife.

“I’m fine,” I answer.

I stare down at the knife and run my fingers over its jagged edge, each point like the strings of an instrument. I push deeper and watch as drops of blood form. As I move my hand away from the blade, the blood trickles down my finger. It’s the proof that I’m a living human being. I look back down at the knife, and I push the blade, and I watch the knife spin on the table, slowly, but I push it again. Faster and faster it spins, like a child’s top, and my eyes never stray away. I watch it spin closer to the edge until it falls to the floor with a bang.

I look up to see my parents’ scrutinizing eyes. I shrug, and I pick my knife up off the ground.

“Whoops.”

I take a couple more bites and then push my chair in.

“Are you done already?”

“Yeah. I’m completely full. Thank you, Mom, for dinner. It was delicious.”

“I’ll put it away in case you want more for later.”

I give her another forced smile, and I thank her before exiting the kitchen to head toward my bedroom. It’s a waste to save that food. I already know it won’t be eaten—by me at least.

In my bedroom, behind my locked door, I fall onto my bed, wrapping myself into a cocoon of blanket, hoping to emerge as a different person in the morning.

We can all dream.

I’VE BEEN
asked many times in my life:
What does depression feel like?
Well, for one thing, it’s torture. To describe depression, it’s as if everything hurts. It hurts to move. It hurts to smile and laugh. It hurts to think. It just hurts to be awake. Every time I’m awake, it’s as if I’m battling through to make it to the next morning.

I once told my therapist that my mind is a broken record player. Dr. Wheeler asked what I meant. I responded back the best way I could:

“What I mean is that my mind is a broken player. There are all these thoughts racing through a million miles per hour. Each one is worse than the last. Some say ‘you’re ugly’ or ‘you’re worthless.’ Some say ‘you should just kill yourself.’ These thoughts keep racing through my head like a record on repeat. Except, I can’t stop them. I can’t press the mute button, because the mute button is broken. So I try to lower the volume, but the volume button is broken. Instead the volume gets louder and louder… until finally I can’t hear anything else. It drowns out the entire world until it drives me mad, and I can’t do anything about it. No one can hear this record except for myself. It is my own personal curse.”

I remember the way she stared at me. I could see in her eyes as she took everything in to analyze, like the good doctor she is.

“Jess,” she said in a sympathetic voice, “do you still hear those voices?”

I remember the way I sighed. She totally didn’t get what I was trying to say. I had to explain to her I wasn’t schizophrenic. I wasn’t hearing voices. It was just what my mind screamed at me every moment of my life, telling me everything I knew and secretly feared.

A person’s own mind is their worst enemy.

The vibration of my cell phone pulls me out of my mind. I bring the phone up to my ear.

“Hello.”

“Yo, what’s up? It’s Tommy.”

Thomas Riley always feels the need to greet a person on the phone like he thinks he’s some kind of badass. Tommy—don’t ever call him Thomas to his face; he gets very pissed off if you do—is a skinny, pale redhead. Let that image sink in. Now you can see why it’s hard to see him as a “badass.”

“Hey, Tommy. Not too much. What are you doing?”

“I have Alex in the car. Look outside your window.”

I walk over to my window and look down to see an old red convertible, with the top up, sitting outside. I look down, and I see twenty-year-old Alexander Young staring up at my window. He gives me a large smile, and I answer with a small wave.

“Get your ass into my car. We’re heading out tonight.”

“Where are—” I’m met by a dial tone before my question even finishes. I grab my light blue zip-up hoodie and throw it on over my T-shirt. I zip it up and put the hood on over my head. As I run down the stairs, I hear my dad ask where I am going. I tell him that I’m going to spend the evening with Tommy and Alex. I hear him mumble something, but I have a feeling it’s about his hatred for Tommy, which is quite intense. Tommy is someone you need to have an appreciation for. Patience is the key to being friends with Tommy Riley, and my dad has little, if any at all.

I jump into the backseat of his car, pushing aside the empty beer bottles, cigarette boxes, and McDonald’s bags.

“Look who’s out of the loony bin.”

He’s about as understated as a garbage truck in the early morning.

“Tommy, I’ve been out for a couple of weeks now,” I respond.

I’ve been out of the hospital for just under a month, and now he’s finally coming to see me.

“Sorry, life has been hectic.”

Alex turns back toward me. “It’s good to see you again.”

Alex, on the other hand, has seen me quite a few times since I’ve been home. Alex is a good friend, but I wouldn’t exactly consider either of them my best friend.

“You too.”

I look out the window as the scenery passes by, a bit too fast for this to be safe driving. Everything flashes by underneath the dim glow of the streetlights. A tree here. A building there. It’s all so monumental, yet insignificant at the same time. All these
things
are here now… but in years, they will all be gone. No one will remember what was here when it is nothing but dirt and rubble.

Even all of us. No one will remember any of us. We’re like cartons of milk. We all have our own expiration dates. In the scheme of everything, we’re like all of these material items—
nothing
in the end. There will come a time when no one will even know my name. No one will cry over my family or me because it will be as if we never existed. It really makes me think what the point of it all is. That’s the ignorant thing with society. Everyone is so damn desperate to be remembered, to be immortalized. That’s why everyone posts his or her entire life online through Facebook or Twitter. This is society’s fucked-up way of each person writing their own damn autobiography. But really, none of it matters.

We’re just dust in the universe, waiting to be blown away.

The car finally comes to a stop, forcing me out of my dangerous mind. Tommy turns around, grabbing a six-pack of beer from the floor by my feet.

“What are you thinking about?”

“That we are nothing.”

“Cool. Now let’s drink, boys.”

Tommy’s answer to everything in life is to drink it away. The first time he ever got drunk was when his father went too far with his punishment. Tommy was fourteen and was covered in bruises. His lip was split, and he wanted anything to stop the pain. He stole a bottle of Jack Daniels from his father’s liquor cabinet, and he drank himself into a stupor right behind the high school. That was the first time I ever saw Tommy so frightened. He was like a pathetic puppy that night. I snuck him into my bedroom, so my parents wouldn’t see how drunk he was. He was gone by the time I woke up. Sadly that wasn’t the last time his father beat him.

Tommy grabs the beer, and I look up to see the abandoned warehouse. Tommy and I have been coming here since we were freshmen in high school. The first night we ever hung out, he took me here. Alex started joining us when he moved here from Michigan in the eleventh grade. It’s funny. We technically shouldn’t be friends. Tommy is very loud and eccentric. He gets into a lot of trouble. And I’m not any of that. I pretty much keep to myself and would rather blend in than stand out. Our personalities juxtapose one another, but we have remained friends all these years because in our own way, we’re like kindred spirits.

We sit behind the warehouse on the old couches we brought here one night when we were about sixteen, maybe seventeen. My memory is a bit hazy sometimes with certain details. We found them outside a house late at night and spent an hour and a half dragging both couches behind this place. They are damp from a recent rainstorm, but we sit down anyway. Tommy opens a can of beer first and downs half of it in a moment.

“Slow down, man,” Alex says, worry in his eyes.

“Yeah, okay, Dad,” Tommy quips.

I’m the last one to grab a beer. I open the can, but I don’t take a sip right away. The smell reaches my nose, and it makes me want to throw the can down to the grass and let the liquid seep into the ground.

“So did you meet any guys at the loony bin?” Tommy really likes to call the hospital the
loony bin
, for some reason I can’t explain. I guess he finds it funny or something.

“Not really. Everyone was as crazy as I was. I don’t think I should date someone equally crazy.”

“You’re not crazy,” Alex mutters. It’s just low enough for me to hear.

I look up and give him a small, somewhat painless smile.

“What about you, Tommy? Any girls in your life?”

“Every girl turns him down,” Alex laughs.

“Fuck off, Alex. I’m single by choice. Just not my choice,” Tommy states as he brings the can of beer to his lips. In the light of the moon, I can’t help but notice Tommy’s light green eyes. His dark red hair is cut close to his head. Alex smirks, and I just sit there, holding my beer in my hands. It still lies untouched.