by John Biron
Mark hanged himself on his birthday from a tree out on the nature trail. He left a note scratched into the bark. All it said was “SORRY M”.
It sucked at the time, still sucks, the suicide, which is plenty enough to suck by itself of course, obviously the worst part of the whole thing is the fact that Mark, a human life, is gone, but it sucked bad because Mark’s house was always the cool house, really, no rules but our own. He had every console and we’d play them all for sixteen hours straight and we wouldn’t see or hear his parents once the whole time.
First met him through Marjorie, a nice girl in my homeroom class. Mark dated Marjorie for years. She was easily the most gorgeous girl in school. It’s major to use gorgeous. That means a lot. Beautiful, hot, there are a million words but gorgeous has character to it. They were planning to get married, I think, with no shortage of disciplinary action for PDA in the halls, at the lunch tables, underneath the big leaning oak tree at the front of the school, all over each other at his house, lucky bastard. Except for whatever made him do that, I guess. But what made it so cool is that she would always have friends. She’d bring them over and we would all hang out and it was amazing, really.
Sometimes his dad, uneven face red and pale, small and always walking zig zag, would even supply the drinks on weekends in the backyard. He would smile and hand out cheap whiskey, vodka. It burned bad but no one dared say so. One time Marjorie puked back there and Mark’s dad appeared out of somewhere, nowhere, shuffling her away, neither of them coming back for a while and then just her quiet as a cotton ball falling on a mattress. Air always heavy and damp, choking like it does. We had too much fun on those muggy nights for sure.
Saw Mark what seemed like crying one night a week or so after the puking, at the nature trail, outlined in ghost white from the moon. It was the night after our Bluejay’s lost bad in the one playoff they ever made it to, too. I wonder why something like that affected him so bad, he didn’t even play. Maybe he was just embarrassed by the throwing up thing. Still thank goodness he didn’t see me. Wouldn’t’ve had a thing to say anyway.
He had a big upstairs game room with a high ceiling that we’d stare up in to for hours. The darkened corners and edges held our young stares in a trance. There was a futon, a pool table, stained wood flooring so spills didn’t matter. The other rooms were mostly on the other side of the house so we could laugh, call each other names, curse anonymous strangers on a video game. Mark would challenge one of us or all of us to a wrestling match, springing up from his spot on the futon to grapple, all of us laughing and him beating everyone and sometimes Marjorie in the corner of the room quietly giggling and something in her look looked like it said more than she ever said out loud. One time Adam went to curse her out and Mark and the rest of us were on him in an instant, pool balls bouncing off his forehead, pink spots welting on his face. We protected her against anything.
The best part of his place was the shed we’d converted to a beer pong stadium, our painting friend’s graffiti coloring the walls with little pictures of cartoon characters, and I remember perfectly the night Mark sank all ten cups in one go, us proud and envious and mad all at once. How Marjorie smiled with her eyes never still in her face, racing back and forth. His house was so damn cool, really. We drank and drank and had fun non-stop.
When it got cold we’d have a bonfire in the backyard almost every night. Smoking and drinking and talking, talking about nothing. Mark would throw big jugs of gasoline on the fire sending huge columns of flame up into the night, embers falling on the fat green leaves of the bushes, on us, the heat intense and forcing our eyes closed.