Chapter 2

“You fucking asshole!” he shouted with a voice that cracked. “Terrell! You stupid piece of shit, let me go!”

This “good” Samaritan was no athlete. No pretty boy with a hoard of groupies. His various permanent injuries, mostly to the right side of his body, disabled him, and the cold November weather probably worsened it. On a good day, he still walked with an obvious limp, and while his damaged arm worked somewhat, it rested lifelessly on his leg or a desk whenever he sat down.

But he was at least forty pounds heavier and five inches taller, and he leveraged himself against a rusty rail so that he wouldn’t tumble over the edge, too.

It was his fully functional arm that grabbed Dakota by the abdomen and began hauling him back up to the bridge platform. Terrell groaned and winced at the clear pain this act caused, but he didn’t relent, and the suicidal young man soon lay on his side between the old steel train tracks. He was “safe” for now. No freight engine had crossed this aging wooden structure in almost a decade. And Terrell wasn’t about to let him make another attempt. “Sorry, man, I can’t let you do that.”

“Why the fuck not?!” His hands began searching for that neglected bottle of liquor. He may not have liked the taste, but he could at least throw it at the do-gooder who thwarted his plans.

But Terrell found it first. He looked at the label for a moment and shrugged. It seemed like he planned to make use of the free booze, and perhaps he thought taking it from Dakota was for the best. Without so much as asking, he slid the bottle into his backpack and zipped it closed. “I don’t know what’s eating you up, but whatever it is, you’re not gonna find a solution at the bottom of a ravine. You’re not, okay? I can’t let you just off yourself. God, you’re what, eighteen? Nineteen? If I have to drag you to the health center kicking and screaming I will.”

“Fuck you, Terrell. You have no right to stop me, and it’s none of your fucking business what I do with my life. Just leave me alone. You don’t even know anything about me.” He had it all planned out. He was ready to go.

Terrell merely shook his head in response.

As tears welled up in his eyes despite all attempts to avoid it, Dakota lay on the decaying wood, paralyzed with despair. He wanted to make a run for it. Certainly, he could get far enough away that Terrell wouldn’t be able to catch him in time. But he couldn’t make himself move. He felt defeated. Devastated. And anyway, he never intended to have an audience for this. He just wanted to die. He didn’t want to scar anyone or make them feel responsible. Why couldn’t Terrell just get lost? Wasn’t he entitled to end his own life if he wanted to?

“I don’t think that’s true, actually,” Terrell finally replied. “I’ve known you for a few weeks now, and you seem like a pretty good person. At least by my standards. I dunno if that means anything to you or not. But it doesn’t matter. I don’t have to know your whole life story to know you shouldn’t kill yourself.” Terrell crawled over to Dakota before sitting down at his side. “Because I know what the world’s like. I mean, there’s a lot of bad. Believe me, I know. But there’s so much more to it. You’d be missing out on a lot of amazing stuff if you died. This world is filled with incredible, astounding things, and you’d be wasting an opportunity to experience them.”

Dakota sniffed. After a long pause, he lifted his head enough to glare at the guy. “Oh, yeah? Like what? Don’t tell me you’re gonna start in about how complicated DNA is or how many strokes of a brush you can count in a Rembrandt painting. I’ve heard that shit already, and I don’t care. It’s boring. I’ve been alive for almost twenty fucking years, and I have absolutely nothing to show for it. I wanna die. Even if you don’t let me do it now, I’ll come back later. So why don’t you just leave? I absolve you of all responsibility. Go away.”

Terrell shook his head emphatically. Reaching down, he rested his hand on Dakota’s arm. He bit into his lower lip for a moment, seemingly trying to decide what to say. He started hesitantly, “No, umm—what if—what if you could do anything you wanted? I mean other than hurting yourself. What if you could feed a whole nation or travel anywhere in an instant? What if you could do literally anything you put your mind to? Would you wanna live then?”

He scoffed. “Is this some sort of suicide hotline tactic? I counter with, ‘There’s no way I could do that,’ and then you say, ‘But you could do some of what you wanted if you just let yourself be happy.’ Well, I tried that, and it didn’t fucking work. So, I don’t wanna hear—”

“No. Dakota, no. Hey, that’s not what I mean at all.” His tone, a strange mix of confidence and fear that was hard to pin down, caught Dakota’s attention immediately.