Anatomy of a Suicide Note

Chapter 15

As I watched in horror, the oldest boy grabbed a teenage girl and pointed a gun directly at the back of her head while he forced me to look in her frightened eyes. She sent out a series of frantic prayers to the Universe, hoping her God might save her. But if God had been listening that day, her prayers weren't as loud as the needed to be. He counted down.

"Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six," he said, then pointed the gun at my face instead. "Oops. I lost my count. I guess I'll have to start all over." Then he counted down from ten. "Zero," he said finally as he sent one single shot through the back of her skull, blood splattering all over my face. He kicked the teenage girl's body to the side and said, "You have a little something on your face."

I closed my eyes and silently counted down from 100, hoping I could transport myself to another, kinder world. But when I opened my eyes again, I found myself in the middle of the same nightmare. The gunman laughed at me and turned to fifteen-year-old Cooper Denton, his best friend and neighbor since elementary school.

Cooper was quiet, but he was at least as dangerous as his older friend. I could tell in that cold, faraway look in his almost-black eyes. Unlike Cole, he'd invested every waking hour in this vengeful massacre. He'd suffered as much as his older friend had and refused to sit back as the world tried to quiet their pain. For as quiet as he appeared on the outside, he screamed on the inside to be set free.

But with Cooper, his trauma almost seemed to be that he'd never been traumatized. Complicated, right? Well, it's true. He grew up with two perfect parents as an only child in a wealthy household where he had the benefit of being babied by his mother twenty-four hours a day. Sounds nice, but in Cooper's fragile mind, he longed to live outside the boundaries of perfection. It's not that he was expected to be perfect but that his mother wore herself out to make sure his life would be perfect. And it was. It was so fucking perfect it made him feel sick to his stomach sometimes.

In his drive to step across that perfectly-painted line, he did everything he could think of to rebel against the white picket fence and made-from-scratch dinners. Whenever they bought him a new toy, he'd smash it to pieces, hoping they'd punish him in some way. But no. That just made them try harder to figure out what he really wanted. What he really wanted was to be left alone to figure out who he was going to be or how he was going to act. Instead, his parents had absolutely everything figured out for him ... until he purposely got himself kicked out of private school.

Finally, he was going to be normal like all the other kids in his neighborhood—no uniforms to wear to school, no fancy AP classes, no prep school fraternities. His first day at school, he got an immediate dose of reality and learned what bullying was for the first time in his life. One of the older boys shoved him into a locker naked and locked him in until the janitor fished him out. By the time the locker opened, he was shaking, crying, and screaming for Mommy. His parents gave him an opportunity to go to yet another private school, but he threatened to kill himself if they did. He wanted to be in public school—no matter how torturous it became. The bullying didn't stop until him and his friends got old and strong enough to fight back. That was the day The Dark Children were born. Their mission was simple and clear—kill them all and let their Mommies glue them back together.

Sometimes too much of a good thing can really kill you, and sometimes it backfires and kills the rest of the world. I overheard them bragging about killing five people so far ...

"But by the time we're done," Cooper said, "it will be at least twenty."