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.He would hide until dark, and then he would hike south, secretly, until he was far out of town, and then he would hitch rides at truck stops until he got to Florida, and then he would stow away on a boat that was going to South America, to some city on the coast near the rain forest or the Andes, where he’d work on the tourists as a confidence man.“It actually sounds pretty stupid, now that I think back on it,” Jay said.“But at the time it seemed like a pretty good plan.”Jay chuckled, his arm still loosely draped over Ryan’s shoulder.Jay leaned his face affectionately against him, and he felt the hot, dark, vegetable smell of Jay’s smoky breath pass across his neck.“I don’t know,” Jay said.“I guess I was feeling a lot of despair at the time—I’d been having some hard times in school.I wasn’t much of a student.Not like Stacey.I was just so bored all the time, and I felt like I was disappointing everyone, and I hated my life so much—“My parents were always putting Stacey up on a pedestal.Like she was the model for how to live, you know.I’m not trying to disrespect her achievements or anything, but you know, it was hard to take.My mom and dad would hold her up like she was this goddess.Stacey Kozelek! Stacey Kozelek got straight A’s! She was so diligent! She had a plan for her life! And I was supposed to be, like, ‘Oooooh: worship.So impressive.’”He shrugged, reluctantly.“Not to talk down on your mom.It wasn’t her fault, you know—she was a hard worker.Good for her, right? But as for me, that wasn’t what I wanted.I never wanted to get to a point in my life where I knew what was going to happen next, and I felt like most people just couldn’t wait until they found themselves settled down into a routine and they didn’t have to think about the next day or the next year or the next decade, because it was all planned out for them.“I can’t understand how people can settle for having just one life.I remember we were in English class and we were talking about that poem by—that one guy.David Frost.‘Two roads diverged in a yellow wood—’ You know this poem, right? ‘Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry I could not travel both and be one traveler, long I stood and looked down one as far as I could, to where it bent in the undergrowth—’“I loved that poem.But I remember thinking to myself: Why? How come you can’t travel both? That seemed really unfair to me.”He paused and took a drag of his cigarette, and Ryan, who had been listening dreamily, waited.Outside, it was snowing, and he could feel his heart making a soft shushing sound in his ears.“I didn’t get very far, though,” Jay said.“The cops picked me up just after midnight, walking down the highway—after curfew, and my mom and dad were there waiting for me when I got home.Pissed as hell.“But nobody thought I was dead.They didn’t even find my clothes that I’d left on the riverbank.I went back the next day, and there they were, my shoes and shirt and pants, just lying there.”As he listened to Jay talk, Ryan leaned back against the old couch and closed his eyes.It was a relief.It was actually a relief to be dead, a lot better than committing suicide, which was what he had been considering during those fall months before Jay called him.He had known, all that semester, that he was going to fail out of college.An academic suspension, they would call it, and probably around that time his parents would find out he had wasted the money from his student loans instead of paying the college bills he owed.All that autumn, he could feel the inevitable revelations looming closer and closer, only a few weeks or months in the future, the various humiliations and the sessions in the offices of various administrators, and at last his parents’ surprise and disappointment as they learned how badly he had fucked up.Late one night in his dorm room, he had typed “painless suicide” into a search engine on the Internet and discovered an assisted-suicide society that was recommending asphyxial suicide by inhalation of helium inside a plastic bag.He was thinking particularly about how difficult it would be to have to face his mom.She had been so happy that he had gotten into a good college.He remembered the way she had obsessed over his college application process [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]