There I was, crouched like a cat with my palms to the concrete, trying to make out my reflection in the gray puddles since the pain was too searing to swallow. In my pocket I had four useless aspirin, one expired credit card, and five and a half nauseating cigarettes. And no water.

Home was always coldest in February, but the wet snow in my hair couldn’t substitute for an ice pack. If anything it brought the migraine into sharper clarity, keeping it fresh like a cadaver in a morgue. Sometimes I could shrink my pain by confining it to a certain image; a nail drilling deep into my skull, an ax burying between my brain-folds, spidery fingers searching my empty eye sockets. I’ll admit, none of those sensations sound particularly desirable. But when I hold fast to one idea, riding those agonizing swells, my misery can only draw up one shape out of infinite designs. So this time I looked into the gutter and pretended I was drowning, while my reflection sat comfortable in his liquid mirror, watching, waiting for my lungs to burst open.

Get a grip. Close your eyes and review the facts. Sometimes that’s all you can do when you’re lost in the throes like that. Who are you? Me? 20, Male. Class of 2023 at Athena Magnet—the last class that almost graduated. Let me set the scene: Georgic halls enclosing prim quadrangles, brick and fresh white paint, sycamore and oak and pimpled faces, leaves sapped of nitrogen and sugar burning impressively. On that particular stretch of the East Coast where everyone’s a Europhile. God, I’m sick just thinking about it—how little we knew of our American playground. Where everything we knew was ripped from the Chez Nous textbook, all a postcard world of baguettes and bicycles, where words like “colonialisme” took on cute, inconsequential shapes dressed in overdone French accents. It was a toy history. A test tube. Pang. Hold on tight, I thought, as the water rushed in.

The problem with Athena is that it was doomed from the start. The stroke of luck that landed me there at fourteen couldn’t account for the cost of maintaining a billionaire’s misbegotten social experiment. We were told to call it “philanthropy.” We interested a couple of reporters, made local headlines—maybe we’ll even find ourselves the subjects of a podcast in five years. But to the investors, we were statistical failures. You can’t just pull low-performing students at random and promise to transform their futures, drop them in a white-collar wasteland and breed them into successful people. Faux, encore faux. The grammar of the elites took longer to learn than their words, but their smug posture could never be replicated. Once the donations dried up and the program was discontinued, our gracious benefactor had proven to the world what it was already thinking: that we were unteachable.

I still can’t answer why. I stretched my brain trying to find out until it broke, and broke, and broke. So there I was, a nobody, grinding his teeth and pretending to drown in the alleyway. A pathetic episode for a high school dropout with a Bachelor’s education. Now I pass my sullen days at the library behind the mall, trying to sell an empty resume to someplace worthwhile, some apex predator of the free market. But no one deals with the trash in my town. And, crumpled and dejected on the sidewalk slush, I was feeling very much like trash.

The snow is soft, kind. White shavings that erase everything. I touch the Lethe on my shoes and watch the waves dance. Pressure is mounting. 

But suddenly, circling that gutter, I felt something else for the first time. Damp clothes anchored my small frame to the floor, and I looked close at my killer. 

He. 

Me. 

I was a victim of my own mind—an utter waste. Their thinking got me here—no—MY thinking got me here. How many letters of French were lost in our false accents? What didn’t their formulas account for? My eyes stung and vain tears started rolling. I was a proud and stupid animal, cursing the concrete desert and the insurance billboards that condescended on my sad display. I groaned, I screamed, until CRACK! At last, my head had split in two.