Excerpt: Wes

David was dead.
The words replayed in my mind, over and over again, echoing louder and louder. For the first time in the six years my parents had been divorced they were able to be in the same room with each. It had also been the first time since their divorce that they had a reason to be together. They wanted to tell my sister and I that our brother was gone.
They said he had been found facedown at the riverbank, close to where he and some of his friends had decided they were going to camp out for their “graduation getaway.” Apparently, they had all been drinking and while his friends had passed out in the tent, David passed out closest to the water.
I felt like I was part of a movie—one of those shitty chick flick tear jerkers that Danielle is into. Suddenly I felt like I had left my body and was watching some other girl’s life on a silver screen. The girl brought herself to her feet and made her way to her bedroom at the end of the hall, where she collapsed onto the bed, tears trying to fall. The back story would be played out in a black-and-white flashback. The girl and the boy were born on the same day a year apart, but unlike most big brothers who would be furious that they had to share anything let alone their birthday, my brother loved the idea that I had been his first birthday present. There’d be more clips of the two growing up, the boy playing with the girl and their younger sister keeping them distracted while Mom and Dad fought loudly in a room on the other side of the house, it would all lead up to the final memory of a week before at the boy’s graduation, and the family kissing him good-bye and wishing him luck on his getaway. The movie would cut to the girl standing in the bathroom, staring at her reflection in the mirror above the sink, looking at everything from her dark brown eyes to her long brown hair. Everything about her made her sick to her stomach…because she was alive and her brother, her best friend, wasn’t.
The scene would cut to the girl picking up the scissors she had carried to the bathroom with her. The camera zooms in to watch her open them and press it to her skin, but since it would be too graphic to show the camera would cut back to the girl’s face, full of determination of what she was doing. The next clip would be of the girl switching the scissors to the other hand and making a trail down her other wrist. Then, maybe, for a dramatic effect the camera would do an extreme close-up of the girl’s eyes and watch her blink before she collapses to the floor.
The girl in the movie isn’t entirely sure of what happens between the time she collapses until the scene where she is waking up in a hospital bed, her wrists bandaged up but she is told that thanks to her little sister’s inability to knock before entering the bathroom it was Danielle who had found the loser on the floor, blood flowing onto the white bathroom tile. That’s the how the girl sees herself. A loser. Who in the hell can’t do the simplest thing such as suicide? She was a failure…and she hated herself even more.