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dad’s apartment building is only two stories tall, so I discounted that idea as well.
    I could overdose on pills, but I remembered, as I went through the bathroom cabinets, that my dad doesn’t keep many pills in the house. Dad is very into holistic remedies, and I don’t think you can overdose on echinacea and neti pots. I could go to the drugstore and buy more pills, but that would take another half hour at least, and I wanted to get cracking. Furthermore, if I tried to overdose but didn’t succeed, then I would run the risk of living, but being severely brain damaged. I am already socially disabled; I don’t need to be mentally disabled on top of that.
    So I settled on cutting myself until I bled to death. I wandered around the house, looking for something sharp enough to kill me. I know, I know: razor blades. But do you keep razor blades just lying around your house? Why? Are you doing a lot of woodworking projects?
    I found my dad’s X-Acto knife in the kitchen, buried under the front section of yesterday’s newspaper. That’s what my dad uses his X-Acto for: cutting out interesting articles without messing up the rest of the paper in the process. I picked up his X-Acto, and for some reason this overwhelmed me with sadness, but I didn’t know whether I was feeling sad about my father’s pathetic, unnecessary commitment to keeping his newspapers in good condition or whether I felt sad because I knew that, once I was dead, he would never want to cut articles out of the newspaper again.
    I took the X-Acto blade upstairs to my room, where I sat down at my computer to make a suicide playlist. I didn’t really want to die to MP3s. I wanted to die to records. The sound quality is better. But each side of a record lasts for only about twenty minutes, and I couldn’t handle the idea of slipping out of consciousness for the very last time to the click … click … click … of a record that had reached the end and needed to be flipped over.
    So I made a long playlist of songs that I thought I wouldn’t mind dying to. It wasn’t like making a road-trip playlist or a running playlist—I had never killed myself before, so I had no idea what I would want to listen to when it was too late for me to skip to the next song. Like, maybe when you’re dying, you actually want to hear something really upbeat. Maybe when the moment came, I’d want to die to ABBA.
    I spent a long time tweaking the playlist, sometimes listening to songs all the way through because I knew I would never hear them again. My playlist wound up being two hours long because I didn’t know how long this would take, and I didn’t want to run out of music and die in silence.
    Again, I knew I could look this up. How long does it take between the time you cut yourself and the time you die? The Internet would know. But I wouldn’t ask, because that made everything seem so clichéd. Another teenage suicide attempt, another cry for attention. It’s all been done before.
    Only mine wasn’t going to be a cry for attention. Mine was going to be punishment. Punishment for Jordan DiCecca and Lizzie Reardon and those girls at lunch and everyone who had ever tortured me or turned their backs while I was tortured. And punishment for myself, too, of course. Punishment for being wrong.
    But when I started thinking about punishment, I realized that I really wanted to leave a note, explaining why I had done it. What if Dad found me dead, and no one ever knew why, so none of the right people ever blamed themselves? Then what would be the point?
    But a note was going to take me a while to write. I couldn’t just scribble off something like, “Goodbye, cruel world,” and stab myself through the heart. I wanted to explain it all, so everyone understood I wasn’t being crazy and melodramatic. I wanted to start from the beginning, so they understood why I did this. I wanted to name names.
    And as I thought more about Dad finding my dead body and suicide note, I