Milked

Skylar | suicide stash.

In spite of the chilliness I had created between me and Phil, he was texting me almost every day to find out when I could come over to his house.

It didn't seem like Meg's mopiness had ceased, so I got the sudden idea to bring her with me. That was what girls my age did, didn't they? When they didn't want to be alone with someone, they brought their friends. It was a defense mechanism.

"Meg," I asked her, approaching our couch, where she was sitting. She looked up with lazy eyes and a strangely distanced smile. "Are you okay?" I asked her.

"I'm fine," she said, and her words dragged gracefully.

"I was just wondering if you would come with me to Phil's..." I said, and as I said it, I really wondered what the hell was wrong with her.

She stood up with the grace of a drunken ballerina. "Let's go!" she said slowly.

Totally baffled, I followed her out the door and over to my car. I had hoped she would offer to drive. However, it appeared that Meg and driving probably wouldn't mix, so that hope transformed into the hope that she wouldn't offer to drive.

I drove, and Meg continued looking like a baby passing gas all the way to Phil's house, and not once did she complain about my heavy music. Something was up with her, but I decided not to let it bother me. After all, the look on Meg's face evidenced something more than mopiness, something closer to happiness or at least a neutral okay-ness, a look that had been absent from her face for weeks.

When Phil opened his door and found me next to my drooling roommate, I swear I saw his mouth droop slightly at the corners, but he recovered quickly.

"This is my roommate, Meg," I said. "She wanted to come with me."

"Come in," he said, and the two of us went in. "Can I fix you two something to drink?"

"Meg's fine. I'll take a beer."

"Great." He went to his kitchen, and Meg and I sat down in his living room. He came back with a beer a few minutes later, and I found myself struggling to come up with a topic to chat about.

"How's school?" he asked finally.

"Still busy," was all I could come up with.

A few more moments passed, and he asked, "How's your little sister?"

Annoyed that he would ask that in front of Meg, I said, "She's fine," and I could hear the agitation in my voice.

Then his phone started ringing. Pulling it out of his pocket, he said, "Shit, I have to take this. It's a work thing, and I might be a while."

Sweet relief. "No problem."

Going to his bedroom, he left Meg and I alone.

I turned to Meg. "I've been over here a lot, but I've never really explored. Wanna take a tour with me?" Snooping around while a phone call occupied Phil seemed like a good idea.

She nodded lazily, so I stood up and helped her up by grabbing her hands.

The two of us went into the first door on the left in the hallway—a room that felt unfinished, like nobody ever went in there. It contained a really fancy chair, a really big globe, a long full-body mirror, and a nice chest. All of these items looked expensive.

Like the snoop I was, I opened the chest, while Meg sat down on the fancy chair.

Inside of it, I found a wedding photo—a picture of Phil and his now-dead bride, as well as a small pistol (I checked to see if it was loaded; it was) and an opened but still-full bottle of single-malt scotch whiskey labeled as being distilled in 1964, which I knew meant expensive.

Now this stash of items seemed very telling to me, and I jumped to what I thought was the only obvious assumption: this was Phil's suicide stash. The death of his wife had caused him to contemplate suicide, and he'd wanted his last meal to be an expensive drink of scotch. He'd even opened the bottle—(I opened it right then, discovering that it smelled, as most scotch did, like hairspray)—and taken a little swig. But something had changed his mind.

The recent memory of him telling me I reminded him of those things worth living for came to me right then.

I didn't want to be a thing worth living for. That put an enormous weight on me, and it was too much to carry, and I quickly took a swig of his more than 50-year-old scotch to distract myself, to give myself that false sense of levity that causes burdens to lose weight temporarily. It tasted disgusting, worse than I imagined even hairspray would taste, and I was glad my swig had been small, as a larger swig would have been more difficult to swallow.

I looked at the picture of him and his wife. She was tiny and tattooed and smiling, with dyed red hair and a seemingly-cheery disposition. His wife, though he didn't talk about her much, had been someone he thought was worth living for. And she had meant so much to him that when she had died, he'd thought about going with her. Because she made his life worth living. Because her death made his death more appealing than life.

There was a reason I didn't like getting close to people. I didn't like feeling our bonds strengthen, because that meant I was tied to them. And right now, I was tied to Phil. I had shown him there were things in life worth living for, and now I was holding him afloat. I was the one keeping him from coming in this room, opening this chest, drinking this scotch and pulling the trigger.

I didn't want to be that person. I had my whole life ahead of me, and Phil wasn't always going to be in it.

I'm using him, I reminded myself, harshly. That's what Mutual Arrangements was for. Take two people so they can use each other, one for sex and the other for money. But that made me wonder if any relationships weren't really about using people, whether for comfort, money, sex, advice, or some other thing. After all, apparently Phil was using me, too, to make his life worth living. And I was using him, for a designated driver, for a good lay, for someone to pay for my college, for a job.

I closed the bottle of scotch, glad to see that my swig hadn't made it look any less full than it had already looked. Then I noticed that Meg was peering over my shoulder, probably judging me.

"I only took a sip," I said.

"I know. I saw you." She still looked and sounded like someone suffering the aftereffects of a trip to the dentist.

"I'm gonna put all this stuff back. It seems really private." I put it all back, closed the chest, and left the room, sitting on the couch to finish my beer, contemplating my findings.

After continuing to think about the suicide stash for a few minutes, I heard talking coming from the room where we had just been, and I realized Meg must still be in there. "Meg?" I called. "What are you doing?"

She came out a few moments later. "I was just talking on the phone," she said slowly. It surprised me to think she could still be capable of a phone conversation in her current state.

"Are you okay?" I asked her again.

"I'm fine," she said.

Phil came back a few moments later, and I gavehim no indication we had gone into his room.