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This writing was accepted for publication in the 84 page perfect-bound issue of cc&d (v238) (the November 2012 Issue) You can also order this 5.5" x 8.5" issue as an ISSN# paperback book:

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Let Me Count The Ways...

Allee Petroski

     “I’ll show that asshole,” Stacy said, blinking back tears as she pulled the car door shut behind her. Fastening her seatbelt and sniffling uncontrollably, she pushed the radio knob, trying to find some form of comfort in music. Comfort was quickly replaced with defeat as the opening piano notes of “Without You” by Nilsson flooded the speakers.
    “Seriously? You’re going to play this on the radio now? Seriously?”
    Stacy let out an exasperated puff, trying to get the freshly dyed hair out of her face as she bombarded the empty air in front of her with ineffectual punches. Gripping the steering wheel, her knuckles turned white and she let out a scream from deep inside of her, shaking furiously. After a few minutes of trying to calm down, Stacy turned off the radio to gather her thoughts. Putting the car in reverse, Stacy carefully made sure not to hit any cars and pulled out of the hair salon’s parking lot.
    This is how the letter will read, Stacy thought to herself, Tell David, this is all for him, almost relishing in the fact that he would know all of this was his fault.
    She reached into her purse she had so hastily thrown onto the passenger seat and searched for her cell phone. As she felt around countless tubes of lip gloss and tampons, Stacy imagined David, his dark, curly hair and evergreen eyes vivid in her mind. But her favorite thing about him, his little patch of bright red facial hair on his chin, is what got her the most. For some reason, the little sprouts of a patchy goatee were what brought a smile to Stacy’s face.
    After finding her cell phone, Stacy stared at the background for a moment. It was a picture of her and David taken on the bus while traveling to the hotel Junior prom was held at. Her hair, half swept up in its glossy glory was slightly in David’s face, tickling his nose and making him laugh as they struggled to take the perfect picture with Stacy’s camera phone. They were happy in that picture. She thought they had always been that happy. Apparently, she was wrong. Stacy moved her eyes back onto the road, not wanting to dwell on the now painfully happy memory.
    Without even having to look at the key pad, Stacy dialed her own voicemail and entered her password, not having to take her eyes off of the road. Bringing the phone to her ear, she could already hear the beginning of David’s message. The message that began with his voice sounding so hollow and distant, “Stacy, I hate to say this,” and would end with him telling her “I’m just not the guy for you, and I don’t want to waste any more time,” cementing her fears that the last two years had been a waste of her time as well. As tears began to flood her eyes again, Stacy chucked the phone across the inside of the car, hearing it crash against the side paneling. She didn’t understand what had brought this on. One minute she’s telling David she loves him before entering the salon. The next, he’s breaking her heart while she absent-mindedly waits for the bleach to finish processing in her hair.
    Pressing on the gas, Stacy sped through town, at least ten miles over the speed limit, a ridiculous twenty miles per hour. As she pulled up to the three-way stop sign, her thoughts went back to the real situation at hand. A car horn behind her jolted her back to consciousness, making her realize that she was still sitting in a car and not a couch at her house.
    Pulling away, Stacy narrowly avoided being T-boned by another car hastily charging through the street. Maybe she should just sit in the middle of the intersection and see how long it took before some other driver wasn’t paying attention and slammed into her. Or she could “accidentally” slam into the guardrail that separated machine from the moss-covered hills, causing the car to tumble over and over again until reaching the shore that waited at the bottom. That would at least make it look like the semblance of an accident, if anything. Shaking her head vigorously from side to side, Stacy cleared the scene that had been playing in her head and focused her attention to the road again. However, as she drove further up the steep street, Stacy began pondering the different ways she could go about this.
    Behind her “accidental” car crash, Stacy’s instant thought was pills. She could swallow an entire bottle of some kind of pill, make it quick and relatively painless. She could just go numb and eventually space out before she ceased to be.
    “But where am I going to get pills? I’m highly doubting taking a bottle of Motrin is going to do anything...other than make me puke,” Stacy said out loud. Verbalized conversations with herself like this were becoming more frequent, especially if she was alone.
    What about NyQuil? Would taking a bottle of NyQuil do the job?
    “Hmmm....I highly doubt that,” she said to no one.
    Watching the curve of the road, Stacy looked out across the lake coming into view. Bobbing waves overlapped each other. This was the lake where she had spent so many days driving her grandparents’ boat too fast. The lake she had spent so many happy days on with her family. And then, as if that imaginary light bulb she had seen in so many cartoons went off over her head, Stacy had an idea.
    What if she walked into the lake and slowly submerged herself in water? After all, she’d spent so much of her young life there, it would only make sense that she ended it there as well.
    “No. Just...no,” Stacy said, scoffing at her own idiotic thought out loud.
    “Besides, why wouldn’t I just do it in the bathtub where no one else outside of the family can see me?” Stacy refocused onto the road again and shook the thought out of her head.
    How about throwing the toaster in the bathtub?
    “That’s just stupid.”
    Turning right into the driveway, Stacy watched the garage door slowly pull itself up and pulled the Lincoln into the garage, making sure not to knock the side mirrors into the side of the garage, something she had nearly done many times.
    She could always close the garage door and leave the car running.
    “Oh hold up, no. There is no way in Hell I am doing that to Granny’s car,” Stacy said, shaking her head. “Besides, doesn’t your body turn a weird pink color if you gas yourself?” Stacy sat in the driver’s seat stroking her chin and trying to answer her own question, wondering if she was remembering her freshman year health class correctly. After a minute or so, she gave an indifferent shrug of her shoulders, got out of the car, and walked into the house, kicking off her stiff flip-flops. Quickly running through the kitchen and into the bathroom drowning in floral, Stacy flipped the lights on to get one look at her newly highlighted hair. After a minute or so of admiring her new blonde streaks, Stacy pranced out of the bathroom, trying to return to what she had come to do.
    Walking across the kitchen, her dancer’s feet roughly padding the wooden floor, Stacy came to the kitchen island. Drumming her fingers on the mint-green counter top, she looked around her, her fidgety fingers wrapping themselves around the handle, pulling the drawer open to reveal rows of shiny knives. Suddenly, another idea found its way to the forefront of her mind. She could take one of the knives and as dramatically as she could summon, reenact Juliet’s final lines from “Romeo and Juliet” like she had always wanted, plunging the knife into her chest in one dramatic finale. How poetic would that death be? Juliet died because she couldn’t have Romeo, Stacy was about to die because she couldn’t have David. She could just imagine it now, using her best British accent to recite “Oh, happy dagger, this is thy sheath. There rust and let me die,” just before plunging the knife into her chest, ridding herself of the agony of a life without her “true love.”
    “No. That would only be remotely cool with people around anyway,” Stacy said to herself, lamenting to the empty kitchen. She slammed the drawer shut, uneasy by the sight of all the cold, shiny metal resting in the drawer. She could not admit that her irrational fear of sharp objects would keep her from impaling or cutting herself in any way.
    Walking around the kitchen, Stacy began to survey all of the pictures that her Granny had plastered the walls with. Stacy laughed as she recognized the picture of her Uncle drunkenly trying to play pool on New Year’s Eve two years ago. She smiled as she saw the picture of her Granny and Great-Granny when they were both much younger women. Granny’s hair was piled high in an ashy beehive while Great-Granny’s was pulled back with huge pins, like the movie stars of the ‘30s normally did. She stopped when she saw the picture in the middle of the wall.
    Staring at the two faces, Stacy found herself momentarily frozen. She stared for a minute, her and her Daddy’s smiling faces frozen in one moment Stacy knew was a genuinely happy one. The photo was faded and fuzzy, it had to have been taken when she was about three, yet she still remembered the important, little bits of that day. Like how her Daddy had grilled hot dogs and placed them in the picnic basket that they only used when they went out on the boat. Or how he had spent almost an hour trying to blow up Elvis, the giant inflatable alligator that they had bought at the marina days earlier, and nearly passed out several times. Or how her Daddy had taught her to swim by herself that day, even if she could only go a few feet before she began to freak out.
    There she was, three year old Stacy in her frilly bathing suit, nestled in the crook her Daddy made with his right arm and hoisting her a good three feet off of the sandy ground. They were smiling at each other, her small, fat hands resting on either side of his face. Her nose was scrunched, a trait that sadly, she had not lost over time. She remembered that her father had moved his face towards hers, making his nose, the nose she had inherited, touch hers. She also remembered how happy she was that day. And how so many other days spent with her family had been filled with that same happiness.
    Were all of those good times spent with her parents and grandparents and brothers really worth throwing away over a few days of depression? Was killing herself really the best idea she could come up with? Was punishing David really worth punishing her family as well?
    “No. No it’s not,” Stacy said, her voice unnecessarily low for the vacant house. As she glared down at her perfectly pedicured toes, she realized that ending her life would only bring pain to those she loved and adored the most. A small puddle began forming by her toes, a muddy mix of eye make-up and tears.
    Lifting her head, Stacy wiped a few stray tears away from her cheeks, rubbing her fingers together trying to get the runny mascara off of their tips. Slowly she began to walk to her bathroom, flipping the harsh overhead lights on. Rising to her tip-toes, Stacy leaned in closer to the mirror, trying to get a better look at herself. There in the mirror she could see her Mommy’s eyes, her Daddy’s nose, and her Granny’s smile spread across her face. Callous laughter rose from her throat as she realized how she had become another one of those melodramatic teens who had always annoyed her. The ones who were constantly threatening to kill themselves because something wasn’t going their way. How could she let herself do that?
    “Oh my God! How could I be so stupid?” she yelled out loud, smacking her forehead with the heels of her hands in exasperation.
    She had finally come to the realization that she was going to start living her life minus David and became at peace with it, even if it might be momentarily. She’d become the old Stacy, working out, eating right, and even remembering to take her vitamins.
    “Don’t I have a bottle of those somewhere?” Stacy questioned, looking at the three cabinet doors, trying to remember where she had last placed the bottle.
    Pressing her middle finger against the glass to her left, the mirrored-cabinet door popped open, revealing hoarded hair products and countless stray bobby pins. An orange bottle of Women’s One-A-Day vitamins stood out against all of the other bottles and jars of different liquids and salves. Grabbing the bottle and twisting the cap off, Stacy plucked out one of the sand-colored horse pills and absent-mindedly popped it into her mouth, trying to put the bottle back before anything fell out of the over-stuffed cabinet.
    As she looked in the mirror again, her smiled faded with one harsh gulp. A cry tried to escape her throat, but to no avail. Stacy’s eyes began to widen, as if trying to push the fear away and her hands rose to her throat. She stood still in the middle of the room for a minute, almost as though she were calming a jittery crowd down. She tried to gulp hard. And she tried again, with only the loud thump of her muscles resonating inside her head. One more time, she thought to herself, and this pill should be down my fricken’ throat.
    Using any strength she could summon in her throat, Stacy took one last desperate gulp, but the pill remained lodged in its new home. Realizing that the pill would not move, Stacy allowed fear to take over. She began thrashing wildly, even throwing herself against the rigid marble countertop of the bathroom, desperately trying to perform the Heimlich Maneuver on herself. If this wouldn’t have been real life, if it would have been something out of a movie, Stacy would probably be laughing right now.
    Out of the corner of her eye, she caught sight of herself in the mirror. Her face was shifting from a tomato-red hue to a lavender-blue. Her lips began to turn into two thick blue lines at the bottom of her face. The small veins that scrawled across her temples like little spider webs began to protrude. Her eyes watered although at this point, she was unsure as to whether it was fear or the slow build of realization.
    Then, as she could feel the pressure building up inside of her, Stacy’s vision began to go black, with darkness slowly creeping up the edges of her eyes. As she lowered herself to the floor, realization took complete hold. How could she have been so stupid? Had she really thought purposefully ending her life would have been a good alternative to simply hating David for a month or so? Had she seriously considered becoming another melodramatic teenager who simply did not want to deal with a break-up? None of that mattered though. Because what she came to realize was that although she did not want to, she was going to die. She realized that she would never be able to take another picture with her father where she was happy and she knew her smile was real. She actually wanted her brothers to wrestle her to the ground, tickling her and begging her to sing the “Lollipop Guild” song from “The Wizard of Oz,” something that had always annoyed her up until these last few moments.
    But no. It was almost more heartbreaking this way. At least if she had killed herself, she could have taken her time and left them a note. It pained her to know her family would not remember her as the girl who took charge of her life, or that they would never know for sure that this was an accident. Instead, her family’s last memories of her would be of her hasty death with her body lying on the cold, ivory tiles of the bathroom, with a vitamin stuck in her throat.
    As the blackness enveloped her, one last tear ran down her cheek as she closed her eyes and choked on the cries that could not escape.

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