Dramatic Child Stars

Thirty.

Percy,
July 29, 2021,
2:32 am.

It was my 22nd birthday and I was on spring break from my third year of university. Riley had recently turned 20 just a few months prior. It was the day that I found out Riley had a suicide plan.

I don't know why he was so focused on it that particular day. I don't know what the trigger was or if it was just something that had spontaneously come up for him. I'm not one for asking a lot of questions, but I know that it was rather hard for him to be alone around that time, and I'd been gone all day with my family doing the cake and pizza ritual that my birthday normally entailed. He'd been invited, but he hadn't wanted to come. I'd spent a lot of the day wondering why he hadn't wanted to, but I gathered it likely had to do with the fact that he'd been using a lot of pills lately. My mom could always tell. He really hated that she could tell.

I wasn't alerted to the fact that something could be wrong when I first got home. Riley wasn't there, but that wasn't abnormal. He was a wanderer. I'd always known that.

Anxiety started to creep in when it got dark, and I still hadn't heard from him. I'd texted twice. I'd called when I was leaving my parents place. The apartment had begun feeling excessively quiet and pervasive. Maybe something in the universe had intentionally tipped me off, but I began to sense that something was amiss.

Then Bryn had called me. We hadn't spoken since I'd left Los Angeles, but she called me and spoke to me in the most familiarly panicked voiced she could muster. She told me that Riley had texted her that he loved her in a completely unprompted message before sending her enough money to pay her nursing school tuition twice. He'd then refused to answer the phone. Then he'd sent a second message apologizing for "everything" without any other context. Bryn was very worried. She wanted me to check on him immediately.

Maybe it was by cosmic design, but I like to think that Riley just knew how to protect himself. That's how I explain the irony of Riley's decision to share his phones location with me four days prior. He'd done it when I was struggling to find him after we'd made plans to meet at the market. He'd never turned it off.

I tracked his phone and learned that he was roughly two miles away, sitting stagnant on a bridge. I really spent too much time evaluating that. I thought maybe he was in a car, but I stared for a while and learned that his phone was not in motion at all.

A minute later I was in my car speeding across town to go and retrieve him. It took me ten minutes to pull onto the bridge. My phone assured me that he still wasn't moving. I had a live location if him, so the phone hadn't been turned off. That's what made it so confusing as I drove up the bridge without seeing him anywhere.

I drove up the bridge in both directions twice. That scared me quite a bit, because according to the map, I was driving right past his phone. That's when I decided to pull over to see if he'd left it behind. At that point, I was almost certain I was too late. My brain was stringing through the awful possibilities. I'd convinced myself that he'd already jumped and that nobody had seen him. I thought maybe I'd find his phone on the ground, and that he was simply gone, and I'd never recover from the loss or something.

I pulled over near the bridge and then walked up the south side where the pedestrian path was, following the gps. Even though the gps showed me walking right over him, I didn't see his phone anywhere. I even dramatically leaned over the railing like I'd somehow magically see him sitting on a boat on the surface of the water or something.

The gps was showing him on the bridge. Why wasn't he on the bridge? I was going to drive myself mad with that.

It was then that I had the sense to call him again. I knew he wasn't going to answer, but I felt hopeless otherwise. My options were running slim.