Very, very sorry for the post-spam, I just found this on my comp and wanted to share. It’s actually a tweaked version of an original story I wrote for my creative writing class, so the language is a lot heavier…it’s really the type of thing I do when I’m feeling down on adolescence. (My professor commented that the sacrificial death seemed unjustified, lol. That’s when I realized that it really was a South Park fic in disguise.) I just love the terrible beauty of being a teenager, if that makes any sense. I hope I never stop feeling with 110 percent of who I am.

Warnings: language, gen, death, mention of suicide, a little violence. It’s not supposed to be super-hardcore angst, just one of those, “Oh god, I’m in for the long haul” moments. Hope it isn’t too wangsty.

I wrote the original version while listening to “Otherside” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers on loop. Maybe turn it on, if you’ve got it? For some reason, that song gets me really teary, haha. Thank you, and again, sorry for posting twice in less than twenty-four hours. I’ll cool it now.

Sutures

It hasn’t even been a week since Stan Marsh slashed open a vein from elbow to wrist, earning himself an ambulance ride and sixty days on suicide watch. Kyle still can’t remember much of what happened--just police sirens, red bathwater, the blood on Sharon’s clean white towels. All he really understands is that things won’t feel right for a long time. He and Stan have tried to talk it out in the hospital, but every time Kyle looks at his friend’s lacerated arm, he wants to bite open his IV catheter and fucking spit in it. Because no matter how many times they try to smile at each other, Stan--best friend, Super Jock, Prom King--is still bleeding between the stitches.

Stan has known him too long, can read the rage in the curls of his fingers. “Dude, I’m sorry,” he pleads. “I was drunk, I was out of my mind. I had no idea what I was doing.”

“You were telling us that we’re not enough for you,” Kyle says, and leaves him alone there, in his too-sterile room. Three days, goddamn him. No one heals in seventy-two hours.

It’s like this: Kyle’s had three best friends since kindergarten; Stan, Kenny, and Eric Cartman. He hates Cartman, but they’re still family--he’d probably take a bullet for the him on sheer principle and vice versa. Until recently, he thought Stan would do the same for any one of them. And Kenny’s badass, even if he comes from a trashy family and subsists primarily on food stamps and porn. Despite the uncountable pizzas and secrets Kyle shares with Stan, Kenny is the only one who’s damaged enough to understand.

“The assmaster can apologize all he wants, but he was the one dying, not you,” Kenny says over the phone. “Isn’t that right? I can see it now. You guys will have a falling out because he doesn’t know what it feels like.”

“What what feels like?”

“Not being able to reach someone who’s only a few feet away.”

“So we’re screwed because I’m too polite to attempt suicide,” Kyle says.

Kenny chews noisily in his ear. Waffles, probably, or Pop Tarts. “You can come over and cry on my shoulder, if you want. There’s nothing good on TV.”

So Kyle leaves his house at seven-thirty and walks a block to the McCormick residence. Small towns are intimate and invasive, and as soon as he’s within sixty feet, his knows with neighborly instinct that Stuart McCormick is drunk. If he needed any confirmation, Stuart’s truck is parked diagonally across the lawn, keys still in the ignition. He can hear breaking dishware and people screaming with redneck-rounded vowels, charming phrases like “git over here” and “wartch your mouth.” He likes to forget that Kenny lives here. Hell, Kenny likes to forget that he lives here.

The front door is open. Kyle does a three-count and steps inside. Stu and Kenny are stumbling out of the hallway, tearing at each other, all claws and teeth and clashing testosterone.

“Get out of my house!” Stuart bellows, punctuating each word with a haphazard strike to the head. “You can tell you’re your mother’s child! You’re a freeloading son of a whore!”

“I’m not yours anyway!” Kenny yells back, flighty with adrenaline, his hands clamped protectively over his ears. They almost look like they’re dancing; some strange, shuffling two-step that’s only tragic because it’s practiced. Rivers of blood trickle from between Kenny’s fingers. The color reminds Kyle of last Friday night, and he falls back a step, haunted by the memory of Stan’s bathroom tile.

Stuart instinctively hurls his bottle of beer at the door when it creaks.

“Dad!” Kenny screams.

Kyle barely ducks in time. It explodes against the doorframe an inch above his head, showering him with Heineken and bits of green glass. Hand-grenades of Hicksville, he thinks numbly, and now he’s trembling too hard to stand. He can barely comprehend his Perfect Son presence in this white-trash house, a constant battleground, landmines under the carpet and words like machine gun rounds.

Kenny cries out again when he realizes Kyle’s okay. He rips away from Stuart’s grip and sprints for the door, catching Kyle’s elbow on the way out and dragging him to his feet. Both of them stagger when they reach the walkway. Stuart barrels down the driveway and slaps Kenny across the face, and Kenny slaps him right back, hard enough to make him stumble. It’s horrible and mesmerizing, like a car accident. Kenny snags a helmet from one of the handrails and shoves Kyle towards the curb.

“The bike,” he orders.

Oh, god, yes. Kyle loves Kenny’s motorcycle. It’s a Harley-D cruiser, deep blue; all those custom parts and gorgeous chrome shells. Kenny washed dishes fifty hours a week and ate one meal a day for nearly eleven months before he could afford it, and he never lets anyone forget what it stands for: freedom, fortitude, the possibility of escape. He’s the only one of them who dares to change. The rest of them haven’t even thought about it that way, taking their lives without trade-ins or complaints, five-card stud. Kenny stacks his deck. Kenny knows how to cheat.

Kyle lets Kenny jam the helmet over his head, then climbs onto the seat behind him. The leather feels good against his crotch, safe and real.

“Hang on,” Kenny orders, revving the motor. He sweeps the kickstand up with his heel and pushes off the asphalt, his sneakers squeaking. Stuart runs after them, bellowing. A second later, they’re tearing down the street, the world shrinking quickly in the distance.

“Shit, dude!” Kyle yells. The helmet is like a wind chamber, rattling his teeth.

Kenny’s fingers tighten on the left handgrip in response, and they whip around a corner, jumping onto the sidewalk and nearly clipping a stop sign. Kenny taught him how to lean with the curves a month or so ago, but he’s rusty. He doesn’t know why Kenny would trust him to throw his weight the right way on a deathtrap; it seems like he’s always pointed in the wrong direction. He wonders if Kenny knows something that he doesn’t.

They’re heading down Bonanza now, the huge, straight stretch of road that cuts in front of all their houses. Kenny picks up another ten miles per hour. The blood pooled in his ears slides delicately down his neck, flirts on the blonde tips of his hair, then spatters across Kyle’s face shield. The tiny droplets scatter in the wind, leaving thin red hash marks.

“Where are we going?” Kyle shouts.

“Who cares! McDonald’s, Middle Park. Away!”

The smell of gas intensifies again, and the motor whines shrilly in protest. They must be going eighty or ninety. He tightens his arms around Kenny’s midsection, feels sinewy muscle jumping hungrily under his skin.

“Kenny!”

“Shut up, Kyle, I’ll get you there!”

Where? he begins to ask, then he sees the truck pulling out of the gas station parking lot a couple hundred feet ahead.

He remembers the vehicle. It belongs to Mr. Adler, their old shop teacher. Years ago, he shaved the skin off his knuckles with the belt sander, and even as Stan and Adler threw him in shotgun and floored it towards the hospital, he had to close his eyes to properly breathe in all of that horsepower. The Sterling is armored against vandalism and student drivers. Indestructible, in suburbia. The trailer is unhitched, but it’s got a huge, cavernous bed, deep enough to be buried in. Kyle feels the blood drop out of his face like a weight.

“Kenny--!”

Kenny smirks and begins to slow leisurely, gracefully, as if they’re playing chicken.

“Kenny, c’mon!”

Unbelievably, Kenny strokes the gas. Kyle screams, and Kenny apologetically starts slowing down again--but not quickly enough. The ribbon of road is disappearing rapidly under the bike’s greedy wheels, too fast for comprehension, and when Kyle reaches up with one hand to cover his eyes, his fingernails squeal against glass and plastic. Because Kenny has given him the helmet. Kenny has always refused to confine his dreams of significance and transcendence.

He’s hunching down now, bracing himself. His joints tighten creakily. Each second seems stretched, over-bright, refreshing itself in tempo with Kyle’s slow heartbeat. All things considered, he’s always wanted to go with a bang and a whimper. The order never really mattered to him.

Stan, you asshole, I’m not sorry I hurt you, Kyle thinks, squeezing his eyes shut and leaning into Kenny’s sweater-clad shoulder. What you did was a “fuck you” to me, to Kenny, even to Cartman. You deserve your pain. You deserve your scars.

“Now he’ll know what it feels like,” Kenny hisses.

Kyle opens his eyes to look up at him.

Half a second later, they collide with Adler’s truck.

Pain. His legs, his head, his right shoulder. The unforgiving white of overhead fluorescents. There’s always been something about the detached sterility of hospitals that makes him itch beneath his skin, crave medications that he doesn’t need. Right now, he’s suspended in the limbo between consciousness and coma, water too pale and shallow to drown in.

Something shifts above him, and he can hear Cartman’s furious voice: “I can’t believe you pussies! First you, now Kenny and Kyle; am I the only one here who wants to see my seventeenth birthday? When did you all stop acting normal? What happened to the fourth fucking grade, huh?”

“Fuck you, Cartman,” someone says softly. “Grow up.”

“Says the kid with fifty new stitches! You’re an asshole, Marsh, and so is Kenny. He should rot in hell for trying to take someone with him, even if it was only the Jew.”

A sudden shuffle of metal and fabric. “Fuck off, Cartman, he didn’t mean to!” Stan screams. Stan hasn’t flipped out since he was nine, and this is enough to boost Kyle those final few feet. He breaks the surface gasping and shivering. Stan and Cartman immediately whirl on him, feud forgotten, and move to help him sit up between walls of get-well cards and white lily bouquets. His ribs scream in protest, but a good third of his heart--the part of him that knows how to lean into the curves--remains utterly silent.

“The impact killed him,” Cartman explains roughly, without preamble. “They’re calling this one an accident.”

Kyle shrugs. His throat is papery dry, but he forces the words out. “It wasn’t a suicide. Suicide implies…meaningless.”

Stan looks away at this, ashamed tears brimming in his eyes. He’s bracing himself against his IV stand, a shaky metal rod on rickety wheels, and Kyle wonders why the hell he’d gamble his balance on something so collapsible. Then he realizes it’s the best he has, and feels like crying himself. Instead, he leans back into his pillows and tries to keep breathing.

“He tried to kill you,” Cartman says.

“That wasn’t his intention. If it was, I’d be flattered.”

“Cartman, leave us alone for a minute,” says Stan. “Go tell the nurse he’s awake.”

“Kiss and make up, fags,” Cartman mutters, choking up, and leaves.

Stan waits until the door clicks shut, then turns to regard Kyle wordlessly for a long moment. He looks sick and washed-out in his hospital gown, almost worse than he did when he was first admitted. His arm has swollen along the sutures, the tiny black threads replaced by thin strips of clear tape. Butterfly stitches. Time for the metamorphosis of healing, as incredible an idea it is; that life is still plunging forward, that the world hasn’t stopped turning.

“He isn’t coming back, is he?” Stan asks softly.

Kyle could lie; it would be so easy. But they all feel it, even Cartman, and he realizes the insult in denying Kenny’s death, the ultimate truth. He draws his lips into a trembling line and shakes his head minutely.

“I get it, I promise you,” Stan whispers. “Kenny was willing to risk your lives for me to realize it, and I swear I understand. Kyle…I…I fucked up.”

“Don’t you ever do that shit to me again,” Kyle says, tougher than he feels.

“I won’t if you won’t.”

Kyle nods and tries to forgive him.

Stan drags up his IV, climbs gingerly over the guardrails, and slides between the bed’s papery sheets. Kyle makes room. Stan’s body is lean and solid, with no trace of the eight-year-old softness they had once possessed. They’re not children anymore, Kyle realizes suddenly. His vision grows hazy with tears, and he lets himself slowly close his eyes. They’re not children, and it’s been too long--they’re medicated; they’re mortal. They’re not allowed take-backs, they’re deficient, they’re already seeing motorcycle crashes and the wrong ends of razor blades.

And they’re sixteen. God, it’s been a hundred years between then and now, and they’re only sixteen.

End

Thank you very much for reading.