"She lived in storm and strife,
Her soul had such desire
For what proud death may bring
That it could not endure
The common good of life...
Her soul had such desire
For what proud death may bring
That it could not endure
The common good of life...
What had happened just before the Uber arrived was Helen's last chance; mentally she was too long gone to admit this fact to herself until it was the point of no return, the bridge hadn't only burned, it was blown to pieces a century before it's time. For some of the living, that's how it ends up.
She was standing on the sidewalk in front of school, waiting for her Uber to pull into the school's parking lot, when a voice called, "Hey, Helen."
She turned to see Draven, a boy who sat next to her in AP Biology, awkwardly jogging towards her over the grass. He was a tubby blond who stood at a height of six-one. Though he was known to be shy with almost every person he came into contact with, he seemed to compulsively talk to Helen at any opportune moment he was around her, as if he were a dying flashlight, and she were a replacement battery regenerating a light he kept inside himself too often. She knew, as anyone else who would care to notice, that he had a heavy and hard crush on her. There were some days she'd look forward to seeing him, but that feeling of the friendly companionship between them had lately been dwindling for her.
"Hey there, Draven," she greeted as he arrived near her, close to being out of breath. "What's up, man?"
"I just wanted to say, 'Hi,' then 'Goodbye, and have a good weekend,'" Draven said, rubbing his belly as he quickly caught his breath. "I haven't seen you all day is all. Just wanted to see you before the day's end."
"We could've had lunch together, you know," Helen said.
"Well, I was going to look for you at lunchtime, but I was in the library with the guys playing Magic The Gathering. Maybe I should've went looking for you instead, I'm starting to suck at the game. I'm losing my touch, you could say."
"I wanted to be alone, anyway," Helen said.
"Oh, okay, " he said. "But what if I looked for you, and found you?"
"Then I would've yelled 'rape' at the top of my lungs, then maced you, Draven. And maybe kicked you in the balls for good measure."
"Damn, woman, that's some heavy shit to consider," Draven said, smiling. "I would've took it like a good sport, though. A man must learn from his mistakes, no matter his true intentions."
"I'm only kidding, Draven," Helen said with a slight grin... her last.
Draven chuckled, then asked, "So you waiting for your mom to pick you up?"
"No, an Uber," Helen replied, looking down at her phone to see the ETA status of the Uber.
"You know, you could cancel it, and I'll drive you home," Draven offered, with a sense of earnestness in his eyes, hoping she'd accept his offer.
"No, Draven, I don't want to burden you," she said, then looked up from her phone to see a disappointed Draven looking at her, as if he were a child being denied a chance to play just ten more minutes on his Playstation.
"You never could be a burden for me, Helen," he said. "Maybe next time?"
Helen didn't want to give an honest answer; Draven was the only person in the world she didn't want to lie to.
Draven said, "Well, the offer will always be open, just to let you know."
"Okay," Helen said. "The Uber will be here in just a few minutes."
"Alright then," Draven said. "Have a great weekend. See you next week."
He turned to leave.
"Thanks anyway for the offer," Helen said.
Draven turned back around to look at her. He said, "You're very welcome, Helen."
There was a moment of silence between them as Draven longingly kept his eyes on her face. She was the most beautiful girl he had ever talked to in the twelve years he'd been a student who not only talked back, but had long conversations with, the type of conversations which sparked something in both of them.
Draven broke the silence by saying, "I wanted to ask you something, since you have the time."
Helen didn't say anything, but simply waited for the question she had been expecting from him ever since he had sat down next in AP Biology, that very moment they had locked eyes with one another: "You wanna go see the new Shazam movie with me tomorrow, then get something to eat?"
"Um," she uttered.
"I heard it sucks, but we could see something else if you want?" Draven continued with his first attempt at asking someone on a date, crossing his fingers inside his mind, hoping she'd say, Yes.
Helen couldn't give him an immediate answer. If she said, No, it would have been a lie. She wanted to accept, but if she answered, Yes, it would have also been a lie, due to the plans she had for the coming Monday. She wanted nothing to get in the way, and if anything possible would change her desired fate during the weekend, she would hate whatever or whoever it was for the rest of her life, even Draven -- if that were even a possible hatred for her to muster.
What had happened next seemed to have happened really slow: she saw the Uber car pulling into the school's parking lot behind Draven, then she instinctively walked straight up to Draven, placed her left hand on his chest, slightly raised herself by standing on her toes, closed her eyes, and kissed him on the lips.
It was both their first, but while Draven had wanted to kiss any of the beautiful high school girls, Helen had only desired to kiss Draven ever since the day she had met him.
As Helen lowered herself away from Draven's lips, time seemed to become normal again as the Uber car came to a complete stop on the curb beside them.
With her hand still on Draven's chest, Helen couldn't help but look away from his gaze.
"I'm sorry, I can't," she nearly whispered. "I'd just be a burden to you."
She turned away without glancing at his face, and made her way to the back passenger door of the Uber car.
Before she reached for the door handle, Draven said, "I care about you, Helen."
She stopped.
"I'd say, 'I love you,' and mean it with all my heart," Draven continued, "but I feel I'm way too young to know exactly what true love really is."
"You're the smartest man I know, Draven," Helen said, her back still facing him. "You know exactly what true love is, but I can't feel it. I'd be too much of a burden on your heart." She quickly opened the door, and sat in the backseat.
Before she closed the door, she heard Draven say, "You could never be a --," but before she heard the last word he'd ever say to her, the door was closed.
"He ain't coming?" the Uber driver asked.
"No," Helen replied. "He's got his own ride. It's just me."
"Whatever you say," the Uber driver said, then drove away from the curb, making his way to the parking lot's exit.
Helen knew anyone else would be crying in that backseat on their way home, but she had accepted the fact she could feel nothing when love was offered to her; all she could feel at that moment, as she had felt for the past year was the weight of hopelessness on her soul, and the eagerness to end her life in a place of isolation.
The moment Helen entered her home she heard her father call her name from the garage before she even closed the front door.
"Is that you?" his voice making its way down the hallway to Helen's annoyed ears.
"Yeah," she hollered back.
"Come in here, I wanna show you something," he hollered.
Helen rolled her eyes as she locked the front door, and made her way down the hallway to an open door that led to the garage. Inside her father sat at a draft table looking up at her as she entered, one hand holding a pen over a canvas paper.
"Come here," he said, beckoning her with his free hand, "check this out. It's the kind of shit you like."
She walked up beside him.
He put his arm around her waist, smiled, and asked, "How was your day, my one and only little sunshine?"
"Fine, Dad," Helen replied, a little annoyed by her father's routine question. She then leaned in to kiss his forehead. "What do you want to show me?"
"What I'm just about finishing tracing," he said. "Look, it's cool."
Helen looked down at the canvas to see a black and white image of a demonic, satanic, and muscular figure holding a sword of fire, fighting off Roman looking soldiers half it's size.
"Looks cool," Helen commented. "What comic book?"
"Not a comic book this time, Helen," her Dad said. "Your daddy is moving up in the world. It's part of a Graphic Novel. It's going to be called, 'Demon Michel.' Wanna read the script the guy sent me for it before I finish? Maybe give me tips on how I should approach this?"
"What makes you think a child like me can contribute anything to something like this?" Helen asked.
"Well, you're no child anymore," her father began to say, "you're eighteen now, and more influential in the arts than you'd like to accept at the moment. Plus, if this Graphic Novel sells big -- fingers crossed -- you can tell people at college, 'My talented Daddy drew that, and I helped his ass.' You'll get a lot of attention from the nerds."
"Dad," Helen groaned.
"Hey, I've always told you, I prefer you to bring home a geek one day instead of an empty headed jock," her father said, shaking his pen at her. "Like I've told you, 'A meat head might bring home the bread, but a nerd can eventually buy you a mansion instead.'"
Helen turned to leave and go straight to her room, but right before entering the hallway she stopped.
With her back still facing her father, she said, "A boy said he was in love with me today."
She heard her father drop his pen on the draft table, and the sound of it rolling down to a complete stop at the ledge where it lay alongside other pens of various colors.
"I've been waiting for this day since you were born, but haven't prepared myself," her father said. "Okay," he took a deep breath, "what's the football player's name?"
"Dad," she groaned once again. "He's not a football player, goddamnit. He's not even into sports at all."
Her father blew out a sigh of relief so heavy his blood pressure must've lowered. "Oh thank God," he said.
"His name's Draven," Helen said. Her back still facing her father. She didn't want to look into his eyes if she were going to lie to him at that moment.
"What kind of name is that?" her father said.
This question made her turn to look at her father right in the eyes.
She said, "Uh, hello, you're a comic book guy. Draven, Eric Draven from the freaking Crow comic."
"Whoa, no kidding," her father said. "Invite him over for dinner tonight. Your mother's bringing home Chinese food. Does he like Chinese?"
"He's not coming over tonight," Helen proclaimed. "You know what, I don't wanna talk about it anymore. I'm going to my room."
On her way down the hallway to her room, her father hollered, "Do you love him back?"
Helen closed her bedroom door and locked it. "Yes, but I don't feel it," she whispered to herself.
Walking over to her computer desk she tossed her backpack on her bed, then sat in her computer chair, and opened her laptop. She opened her Spotify, and clicked on random. The song that came on was Stand Inside Your Love by Smashing Pumpkins. Before Billy Corgan's beautiful voice sang the first lyric, Helen muted it. What came out of her speakers next was Marilyn Manson's (s)AINT. She left it on as she went on her e-mail account to confirm her flight on the coming Monday, set to take off out of the state to a random city she had selected buy throwing a dart at a map of the United States pinned on her bedroom wall. Using Google Maps, she researched the area outside the city the dart had landed on, and found a campsite among the foothills at the base of a mountain where she could... well... go to after buying the shotgun she had ordered put on hold for her at one of the city's local gun stores. The guy who answered the phone was a complete gentleman when she inquired if it was okay for them to hold a specific one that she had settled on days earlier -- a Mossberg 500 12 Gauge Pump-Action with Pistol Grip -- until she arrived in town to pick it up.
"Sure we can do that for you, ma'am," the man said. "Just leave me your name, and we'll do the background check when you come to pick it up. You can pay for it then too." He chuckled at the last statement which was only amusing to him.
Helen gave her full name, thanked him very much, then hung up when the conversation was over.
All she had to do when Monday morning came was leave the house before her parents woke up, take an Uber straight to the Airport, text her mother she'd be home late due to her attending a poetry reading which really only took place on Fridays after school for only an hour, then she'd board the plane, and chill for the nearly three hour flight. Hopefully it would basically be devoid of people; she didn't want to talk to some random fool the whole time. By the time either of her parents realized she wasn't coming back home for good, Helen would be in those foothills, staring into the sunset before... well... she wasn't able to go back home.
Until that moment came, Helen had a lot of time to waste, an entire weekend, in fact. She would spend it listening to music, and writing her last words in her journal. She was undecided whether or not she was going to upload the pages to her website. Either it was meant for her parent's eyes only after she was gone, or on the internet for the world to see -- if the world was even remotely interested in her at all. The website she had designed had gotten over a thousand hits since the day she created it the year prior. It was part of a web hosting service called New Boundaries, where individuals could create their own site the way they saw fit. New Boundaries' selling line was: "To revive the act of creativity through free expression. Something our modern times has forgotten."
There were thousands of different types of websites created by all types of different people, all communicating with one another regarding their specific subject matter. Helen found a community of people obsessed with the My Little Pony book franchise; from girls in their early teens to old men in their mid-forties. Helen looked deeply into this community of people, just to see if there was any sinister intent coming from the old men, but shockingly there were no perverts to be found, all the men she found just talked about the ponies, and even shared pictures of themselves at My Little Pony cosplays.
Though the result of not finding one pervert among a sea of little girls would satisfy most people who aspired to be among spring flowers, Helen was a bit dispirited by it, being that she was part of an online community that preferred to hangout at an old cemetery at the stroke of midnight. And that's exactly who she communicated with, people who designed their websites just like she did, with a devout interest with the dark arts. These people were goths, emos, punk rockers, metal heads, satanists, pagans, or any other label most good Christian folk didn't like to be around. The ones where Christians would say they still loved, but think, I actually hate.
Helen spent most of the year trying to perfect her website as much as the ones she admired, but felt she couldn't get to their level. As of that moment, being as depressed and emotionless as she was, she concluded she had gone as far as she could with it. The website went under the moniker Splitting the Atom, named after a Massive Attack song, and what Helen felt was the greatest mistake humanity ever created, but regrettably used only twice. That was the exact style of what her particular community was all about: the dark side of humanity, with tongue-in-cheek humor as an important ingredient. Helen wasn't exactly the most humorous with the content on her website as most, but she tried her best before the depression had kicked into high gear at the start of her senior year.
She logged onto her website to see if were going to make changes. After nearly ten minutes of browsing at each page within the site, she decided to log off, turn up her speakers that was then playing Rammstein music, and opened her notebook to write down whatever came to her mind. If she couldn't come up with words, she'd draw something random.
An hour had gone by when there was a knock on her bedroom door.
"Food's here, sunshine," her mother called from the other side of the door.
"Okay, mom," Helen hollered over the music.
She closed her notebook, turned down the speakers, and left her room to get a plate of Chinese food. As she was in the kitchen, filling her plate, her parents ate silently at the kitchen table as they watched her scooping food out of the cartons. She turned to go back down the hallway to her room when her plate was full.
"So, Helen," her mother said. "Why don't you come eat with us for a change?"
Helen came to a complete stop, and winced like she had never winced before, so hard it hurt. She totally forgot what she had told her father about what Draven admitted to her earlier that day. She got rid of that expression as soon as she turned to look at her parents as they both stared up at her -- her father chewing slowly.
"Okay," Helen said, then walked over to them, sat in the chair, and began eating immediately.
"So how was your day?" her mother asked.
Helen tilted her head, and raised a shoulder to indicate, Same old stuff, since her mouth was full of Chow Mein.
"Really?" her mother inquired further.
Helen looked down at her food as she swallowed the Chow Mein, and spun her fork to get herself another mouthful of the noodles so she wouldn't have to talk about what she knew what her mother already knew. She said, "Yeah, really."
"He's not a football player, like your father said, right?" her mother asked.
Helen's eyes shot up at her father, and she groaned, "Dad."
Her father said, to his wife, "Don't embarrass her, babe. It's the first time a boy has fallen head over heels for her. I thought it would happen in elementary, but it happened in High School. In her senior year, no less. That makes me a happy man."
"Was he looking in your eyes when he said he loved you, sunshine," her mother said, ignoring her husband.
Helen dropped her fork on her plate, and pressed both hands over her eyes.
"Goddamnit, you guys," she said, aggravated.
"Helen, please, we're at dinner," her mother said.
Helen informed, "He didn't actually use the words, 'I love you.'" She uncovered her eyes, and continued, "He said he cared about me, and he would've said he loved me, but he feels he's too young to truly know what true love actually is."
"Whoa," her father uttered.
"That's honestly the most romantic thing I've ever heard," her mother said. Then she said to her husband, "Don't you think, babe?"
"Hold on a sec, sunshine," her father said, "what made him blurt it out all of a sudden like that? Is he actually stalking you?"
"No, Dad, we've actually been talking to each other since the start of this school year," Helen said. "The thing is, before my Uber picked me up he asked me out on a date, and..."
Helen went silent. It was the first time she thought about the kiss since the moment it actually happened.
"What?" her mother asked.
"I kissed him," Helen stated.
Her father jumped up from his chair, nearly toppling the kitchen table over by accident.
"WHAT?!" he basically yelled in shock.
"Babe, what the fuck, man?" her mother blurted out.
Helen felt she had enough of the conversation, and said, "You know, mom, dad, I can't talk about this right now. This is just too weird for me at the moment. I'm - I'm gonna go back to my room. Do homework, and all that shit a high school kid is suppose to do." She got up, took hold of her plate of Chinese Food off the table, and went hastily towards her room.
Her father called out to her, "Sunshine, don't worry, I'm not mad. Just go to the corner store, and buy condoms, ASAP!"
Helen closed the bedroom door behind her. She wasn't mad, not at all, simply annoyed. Sitting back down in her computer chair, she turned up the speakers playing the music, and began to finish her meal. Later, before she went to bed just after three in the morning, she'd be too focused on writing in her journal to acknowledge what her and her parents even talked about at the kitchen table.
The next two days were basically a blur for her, as she spent most of Saturday image scanning the pages of her journal to her laptop computer, and listening to music, as well as pondering mortality in the general sense. When the brain shuts down, what is there to be seen? Light, darkness? Is everything everybody says about the afterlife even true in the first place, or is it all basically a pipe dream for all those who fear no longer continuing with their identity they spent their entire lives developing? Blah, Blah, Blah, Helen thought as she finished uploading her journal's pages to the computer, and made final touchups to her New Boundaries website. A few times on that Saturday she did leave her room to get something to eat, or drink.
The first time, as she passed by the open door leading to the garage walking down the hallway to the kitchen, her father would call out, "Hey there, my sunshine. How's it going?"
"Fine as always, Dad," Helen said.
When she was in the kitchen, browsing through the fridge for a snack and drink, her mother sat on the couch in the living room watching television.
Her mother asked, "Is your homework hard this weekend, sunshine?"
"I'm actually done with homework already," Helen said. "Right now I'm writing, and listening to music."
Her mother turned on the couch, looked towards the kitchen at her daughter, and said, "Cool. Can I read it when you're done?"
Helen looked back at her mother, saying, "Yes, of course, Mom."
"Is it poetry?" her mother asked.
"No. It's prose."
"I just thought since Love is in the air for you, you'd be writing poetry." Her mother smiled.
Helen immediately turned around, a half-full carton of Chow Mein in one hand and a Gatorade in the other, and went down the hallway straight to her room.
She heard her mother say, "Teenage life. I fucking miss it."
At one point during that Saturday, as the sun faded away outside her bedroom's drawn blinds, Helen was listening to the song The Downward Spiral by Nine Inch Nails, and she decided to write one more journal entry, and add to the one's she was going to upload on her website. She got her pen and wrote down:
My pleasures are completely gone
And my feelings have faded away and are done
I'll finish my time here by facing the dying Sun
For once I was loved, and maybe I'll be hated
I'm tired of these people, and this world they all created
I'm done, I'm done, I'm fucking done, this is it
I'm escaping from all the FROLICKING BULLSHIT!
Helen wrote her signature under the last words she'd ever write in the journal. She image scanned the last page to her computer.
On Sunday she didn't wake up until almost one in the afternoon, then laid in bed for about a half-hour, simply thinking about nothing in particular; her plans for the next day were ready to be executed. When she finally got up, she went to the bathroom, and as she brushed her teeth she did not bother looking at herself in the mirror. She then had a cup of coffee, and ate leftover Broccoli Beef for her late breakfast. Her parents weren't around; she thought they must of went shopping or something at the time she was in the kitchen eating.
Later, as noon became evening, she began uploading the journal pages to her Splitting the Atom website.
There was a knock on her bedroom door.
"You there, sunshine?" her father called behind the door.
"Yeah, Dad," Helen replied.
"Is it cool if I open the door, and talk with you for a minute?" he asked.
"Yes."
The door opened, and her father entered just passed the threshold, coming to a stop, looking down right at his daughter sitting in her computer chair.
"I just wanted to apologize to you for my reaction the other day," her father began saying, "when you said you kissed -- what's his name."
"Draven," Helen reminded.
"Yes, of course," her father said. "Look, I'm sorry about yelling about you buying condoms, and shit."
"No need to apologize, Dad. It was actually appropriate."
"Yes. Thank you, Helen. Damn, you're so mature for your age." He sighed in relief. "But all I just want to say is that you're my one and only daughter, and I don't want you to just jump the gun and make a mistake you might regret."
"Okay, Daddy," Helen said.
"I just want to know one thing, and then I'll not butt in your life too much after, okay?"
"What is it?" Helen asked, disinterested in whatever the question even was.
"What made you just kiss Draven?"
Helen, looking her father right in the eyes, said, "Because he deserved it."
"Okay, sunshine." As he closed Helen's bedroom door, he said, "Mom's outside barbecuing meat patties for dinner."
As Helen sat alone in her room after her father closed the door, she whispered to herself, "He may have deserved it, but I don't care."
That night she slept soundly, and dreamlessly, as if seven hours had gone by in a blink of an eye. She awoke Monday morning at half past five, well before her parents got up, brushed her teeth -- still not looking at her own reflection -- then got dressed. She put on a black t-shirt, black jeans, and wore a black beanie with the words Flippin Sweet sown into it in white threading. The only baggage she was going to bring with her on the plane was her backpack with an extra pair of clothes, her debit card, credit card, and Driver's License, as well as two hundred fifty dollars in cash. Just after six she ordered herself an Uber, and waited in the living room, sitting on the couch, not thinking of much at all, but hoping neither of her parents would wake up to see her for one last time.
The Uber had arrived, and Helen quietly left the house. As the driver drove down the street, Helen sent her mother a text, saying: Went to go eat breakfast at Denny's before school. I'll be home late. Going to a poetry reading after school in the library.
The great thing about twenty-first century technology was how easy and fluid travel had become due to automation: a ride to the airport was so easy, being that all one had to do was click the screen on their smartphone; at the airport, to get your ticket, all one had to do was scan a barcode on a piece of paper printed from an email at a kiosk. Helen was grateful not to have to look any airport worker in the face, smiling as if they cared about her emotional comfort, but really looking forward to when Friday ended, so they could drink booze, pondering over what else they could have done with their lives. Not even when going through security, did Helen look anyone in the eyes; it was routine, and luckily she didn't have to go through a pat-down.
The plane took off from the airport slightly ahead of schedule due to low attendance on the flight. Helen had a row of seats to herself as she sat staring out the window at the world below her. She knew how beautiful the world was from that high up, as well as how beautiful it could be, depending on where one stood at on the ground, but she did not care either way; she was on her way out, and there was nothing, and nobody to stop her. That's the thing about the tragedy of suicide, those who do it successfully keep it secret until their death exposes it.
After the plane landed, she immediately ordered an Uber to pick her up. As she made her way to the curb outside baggage claim, she looked down at her phone and saw that her Uber driver was already outside, waiting for her. She unwaveringly got in the backseat.
"Have a good flight?" the driver asked as he pulled away from the curb, and headed for the exit to the freeway. He spoke with a Russian accent.
"Yes," Helen replied absently, looking down at her phone to see how long the ride was going to be, then searching for a place to have her last meal.
"I see you want to go to a strip mall," the driver said. "Don't you want to go to a hotel first, or are you meeting up with a friend?"
"I'm buying something that's on hold for me," Helen replied, staring out the car window. "Then I'm gonna get myself a Subway sandwich, and meet up with my friends at a campsite in Onomato National Park."
"That's a beautiful place, especially at sunset," the driver informed. "Is this your first time here?"
"Yes," Helen answered.
"It would be my pleasure to be your driver until you get to your final destination," the driver said with a smile Helen didn't bother to notice as she was still staring outside the car window. "I won't charge for the wait when you make your purchases before heading to Onomato. You can just order me again once you get in the car. Is that cool?"
"I don't want to waste your time," Helen said.
"It's your lucky day, young lady," the driver informed. "I live life according to my own tune, and that tune says, 'You can't waste what's not real.'"
"What does that mean?" Helen asked.
"Means I'm patient."
"Well, um, thank you," Helen said, looking in the rearview mirror at the driver's eyes.
"You're very welcome," he said. "Always a pleasure to serve people new to town."
At the gun store she had to wait only about twenty minutes until she was approved to purchase the Mossberg 500 12 Gauge Pump-Action.
"The case is gonna cost you extra," the clerk stated. "Hope that's not bad news."
"No, it's not," Helen said.
"Okay then. Which case you want, the Bulldog, or the Cattail?" The clerk held them up to her with both hands.
Helen pointed, and said, "The Cattail."
"We got ourselves here a cat person," the clerk said as he put the shotgun inside the Cattail case.
"I don't own a pet, but if I did, it would be a cat," Helen said.
"So what you gonna be hunting?" the clerk asked.
"I'm going to meet up with some friends at a campground at Onomato National Preserve. They said people can hunt turkeys."
"Sounds fun," the clerk said, smiling. "You ever shoot one of these before."
"No, but my friend is going to train me the proper way."
"Cool. Just to let you know, we love our trees around here, so please aim for the dirt when you do practice shooting." The clerk handed Helen the shotgun case.
"Okay," she said, then left.
The Uber driver then drove her to the closest Subway, and waited in the parking lot as she ordered a foot long sandwich.
When she got in the backseat with the sandwich in hand, the driver said, "You could've eaten it inside if you wanted."
"I'll eat it at the campground," Helen said.
The drive to the Onomato camp site took almost forty minutes.
Before Helen got out of the car, the driver asked, "How long you staying here with your friends?"
"Um, around five days, I think," she replied. "They weren't clear about how long we were gonna stay here."
"Please do order me when you need a ride to the airport," the driver said, not turning his head around to look at her. Not once did either of them look at one another directly in the face the whole time. "It would be my honor to do so."
"Sure," Helen said, "why not?"
She put her backpack around her back, picked up the Cattail gun case, then her Subway sandwich, and closed the car door. As she walked the path leading deeper into the Onomato forest toward the campground, she didn't look back once to notice that the Uber car never left the parking lot before going uphill for a bit, and then turning a bend. After walking just over half a mile she finally turned around to see if there was anyone else around. With the exception of some birds chirping and singing, the area was quiet.
Helen walked off the path, heading up a hill through tall grass, and between trees. Her ultimate goal was to find the perfect view of the horizon where she could see her final sunset. For about an hour she wandered around looking for the perfect spot to die before finding a leveled area on a hill where she realized she'd have a clear view of the sun setting just over a mountain range miles away. She found this realization fateful as there were very few clouds in the sky that day in an area known to be cloudy a lot during that time of year.
Placing her backpack and gun case on the ground, Helen stood looking at where the sun would set hours later, calmly eating her last meal, a Subway sandwich. It was going to be easy -- to end it all -- for she felt nothing. No second thoughts or realizations of consequences were going to stop her. At that moment as she chewed she thought of nothing else but the moment she was going to put the gun barrel to her face and pull the trigger.
I'm going to end my life here at the sight of my last sunset, Helen thought. My sun will shine no more.
"You already did it," a man with a Russian accent said.
Helen dropped her eyes away from the horizon, and turned to see a man standing a few yards away from her, looking down at his smartphone as he moved his thumbs along the screen's surface.
"You just don't remember it," he continued. "No one ever does."
"Who are you?" Helen asked.
The man looked up from his smartphone, and replied, "I'm Michel, your Uber driver. You'd recognize me if you bothered to look at me in the face when you talked to me, but that's all right with me, no big deal. But the thing is, you didn't give me a five star rating after doing all that driving around town for your last trip amongst the living. That five star rating would have been nice, you know."
"Why'd you follow me up here?" Helen asked. "You knew I had a gun. I'll use it on you if you come any closer."
"Girl, you don't even have the foot long sandwich you think you're holding in your hand," Michel said, pointing at her hands.
Helen looked down to find both her hands were empty.
"The first step is realization," Michel said. "Now look at the ground to your left."
Helen did as he said, and saw her body splayed out on the ground. The face was a bloody mess, caved in and shredded. Between her feet lay the shotgun.
"The second step is notification of consequences," Michel said.
Helen looked back at Michel to see him put his smartphone in one of his jean's front pocket, then reach behind him. When he pulled out what he had tucked in his waistband at his lower back, Helen asked: "What's that?"
"It's a newspaper," Michel stated, then said with disdain, "Fucking millennials, all you kids know is what a touchscreen shows you." He then opened up the newspaper, found what he was looking for, and read allowed: "Today, the Shaker Krista School District had every one of its schools put on lockdown for nearly three hours due to reports from the Federal Bureau of Investigations, informing the police and School District of an armed eighteen year old woman, Helen Shine, who allegedly made 'credible' threats on one, or many of the schools in the area. A spokesman for the FBI stated at a news conference, 'Helen Shine is known to have an obsession with Ronnie Filbert, the perpetrator of America's worst, most tragic school mass shooting, as well as an infatuation with the act of murder.' After the schools were on lockdown for three hours, every student in every school of Shaker Krista County were sent home with an immense police presence as they walked out of the buildings."
Michel crumpled up the newspaper, then tossed it behind him.
"That happened today?" Helen asked.
"Well, to you that was tomorrow's newspaper," Michel informed. "You're still living in the moment where you were eating the sandwich, waiting for the sunset. The thing is, in the afterlife, time is irrelevant. So..." Michel paused for a moment, then said, "Never mind that kind of talk, let's just move on. As a therapist with no imagination would ask, 'How does that make you feel?'"
"What?" Helen asked.
"What I just read to you," Michel said. "The fact that people all around the country -- who don't know you, never even met you before in their lives -- think you're a murderous nut case, bent on blowing strangers away before you blow yourself away. The FBI believed it so much they had over a million kids sent home. They're gonna be home for the next two days. Your name is appropriate for this kind of situation." Michel waved his hand before him, looking up at an imaginary sign, saying, "Helen Shine, the woman who made a million children shit their pants." He lowered his hand. "You know, I don't understand why they called you a 'woman' when -- by what I see right now -- you're still just a damn kid. How does it make you feel?"
"I...don't, um," Helen shook her head, "I don't feel anything."
"Exactly," Michel said, moving closer to Helen. "You don't feel a thing. No sadness. No happiness. Nothing you can exactly say is in between, like fine, okay, or just plain old all right. And most of all, what you were hoping for in death, not even relief." Michel points up at the trees. "You see that breeze moving the branches?"
Looking up into the trees, Helen replied, "Yes."
"And you see it moving the tall grass at the edge of the clearing there?"
Helen looked over at the tall blades waving back and forth, and she replied, "Yes."
"Do you notice it moving your long beautiful hair?"
"No," Helen said.
"That is the relief you never had in death," Michel said. "A soothing breeze, as if it were a touch from God himself. While you were alive you would tell yourself you felt 'nothing' when reality touched your heart. That obviously was a lie, many, many, people try convincing themselves is the truth, and lose patience before relief is even able to arrive."
"What now?" Helen asked.
"That question leads us to the third, and final step." Michel walked over to Helen's corpse, and stared down at it as he said, "You have two choices, either you stay here on this water rock to wander around for eternity with no goal in mind due to your total lack of desire, or you come with me in the Uber car where I can bring you to move on."
"If I stay?" Helen asked.
"Like I said, Helen, you will have no desire, no fear, no nothing. You may end up stuck in a desert, going in circles. I've seen it happen to so many. The bright side is the fact you wouldn't give one fuck about it, including not seeing the bright side of it. You get what I'm saying?"
"Yes," Helen told him. "What happens if I choose to move on?"
"I actually don't know," Michel said, shaking his head. "I've never been given the choice myself, so I've never seen the result. All I know is that what happens after you choose to move on isn't up to me."
"Do I make the choice right now?" Helen asked.
"No, not until I'm done with step two. Notifying you on the consequences of you taking your own life. Okay, Helen?"
"Okay."
"About four hours before you ate the buckshot your parents got worried enough to file a police report. Your mother had been trying to call you all day, but, as you know yourself, you blocked her number while you were on the plane. The cops ask both your parents questions, blah, blah, blah, then go onto your laptop computer which lucky for them you don't have a password to keep them locked out. So they open up the web browser, and low and be-fuckin'-hold you left your Google account open, and they find that you've purchased plane tickets to the city you randomly selected to blow your brains away in. They think you simply ran away until they find your Splitting the Atom website where you uploaded your personal journal entries just the day before. The detective barely reads a fucking word of it until he skips all the way to the last page to read the last two words, 'Frolicking Bullshit,' in all caps, and underlined. The site of those words, and the city you purchased the plane ticket for flips the panic switch inside him."
"What about it?" Helen asked. "The words, 'Frolicking Bullshit.' Why does the cop panic?"
"I'll get to it," Michel said. "The next day when they find out what you purchased with your credit card at the gun store right after leaving the airport, they freak the fuck out, call the FBI where you live, then call the FBI in the city here, and get all the schools locked down, then eventually send all the kids home. The media says you got a hard on for Ronnie Filbert, and want to continue what he started."
"Who's Ronnie Filbert?" Helen asked.
"You seriously don't know what happened in that city down the hill twenty years ago this coming Friday at Victory High School?" Michel asked.
"I wasn't born yet," Helen said.
"Ronnie Filbert murdered fifty-five people at his High School," Michel informed. "Students and a few Teachers."
"What does that have to do with me?"
"When he was shooting up the school, he was wearing a white t-shirt with the words 'Frolicking Bullshit' printed on it," Michel informed. "Because those were the last words you wrote down, the feds think you're all in love with his dead ass, and convince the city down there you're going to shoot any random school you come across. They don't realize you already were dead when they came to that determination until after finding your corpse here. For a long time your name will suffer the stigma of false judgement by not only your peers back at your school, but much of the internet's trolls. The media will never acknowledge the fed's mistake. Your father won't be able to work for a while, spending most of his time getting drunk. Eventually he'll have to go to rehab, and make shit money as an addiction counselor. Your mother divorces your father, and moves as far away from him as she can, because every time she'll even think about him, she'll see you. One day she swallows forty-seven oxycontin pills, and dies in her bed."
Not that Helen noticed, but the noon sky became afternoon in a snap of the fingers when Michel told Helen about the fate of her mother. If time existed it would've been half past five.
Michel continued, "When your father learns of your mother's suicide he relapses. Drinks so much whiskey in one evening, he passes out, and dies in his sleep."
The sun lowered in the sky, but the sky was still blue.
Helen simply stared down at the ground, unmoved by the knowledge of the fate of her father.
"Can I make my decision now?" Helen asked
"I'm not finished yet, Miss Shine," Michel said. "Draven."
Michel simply saying that name made Helen look up from the ground to see her Uber driver staring over at her, a hint of a smile on his face. The sun moved down to set on the horizon, it's light dying slowly as Michel spoke of Draven's fate.
"I see it every time with people like you," Michel said. "I tell you suicides how bad your parents and siblings feel in the aftermath of their tragedy, and nothing really changes, you still feel nothing. I mean, you are dead, after all, but when I mention someone you truly loved, and how the tragedy destroyed them, then things do truly start to change. You want to know what happened to that fat ass?"
"Don't fucking call him that," Helen said, angry.
"I do apologize, but like you, I don't feel a thing," Michel said. "No sympathy for the living."
"What happens to Draven?" Helen said, nearly yelling at Michel.
"Is it really any of your business?" he asked.
"YES!" Helen's chaw began to shiver.
"You become a burden to him in death like you claimed you'd be in life," Michel said. "Many of the students back at your High School begin to pick on him as soon as it gets around you two were close, because let's face it, High School gossip is usually ninety-nine percent accurate. More accurate than the mainstream media I regrettably have to say. I mean, shit, almost everyone but Draven think you were a nutcase with a shotgun, ready to kill anyone you'd come across. Even when the coroner concludes you killed yourself a full day before the FBI deemed you a credible threat to human life. This drives Draven into a bad, heavy depression. He quits school before graduation. After he finds out the exact place where you killed yourself, he comes here at the end of summer. And just like you, he waits for sunset."
The sun edged over the horizon, and the sky turned dark. Not one star shined in the sky. Shrouded in complete darkness, Helen fell to her knees. She felt the tears roll down her cheeks. Michel reached behind him, took out a candle from the waistband at his lower back, and with a lighter he retrieved from his jeans' pocket, lit the candle to see Helen quietly weeping.
"Does he blow his brains out?" she asked, her eyes closed.
"No, he doesn't," Michel said.
"Oh, thank God," Helen said, relieved. "Draven simply pays me a visit. That's all. He doesn't kill himself."
"I didn't say he didn't kill himself," Michel informed. "I just said he didn't use a gun, because he was more committed than you were. He used a knife. First he slits his throat, cutting the jugular so good that when he attempts to slit his wrists the flow of blood from his neck is so great it causes the knife to slip from his hands. He then falls to his knees just like you are right now in this darkness. And his last thought is the hope he'll be with you the moment he dies, but in fact, he'll just meet me, and feel nothing. You see, Helen, you were a burden to him after all."
Helen screamed the word 'No' so loud it convinced the sun to rise for a new day. She wept for Draven, falling on all fours, repeating the words, "I'm so sorry, Draven. I'm so sorry," over and over again, until Michel knelt beside her, placing his hand on her shoulder.
"It looks like you've chosen to move on, Helen Shine," Michel said. "Now stop crying, because it's time to leave. They're about to come here and find your dead body."
Helen wiped away her tears with the back of her hand. She asked, "What? Who?"
"The pigs are gonna be here soon, so we gotta go to get you moving on from this plane of existence, alright. So, come one, get on your feet."
Michel helps Helen stand up.
"Will Draven still kill himself?" she asked, tears still flowing down her cheeks.
"That doesn't matter right now," Michel said, turning away from her. "Now, follow me. The car's waiting in the parking lot. It's been there since Monday."
"Wait, what day is it?"Helen asked, following Michel down the hill to the path.
"It's Wednesday," Michel told her.
"But we were just up there not even twenty minutes."
"I told you already, in the afterlife time isn't relevant to your current perception," Michel said. "With their equations people like Einstein and Hawking try proving this realm can exist amongst the living, but that's actually impossible, because you have to be dead to experience it."
"Huh?" Helen uttered as they got to the path.
"Exactly. It's boring to talk about something that isn't real in the first place."
"What's not real?" Helen asked, confused.
"Time," Michel said. "Remember what I told you earlier, 'can't waste what's not real.' Come on, hurry up, they're about to get here."
They were both about to have a clear view of the parking lot.
"You mean the cops, right?" Helen asked.
"Yes. And if they get here before we leave, they'll be a pain in the ass."
"But if I'm dead, how could they even notice I'm here?"
"That's just how things work, Helen. I can't explain everything."
They looked a hundred yards down the path to the parking lot and saw a SWAT team gearing up. A Sheriff's Deputy wearing a bullet proof vest was walking around Michel's car, looking inside, hand on his gun.
"Fucking shit," Michel blurted, stopping in his tracks. "They're fucking already here. Goddamnit, I hate this shit sometimes."
Michel grunted in frustration, placing his hands on his waist, and stomping his foot on the pavement once. This was the first moment Helen saw him emit any kind of emotion since first meeting him.
"I thought you didn't feel," Helen said.
"I do when it counts," Michel said, looking up at her, "when fools like the ones down there get in my way. They won't recognize you, only if you don't say a word. Just nod your head, 'yes' or 'no,' if they ask you any questions. Got it?"
"Okay, got it," Helen assured. "Why won't they recognize me?"
"They're wannabe Angels misguided by a false sense of righteousness, and are blind to everything with the exception of the orders they are given. They're here because of the fact most of the living that know who you are right now want you dead simply because you happened to write those two simple words in your journal which were on Ronnie Filbert's t-shirt as he killed those people twenty years ago. These idiots can keep you from moving on. So just follow me, and if they ask us anything, I'll do the talking. Oh, and by the way, don't look into their eyes."
Michel began walking toward the parking lot, and Helen followed a little behind him with her head down. She noticed something under Michel's shirt at his lower back, figuring it was another newspaper, she lowered her eyes to the pavement as they walked on. About halfway to the parking lot, one of the SWAT members saw them coming.
"Sir, two incoming," he said to the Sheriff's Deputy.
"You two, halt," the Deputy howled.
"You got it," Michel said.
Helen and him stopped walking. Michel watched the Deputy and the swat members walked over to them.
"Remember, not a word, and don't look into their eyes," Michel quietly told Helen, then smiled at the Sheriff's Deputy, saying, "So what's going on, gents, are their bank robbers hiding out?"
"There's an armed woman in the area," the Deputy said as he got closer, hand still on the butt of his handgun.
"So only one bank robber then," Michel said.
"She didn't rob a bank, but she's the subject of a statewide manhunt," the Deputy informed.
"Oh my, the crazy bitch must have killed her entire family then," Michel said, shaking his head. "The sad, horrific things that happen in this world not even God can prevent. Such a shame."
The Sherif's Deputy, and the eleven SWAT members arrived where Michel and Helen stood.
"I didn't say she killed anybody," the Deputy corrected. He reached into his pants pocket, and pulled out a piece of glossy photo paper. "Have you seen this woman?"
There was no image on the photo paper, it was just white.
Michel looked at it for a moment, pretended to think, then said, "No. I haven't"
"How 'bout you, you seen this woman around?" the Deputy asked Helen.
Helen glanced at the blank photo. For a moment she was confused. Michel was right, these people were completely idiotic, and blind to the truth.
"No," she replied, slightly shaking her head, and looking back down at the ground.
The Deputy, as well as all the SWAT members stirred in their stances by the one word Helen had said, all their eyes were on her. She forgot that Michel told her to say nothing.
"Gentlemen," Michel began to say, "we did find something that might interest you."
The Deputy looked back at Michel, and asked, "What?"
"We found a dead body that may be the very woman you're looking for," Michel said. "This girl here beside me is all in shock about it. I mean, we were just on this wonderful hike on this beautiful day, and bam, dead body. Beside her was a shotgun. It could be her, but by the photo you're showing us, I don't know, cause the face up the hill there is like, you know, gone."
"Why didn't you call the authorities when you found the body?" the Deputy asked.
"No cellphone service."
"You're gonna show me where this supposed body is right now," the Deputy commanded.
"I ain't showing you shit," Michel said. "Just turn right off the path once you pass the bend up there, and you'll find it. Alright. Now I got to get her home."
"Don't use that language with me, Russki," the Deputy demanded.
"Don't call me 'Russki,' you brainless mortal," Michel said.
"Show me where the body is right now, or I'll detain your foreign ass for obstruction."
Helen began weeping. The Deputy turned to look at Helen as she raised her head, and stared up at him with her tearful eyes.
"I just want to move on from this," she pleaded.
"I told you not to say a word, you poor thing," Michel said.
"It's her," the Deputy yelled to the SWAT members, and pulling out his gun, aiming it right at Helen. "Show us your hands, or you will die right now."
"Hey, guys, she is not armed, okay," Michel informed.
"Get back, sir, she's dangerous," the Deputy yelled.
"Don't point that fucking thing at her, dumb shit," Michel demanded.
As Helen began raising her hands, Michel grabbed hold of the Sherif Deputy's wrist with his left hand and shoved the barrel away from Helen's direction. The gun went off, the bullet going into the trees. Michel reached for the waistband at his lower back, pulled out a Nickel Plated .45 semi-automatic gun, and placed the barrel of it on the oblivious Deputy.
"Dog's bitches like you never learn how to listen," Michel said before pulling the trigger, killing the Sherif's Deputy.
As the Deputy's body flopped to the pavement, Michel shot at two SWAT members with his gun, hitting one in the cheek bone, sending him backward to the pavement as he dropped his MP-5N machine gun. The second he put two bullets in, one in the man's testicles, the other he managed to get into the man's trigger hand as he screamed. He did it so fast it caught the rest of the SWAT team by surprise. The lack of their response gave Michel enough time to reach behind him to retrieve another handgun of the same type from his waistband. He began shooting at the other SWAT members as they scattered, running away to get behind trees.
As Michel continued to shoot both his guns, he yelled, "Run to my car, Helen. Now!"
She took off down the path, not knowing if she might even make it to the car without getting shot.
Someone returned fire on Michel, missed, and Michel fired twice from where it came from. A man screamed in pain and fell to the ground. Michel began jogging backwards down the path to the parking lot, blindly firing his guns into the trees.
"The Reaper doesn't need to reload like you mortal pansies!" Michel yelled as he fired again and again, moving back leap by leap.
Helen made it to Michel's car, opened the back passenger door, jumped in, and slammed the door.
When Michel felt he got close enough to the car he stopped firing, turned around, and saw Helen sitting in the backseat.
"Fucking idiots don't know what hit them," he said, smiling down at her worried face.
Then machine gun fire went off. Michel's smile disappeared as he stumbled into the the back passenger door.
"You motherfuckers," Michel yelled in pain. He spun around, and returned fire.
Helen saw his back with blood pouring out of five or seven bullet holes.
"NO!" Helen screamed painfully.
Michel leaned back into the back passenger side window, smearing it with his blood, as he continued to return fire. After almost half a minute he slid to the side, falling to the ground. He fired four more shots before deciding to stop.
"Open the door, Helen," he called out.
Helen opened the door to find Michel laying on his side on the ground, throwing up blood. She cried, not knowing what to say.
"I'm sorry, sunshine," Michel said, struggling with each word as he took his last breaths. "I'm not able to help you move on. They won't let me, because they are too foolish to know they are fools." He raised up his left hand to give her his gun. "You can go out the way you want to, the way they expect you to."
With tears flowing from her eyes, Helen took hold of the handgun.
"Put the gun down, you crazy bitch!" a SWAT member yelled. "Or you will fucking die!"
Helen looked up and saw the last of the SWAT members aiming their guns at her.
"Is this what you really want, you soulless fucking assholes!" she yelled.
She raised the gun, pointed it in their direction, and pulled the trigger.
Click. It was empty.
The SWAT members opened fire. The bullets entered her chest and head. As she fell backwards into the backseat of Michel's Uber car, well...
She woke up in her room, catching her breath so hard it was as if she were nearly drowning to death just moments earlier. Gripping her chest as she fiercely inhaled and exhaled, she not only felt her heart beating in her hand, she felt it pulsing her entire head. It took nearly two minutes to calm her nerves. The room was dark, but sunlight shined through from the edges of the drawn curtains.
"It was just a nightmare," Helen finally said. "Nothing more than a bad dream."
There was a snap clicking sound from the corner of her room near the curtain covered window. Helen looked up in the darkness to see a flame coming from a bic lighter.
"It wasn't a dream, Helen," a man said as he lit himself a cigarette. "It actually did happen, consequences and all."
The man wasn't Michel; his accent was American. Helen freaked, backed herself to the top edge of her bed against the wall, curling her knees up to her chest.
"Who the fuck are you?" Helen asked.
"Well, as you can tell, I'm not Russian." The man chuckled, taking a drag of his cigarette.
"There's no smoking in this house, dude," Helen stated instinctively.
"That doesn't matter," the man said, continuing to smoke his cigarette. "The misguided Angels are on their way, and this time they're not just mindless cops, they're everyone else. Do you feel the ground shaking?"
Helen began to hear rumbling coming from outside, and feel a vibration lightly shaking her bed.
"Yes," she replied. "Why is this still happening to me? Am I in Hell?"
"No, girl," the man said, almost giggling. "Heaven and Hell are simple lies, metaphors for life itself, not the afterlife."
"Then what the fuck is going on?"
"I'm here to give you a message before the mob of fools come to shred you apart. The message is: Those who claim to bring the light cause the largest shadows of darkness. You and I have the ability to see that darkness. It doesn't mean we're evil, but evil in their ignorant perception, because we know and accept their faults unlike they ever can themselves. And most of all it is our duty to exploit the darkness they unwittingly bring to the flourishing day and renewing night."
The man walked away from the corner of where he was standing, briefly walking by a beam of light shining through the edge of the curtain. Helen saw his face only for a moment, and of course did not recognize who he was. He continued walking over to her computer desk.
In the darkness he said, "Whether it be dreadful or hopeful, a dream can fade upon wakening due to an insurmountable desire such as suicide. The spider's web has already tied down your soul, sunshine, and there's only one way to free you from such a horrible, unforgiving weight."
With fresh tears rolling down her cheeks, Helen asked, "What is it?"
She saw the burning cigarette lighten up as the man took a drag.
Exhaling the smoke, he said, "A miracle that is beyond the plausibility of both reason and rationality, but nonetheless accepted as the ultimate truth."
The rumbling outside got louder all of a sudden, and the ground began shaking.
"They're here," the man said.
Then Helen's bedroom walls shattered to pieces, and she was blinded by a searing white light.
She opened her eyes to find herself kissing Draven, then released her lips from his as she realized she was back in front of her High School. She looked down at her hand on his chest, and saw Draven's placed over the back of it, his touch more soothing than she ever thought it could be, because before that moment, they had never even laid a finger on one another.
Draven looked into her eyes, and said, "I've been wanting to do that since the moment I met you. I --"
Helen interrupted him by saying, "I love you too."
Draven was at a loss for words, and looking like he was about to cry.
A car honked once just a few feet away from them.
"Oh, shit," Helen uttered. "Hold on a second, Draven."
Helen went up to the car, and leaned down to the front passenger door as its window slid down.
She looked over and gestured to Draven as she said, "Look my friend just offered me a ride last second. I'm sorry to waste your time."
"It's your lucky day, young lady," the driver said with a Russian accent. "I live life according to my own tune, and that tune says, 'You can't waste what's not real.'"
Helen looked into the Uber car and saw Michel sitting in the driver's seat. When her jaw dropped, Michel simply gave her a wink.
"Just give me a five star rating for being so prompt, please," he said.
"Um, for sure," Helen said.
"Have fun with your boyfriend, sunshine," Michel said, then drove away.
"Hey there, Draven," she greeted as he arrived near her, close to being out of breath. "What's up, man?"
"I just wanted to say, 'Hi,' then 'Goodbye, and have a good weekend,'" Draven said, rubbing his belly as he quickly caught his breath. "I haven't seen you all day is all. Just wanted to see you before the day's end."
"We could've had lunch together, you know," Helen said.
"Well, I was going to look for you at lunchtime, but I was in the library with the guys playing Magic The Gathering. Maybe I should've went looking for you instead, I'm starting to suck at the game. I'm losing my touch, you could say."
"I wanted to be alone, anyway," Helen said.
"Oh, okay, " he said. "But what if I looked for you, and found you?"
"Then I would've yelled 'rape' at the top of my lungs, then maced you, Draven. And maybe kicked you in the balls for good measure."
"Damn, woman, that's some heavy shit to consider," Draven said, smiling. "I would've took it like a good sport, though. A man must learn from his mistakes, no matter his true intentions."
"I'm only kidding, Draven," Helen said with a slight grin... her last.
Draven chuckled, then asked, "So you waiting for your mom to pick you up?"
"No, an Uber," Helen replied, looking down at her phone to see the ETA status of the Uber.
"You know, you could cancel it, and I'll drive you home," Draven offered, with a sense of earnestness in his eyes, hoping she'd accept his offer.
"No, Draven, I don't want to burden you," she said, then looked up from her phone to see a disappointed Draven looking at her, as if he were a child being denied a chance to play just ten more minutes on his Playstation.
"You never could be a burden for me, Helen," he said. "Maybe next time?"
Helen didn't want to give an honest answer; Draven was the only person in the world she didn't want to lie to.
Draven said, "Well, the offer will always be open, just to let you know."
"Okay," Helen said. "The Uber will be here in just a few minutes."
"Alright then," Draven said. "Have a great weekend. See you next week."
He turned to leave.
"Thanks anyway for the offer," Helen said.
Draven turned back around to look at her. He said, "You're very welcome, Helen."
There was a moment of silence between them as Draven longingly kept his eyes on her face. She was the most beautiful girl he had ever talked to in the twelve years he'd been a student who not only talked back, but had long conversations with, the type of conversations which sparked something in both of them.
Draven broke the silence by saying, "I wanted to ask you something, since you have the time."
Helen didn't say anything, but simply waited for the question she had been expecting from him ever since he had sat down next in AP Biology, that very moment they had locked eyes with one another: "You wanna go see the new Shazam movie with me tomorrow, then get something to eat?"
"Um," she uttered.
"I heard it sucks, but we could see something else if you want?" Draven continued with his first attempt at asking someone on a date, crossing his fingers inside his mind, hoping she'd say, Yes.
Helen couldn't give him an immediate answer. If she said, No, it would have been a lie. She wanted to accept, but if she answered, Yes, it would have also been a lie, due to the plans she had for the coming Monday. She wanted nothing to get in the way, and if anything possible would change her desired fate during the weekend, she would hate whatever or whoever it was for the rest of her life, even Draven -- if that were even a possible hatred for her to muster.
What had happened next seemed to have happened really slow: she saw the Uber car pulling into the school's parking lot behind Draven, then she instinctively walked straight up to Draven, placed her left hand on his chest, slightly raised herself by standing on her toes, closed her eyes, and kissed him on the lips.
It was both their first, but while Draven had wanted to kiss any of the beautiful high school girls, Helen had only desired to kiss Draven ever since the day she had met him.
As Helen lowered herself away from Draven's lips, time seemed to become normal again as the Uber car came to a complete stop on the curb beside them.
With her hand still on Draven's chest, Helen couldn't help but look away from his gaze.
"I'm sorry, I can't," she nearly whispered. "I'd just be a burden to you."
She turned away without glancing at his face, and made her way to the back passenger door of the Uber car.
Before she reached for the door handle, Draven said, "I care about you, Helen."
She stopped.
"I'd say, 'I love you,' and mean it with all my heart," Draven continued, "but I feel I'm way too young to know exactly what true love really is."
"You're the smartest man I know, Draven," Helen said, her back still facing him. "You know exactly what true love is, but I can't feel it. I'd be too much of a burden on your heart." She quickly opened the door, and sat in the backseat.
Before she closed the door, she heard Draven say, "You could never be a --," but before she heard the last word he'd ever say to her, the door was closed.
"He ain't coming?" the Uber driver asked.
"No," Helen replied. "He's got his own ride. It's just me."
"Whatever you say," the Uber driver said, then drove away from the curb, making his way to the parking lot's exit.
Helen knew anyone else would be crying in that backseat on their way home, but she had accepted the fact she could feel nothing when love was offered to her; all she could feel at that moment, as she had felt for the past year was the weight of hopelessness on her soul, and the eagerness to end her life in a place of isolation.
The moment Helen entered her home she heard her father call her name from the garage before she even closed the front door.
"Is that you?" his voice making its way down the hallway to Helen's annoyed ears.
"Yeah," she hollered back.
"Come in here, I wanna show you something," he hollered.
Helen rolled her eyes as she locked the front door, and made her way down the hallway to an open door that led to the garage. Inside her father sat at a draft table looking up at her as she entered, one hand holding a pen over a canvas paper.
"Come here," he said, beckoning her with his free hand, "check this out. It's the kind of shit you like."
She walked up beside him.
He put his arm around her waist, smiled, and asked, "How was your day, my one and only little sunshine?"
"Fine, Dad," Helen replied, a little annoyed by her father's routine question. She then leaned in to kiss his forehead. "What do you want to show me?"
"What I'm just about finishing tracing," he said. "Look, it's cool."
Helen looked down at the canvas to see a black and white image of a demonic, satanic, and muscular figure holding a sword of fire, fighting off Roman looking soldiers half it's size.
"Looks cool," Helen commented. "What comic book?"
"Not a comic book this time, Helen," her Dad said. "Your daddy is moving up in the world. It's part of a Graphic Novel. It's going to be called, 'Demon Michel.' Wanna read the script the guy sent me for it before I finish? Maybe give me tips on how I should approach this?"
"What makes you think a child like me can contribute anything to something like this?" Helen asked.
"Well, you're no child anymore," her father began to say, "you're eighteen now, and more influential in the arts than you'd like to accept at the moment. Plus, if this Graphic Novel sells big -- fingers crossed -- you can tell people at college, 'My talented Daddy drew that, and I helped his ass.' You'll get a lot of attention from the nerds."
"Dad," Helen groaned.
"Hey, I've always told you, I prefer you to bring home a geek one day instead of an empty headed jock," her father said, shaking his pen at her. "Like I've told you, 'A meat head might bring home the bread, but a nerd can eventually buy you a mansion instead.'"
Helen turned to leave and go straight to her room, but right before entering the hallway she stopped.
With her back still facing her father, she said, "A boy said he was in love with me today."
She heard her father drop his pen on the draft table, and the sound of it rolling down to a complete stop at the ledge where it lay alongside other pens of various colors.
"I've been waiting for this day since you were born, but haven't prepared myself," her father said. "Okay," he took a deep breath, "what's the football player's name?"
"Dad," she groaned once again. "He's not a football player, goddamnit. He's not even into sports at all."
Her father blew out a sigh of relief so heavy his blood pressure must've lowered. "Oh thank God," he said.
"His name's Draven," Helen said. Her back still facing her father. She didn't want to look into his eyes if she were going to lie to him at that moment.
"What kind of name is that?" her father said.
This question made her turn to look at her father right in the eyes.
She said, "Uh, hello, you're a comic book guy. Draven, Eric Draven from the freaking Crow comic."
"Whoa, no kidding," her father said. "Invite him over for dinner tonight. Your mother's bringing home Chinese food. Does he like Chinese?"
"He's not coming over tonight," Helen proclaimed. "You know what, I don't wanna talk about it anymore. I'm going to my room."
On her way down the hallway to her room, her father hollered, "Do you love him back?"
Helen closed her bedroom door and locked it. "Yes, but I don't feel it," she whispered to herself.
Walking over to her computer desk she tossed her backpack on her bed, then sat in her computer chair, and opened her laptop. She opened her Spotify, and clicked on random. The song that came on was Stand Inside Your Love by Smashing Pumpkins. Before Billy Corgan's beautiful voice sang the first lyric, Helen muted it. What came out of her speakers next was Marilyn Manson's (s)AINT. She left it on as she went on her e-mail account to confirm her flight on the coming Monday, set to take off out of the state to a random city she had selected buy throwing a dart at a map of the United States pinned on her bedroom wall. Using Google Maps, she researched the area outside the city the dart had landed on, and found a campsite among the foothills at the base of a mountain where she could... well... go to after buying the shotgun she had ordered put on hold for her at one of the city's local gun stores. The guy who answered the phone was a complete gentleman when she inquired if it was okay for them to hold a specific one that she had settled on days earlier -- a Mossberg 500 12 Gauge Pump-Action with Pistol Grip -- until she arrived in town to pick it up.
"Sure we can do that for you, ma'am," the man said. "Just leave me your name, and we'll do the background check when you come to pick it up. You can pay for it then too." He chuckled at the last statement which was only amusing to him.
Helen gave her full name, thanked him very much, then hung up when the conversation was over.
All she had to do when Monday morning came was leave the house before her parents woke up, take an Uber straight to the Airport, text her mother she'd be home late due to her attending a poetry reading which really only took place on Fridays after school for only an hour, then she'd board the plane, and chill for the nearly three hour flight. Hopefully it would basically be devoid of people; she didn't want to talk to some random fool the whole time. By the time either of her parents realized she wasn't coming back home for good, Helen would be in those foothills, staring into the sunset before... well... she wasn't able to go back home.
Until that moment came, Helen had a lot of time to waste, an entire weekend, in fact. She would spend it listening to music, and writing her last words in her journal. She was undecided whether or not she was going to upload the pages to her website. Either it was meant for her parent's eyes only after she was gone, or on the internet for the world to see -- if the world was even remotely interested in her at all. The website she had designed had gotten over a thousand hits since the day she created it the year prior. It was part of a web hosting service called New Boundaries, where individuals could create their own site the way they saw fit. New Boundaries' selling line was: "To revive the act of creativity through free expression. Something our modern times has forgotten."
There were thousands of different types of websites created by all types of different people, all communicating with one another regarding their specific subject matter. Helen found a community of people obsessed with the My Little Pony book franchise; from girls in their early teens to old men in their mid-forties. Helen looked deeply into this community of people, just to see if there was any sinister intent coming from the old men, but shockingly there were no perverts to be found, all the men she found just talked about the ponies, and even shared pictures of themselves at My Little Pony cosplays.
Though the result of not finding one pervert among a sea of little girls would satisfy most people who aspired to be among spring flowers, Helen was a bit dispirited by it, being that she was part of an online community that preferred to hangout at an old cemetery at the stroke of midnight. And that's exactly who she communicated with, people who designed their websites just like she did, with a devout interest with the dark arts. These people were goths, emos, punk rockers, metal heads, satanists, pagans, or any other label most good Christian folk didn't like to be around. The ones where Christians would say they still loved, but think, I actually hate.
Helen spent most of the year trying to perfect her website as much as the ones she admired, but felt she couldn't get to their level. As of that moment, being as depressed and emotionless as she was, she concluded she had gone as far as she could with it. The website went under the moniker Splitting the Atom, named after a Massive Attack song, and what Helen felt was the greatest mistake humanity ever created, but regrettably used only twice. That was the exact style of what her particular community was all about: the dark side of humanity, with tongue-in-cheek humor as an important ingredient. Helen wasn't exactly the most humorous with the content on her website as most, but she tried her best before the depression had kicked into high gear at the start of her senior year.
She logged onto her website to see if were going to make changes. After nearly ten minutes of browsing at each page within the site, she decided to log off, turn up her speakers that was then playing Rammstein music, and opened her notebook to write down whatever came to her mind. If she couldn't come up with words, she'd draw something random.
An hour had gone by when there was a knock on her bedroom door.
"Food's here, sunshine," her mother called from the other side of the door.
"Okay, mom," Helen hollered over the music.
She closed her notebook, turned down the speakers, and left her room to get a plate of Chinese food. As she was in the kitchen, filling her plate, her parents ate silently at the kitchen table as they watched her scooping food out of the cartons. She turned to go back down the hallway to her room when her plate was full.
"So, Helen," her mother said. "Why don't you come eat with us for a change?"
Helen came to a complete stop, and winced like she had never winced before, so hard it hurt. She totally forgot what she had told her father about what Draven admitted to her earlier that day. She got rid of that expression as soon as she turned to look at her parents as they both stared up at her -- her father chewing slowly.
"Okay," Helen said, then walked over to them, sat in the chair, and began eating immediately.
"So how was your day?" her mother asked.
Helen tilted her head, and raised a shoulder to indicate, Same old stuff, since her mouth was full of Chow Mein.
"Really?" her mother inquired further.
Helen looked down at her food as she swallowed the Chow Mein, and spun her fork to get herself another mouthful of the noodles so she wouldn't have to talk about what she knew what her mother already knew. She said, "Yeah, really."
"He's not a football player, like your father said, right?" her mother asked.
Helen's eyes shot up at her father, and she groaned, "Dad."
Her father said, to his wife, "Don't embarrass her, babe. It's the first time a boy has fallen head over heels for her. I thought it would happen in elementary, but it happened in High School. In her senior year, no less. That makes me a happy man."
"Was he looking in your eyes when he said he loved you, sunshine," her mother said, ignoring her husband.
Helen dropped her fork on her plate, and pressed both hands over her eyes.
"Goddamnit, you guys," she said, aggravated.
"Helen, please, we're at dinner," her mother said.
Helen informed, "He didn't actually use the words, 'I love you.'" She uncovered her eyes, and continued, "He said he cared about me, and he would've said he loved me, but he feels he's too young to truly know what true love actually is."
"Whoa," her father uttered.
"That's honestly the most romantic thing I've ever heard," her mother said. Then she said to her husband, "Don't you think, babe?"
"Hold on a sec, sunshine," her father said, "what made him blurt it out all of a sudden like that? Is he actually stalking you?"
"No, Dad, we've actually been talking to each other since the start of this school year," Helen said. "The thing is, before my Uber picked me up he asked me out on a date, and..."
Helen went silent. It was the first time she thought about the kiss since the moment it actually happened.
"What?" her mother asked.
"I kissed him," Helen stated.
Her father jumped up from his chair, nearly toppling the kitchen table over by accident.
"WHAT?!" he basically yelled in shock.
"Babe, what the fuck, man?" her mother blurted out.
Helen felt she had enough of the conversation, and said, "You know, mom, dad, I can't talk about this right now. This is just too weird for me at the moment. I'm - I'm gonna go back to my room. Do homework, and all that shit a high school kid is suppose to do." She got up, took hold of her plate of Chinese Food off the table, and went hastily towards her room.
Her father called out to her, "Sunshine, don't worry, I'm not mad. Just go to the corner store, and buy condoms, ASAP!"
Helen closed the bedroom door behind her. She wasn't mad, not at all, simply annoyed. Sitting back down in her computer chair, she turned up the speakers playing the music, and began to finish her meal. Later, before she went to bed just after three in the morning, she'd be too focused on writing in her journal to acknowledge what her and her parents even talked about at the kitchen table.
The next two days were basically a blur for her, as she spent most of Saturday image scanning the pages of her journal to her laptop computer, and listening to music, as well as pondering mortality in the general sense. When the brain shuts down, what is there to be seen? Light, darkness? Is everything everybody says about the afterlife even true in the first place, or is it all basically a pipe dream for all those who fear no longer continuing with their identity they spent their entire lives developing? Blah, Blah, Blah, Helen thought as she finished uploading her journal's pages to the computer, and made final touchups to her New Boundaries website. A few times on that Saturday she did leave her room to get something to eat, or drink.
The first time, as she passed by the open door leading to the garage walking down the hallway to the kitchen, her father would call out, "Hey there, my sunshine. How's it going?"
"Fine as always, Dad," Helen said.
When she was in the kitchen, browsing through the fridge for a snack and drink, her mother sat on the couch in the living room watching television.
Her mother asked, "Is your homework hard this weekend, sunshine?"
"I'm actually done with homework already," Helen said. "Right now I'm writing, and listening to music."
Her mother turned on the couch, looked towards the kitchen at her daughter, and said, "Cool. Can I read it when you're done?"
Helen looked back at her mother, saying, "Yes, of course, Mom."
"Is it poetry?" her mother asked.
"No. It's prose."
"I just thought since Love is in the air for you, you'd be writing poetry." Her mother smiled.
Helen immediately turned around, a half-full carton of Chow Mein in one hand and a Gatorade in the other, and went down the hallway straight to her room.
She heard her mother say, "Teenage life. I fucking miss it."
At one point during that Saturday, as the sun faded away outside her bedroom's drawn blinds, Helen was listening to the song The Downward Spiral by Nine Inch Nails, and she decided to write one more journal entry, and add to the one's she was going to upload on her website. She got her pen and wrote down:
My pleasures are completely gone
And my feelings have faded away and are done
I'll finish my time here by facing the dying Sun
For once I was loved, and maybe I'll be hated
I'm tired of these people, and this world they all created
I'm done, I'm done, I'm fucking done, this is it
I'm escaping from all the FROLICKING BULLSHIT!
Helen wrote her signature under the last words she'd ever write in the journal. She image scanned the last page to her computer.
On Sunday she didn't wake up until almost one in the afternoon, then laid in bed for about a half-hour, simply thinking about nothing in particular; her plans for the next day were ready to be executed. When she finally got up, she went to the bathroom, and as she brushed her teeth she did not bother looking at herself in the mirror. She then had a cup of coffee, and ate leftover Broccoli Beef for her late breakfast. Her parents weren't around; she thought they must of went shopping or something at the time she was in the kitchen eating.
Later, as noon became evening, she began uploading the journal pages to her Splitting the Atom website.
There was a knock on her bedroom door.
"You there, sunshine?" her father called behind the door.
"Yeah, Dad," Helen replied.
"Is it cool if I open the door, and talk with you for a minute?" he asked.
"Yes."
The door opened, and her father entered just passed the threshold, coming to a stop, looking down right at his daughter sitting in her computer chair.
"I just wanted to apologize to you for my reaction the other day," her father began saying, "when you said you kissed -- what's his name."
"Draven," Helen reminded.
"Yes, of course," her father said. "Look, I'm sorry about yelling about you buying condoms, and shit."
"No need to apologize, Dad. It was actually appropriate."
"Yes. Thank you, Helen. Damn, you're so mature for your age." He sighed in relief. "But all I just want to say is that you're my one and only daughter, and I don't want you to just jump the gun and make a mistake you might regret."
"Okay, Daddy," Helen said.
"I just want to know one thing, and then I'll not butt in your life too much after, okay?"
"What is it?" Helen asked, disinterested in whatever the question even was.
"What made you just kiss Draven?"
Helen, looking her father right in the eyes, said, "Because he deserved it."
"Okay, sunshine." As he closed Helen's bedroom door, he said, "Mom's outside barbecuing meat patties for dinner."
As Helen sat alone in her room after her father closed the door, she whispered to herself, "He may have deserved it, but I don't care."
That night she slept soundly, and dreamlessly, as if seven hours had gone by in a blink of an eye. She awoke Monday morning at half past five, well before her parents got up, brushed her teeth -- still not looking at her own reflection -- then got dressed. She put on a black t-shirt, black jeans, and wore a black beanie with the words Flippin Sweet sown into it in white threading. The only baggage she was going to bring with her on the plane was her backpack with an extra pair of clothes, her debit card, credit card, and Driver's License, as well as two hundred fifty dollars in cash. Just after six she ordered herself an Uber, and waited in the living room, sitting on the couch, not thinking of much at all, but hoping neither of her parents would wake up to see her for one last time.
The Uber had arrived, and Helen quietly left the house. As the driver drove down the street, Helen sent her mother a text, saying: Went to go eat breakfast at Denny's before school. I'll be home late. Going to a poetry reading after school in the library.
The great thing about twenty-first century technology was how easy and fluid travel had become due to automation: a ride to the airport was so easy, being that all one had to do was click the screen on their smartphone; at the airport, to get your ticket, all one had to do was scan a barcode on a piece of paper printed from an email at a kiosk. Helen was grateful not to have to look any airport worker in the face, smiling as if they cared about her emotional comfort, but really looking forward to when Friday ended, so they could drink booze, pondering over what else they could have done with their lives. Not even when going through security, did Helen look anyone in the eyes; it was routine, and luckily she didn't have to go through a pat-down.
The plane took off from the airport slightly ahead of schedule due to low attendance on the flight. Helen had a row of seats to herself as she sat staring out the window at the world below her. She knew how beautiful the world was from that high up, as well as how beautiful it could be, depending on where one stood at on the ground, but she did not care either way; she was on her way out, and there was nothing, and nobody to stop her. That's the thing about the tragedy of suicide, those who do it successfully keep it secret until their death exposes it.
After the plane landed, she immediately ordered an Uber to pick her up. As she made her way to the curb outside baggage claim, she looked down at her phone and saw that her Uber driver was already outside, waiting for her. She unwaveringly got in the backseat.
"Have a good flight?" the driver asked as he pulled away from the curb, and headed for the exit to the freeway. He spoke with a Russian accent.
"Yes," Helen replied absently, looking down at her phone to see how long the ride was going to be, then searching for a place to have her last meal.
"I see you want to go to a strip mall," the driver said. "Don't you want to go to a hotel first, or are you meeting up with a friend?"
"I'm buying something that's on hold for me," Helen replied, staring out the car window. "Then I'm gonna get myself a Subway sandwich, and meet up with my friends at a campsite in Onomato National Park."
"That's a beautiful place, especially at sunset," the driver informed. "Is this your first time here?"
"Yes," Helen answered.
"It would be my pleasure to be your driver until you get to your final destination," the driver said with a smile Helen didn't bother to notice as she was still staring outside the car window. "I won't charge for the wait when you make your purchases before heading to Onomato. You can just order me again once you get in the car. Is that cool?"
"I don't want to waste your time," Helen said.
"It's your lucky day, young lady," the driver informed. "I live life according to my own tune, and that tune says, 'You can't waste what's not real.'"
"What does that mean?" Helen asked.
"Means I'm patient."
"Well, um, thank you," Helen said, looking in the rearview mirror at the driver's eyes.
"You're very welcome," he said. "Always a pleasure to serve people new to town."
At the gun store she had to wait only about twenty minutes until she was approved to purchase the Mossberg 500 12 Gauge Pump-Action.
"The case is gonna cost you extra," the clerk stated. "Hope that's not bad news."
"No, it's not," Helen said.
"Okay then. Which case you want, the Bulldog, or the Cattail?" The clerk held them up to her with both hands.
Helen pointed, and said, "The Cattail."
"We got ourselves here a cat person," the clerk said as he put the shotgun inside the Cattail case.
"I don't own a pet, but if I did, it would be a cat," Helen said.
"So what you gonna be hunting?" the clerk asked.
"I'm going to meet up with some friends at a campground at Onomato National Preserve. They said people can hunt turkeys."
"Sounds fun," the clerk said, smiling. "You ever shoot one of these before."
"No, but my friend is going to train me the proper way."
"Cool. Just to let you know, we love our trees around here, so please aim for the dirt when you do practice shooting." The clerk handed Helen the shotgun case.
"Okay," she said, then left.
The Uber driver then drove her to the closest Subway, and waited in the parking lot as she ordered a foot long sandwich.
When she got in the backseat with the sandwich in hand, the driver said, "You could've eaten it inside if you wanted."
"I'll eat it at the campground," Helen said.
The drive to the Onomato camp site took almost forty minutes.
Before Helen got out of the car, the driver asked, "How long you staying here with your friends?"
"Um, around five days, I think," she replied. "They weren't clear about how long we were gonna stay here."
"Please do order me when you need a ride to the airport," the driver said, not turning his head around to look at her. Not once did either of them look at one another directly in the face the whole time. "It would be my honor to do so."
"Sure," Helen said, "why not?"
She put her backpack around her back, picked up the Cattail gun case, then her Subway sandwich, and closed the car door. As she walked the path leading deeper into the Onomato forest toward the campground, she didn't look back once to notice that the Uber car never left the parking lot before going uphill for a bit, and then turning a bend. After walking just over half a mile she finally turned around to see if there was anyone else around. With the exception of some birds chirping and singing, the area was quiet.
Helen walked off the path, heading up a hill through tall grass, and between trees. Her ultimate goal was to find the perfect view of the horizon where she could see her final sunset. For about an hour she wandered around looking for the perfect spot to die before finding a leveled area on a hill where she realized she'd have a clear view of the sun setting just over a mountain range miles away. She found this realization fateful as there were very few clouds in the sky that day in an area known to be cloudy a lot during that time of year.
Placing her backpack and gun case on the ground, Helen stood looking at where the sun would set hours later, calmly eating her last meal, a Subway sandwich. It was going to be easy -- to end it all -- for she felt nothing. No second thoughts or realizations of consequences were going to stop her. At that moment as she chewed she thought of nothing else but the moment she was going to put the gun barrel to her face and pull the trigger.
I'm going to end my life here at the sight of my last sunset, Helen thought. My sun will shine no more.
"You already did it," a man with a Russian accent said.
Helen dropped her eyes away from the horizon, and turned to see a man standing a few yards away from her, looking down at his smartphone as he moved his thumbs along the screen's surface.
"You just don't remember it," he continued. "No one ever does."
"Who are you?" Helen asked.
The man looked up from his smartphone, and replied, "I'm Michel, your Uber driver. You'd recognize me if you bothered to look at me in the face when you talked to me, but that's all right with me, no big deal. But the thing is, you didn't give me a five star rating after doing all that driving around town for your last trip amongst the living. That five star rating would have been nice, you know."
"Why'd you follow me up here?" Helen asked. "You knew I had a gun. I'll use it on you if you come any closer."
"Girl, you don't even have the foot long sandwich you think you're holding in your hand," Michel said, pointing at her hands.
Helen looked down to find both her hands were empty.
"The first step is realization," Michel said. "Now look at the ground to your left."
Helen did as he said, and saw her body splayed out on the ground. The face was a bloody mess, caved in and shredded. Between her feet lay the shotgun.
"The second step is notification of consequences," Michel said.
Helen looked back at Michel to see him put his smartphone in one of his jean's front pocket, then reach behind him. When he pulled out what he had tucked in his waistband at his lower back, Helen asked: "What's that?"
"It's a newspaper," Michel stated, then said with disdain, "Fucking millennials, all you kids know is what a touchscreen shows you." He then opened up the newspaper, found what he was looking for, and read allowed: "Today, the Shaker Krista School District had every one of its schools put on lockdown for nearly three hours due to reports from the Federal Bureau of Investigations, informing the police and School District of an armed eighteen year old woman, Helen Shine, who allegedly made 'credible' threats on one, or many of the schools in the area. A spokesman for the FBI stated at a news conference, 'Helen Shine is known to have an obsession with Ronnie Filbert, the perpetrator of America's worst, most tragic school mass shooting, as well as an infatuation with the act of murder.' After the schools were on lockdown for three hours, every student in every school of Shaker Krista County were sent home with an immense police presence as they walked out of the buildings."
Michel crumpled up the newspaper, then tossed it behind him.
"That happened today?" Helen asked.
"Well, to you that was tomorrow's newspaper," Michel informed. "You're still living in the moment where you were eating the sandwich, waiting for the sunset. The thing is, in the afterlife, time is irrelevant. So..." Michel paused for a moment, then said, "Never mind that kind of talk, let's just move on. As a therapist with no imagination would ask, 'How does that make you feel?'"
"What?" Helen asked.
"What I just read to you," Michel said. "The fact that people all around the country -- who don't know you, never even met you before in their lives -- think you're a murderous nut case, bent on blowing strangers away before you blow yourself away. The FBI believed it so much they had over a million kids sent home. They're gonna be home for the next two days. Your name is appropriate for this kind of situation." Michel waved his hand before him, looking up at an imaginary sign, saying, "Helen Shine, the woman who made a million children shit their pants." He lowered his hand. "You know, I don't understand why they called you a 'woman' when -- by what I see right now -- you're still just a damn kid. How does it make you feel?"
"I...don't, um," Helen shook her head, "I don't feel anything."
"Exactly," Michel said, moving closer to Helen. "You don't feel a thing. No sadness. No happiness. Nothing you can exactly say is in between, like fine, okay, or just plain old all right. And most of all, what you were hoping for in death, not even relief." Michel points up at the trees. "You see that breeze moving the branches?"
Looking up into the trees, Helen replied, "Yes."
"And you see it moving the tall grass at the edge of the clearing there?"
Helen looked over at the tall blades waving back and forth, and she replied, "Yes."
"Do you notice it moving your long beautiful hair?"
"No," Helen said.
"That is the relief you never had in death," Michel said. "A soothing breeze, as if it were a touch from God himself. While you were alive you would tell yourself you felt 'nothing' when reality touched your heart. That obviously was a lie, many, many, people try convincing themselves is the truth, and lose patience before relief is even able to arrive."
"What now?" Helen asked.
"That question leads us to the third, and final step." Michel walked over to Helen's corpse, and stared down at it as he said, "You have two choices, either you stay here on this water rock to wander around for eternity with no goal in mind due to your total lack of desire, or you come with me in the Uber car where I can bring you to move on."
"If I stay?" Helen asked.
"Like I said, Helen, you will have no desire, no fear, no nothing. You may end up stuck in a desert, going in circles. I've seen it happen to so many. The bright side is the fact you wouldn't give one fuck about it, including not seeing the bright side of it. You get what I'm saying?"
"Yes," Helen told him. "What happens if I choose to move on?"
"I actually don't know," Michel said, shaking his head. "I've never been given the choice myself, so I've never seen the result. All I know is that what happens after you choose to move on isn't up to me."
"Do I make the choice right now?" Helen asked.
"No, not until I'm done with step two. Notifying you on the consequences of you taking your own life. Okay, Helen?"
"Okay."
"About four hours before you ate the buckshot your parents got worried enough to file a police report. Your mother had been trying to call you all day, but, as you know yourself, you blocked her number while you were on the plane. The cops ask both your parents questions, blah, blah, blah, then go onto your laptop computer which lucky for them you don't have a password to keep them locked out. So they open up the web browser, and low and be-fuckin'-hold you left your Google account open, and they find that you've purchased plane tickets to the city you randomly selected to blow your brains away in. They think you simply ran away until they find your Splitting the Atom website where you uploaded your personal journal entries just the day before. The detective barely reads a fucking word of it until he skips all the way to the last page to read the last two words, 'Frolicking Bullshit,' in all caps, and underlined. The site of those words, and the city you purchased the plane ticket for flips the panic switch inside him."
"What about it?" Helen asked. "The words, 'Frolicking Bullshit.' Why does the cop panic?"
"I'll get to it," Michel said. "The next day when they find out what you purchased with your credit card at the gun store right after leaving the airport, they freak the fuck out, call the FBI where you live, then call the FBI in the city here, and get all the schools locked down, then eventually send all the kids home. The media says you got a hard on for Ronnie Filbert, and want to continue what he started."
"Who's Ronnie Filbert?" Helen asked.
"You seriously don't know what happened in that city down the hill twenty years ago this coming Friday at Victory High School?" Michel asked.
"I wasn't born yet," Helen said.
"Ronnie Filbert murdered fifty-five people at his High School," Michel informed. "Students and a few Teachers."
"What does that have to do with me?"
"When he was shooting up the school, he was wearing a white t-shirt with the words 'Frolicking Bullshit' printed on it," Michel informed. "Because those were the last words you wrote down, the feds think you're all in love with his dead ass, and convince the city down there you're going to shoot any random school you come across. They don't realize you already were dead when they came to that determination until after finding your corpse here. For a long time your name will suffer the stigma of false judgement by not only your peers back at your school, but much of the internet's trolls. The media will never acknowledge the fed's mistake. Your father won't be able to work for a while, spending most of his time getting drunk. Eventually he'll have to go to rehab, and make shit money as an addiction counselor. Your mother divorces your father, and moves as far away from him as she can, because every time she'll even think about him, she'll see you. One day she swallows forty-seven oxycontin pills, and dies in her bed."
Not that Helen noticed, but the noon sky became afternoon in a snap of the fingers when Michel told Helen about the fate of her mother. If time existed it would've been half past five.
Michel continued, "When your father learns of your mother's suicide he relapses. Drinks so much whiskey in one evening, he passes out, and dies in his sleep."
The sun lowered in the sky, but the sky was still blue.
Helen simply stared down at the ground, unmoved by the knowledge of the fate of her father.
"Can I make my decision now?" Helen asked
"I'm not finished yet, Miss Shine," Michel said. "Draven."
Michel simply saying that name made Helen look up from the ground to see her Uber driver staring over at her, a hint of a smile on his face. The sun moved down to set on the horizon, it's light dying slowly as Michel spoke of Draven's fate.
"I see it every time with people like you," Michel said. "I tell you suicides how bad your parents and siblings feel in the aftermath of their tragedy, and nothing really changes, you still feel nothing. I mean, you are dead, after all, but when I mention someone you truly loved, and how the tragedy destroyed them, then things do truly start to change. You want to know what happened to that fat ass?"
"Don't fucking call him that," Helen said, angry.
"I do apologize, but like you, I don't feel a thing," Michel said. "No sympathy for the living."
"What happens to Draven?" Helen said, nearly yelling at Michel.
"Is it really any of your business?" he asked.
"YES!" Helen's chaw began to shiver.
"You become a burden to him in death like you claimed you'd be in life," Michel said. "Many of the students back at your High School begin to pick on him as soon as it gets around you two were close, because let's face it, High School gossip is usually ninety-nine percent accurate. More accurate than the mainstream media I regrettably have to say. I mean, shit, almost everyone but Draven think you were a nutcase with a shotgun, ready to kill anyone you'd come across. Even when the coroner concludes you killed yourself a full day before the FBI deemed you a credible threat to human life. This drives Draven into a bad, heavy depression. He quits school before graduation. After he finds out the exact place where you killed yourself, he comes here at the end of summer. And just like you, he waits for sunset."
The sun edged over the horizon, and the sky turned dark. Not one star shined in the sky. Shrouded in complete darkness, Helen fell to her knees. She felt the tears roll down her cheeks. Michel reached behind him, took out a candle from the waistband at his lower back, and with a lighter he retrieved from his jeans' pocket, lit the candle to see Helen quietly weeping.
"Does he blow his brains out?" she asked, her eyes closed.
"No, he doesn't," Michel said.
"Oh, thank God," Helen said, relieved. "Draven simply pays me a visit. That's all. He doesn't kill himself."
"I didn't say he didn't kill himself," Michel informed. "I just said he didn't use a gun, because he was more committed than you were. He used a knife. First he slits his throat, cutting the jugular so good that when he attempts to slit his wrists the flow of blood from his neck is so great it causes the knife to slip from his hands. He then falls to his knees just like you are right now in this darkness. And his last thought is the hope he'll be with you the moment he dies, but in fact, he'll just meet me, and feel nothing. You see, Helen, you were a burden to him after all."
Helen screamed the word 'No' so loud it convinced the sun to rise for a new day. She wept for Draven, falling on all fours, repeating the words, "I'm so sorry, Draven. I'm so sorry," over and over again, until Michel knelt beside her, placing his hand on her shoulder.
"It looks like you've chosen to move on, Helen Shine," Michel said. "Now stop crying, because it's time to leave. They're about to come here and find your dead body."
Helen wiped away her tears with the back of her hand. She asked, "What? Who?"
"The pigs are gonna be here soon, so we gotta go to get you moving on from this plane of existence, alright. So, come one, get on your feet."
Michel helps Helen stand up.
"Will Draven still kill himself?" she asked, tears still flowing down her cheeks.
"That doesn't matter right now," Michel said, turning away from her. "Now, follow me. The car's waiting in the parking lot. It's been there since Monday."
"Wait, what day is it?"Helen asked, following Michel down the hill to the path.
"It's Wednesday," Michel told her.
"But we were just up there not even twenty minutes."
"I told you already, in the afterlife time isn't relevant to your current perception," Michel said. "With their equations people like Einstein and Hawking try proving this realm can exist amongst the living, but that's actually impossible, because you have to be dead to experience it."
"Huh?" Helen uttered as they got to the path.
"Exactly. It's boring to talk about something that isn't real in the first place."
"What's not real?" Helen asked, confused.
"Time," Michel said. "Remember what I told you earlier, 'can't waste what's not real.' Come on, hurry up, they're about to get here."
They were both about to have a clear view of the parking lot.
"You mean the cops, right?" Helen asked.
"Yes. And if they get here before we leave, they'll be a pain in the ass."
"But if I'm dead, how could they even notice I'm here?"
"That's just how things work, Helen. I can't explain everything."
They looked a hundred yards down the path to the parking lot and saw a SWAT team gearing up. A Sheriff's Deputy wearing a bullet proof vest was walking around Michel's car, looking inside, hand on his gun.
"Fucking shit," Michel blurted, stopping in his tracks. "They're fucking already here. Goddamnit, I hate this shit sometimes."
Michel grunted in frustration, placing his hands on his waist, and stomping his foot on the pavement once. This was the first moment Helen saw him emit any kind of emotion since first meeting him.
"I thought you didn't feel," Helen said.
"I do when it counts," Michel said, looking up at her, "when fools like the ones down there get in my way. They won't recognize you, only if you don't say a word. Just nod your head, 'yes' or 'no,' if they ask you any questions. Got it?"
"Okay, got it," Helen assured. "Why won't they recognize me?"
"They're wannabe Angels misguided by a false sense of righteousness, and are blind to everything with the exception of the orders they are given. They're here because of the fact most of the living that know who you are right now want you dead simply because you happened to write those two simple words in your journal which were on Ronnie Filbert's t-shirt as he killed those people twenty years ago. These idiots can keep you from moving on. So just follow me, and if they ask us anything, I'll do the talking. Oh, and by the way, don't look into their eyes."
Michel began walking toward the parking lot, and Helen followed a little behind him with her head down. She noticed something under Michel's shirt at his lower back, figuring it was another newspaper, she lowered her eyes to the pavement as they walked on. About halfway to the parking lot, one of the SWAT members saw them coming.
"Sir, two incoming," he said to the Sheriff's Deputy.
"You two, halt," the Deputy howled.
"You got it," Michel said.
Helen and him stopped walking. Michel watched the Deputy and the swat members walked over to them.
"Remember, not a word, and don't look into their eyes," Michel quietly told Helen, then smiled at the Sheriff's Deputy, saying, "So what's going on, gents, are their bank robbers hiding out?"
"There's an armed woman in the area," the Deputy said as he got closer, hand still on the butt of his handgun.
"So only one bank robber then," Michel said.
"She didn't rob a bank, but she's the subject of a statewide manhunt," the Deputy informed.
"Oh my, the crazy bitch must have killed her entire family then," Michel said, shaking his head. "The sad, horrific things that happen in this world not even God can prevent. Such a shame."
The Sherif's Deputy, and the eleven SWAT members arrived where Michel and Helen stood.
"I didn't say she killed anybody," the Deputy corrected. He reached into his pants pocket, and pulled out a piece of glossy photo paper. "Have you seen this woman?"
There was no image on the photo paper, it was just white.
Michel looked at it for a moment, pretended to think, then said, "No. I haven't"
"How 'bout you, you seen this woman around?" the Deputy asked Helen.
Helen glanced at the blank photo. For a moment she was confused. Michel was right, these people were completely idiotic, and blind to the truth.
"No," she replied, slightly shaking her head, and looking back down at the ground.
The Deputy, as well as all the SWAT members stirred in their stances by the one word Helen had said, all their eyes were on her. She forgot that Michel told her to say nothing.
"Gentlemen," Michel began to say, "we did find something that might interest you."
The Deputy looked back at Michel, and asked, "What?"
"We found a dead body that may be the very woman you're looking for," Michel said. "This girl here beside me is all in shock about it. I mean, we were just on this wonderful hike on this beautiful day, and bam, dead body. Beside her was a shotgun. It could be her, but by the photo you're showing us, I don't know, cause the face up the hill there is like, you know, gone."
"Why didn't you call the authorities when you found the body?" the Deputy asked.
"No cellphone service."
"You're gonna show me where this supposed body is right now," the Deputy commanded.
"I ain't showing you shit," Michel said. "Just turn right off the path once you pass the bend up there, and you'll find it. Alright. Now I got to get her home."
"Don't use that language with me, Russki," the Deputy demanded.
"Don't call me 'Russki,' you brainless mortal," Michel said.
"Show me where the body is right now, or I'll detain your foreign ass for obstruction."
Helen began weeping. The Deputy turned to look at Helen as she raised her head, and stared up at him with her tearful eyes.
"I just want to move on from this," she pleaded.
"I told you not to say a word, you poor thing," Michel said.
"It's her," the Deputy yelled to the SWAT members, and pulling out his gun, aiming it right at Helen. "Show us your hands, or you will die right now."
"Hey, guys, she is not armed, okay," Michel informed.
"Get back, sir, she's dangerous," the Deputy yelled.
"Don't point that fucking thing at her, dumb shit," Michel demanded.
As Helen began raising her hands, Michel grabbed hold of the Sherif Deputy's wrist with his left hand and shoved the barrel away from Helen's direction. The gun went off, the bullet going into the trees. Michel reached for the waistband at his lower back, pulled out a Nickel Plated .45 semi-automatic gun, and placed the barrel of it on the oblivious Deputy.
"Dog's bitches like you never learn how to listen," Michel said before pulling the trigger, killing the Sherif's Deputy.
As the Deputy's body flopped to the pavement, Michel shot at two SWAT members with his gun, hitting one in the cheek bone, sending him backward to the pavement as he dropped his MP-5N machine gun. The second he put two bullets in, one in the man's testicles, the other he managed to get into the man's trigger hand as he screamed. He did it so fast it caught the rest of the SWAT team by surprise. The lack of their response gave Michel enough time to reach behind him to retrieve another handgun of the same type from his waistband. He began shooting at the other SWAT members as they scattered, running away to get behind trees.
As Michel continued to shoot both his guns, he yelled, "Run to my car, Helen. Now!"
She took off down the path, not knowing if she might even make it to the car without getting shot.
Someone returned fire on Michel, missed, and Michel fired twice from where it came from. A man screamed in pain and fell to the ground. Michel began jogging backwards down the path to the parking lot, blindly firing his guns into the trees.
"The Reaper doesn't need to reload like you mortal pansies!" Michel yelled as he fired again and again, moving back leap by leap.
Helen made it to Michel's car, opened the back passenger door, jumped in, and slammed the door.
When Michel felt he got close enough to the car he stopped firing, turned around, and saw Helen sitting in the backseat.
"Fucking idiots don't know what hit them," he said, smiling down at her worried face.
Then machine gun fire went off. Michel's smile disappeared as he stumbled into the the back passenger door.
"You motherfuckers," Michel yelled in pain. He spun around, and returned fire.
Helen saw his back with blood pouring out of five or seven bullet holes.
"NO!" Helen screamed painfully.
Michel leaned back into the back passenger side window, smearing it with his blood, as he continued to return fire. After almost half a minute he slid to the side, falling to the ground. He fired four more shots before deciding to stop.
"Open the door, Helen," he called out.
Helen opened the door to find Michel laying on his side on the ground, throwing up blood. She cried, not knowing what to say.
"I'm sorry, sunshine," Michel said, struggling with each word as he took his last breaths. "I'm not able to help you move on. They won't let me, because they are too foolish to know they are fools." He raised up his left hand to give her his gun. "You can go out the way you want to, the way they expect you to."
With tears flowing from her eyes, Helen took hold of the handgun.
"Put the gun down, you crazy bitch!" a SWAT member yelled. "Or you will fucking die!"
Helen looked up and saw the last of the SWAT members aiming their guns at her.
"Is this what you really want, you soulless fucking assholes!" she yelled.
She raised the gun, pointed it in their direction, and pulled the trigger.
Click. It was empty.
The SWAT members opened fire. The bullets entered her chest and head. As she fell backwards into the backseat of Michel's Uber car, well...
She woke up in her room, catching her breath so hard it was as if she were nearly drowning to death just moments earlier. Gripping her chest as she fiercely inhaled and exhaled, she not only felt her heart beating in her hand, she felt it pulsing her entire head. It took nearly two minutes to calm her nerves. The room was dark, but sunlight shined through from the edges of the drawn curtains.
"It was just a nightmare," Helen finally said. "Nothing more than a bad dream."
There was a snap clicking sound from the corner of her room near the curtain covered window. Helen looked up in the darkness to see a flame coming from a bic lighter.
"It wasn't a dream, Helen," a man said as he lit himself a cigarette. "It actually did happen, consequences and all."
The man wasn't Michel; his accent was American. Helen freaked, backed herself to the top edge of her bed against the wall, curling her knees up to her chest.
"Who the fuck are you?" Helen asked.
"Well, as you can tell, I'm not Russian." The man chuckled, taking a drag of his cigarette.
"There's no smoking in this house, dude," Helen stated instinctively.
"That doesn't matter," the man said, continuing to smoke his cigarette. "The misguided Angels are on their way, and this time they're not just mindless cops, they're everyone else. Do you feel the ground shaking?"
Helen began to hear rumbling coming from outside, and feel a vibration lightly shaking her bed.
"Yes," she replied. "Why is this still happening to me? Am I in Hell?"
"No, girl," the man said, almost giggling. "Heaven and Hell are simple lies, metaphors for life itself, not the afterlife."
"Then what the fuck is going on?"
"I'm here to give you a message before the mob of fools come to shred you apart. The message is: Those who claim to bring the light cause the largest shadows of darkness. You and I have the ability to see that darkness. It doesn't mean we're evil, but evil in their ignorant perception, because we know and accept their faults unlike they ever can themselves. And most of all it is our duty to exploit the darkness they unwittingly bring to the flourishing day and renewing night."
The man walked away from the corner of where he was standing, briefly walking by a beam of light shining through the edge of the curtain. Helen saw his face only for a moment, and of course did not recognize who he was. He continued walking over to her computer desk.
In the darkness he said, "Whether it be dreadful or hopeful, a dream can fade upon wakening due to an insurmountable desire such as suicide. The spider's web has already tied down your soul, sunshine, and there's only one way to free you from such a horrible, unforgiving weight."
With fresh tears rolling down her cheeks, Helen asked, "What is it?"
She saw the burning cigarette lighten up as the man took a drag.
Exhaling the smoke, he said, "A miracle that is beyond the plausibility of both reason and rationality, but nonetheless accepted as the ultimate truth."
The rumbling outside got louder all of a sudden, and the ground began shaking.
"They're here," the man said.
Then Helen's bedroom walls shattered to pieces, and she was blinded by a searing white light.
She opened her eyes to find herself kissing Draven, then released her lips from his as she realized she was back in front of her High School. She looked down at her hand on his chest, and saw Draven's placed over the back of it, his touch more soothing than she ever thought it could be, because before that moment, they had never even laid a finger on one another.
Draven looked into her eyes, and said, "I've been wanting to do that since the moment I met you. I --"
Helen interrupted him by saying, "I love you too."
Draven was at a loss for words, and looking like he was about to cry.
A car honked once just a few feet away from them.
"Oh, shit," Helen uttered. "Hold on a second, Draven."
Helen went up to the car, and leaned down to the front passenger door as its window slid down.
She looked over and gestured to Draven as she said, "Look my friend just offered me a ride last second. I'm sorry to waste your time."
"It's your lucky day, young lady," the driver said with a Russian accent. "I live life according to my own tune, and that tune says, 'You can't waste what's not real.'"
Helen looked into the Uber car and saw Michel sitting in the driver's seat. When her jaw dropped, Michel simply gave her a wink.
"Just give me a five star rating for being so prompt, please," he said.
"Um, for sure," Helen said.
"Have fun with your boyfriend, sunshine," Michel said, then drove away.
| ...But lived as ’twere a king | |
| That packed his marriage day | |
| With banneret and pennon, | |
| Trumpet and kettledrum, | |
| And the outrageous cannon, | |
| To bundle time away | |
| That the night come." -W.B. Yeats |
