Owen took a red plastic basket containing a fried peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich from the grill

section of his college’s dining hall and walked to a table where his friend Daniel was waiting for him. He

sat across from Daniel, stared down at the sandwich in the basket, and let out a brief sigh that ended with

what might have been a whimper.

Owen had been thinking about the dead girl, Carly Smith, who went to school with him until the

tenth grade. He had also been thinking about his fiction workshop class and the famous writer who was

supposed to visit that class in three days, when Owen’s latest story would be discussed. But more than

anything else, he had been thinking about his increasing desire to be in a romantic relationship with

someone and his increasing fear of dying alone someday.

Still staring down at the sandwich, he thought about the last time that the fiction workshop class

discussed one of his stories. The professor, a woman in her late thirties who wrote mostly poetry and

creative nonfiction, had begun the discussion by asking, “So what did you like about Owen’s draft?” She

preferred to begin every workshop on a positive note, so that the student whose story was being discussed

could be built up before being broken down. Nobody had anything positive to say about Owen’s draft, not

even Daniel, who was usually the most willing to compliment Owen’s writing in class.

At the dining hall, Owen looked up from his sandwich with a thin smile and said to Daniel, “I

didn’t think you’d do me thisaway.” Daniel’s distant gaze and scrunched eyebrows registered to Owen

that he did not get the Cormac McCarthy reference, despite the fact that they had both recently finished

reading No Country for Old Men for an English class.

“What are you talking about?” Daniel asked.

Owen felt stupid and said, “Never mind.” He thought, ‘I regret saying everything that I say either

immediately or shortly after saying it. What the fuck is wrong with me?’ He took a slow, reluctant bite of

his sandwich—batter mixing with bread mixing with strawberries mixing with peanuts—and asked,

“What the fuck is wrong with me?”

 Daniel shrugged and jabbed at a damp pasta noodle with his fork. “I don’t even know where to

begin,” he said in a sarcastic, cartoonish voice that amused Owen. Then, in his normal soft-spoken voice,

Daniel asked, “When are you taking that trip to San Antonio again? I can’t remember.”

“I’m driving to the airport in Cleveland on the last day of the month, and then I’ll be gone for the

first three days of the new semester.”

“Oh yeah, that’s right.” Daniel took a sip from his glass of Mello Yello and guava juice. “Have

you told your professors about missing those first three days yet?”

“No, but I doubt that any of them will have a problem with my absence.”

Daniel laughed and said, “That just sounded vaguely suicidal, but I know you didn’t mean it that

way. I’m such a terrible person for finding that funny.”

“We are both terrible people. Our professors would be happier if we both flew to San Antonio

and never returned.” Owen raised his sandwich to his mouth but realized that he couldn’t attempt to

stomach another bite. He thought, ‘Yes. My inability to try has finally paid off’ and asked, “Do you want

to leave now?”

Owen and Daniel walked from the dining hall to a small gray house where their fiction workshop

class was held. While they walked, Daniel complained to Owen about how their English professor had

recently accused Daniel of reading the SparkNotes for No Country for Old Men. “I mean, I realize that he

was only joking, but it still pissed me off. I just hate SparkNotes so much. I don’t know. I’m starting to

get angry again.” Owen agreed with Daniel that it was an embarrassing and unfair accusation, because

Owen knew that Daniel had always been exceptionally studious, double-majoring in creative writing and

philosophy and double-minoring in ethics and gender studies. Daniel was the type of student who would

never use SparkNotes—never had used them—and Owen was unable to understand how Daniel had ever

become his friend. In high school, Owen had been assigned to read King Lear two separate years by two

separate English teachers, and both years Owen read the SparkNotes for the play instead of the play itself.
Owen figured that if Daniel were ever to find out, their friendship would be immediately terminated, or at

least seriously damaged.

Owen and Daniel sat next to each other at a large square table inside the small gray house. When

the professor and the other fourteen students in the class entered the room and sat at the table, Owen

noticed that everyone except him had brought a copy of the famous writer’s short story collection that the

class was reading together. The professor started a discussion on two of the stories from the collection and

Owen contributed once, saying something about how the two protagonists of one story seemed to be

vaguely haunted by a specific childhood experience that happened to them in a museum of natural

history. After making that one contribution, Owen felt as if nothing else that he could say about either of

the stories would be interesting or relevant, that he would not be able to articulate himself in a way that

would make him seem like an interesting or relevant human being. He removed a stick of watermelon-

flavored gum from the pocket of his blue jeans and chewed it quietly for the remainder of the class, not

saying another word.

Outside the small gray house, Daniel said to Owen, “I’m going to head over to the library. Do

you want to come with me?”

Owen used his tongue to roll the wad of gum in his mouth into a small ball and then swallowed it.

The gum had lost its watermelon flavor long ago. Owen thought, ‘I just swallowed a sticky ball of

nothing. Fuck.’ He shifted the weight of his backpack on his right shoulder and coughed into his fist,

trying not to choke on the wad of waxy material in his throat. “No thanks, I’m just going to relax in my

room until dinnertime. But I’ll see you then.”

Daniel nodded and said, “Okay. See you then, ass-dick.” He and Owen bumped their fists, and

then Daniel walked across the street towards the library.

Owen walked to his dorm room, then removed his laptop from his backpack and plugged it into

the charger on his desk. He opened his web browser and logged in to his Facebook account. Owen often

felt confused by Facebook, a website that seemed to serve no definitive purpose but could sometimes
afford him great opportunities. One month ago, for instance, Owen had read a blog post that mentioned an

avant-garde minimalist poet named Stewart Tummler, and on a whim, Owen decided to send Stewart a

friend request on Facebook. Stewart accepted the request and soon afterward sent Owen ten free copies of

his self-published chapbook, which Owen distributed to Daniel and a few other friends at college. Owen

then submitted two of his own poems to Stewart’s online literary journal, and Stewart published them.

Owen felt quite happy about that experience and believed that he owed it more or less entirely to

Facebook.

Sitting in front of his computer, staring vacantly at his Facebook notifications, Owen listened to

the song “…And Keep Reaching for those Stars” by the band I Hate Myself and softly sang along. “Yeah

look at me, sad and low and lonely, dead-end job, a slob, and fucked up all the time. I’m going nowhere,

I’d rather go somewhere instead. I’m going nowhere, I’d rather go somewhere instead. I’m gonna blow a

hole through the back of my head.” Owen received a Facebook Chat message from Rachel, one of his

friends from high school. Owen had known Rachel since the sixth grade and been in love with her since

the tenth grade.

“Hi,” said Rachel.

“Howdy,” said Owen. He asked Rachel how she was doing, and Rachel replied that she’d been

dealing with a lot of “upsetting but insignificant issues” and that she was “sick of life’s constant

dynamics.” Owen did not understand what Rachel meant, but the tiny thumbnail image of Rachel smiling

with one of her sorority sisters convinced him to lie and say, “I understand what you mean.”

After a few seconds, Rachel replied, “Carly’s passing has been making me think too. Just about

life and all that.”

“Yeah. The first status I saw, I thought it was a joke.”

“Me too.”

Owen minimized the Chat window and looked at Carly Smith’s Facebook page, scrolling through

the stream of sympathetic posts addressed directly to Carly as if she were still alive. He eventually arrived

at the bottom of the stream, where the sad story had only begun to unfold. Owen maximized the Chat
window and said, “Looking at her Facebook page is a very surreal experience. It’s like reading a short

story, almost. She has all of these normal statuses and posts on her page, then one day ‘she and someone

else are at this hospital,’ and then she’s gone. Do you know what even happened?”

“It is very surreal,” said Rachel. “I wish that her parents would delete the page or freeze it or

something. I don’t like it. And yeah. There are two stories. One is that she was drinking with some friends

and her blood sugar rose to a deadly level. Two vessels in her brain popped. She kept having seizures so

they put her in an induced coma to try to stop the seizures and then her heart stopped the next day. The

other story is the same, but without the drinking and the blood sugar rising.”

Owen thought about the chocolate cupcakes that Carly used to eat in class when she and Owen

were in the fourth grade together. Back then, it had seemed unfair to Owen that Carly was allowed to

have a snack whenever she wanted—before lunch, during recess, after lunch, during quizzes. He did not

know that Carly suffered from diabetes, and he had to have his mother explain to him what diabetes even

was. Owen’s mother had told Owen that she also suffered from diabetes and that she had had to stick a

needle in her butt every single morning since she was nine years old. Carly was about nine years old in

the fourth grade. Owen wondered if Carly had to stick a needle in her butt every day before she came to

school and ate cupcakes. In his dorm room, Owen said, “Be right back” to Rachel, then walked away

from his computer and took a Twinkie out of a box in his closet. When he returned to his seat, he said,

“Okay.”

“Welcome back,” Rachel replied. “Anyway, it’s just awful. I went to her calling hours last

weekend.”

“I don’t know that I could’ve gone. I’ve been to plenty of funerals, but not for anyone that young.

For anyone my own age.”

“I had goose bumps. In fact, I still do whenever I think about it. But something that bothers me,

and I think you’ll be able to appreciate this, is how people like Alissa Heinz are treating the situation.

Alissa hated her, and now she’s posting all of this bullshit on Carly’s page about what an inspiration she

was. They hadn’t even seen each other for years, and now people who didn’t actually know her but just
took one picture with her one time or something like that are posting all of these messages on her page,

acting like they were best friends and la la la. It’s not cool to die. And it’s not cool to become best friends

with someone after they’re dead. It’s just like when Natalie hanged herself.”

Owen thought about Natalie, the girl who hanged herself in her backyard at the end of Owen’s

sophomore year of high school. Natalie had apparently committed suicide after her mother scolded

Natalie for being a lesbian. Owen finished his Twinkie and said, “When Natalie died, I made a lot of

jokes and said stupid things because she used to bully me. But I didn’t know how else to react. Her death

still haunts me. Natalie wasn’t my friend, but I nonetheless wish that she hadn’t met such a tragic end.”

Owen sat at his computer for five minutes without a response from Rachel. He tried to think of something

humorous to lighten the conversation. He finally decided to say, “Bit of a bummer conversation, isn’t it?

Lol.” But Owen was not actually laughing out loud. He was listening to I Hate Myself, thinking about

Natalie’s body hanging from a tree branch and her mother screaming from inside her house.

After a few more seconds, Rachel replied, “It is a bummer, but at least it’s real. I don’t have many

real conversations anymore. Most of them consist of nothing but one-dimensional bullshit.”

“Are you going home this weekend?”

“No, I went home last weekend. Sorry.”

“It’s all good,” Owen lied to her again. “I was just asking since we never went out to eat like we

said we would however long ago.”

“It’ll happen. When we’re both home. Summer is coming.”

“It is. And I can’t wait,” said Owen. “I need a break from school so badly.”

“Me too. Only seven weeks left of the semester!”

Then Rachel told Owen that she had to sign off and go to a sorority meeting. They said goodbye

to each other, and Owen spent the next twenty minutes listening to depressing songs and eating three

more Twinkies. He began to cry, feeling a sort of absolute terror minimized only by some sense of defeat

in the face of everything that the universe had thrust at him so forcefully and unapologetically since the

day he exited the comfortable innocence and naivety of a childhood without insecurities and entered the
cruel and perplexing paralysis of adulthood, its new and somewhat senseless responsibilities, obstacles,

and instances of pure heartache all seemingly without end. Owen shut down his laptop and climbed into

bed, then turned toward the curtained windows and buried his face into his pillow.