Dad goes over and kisses him on top of the head. “My dad radar is going off and I don’t know why. Am I projecting? You sure you’re fine?”
Aaron shrugs. “I didn’t find out about Avenue Q yet. Thought today was the day but apparently not. And anyway, I’m not sure …”
Dad looks at him, waiting for him to finish. Aaron won’t. He can’t. It’s too close to the truth. The stupid reason he wound up on the bridge.
It wasn’t one thing, of course. And thank God for that, since killing yourself because someone didn’t like you in a play is too self-absorbed, even for him. But that was basically the last straw. On the subway home from school, when Sarah Palmer mentioned she’d seen their school production of Rent, stupidly—he was so painfully stupid—he asked how she’d liked it.
“It was … okay,” she said. The train was heading into Manhattan, over the Bronx River.
“Is that all?” he asked.
She ran her fingers through her long brown hair. “I thought Kelly Jameson was really good.”
Kelly Jameson had been Mimi to his Roger. Kelly was on the fast track to AMDA—the American Musical and Dramatic Academy—and everyone knew she was awesome. Sarah’s elusive statement ought to have been enough to get a normal kid to stop digging. But Aaron wasn’t normal and he sucked with social cues, and mostly he didn’t want to walk around miserable all night if she was simply forgetting to compliment him. They were pretty good friends, after all. And everyone had said he’d been a really good Roger. Marissa Jones had said his and Kelly’s duet of “Without You” was almost better than the Broadway cast album version. So he followed up.
“What about me?”
Sarah pursed her lips.
That ought to have been enough, but it wasn’t. Nothing was ever enough for him, and he hated himself for it.
“What? Did I, like, suck?” he persisted. “I don’t care. You can tell me.”
Sarah took a deep breath and tapped her fingers against the window.
“I thought you were not great,” she said. “Your voice is just okay. I thought you kind of knew that. Sorry. I’m just being honest.”
He laughed. He always laughed when his feelings were hurt. Also because it was a pile-on, and maybe she didn’t know it, but it was, and he was thinking, Great. Awesome. Thank you, Sarah. I cannot take a single thing more. Thanks a lot.
But instead he said, “Yeah. I know. I kinda sucked.”
Sarah looked relieved. “For what it’s worth, I thought almost everyone was really bad.”
It wasn’t worth much, and when he stood to get off at the George Washington Bridge stop, he expected someone would ask why he was getting off there when he lived a hundred blocks south, but no one did. As he climbed the steps to the street, he thought: No one can ever know that this was the last straw. That I killed myself because Sarah Palmer didn’t like me in Rent. That’s too pathetic, even for me.
It wasn’t just that, though. It was a lot of stuff.
It was that he was tired of being so deeply sick of himself and his stupid brain.
It was that he was tired of always fucking up.
It was that he couldn’t see this ever changing.
It was that the world ignored him so much that he figured it wouldn’t make a difference if one day he didn’t show up to life.
It was that he even sucked at the things he thought he was good at.
Witness the severely underwhelming performance of the video he’d posted last night on YouTube. Insignificant, but symbolic in its insignificance. “Walking Alone” was the track, and while he’d recorded it, he’d had a sense that this was the one where it all came together. The lyrics were real and he felt them deep inside. Maybe it was a little retro … but people liked retro, right? It was going to be his breakthrough on Spotify, make the Viral 50. He felt it in his bones.
He’d come up with the lyrics in a fit of inspiration.
There were times when his lyrics stabbed him in the gut. He’d come to know that feeling, when he wrote something that begged to be heard by others. He’d come to understand that those moments were real, and that’s why out of his maybe two hundred songs, he’d written music for only twelve.
This was one of those.
He opened GarageBand and in about an hour he came up with the music. He banged out a slow, somber dirge of a melody on the electric piano, and then he slowed down a retro beat from 120 bpm to 75, and the resulting sound was—haunting. He added a bass track that looped, and then his vocals. His singing, people said, was like Bob Dylan’s. (He knew this meant it wasn’t naturally pretty, but gritty was good to a lot of people, so it was good enough for him.) There was a yearning in the vocals that made his stomach buzz because people would hear it, and they’d just get it. They’d get him. They’d admire him.
It was one of Dad’s late nights at Montefiore, so a long chat in his bedroom and a sharing of the new music wasn’t in the cards, and this one needed to be heard immediately. So he got on his YouTube channel and played it, and then came up with the genius idea to record a harmony and sing the vocals live. That’s the one he published, and then he sent out an email to every single person he knew, telling them he had recorded his best song ever.
This was how it worked. This was how you went Viral 50. You made a good song, you got people talking about it on YouTube, you paid to send it off to Spotify, you caught the attention of an influential playlist maker, and bam! You’re Ed Sheeran.
Then he waited. Hours. Seventy-four people on his email list. The number of plays? Six. Four or five of them were his, he was pretty sure.
Out of seventy-four people, maybe one or two people had clicked play. And not a single comment or like.
Was he that bad? What did everyone else know about him that he didn’t know? No comments or likes cut him from the inside, pierced his organs and hollowed him out until he was utterly cored.
He remembers how he lay there last night, and he found a spot on his bedroom wall and he stared at it, the beige wall, so plain, so I-need-something-to-change-but-nothing-ever-does. He stared and he stared, thinking, This isn’t normal. Because he hadn’t ever stared at a spot before for hours, and if he could have moved, he would have gone online and searched staring at a spot on the wall for hours, but he couldn’t actually move. When his father came home and stopped by his open doorway, Aaron closed his eyes and pretended to be asleep with the lights on, and then, when Dad turned the lights out, he opened his eyes again, staring back at that same spot he could no longer see, and he wondered whether anyone would miss him if he just disappeared from the world.
“Aar—?” his dad says now.
“Wha— Yeah.”
“Where are you, Aaron Boroff?”
He pastes a smile on his face. One that even he’d believe. He’s that good an actor.
“Bermuda,” he says. “Sorry, thinking of something funny.”
Dad smiles. “Okay. You’re sure you’re all right?”
Aaron cocks his head and looks at his dad out of the side of his eye. Dad laughs. “Okay. Just checking. Sleep tight?”
“Bedbugs, you’d better not bite or there will be hell to pay,” Aaron says.
Dad laughs again, hugs him, kisses him on the top of the head, and goes to his bedroom.