Plus Tax

*Sensitive content warning for adult language and for mentions of alcohol, suicide, self harm, and mental illness.

“Please, don’t do it.”

The line goes dead. She hung up. She is fed up with this, I know it. She is fed up with me.

But I don’t feel it. That’s the most fucked up part of all of this, I think. I used to cry when she was mad at me. When anyone was, really. But somewhere over the course of the past two years, I lost that, too. 

It’s not just numb, it’s empty.

The tile should be cold against my ass, the concrete my head is leaned on should be hard and unforgiving. I should be uncomfortable, but instead I’m caught in this maddening little space between the bathroom counter and the tub where I can’t really feel anything at all.

The phone buzzes, and I half expect it to be her usual “sorry, I just can’t handle you right now” text, but all that pops up on the screen is a low battery warning. 

Even the phone doesn’t have the energy to handle me right now.

I’m not quite sure how I got down here, but the scratch down my right arm hints at something between sitting and collapsing. I can picture it now; standing between the sink and the tub, another dizzy spell hitting, knees giving out, tile rushing up to greet skin. Just like they’re supposed to, my arms would have shot out to grab onto the nearest stable object, but then again, just like they’re supposed to, inertia and gravity would have carried me on down to the floor, leaving my silly arms out for the edge of the counter to catch and tear. 

The sink is dripping. I reach up to shift the handle, but something is clenched in my hand. Several somethings, I think.

I don’t remember getting these out. It must have been a conscious effort, I think, to trip down the stairs and into the bathroom by the front door, where we keep all of the medication. Childproof caps are hard, too, so more exertion there. Then the counting, the recounting. The calculating. And then back up the stairs, and now squeezed here, the phone in one hand and eighty cents in the other.

Eighty cents, plus tax. That was my first joke with her. It was before things got bad. Way before. We were eleven, maybe, just starting sixth grade. She was thin and gangly, limbs too long for the rest of her body and buck teeth too big for the rest of her face. Pippa was the kind of girl who stood out in the lunch room. The kind of girl no one wanted to plop down next to them and strike up a conversation.

I was sitting with my three closest friends, two of us on each side of the table, probably not speaking with any of them. Out of nowhere, a blur of legs and wild curls and a hot pink t-shirt arced over the bench, coming to a rest beside me.

“Hi! I’m Phillipa, but don’t call me that, it’s dreadful. Call me Pippa instead,” she sang, sticking out a thin hand. I eyed it as she kept talking, leaving her hand floating out in the air like some sort of pale flag. “You’re Alexis, I already know. But I’m going to call you Lex, because everyone needs a nickname.” She raised an eyebrow and tilted her head towards the waiting hand, which I quickly shook before turning away, eyes wide at the other girls. They didn’t so much as glance up from their phones.

“Well so here’s the thing, Lex,” she said, bumping my shoulder. I scooched away from her, but she closed the gap to bump my shoulder again and lower her head, hand cupping her mouth like she was about to share some wild secret. “I,” she said, pausing for what I can only imagine was intended to be dramatic effect, “am in desperate need of some lunch money. I’m planning on getting the teriyaki combo, so it’s only three dollars, but I’ve got nothing on me right now.”

“And you picked me, of all people, to ask?” I slid away from her again, and thankfully she didn’t follow.

“Well, Lex, you do have your change sitting right there next to you,” she said, smiling a little. “I could see it from a mile away. Easy prey,” she whispered, wrinkling up her nose at me.

And so I started to count out her lunch money. One dollar, two, three, ten cents, twenty, twenty-one.

“That’s too much,” she said as I dropped the coins into her hand. “It’s just three dollars.”

“Three dollars. Plus tax.” I said, wrinkling my nose just the way she did.

And I think from then on, we were friends. It was always Lex and Pippa this, Lex and Pippa that. When we started going to parties, we always went together. We looked out for each other, and I think that was a comfortable place for me. I had a purpose.

Once I started getting bad, she would go to the parties alone, and everyone would ask where Lex was. She would bring me back wild stories of the drugs people were buying, who was hooking up with who on whose couch, the seven-hundred or so dollars one guy spent on cheap pineapple seltzers, plus tax.

Of course, eventually people stopped asking where Pippa’s sidekick was. And eventually she stopped telling me stories.

Thunder shakes the house, snapping me half out of my head and back into the bathroom. I knew there was a storm coming, I think. I hope I closed the window in my room.

I slowly stand up, squeezing my hips out from my hiding spot. I step out of the bathroom. The window is closed. Another step and I’m beside my bed, then sitting on it. Phone in one hand. Eighty cents in the other. Plus tax. 

The tax is always there. Even if I might not be.

Killing myself has always been a math problem. Never really a question of “if”, more a question of “how much will it cost my parents”. Last year I started keeping track of how much they’ve spent on me, from diapers and baby food to textbooks and car insurance. I’m at over four hundred grand right now. Plus tax.

It’s mostly guilt that stops me most times. Guilt that they put all of that money and effort into raising a kid who isn’t fucked in the head, had all of those tax dollars taken out of their wallets for me. And then I failed them. 

My dad always used to tell me not to ever come in last on the soccer field. I would be a hundred yards from whoever was in front, but for all of my drills and sprints and scrimmages I was never the last person back to the starting line. I didn’t fail him. Not then.

Travel soccer team. Five hundred dollars per season, eight seasons straight. Plus fees. Plus tax.

I won three big scholarships this year, but I don’t think they give the dollar award out if the winner is dead by the time they need the money. Application fees were fifty dollars a piece. Plus tax.

Medication from the doctor we went to last year. Medication that I stopped taking four months ago. Three bottles for about eight hundred bucks total. Plus tax.

The guilt stops me most times. But guilt is hard when you’re empty. It’s like trying to dissolve sugar into an empty glass of water; it doesn’t work. 

I click the button on the side of my phone. It doesn’t turn on. Dead.

We’ll do this nice and slow, then. One at a time. 

I’ve always dry-swallowed pills, so the first one is easy. I knock it back like it’s one of those shots Pippa and I used to do in the basement on New Years. One down.

I keep trying to pull up something happy in my head, some sort of last memory to leave on. All I can get is the time my parents found Pippa trying to sneak in my back door at three in the morning, before we realized that she could climb the lattice by my bedroom window instead. 

Two, then three. The lights in my room are too bright. I close my eyes and lay back. I could be sleeping. I could be Snow White, or Sleeping Beauty. Maybe a kiss will wake me up one day.

Four, five. My throat is chalky. It’s sort of like the time Pippa and I ate two whole bags of Hostess powdered donuts, only less sweet. And without her.

Six. 

The doorbell rings. So does the little teal VTech handset on my desk. I don’t move.

After six rings, my twelve-year-old voice comes through the speaker. “Hi, it’s Lex. But I don’t want to talk right now, so leave me a message, and maybe I’ll call you back, but return calls are five dollars!” And then there’s giggles in the background. Mine. Hers. Her voice chimes in: “Five dollars, plus tax!”

Beep.

“Lex, I’m sorry, I’m here,” she says. She’s crying.

She is here.

“I’m right outside. I lost the signal in the tunnel, I wasn’t thinking, I should have known it would cut out.” She is crying harder. She rings the bell again.

I am frozen. She is here.

“Open the door, Lex. Please, I know you can hear me.” She is begging. I can imagine what she looks like, kneeling to look through the mail flap, mouth open in an ugly sob, tears and rain indecipherable as they stream from her hair and down her cheeks, dripping from the tip of her small nose. 

She thinks I did it. I haven’t picked up the phone. I haven’t put down the pills. 

The phone is across the room. The front door is even farther. But what’s in my hand is right here.

The last phone call I made was to Pippa. I hadn’t spoken to her in over a week and a half. I’d ignored her calls, deleted her texts. I lost her. I couldn’t pretend I had her back.

But still, when I decided to do it, I called her. Not my parents, not the suicide hotline. Her.

Seven.

But my throat is too dry, and then I am coughing, and that one comes up, and so do two more, like they were sitting at the back of my throat just waiting to reemerge. My nose burns, my eyes streaming, white caplets and tears and mucus all in a mess on the bed, and then-

And then she’s there, right in front of me, backlit by the street lights, gangly arm waving in the window. But she’s on the other side, clinging to the lattice like she’s done so many times before, hair wild around her head and yelling something through the glass.

Open up.

So I do. It’s all the same, the thing I’ve done so many times. Crawl across the bed. Turn the handle at the corner of the window. Grab the edge, pull up, hard. 

She tumbles in, a blur of legs and wild curls and a hot pink t-shirt, closing the window behind her. She is completely soaked.

But she is here.

She holds out one thin hand, and at first I think she wants a shake. But then I feel my fist still balled, and what’s inside it. 

Before I realize what she’s doing, she pries open my hand and peels out its contents, collects the three slimy caplets from the bed, and unceremoniously throws them all on the wood floor. She keeps my hand clenched in hers as she brings a black combat boot down on them, crunching each one beneath her heel like we used to kill wasps in the shed behind my house.

I crawl to the edge of the bed. All that is left is a pile of white dust, the contents of a Pixy Stik emptied out and forgotten.

“That was eighty cents.” I say. “Wait, no. That’s bad math. Sixty. Sixty cents.”

She looks down at me. “Plus tax?”

I nod. “Plus tax.” 

She kneels by my feet, still holding my hand, and blows once, fast and sharp, like she’s putting out a candle. And the bits of white dust scatter, mixing in with the rest of the dirt and debris beneath my bed.

She is here. This is good. This is normal.

She stands, pulling me up with her, keeping me steady on my shaky legs. “I,” she says, pausing for the dramatic effect that I know so well, “am in desperate need of a towel,” she says, tilting her head towards the closet, dripping water all around her. 

This is easy. I shrug her hands off, step to the door, pull a towel off the pile, close the door. Simple. 

She makes a big show of fanning the towel out around herself, dancing around wrapped in starfish-printed fabric, and somehow still slinging water around from the ends of her hair. 

A few drops land on my toes, and suddenly I can feel them, cold and wet and a bit jarring. But they are there. And I am here. And maybe if I can feel something in my toes it’s not too unreasonable to think that I can feel something in my head.

I start to cry. She drops the towel and comes up to me, hugs me, tells me things will be okay. But she doesn’t understand how big this is. 

I start to cry, and I can feel it. I am upset because she drove all this way, ashamed because I worried her and made her cry, missing all of the time that I feel like we’ve lost. But sad is not empty.

I cry, and then I think I smile a little. This is good. This is good.