The basement smells like mildew and burnt coffee, the same way it does every month, like the building itself is stuck in some permanent state of almost-giving-up.
Josh drops me off out front and doesn’t come in. Can’t, actually. There’s a separate meeting upstairs for people like him, the ones who love people like me, but this room down here is just for us. The ones still doing math in our heads about exit routes.
Folding chairs are arranged in a circle that’s a little too small for the room. I take the same seat I always take, third from the door, close enough to leave without making a scene, far enough that I don’t look like I’m trying to leave.
There’s a woman across from me I haven’t seen before. Mid-forties maybe, cardigan the color of dishwater, hands wrapped around a Styrofoam cup like it’s the only warm thing left in the world. When it’s her turn to talk, she laughs before she even starts, this short, brittle sound that doesn’t have anything to do with humor.
“So.” She sets the cup down on the floor by her feet. “About three months ago I decided I wasn’t going to be here anymore. Which, in hindsight, was a financial mistake.”
A couple of quiet, understanding chuckles ripple around the circle.
“I maxed out four credit cards.” She holds up fingers, counting them off like a grocery list. “Four. Because why not, right? I’m not going to be around to deal with the bill. Went to Cancun. Bought my sister a car.”
“You bought your sister a car?” someone rudely interrupts out of their own surprise.
“A car.” She nods, staring at some point on the carpet. “A whole car. For a woman who hasn’t spoken to me since 2019.”
The basement door creaks open behind me. A woman slips in without apologizing, dressed head to toe in a black hijab, her face covered except for the narrow slit around her eyes. Even that is hidden behind dark sunglasses. I vaguely recall seeing her here for a while, she’s definitely a regular. She takes the empty chair nearest the stairs and sits so quietly that the circle almost pretends not to notice her.
The original woman continues.
“Then finally once all my money was gone I decided to take every SSRI I had in the cabinet. Just, all of them. Lined them up on the counter like I was doing inventory and then swallowed the whole lot.”
The room goes quiet in that specific way where nobody moves, because everybody in this circle knows exactly what that moment feels like.
“And then I panicked.” She says it almost apologetically, like she’s confessing to something embarrassing rather than the fact that she’s alive. “Completely panicked. Started sobbing on my bathroom floor, absolutely convinced I was going to die, and it turns out when you’re actually staring down the barrel of it, your body just says no. Made myself throw up. All of it. On my hands and knees in front of the toilet, crying and gagging.”
I know the feeling. I’ve been in that exact situation myself before.
“So I didn’t die.” She spreads her hands out, gesturing at herself, at the basement, at all of it. “Instead I get to live with four maxed-out credit cards, a nice tan, and a sister who still won’t return my calls even though I bought her a literal car.”
She laughs again, longer this time, and it slides sideways into something that isn’t laughing at all.
“The debt alone.” Her voice drops. “I think about the debt more than I think about anything else now. I look at the statements and I think, well, I already tried once, and now I have an even better reason.”
She sighs, long and shaky, like she’s trying to talk herself back into the sentence.
“But I’m trying.” The words come out small. “I keep telling myself that counts for something.”
A few heads nod around the circle. Nobody pushes her further. She goes quiet, staring back down at her cup.
“Thank you, Jinette.” The volunteer leader, Marcus, says it soft, giving her the room to just exist for a second without anyone expecting anything else out of her. Jinette nods without looking up.
Marcus’s eyes move around the circle, and then they land on me.
“Caleb, right?”
“Yeah.”
“We don’t hear from you much.” He says it gently, no pressure buried in it, just an open door. “Would you like to give it a try today?”
I promised Josh last month I’d actually talk for once instead of just sitting here counting ceiling tiles until the hour’s up. I could lie to him later and tell him I did, and he’d probably believe me because he wants to. But he doesn’t deserve that.
“Yeah.” My voice comes out rougher than I expect. “I’ll try.”
I can’t remember the last time I said any of this out loud, start to finish. Maybe five years ago to some random therapist?
I think about Lauren. Her face appears the way it always does, easy and unbidden, like it’s been waiting just below the surface the whole time. That specific smile. The way she’d tilt her head when she was listening to something.
I exhale.
“Growing up, there were these twins who lived next door to me.” My hands stay flat on my knees. “We were friends since we were kids. Rode bikes together, that whole thing. And I was in love with one of them. Had been since we were probably nine years old.”
Marcus nods slowly.
“We used to spend entire summers together. All three of us. Building forts in their backyard, catching fireflies in jars we always ended up letting go before bed because none of us could stand the thought of them dying in there.” I feel something loosen in my chest, just slightly. “It was as good of a childhood as anyone could dream of.”
The twins surface behind my eyes, clear as anything, Lauren’s laugh carrying across a backyard, Madison always half a step behind her sister, watching everything with those same eyes.
“Freshman year of high school, the twin I liked asked me out. We were fourteen. And looking back on it, that’s kind of insane, because I was such a coward about the whole thing. I’d wanted to ask her out for probably two years by that point. Thought about it constantly. Rehearsed what I’d say in the mirror like an idiot.”
A dry, humorless laugh escapes me before I can stop it.
“But I never did it. I was too scared. Scared she’d say no, scared it’d ruin what we already had, scared of basically everything a fourteen-year-old boy is scared of.” I shake my head slightly. “So she did it instead. Walked right up to me at my locker in front of everyone and asked if I wanted to be her boyfriend. Didn’t even blink.”
I stop there for a second, staring at some point on the carpet the same way Jinette had.
“She was always braver than me. About everything.”
I breathe in and out.
“Once we started dating, things changed. She let me in further than she ever had before. And it turned out there was this whole part of her I never knew was there. A darkness. I don’t really have a better word for it than that. Deep, deep darkness.”
“About a year in, she asked me to make a suicide pact with her. That we’d die together. Both of us.”
Across the circle, the woman in the hijab coughs once. Loud enough I almost forget my place.
“I thought she was joking, at first. Genuinely thought it was some dark joke, the kind teenagers make because they think it makes them sound interesting.” My jaw tightens. “She wasn’t joking. It took me embarrassingly long to understand that.”
The weight of the memory presses down on me the way it used to when I was a teenager, lying awake next to Lauren, staring at the ceiling of her bedroom while she slept like it was nothing.
“I was so in love with her. So desperate not to disappoint her, not to be the coward again, the one who couldn’t say the thing first, couldn’t do the thing first. So I didn’t run. I just... let her keep talking about it.” My voice roughens. “And she talked about it a lot. For years. She had this way of making it sound beautiful. How it would feel to go together, in each other’s arms. Like it was the most romantic thing two people could ever do for each other.”
“It scared me at first,” I say. “I want to be clear about that. That first time she brought it up I couldn’t sleep for days. But it’s like anything else. You hear something enough, and eventually your brain just... files it under normal. And then somewhere in there I started thinking about it too. Not because I wanted to die. But because I loved her so much that the idea of never being separated from her started to sound almost peaceful. Like maybe it would be nice.”
I press my palms flatter against my knees.
“But that wasn’t the plan I had in my head. My actual goal, was to show her life was worth sticking around for. I figured if I just loved her hard enough, long enough, she’d come around on her own. That’s the kind of thing you believe when you’re young and stupid and drowning in hormones.”
Someone shifts in their folding chair.
“After our first time, she told me dying together would feel even better than sex... Like she was building a case one piece of evidence at a time.”
“It was the June after junior year.” I don’t say how many years ago. That part isn’t theirs to have. “This exact month, actually, which is a fun thing to sit with every year around this time. We were lying together in her room, middle of the afternoon, and I remember just staring at her. Completely gone for her. Thinking I was the luckiest man alive, that whatever I’d done to deserve her, I’d do it again a thousand times over.”
I sigh.
“She looked at me and said it was time.”
“I said, what. Just, what. Like I didn’t understand English all of a sudden.” My voice comes out quieter now. “She got up off the bed and beckoned me with her hand. Told me today was the day we were going to do it.”
I feel my eyes start to sting, and I don’t wipe at them.
“I remember opening my mouth to start begging, and she put her finger against my lips before I could get a word out. Just, shhh’d me. Real gentle about it. She said it had to be that day. Said if I wouldn’t come with her, she’d do it alone. And I knew, she wasn’t bluffing. I could see it in her fucking eyes.”
I breathe out long through my nose.
“So I followed her.”
“On the drive there, I remember my mouth kept filling up with spit, that feeling you get right before you throw up. I was that scared. Terrified, actually.” I scoff, short and humorless. “Pretty pathetic, huh. Guess I still am, in a lot of ways.”
“We ended up at some parking garage. Nothing special, just some random one downtown. Drove up to the seventh level and parked right near the edge. It was beautiful outside that day. Maybe a smidge too hot.”
“She was radiant when we got out of the car. Not afraid like me. She climbed up onto the ledge like she was stepping onto a stage, and then she turned around and held her hand out for me, waiting for me to climb up next to her.”
“She gave me a big kiss and then smiled at me like I’d just made her the happiest she’d ever been in her whole life. And then she said, on three.”
“She counted one. And that’s when I started begging. I didn’t want to die. I knew it right then, clearer than I’d ever known anything, but she just kept counting like I wasn’t even talking.”
“On two I screamed like a kid. And then she got to three.”
“Her hand pulled at mine, just a little. Barely anything. And I ripped it back so fast.” I laugh, short and awful, no humor in it at all.
That stupid tug, that’s what the security camera caught, and that’s what the whole city of Worcester decided meant I pushed her. Those few frames became my entire identity when I was still Adam…
I swallow.
“She looked like I’d betrayed her as she fell. That’s the last expression I ever saw on her face, like I was the one who did something unforgivable to her.”
“I cried so much I don’t even remember getting down there. I just remember being on the phone with 911, screaming the address, and she was already gone by the time I reached her. Her face didn’t look peaceful. Didn’t look like anything you’d want to remember. Just empty. Joyless. Like all the light that used to live behind her eyes had already…”
A chair slams backward, clattering against the concrete floor.
“ALRIGHT, I’VE HAD ENOUGH, CALEB!”
Every head in the circle whips toward the noise. I squint at the woman in the hijab, who’s standing now, chest heaving, hands yanking at the fabric wound around her head. She rips off the sunglasses first, then the black cloth, and underneath it all is blonde hair spilling loose, green eyes blazing, face flushed red with anger.
A laugh bubbles up out of me before I can stop it, and then I’m smiling. Every eye in the circle swivels toward me now, probably wondering what kind of person grins like an idiot in the middle of describing the worst day of his life, right after some stranger just tore off a disguise and started screaming his name.
But I can’t help it. Something in my chest unclenches all at once, like a fist letting go.
She followed me here. She’s been here the whole time, sitting close. And instead of that feeling invasive, it just feels like relief. Like I’m truly not alone anymore…
“Oh. Hi, Alyssa.”
Alyssa: