Damage - A. M. Jenkins [52]
The scraping stops. Curtis brushes paint flakes away, smoothing the wood with his hand. After a few moments you remember today’s football practice.
“Where’d you go?” you ask him.
Curtis just shrugs.
You already know, anyway. He didn’t want to there anymore—so he undid his chin strap, dropped helmet on the ground, and walked away.
Now, sitting here, you realize something else, because of Curtis and his dad; because Curtis has never gone visit his father in the whole five years since his dad left. Never called him, even. And he never will.
When you think about that, you understand that Curtis made a decision when he walked off the field this afternoon. He’ll never go back—not to sit on the bench, not to play, not even to watch a game from the stands. That’s the way Curtis is. For him, this football season is over.
All because of you.
Curtis is scraping again, pressing the razor’s edge along the wood in rhythmic strokes.
“I’m sorry, man,” you tell him.
“Why?”
“If I’d been able to hold on to the ball—”
“Forget it. Couldn’t stand one more second of that beer-bellied Nazi asshole.”
“Yeah, but if—”
“Doesn’t matter. Whole thing gave me a bad taste in my mouth.” He frowns a little, then scrapes harder.
A large flake of paint has landed on your knee. You pick it up and break it in half. Then you break it in half again. And again. Finally, when it’s so small it’s disappeared on the end of your finger, you clear your throat. “Heather and I broke up,” you tell Curtis.
The thought of what that means—aimless hours, nobody to get out of bed for, nobody who can make you real—leaves one big unshed ache in your chest.
“You okay?” Curtis is asking.
You start to shrug, but your eyes sting with sudden and somehow you’re shaking your head no.
Curtis rasps steadily away at the railing. Just when you think he’s not going to comment, he says, “I Hurts like hell.”
You’re remembering how you wanted to leave, that morning in the tack room long ago, but didn’t. Curtis won’t leave either—whatever you choose to tell him.
“Actually,” you hear yourself say, “I’ve been kind thinking about killing myself lately.”
The scraping stops.
“How?” Curtis asks, after a moment, and even though you can hear a little worry hovering at the edge that one-word question, for one crazy split second actually think you might laugh.
Anybody else would have asked why.
You should have known Curtis is too practical that. Curtis always starts at the outside of a problem and works his way in—like peeling an onion.
Sitting there in his presence, a bare possibility stirs; the possibility that letting go of the cliff’s edge may not mean that you have to fall.
The words are more than ready. They rise through the catch in your throat and tumble out into raw, jumbled piles: Heather and her father; heaviness, football, and razors. After a few minutes, Curtis quits pretending to scrape paint; he comes around with the still in his hand and sits beside you on the steps.
And you sit there talking: Curtis, flicking the button on the scraper, clicking the razor in, then out, then again, thinking hard, interrupting with a question once in a while; you, picking up flakes of paint, splitting them smaller and smaller, feeling your way into the future that you hadn’t been able to see.
Millions of people suffer from depression or know someone who does. If you want to know more about depression and what you can do to get help, contact the following organizations for information:
American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP)
3615 Wisconsin Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20016–3007
(202) 966–7300
(800) 333–7636
www.aacap.org
American Psychiatric Association
1400 K Street, NW
Washington, DC 20005
(888) 357–7924
www.psych.org
American Psychological Association
750 First Street NE
Washington, DC 20002–4242
(202)