The short goodbye

Andy was the master of the short goodbye. At parties when everyone else was saying goodbye first by the snack table and then out on the back porch and then by the coat rack, Andy would slip out the door and be gone. Once in a while somebody would text to say "Hey, you didn't say bye!", but in general nobody did and it just went to confirm what Andy had thought all along, which was that nobody cared that much or noticed whether he was there or not. In fact, it seemed like nobody really cared who was there at all. Some people were funny, life-of-the-party types, but if they weren't there, someone else like them would usually step up to take their place.
It felt good to Andy to leave that way. It was the one element of his social life he could control: whether or not to give others the gift of his presence. Even though he knew that gift wasn't all that special.
When Andy moved to the city after high school, at first he couldn't believe how different from high school the art scene was. Everyone still looked like kids to him, including himself, but these kids all talked to each other. The kids with muscles talked to the kids with glasses. The really nerdy guys had girlfriends. Tall girls talked to short guys. It seemed kind of like heaven and for a while Andy was high on life, riding on the clouds of a sky where everything had gotten straightened out the way it should be.  He had girls and they were hotter than he ever would have expected. He played in bands and people listened to his weird computer music and it was all amazing, except that after a couple of years it wasn't. When Andy had finally met everyone in all the overlapping friend circles and dated every woman who was hot enough but not too hot, and played in every venue in town except the really good ones, he started to realize that in the end, it was more like high school than he had thought. The popular people were still popular. They were happy, and getting married. Their bands were on national tours. The restaurants they worked at had the best-looking people and the best tips. They just had better luck, and it showed on their faces.
After the second restaurant full of ugly waitstaff fired Andy and the third girl said she didn't love him and he realized he was only dating the one after her because she did and his final bandmate quit to play in a better band, Andy started having dreams about leaving. In his dreams, he said goodbye to nobody, just packed up his room without finding a replacement roommate and caught a train to a different city, where he could start over. In his dreams, he didn't mention leaving on his facebook page or in his email, and his friends (or the people who were sometimes his friends) had to make calls and investigate and talk to his landlord to find out that he had gone at all. In his dreams, they talked to each other for weeks afterward: "Why did he leave? Do you think it was because of Annie? Do you think he was depressed? Should we stage a rescue?"
But even in Andy's dreams, he couldn't make them talk about him for more than a few weeks, so he stopped dreaming about it.
 Andy started getting depressed in a serious way. Mostly he felt like he was sleepwalking, or underwater. He could look at a photo for a whole minute before realizing it was a picture of astronauts wearing space suits. Thinking was tiring him out. Asking questions like "Why am I depressed?" seemed like too much trouble. All of his ideas felt tired and used. Andy had spent a long time thinking about the unfairness of his social scene, but if a friend wanted to talk about it now his arguments seemed circular in a way that made him want to lie down and sleep for a thousand years.
 Andy had never really thought about killing himself before. He hated pain and was attached to the idea that something better was just around the corner.  In the end, he did it the way he did most things. He thought and overthought and thought more and decided against it and decided for it and then one day hiked up to Angel's Rest on an impulse and jumped off.  He didn't leave a note or talk to anyone beforehand or give anything away.  His life on earth was his last weapon, the last factor he had control over. And just like he would have wanted, afterwards his friends, or the people who were sometimes his friends, talked and talked about it. "Why did he do it? Do you think it was because of Annie? Do you think he was depressed? Should we have tried to do something?"
But in the end, after everyone including Annie had all cried and suffered, they all ended up being privately mad at Andy. They thought about how selfish he was, how cruel it was of him to make everyone deal with his dying, how he could have at least had the decency to write a note and give them some closure, how he should have said goodbye.  It would have confirmed Andy's fears that being an adult wasn't so different from being in high school, that the unpopular people stayed that way even after death.

Dog Jaw

"Do you want to feel my dog jaw?"

I moved my gaze slowly, slowly from the page in front of me and regarded my brother.
"I know all your jokes already. I know that one."
"Do you want to feel my dog jaw?" my brother repeated, hopefully. He swung himself off his bed and came over to me. "Here," he pointed at his chin, "feel it."
"Will you promise not to talk to me for 15 minutes if I do?"
He thought about it. "Yeah. Just feel it. Come on!"
I brushed his chin with my fingers and then jumped back with a squeak as he growled and snapped at my hand.
"You're terrifying. That was a good joke. Now shut up for fifteen minutes and let me read."
My brother was smiling. I guessed it had been worth it. He hopped back over to his side and stretched out on his bed, staring at the ceiling. The late-afternoon sun coming through the window made his hair look dusty. I brought my book back up to my face, but my mind wandered. It was hard to pay attention to a story in this kind of sunlight. I let my mind roam at peace back into its honeycomb of memories. It was a specifically pleasurable feeling, letting it skip where it wanted and stop where it pleased. My mind's eye hung for a moment on a recess memory, from elementary school, swinging up on the swing set and letting my eyes unfocus on the blue sky until I saw tiny clear creatures, like snakes or worms in a tide pool, swimming across my vision. It was astonishing. When I told my teacher about it he said it was tiny specks of dust on my eyeball.

"If you could have any kind of birthday party in the world, what would it be?" my brother asked out of nowhere. He was wearing his catcher's mitt and batting idly at the string that hung from the lamp over his bed.
"Davis..."
"No, I'm serious. Like a party with a theme. Like would it be Star Wars, or wild west, or pirate ship.."
"I truly have no idea," I told him. "I would rather just have a party where I could dress up."
"I would probably have it be Space theme. It wouldn't matter what movie or TV show, or it could be sort of all of them.."
I snorted. "Not very likely. Can you picture dad letting you have a space party?"
"You never know. He used to let us do more fun stuff. Maybe he'll get in a good mood again."
I looked around at him. He was still staring up at the light fixture. His eyes looked untroubled.
"Maybe," I told him.
We were silent for a few minutes.
"You know," I said after a while, "summer vacation is not going to last for that much longer."
Davis grinned and jumped his eyebrows at me. "I know. I can't wait to see...everybody."
"Are you going to talk to the teachers?"
Davis was thoughtful and silent for another minute.
"I don't know." He flipped over onto his stomach and dangled his arm off the edge of the bed. His cheek squished against the mattress. "Are you?" he said in a squished-sounding voice.
"I don't know."

There were footsteps suddenly outside the door. It rattled. I heard the key in the lock.
The door opened and Dad was in the doorway with a tray. He fixed us with a cold eye and put the tray down. He gathered up the dirty dishes from yesterday, shifted the stack to one arm, grabbed the little porta-potty with the other hand.
"I'll be back with this and some more TP in a minute," he said.
It was all he ever said.