For the most part, I blame it on my father for not encouraging me enough, my mother for spanking me when I was three years old, my elementary school teachers for not fostering my creativity, and society for allowing me to grow up in a dirty city teeming with crime and licentiousness and all-night triple X movie theaters. It’s all their faults that I turned out the way I am now; all of my troubles with the law and my antisocial behavior can be directly traced to my deeply unsettling childhood, even though I didn’t realize how unhappy I was as a child. If everyone else had just done things differently, I’d probably end up a well-adjusted straight-A student who wears name-brand clothes and dates a steady girlfriend and who thought marijuana was the root of all evil.

Instead, that teacher found me behind the gymnasium lighting up when I was supposed to be in calculus, not that it particularly matters where I was supposed to be since I’d already figured out that all of school is a waste of time, anyway. Why should I sit in a stuffy classroom listening to a stuffy man talk about numbers and formulas that don’t mean anything and don’t have anything to do with the real world? It’s not just that I know all that stuff is useless, but that it’s so static, you know? When life is so fluid and always changing, why should I care about some rigid set of rules that make graphs look a certain way?

Anyway, my calculus teacher is named Mr. Garfield, like the cat except he doesn’t even try to be funny. I’d bet he’s never even been laid; he probably puts all his dates to sleep by droning on and on about polynomials and bell curves and how proud he is that the girls’ Varsity golf team made it to state this year, and who really cares? That stupid jerk-off was the one who called the office and told them I wasn’t in class. I’d cut his class plenty of times before, and he hadn’t said anything. He claims that this time he told on me because he was concerned about my grade, which was supposedly suffering because of all my absences. I think it’s because he figured out that I figured out that I don’t need him, and he got be in trouble because he still likes to pretend that he’s still a useful part of society and has something to contribute to the world, yada yada yada.

I’d just begun experimenting with cocaine. I’m not addicted or anything, I just wanted to try it out to see what it was like. The coke never made me murder anyone or threaten people with drugs or anything. People act like it’s the scariest, worst thing in the world, but honestly, it’s just another thing you can do to get out of the black hole of a life you’re living. It doesn’t melt your brains like TV and videogames, and it doesn’t take over your whole life like videogames. It does both of those, sometimes, which was what I was looking for, but I never got to that point.

So, Mr. Garfield called the office to say I was missing, and they called the cops to send out a truancy officer. Then, this idiot of a freshman named Paula I-Don’t-Know-Her-Last-Name walked past me on her way to meet her mommy for a doctor’s appointment or a dentist appointment, I don’t remember exactly what, although that stupid lawyer made a point of focusing on every single detail during my trial. The teachers caught me and brought me before the school board, and then I was passed on to child services because clearly I had to be troubled if I was using drugs and cutting class and anything else.

A social worker met with me as part of the court order. She was young and had fake blonde hair with tight little fake curly ringlets to match her fake nails and fake smile. “You’ve got a good family life, Seth,” she’d said. “What makes you act the way you do?”

“You really want a reason?” I demanded. I’d grown up with plenty of affirming of feelings and tolerance and all that crap in school and at home and everything else, and I was sick of that. I didn’t need anyone to tell me that it was OK to feel angry so long as I treated others with respect and what-not. That sort of behavior is only good for pretentious jerks who like to hear themselves talk about how good they are because they’re so accepting of things and everything else. I didn’t need that.

I figured I could break through that social worker’s fake smile by punching her face, or by shocking her enough to make her stop acting all high-and mighty and so knowledgeable about her feelings, so I announced, “What if I say my parents beat me? Would that make things easier on you? Would you be able to fit me into your idea of what a troubled youth is? Do you want me to say I was raped, or that the girl I liked didn’t smile at me the right way and that made me depressed?”

With the straight-line frown that I always recognized as the “I’m concerned,” look that psychologists use when you say something and they’re not sure what to make of it. She leaned forward, and I saw through the gesture as an obvious attempt to seem closer to me. She asked, “Do you feel like you need to make jokes about those things?” she asked. “Is it an act, to try to keep the attention away from something that scares you?”

“Yes, I’m so deep and troubled,” I answered, carefully keeping all sarcasm from my voice. “I guess I just had a bad life, is all. I wish I’d had real problems to blame it on, like an alcoholic dad or a mom with multiple boyfriends. Even a suicidal sibling would have been nice, just so I could use that to explain everything that’s wrong with me, but I don’t have any of that. I guess that means I’m just some kind of screw-up, right?”

“I don’t think you’re a screw-up,” said my social worker with a too-nice smile and a too-gentle tone of voice that told me she was trying to be gentle and kind and probably some other things, too. “I think you’re angry, and that’s why you’re saying these things,” she continued. “I want to help you be happier. I don’t want to change you, but I just want you to know you don’t have to b angry any more.”

“By golly, you’ve broken my shell!” I’d replied. “Even though you’ve known me for less than an hour, you’ve made all the right, kind, insightful guesses. You asked me the right questions, and you’ve found the real me. My faith in humanity is restored; I’m going to be a good kid, now and always get straight A’s in school. Maybe I’ll be the president one day.”

The social worker was pretty good at hiding her frustration, other than a twitch of her lip and a too-casual weight-shift, I might have really believed she wasn’t all that bothered by my remarks. By that point, I needed a cigarette, though, and mocking the woman was starting to bore me, so I ended my games by telling her that I wanted to leave, and I had a lot of homework to do, so please, excuse me.

After that, the government decided that home wasn’t good enough for me, which I didn’t really care about, because I didn’t care about much of anything, really. Mom cried, though, when she found out, and began to repeat herself over and over, saying, “We’re good parents, we really are. Don’t take my baby away.”

The social worker said that she wasn’t taking me away to punish Mom and Dad, she was doing it to put me in a stable environment where I could get away from negative influences in my life. I guess that really means that even though the Department of Human Services couldn’t find anything actually wrong with how Mom and Dad raised me, they wanted to get me out of there until they could figure out what they’d done to mess me up so much. Good luck. Mom and Dad are just as boring and typical as everyone else’s parents I know.

So, skipping over the boring weeks of processing and packing to move on, which I was able to do slowly because social services decided I wasn’t in immediate danger, I ended up here in this purgatory Hell, with a family that tries to be too understand and too loving and takes me to baseball games and movies and tries to make me feel like I’m really “part of the family.”

I do my chores like a good kid and I go to school, and I pretty much have everyone around me convinced that I really am a good kid, because honestly, that’s a lot easier right now than the alternative. I’m sure I’ll get bored with this game after a while, and then I’ll be myself again, but right now, everyone’s so willing to give me the benefit of the doubt and still so suspicious that I’m going to sneak a knife up my shirt or get high and kill everyone or something that it takes all the sport out of my entertainments.

Of course, I still smoke when I can, but I have to ration my stuff up until I can get a hold of a good amount of money and find a good dealer who won’t try to rip me off or slip something actually dangerous in with the good product. I’m pretty sneaky with my habits, though; I haven’t even been caught once yet.

The other day, I bought a pack of Tarot cards from a cheap tourist-y magic store. You know, one of those stores that sells Ouija boards alongside Harry Potter toys and little booklets explaining how to do coin tricks. I used to mess around with that magic stuff a few years back, you know, before it became cool, and I was just curious about what all the faces would say about my future.

I flipped over the appropriate cards, and learned that great wealth lay before me, as well as health and great power. Maybe there was something good about coming out to the ‘burbs after all. Later on, when I checked my horoscope in the newspaper, it told me to be careful what I say for fear that I might alienate a good friend. Story of my life.

While I was playing cards, though, my foster mom walked into the kitchen and saw what I was doing. She started to scold me and gathered up all my cards, then locked them in a drawer- who has lockable drawers any more, anyway? Besides her, that is. Then, she sat next to me, and gave me a big speech about Jesus and witchcraft and why I shouldn’t bother with the occult; I don’t remember her exact phrasing because I wasn’t really paying attention any more, I was just annoyed that I’d blown almost ten whole dollars on the back only to have it confiscated.

After she was finished with her little speech, my foster mother kept her eye on me, like she was worried I was going to cast a spell on her or try to get my cards back or something. I didn’t care that much, you know, I’m not one of those crazy kids who thinks they’re a witch, I just like to mess around with different things. I went for a walk around the block in order to get away from her, and all I noticed about my neighborhood was that it was so boring and cookie-cutter-conformist. Everyone had mowed front lawns with kids’ bikes in the front yard and tire swings on trees. Back home, black kids used to sit on their doorsteps and yell and pretty girls who walked by, and the little kids who were still in elementary school would give wrong directions to drivers who pulled up, lost.

That was when I started to think I might actually go clinically insane if I had to spend too much more time in that suburb. I didn’t particularly miss my friends; I didn’t really have any friends worth missing, and I was sure they all had enough going on in their lives not to miss me, either. Probably didn’t even notice that I was gone, yet.

My foster family kept their play-acting up so that they could all pretend they were a big happy family, and I was part of it too. Every night, we sat down to dinner, and it was always some big four-or-five course affair that my foster-mother would spend an hour or two preparing, and everyone would say, “Please” or “Thank you,” or “Pass the peas,” even when the bowl of peas was sitting right in front of them and all they’d have to do was reach across my foster brother’s plate to get some peas for themselves. I felt like I was living in some never-ending sitcom.

School was even worse. My foster family’s children went to public school, at least. I’m not sure how I’d have survived if I had to go to some preppy-uniform-artsy school, but this place wasn’t much better. It had all the symptoms of the suburbs as a whole. Everyone thought they were really special or really unique, even though most everyone behaved the same way everyone does everywhere else. Kids thought they were my “brothers,” like they knew what life on the streets was like because they could talk like rappers, even though everybody else knew they’d just go home to their two-story houses and their dogs and their parents and their three regular meals a day; yeah, they really knew the streets.

That’s not to say these kids were particularly worse than the kids back home; sure, they were fake, but everyone everywhere is fake in one way or another. The real question of honesty isn’t about whether you show your real self to others, because nobody does that. The real issue is whether you realize that you’re being fake with people. Like me, I know I’m manipulative, and I’m fine with that, which is why I’m more honest than other people who act all nice and share their feelings and whatnot but don’t realize they’re fooling themselves into living a stereotype.

Anyway, the kids in the suburb weren’t necessarily faker than the kids back home, the problem was that they all know one another. Everyone always had to stick their nose in everybody’s business, and since I hadn’t known everyone since I was four years old and pooped my pants in fourth grade or whatever, everyone wanted to know immediately how to sum me up in a way that was easy to comprehend, since nobody had the time to get to know me for real.

I got sick of my new life within a few days, and I decided to be myself again pretty soon, or at least as much of myself as I could allow myself to show to the creeps and losers around me. I found someone who dealt pretty soon. She wasn’t all that surprised when I came to her, I guess everyone was just waiting for me to screw-up, seeing as it was my turn to be “the foster kid,” but I didn’t really care what they thought of me, for some reason.

The last time I got high, I left home, because I didn’t want to hear another annoying lecture from my foster mother, who by that time had apparently decided I was as evil or as troubled or as, I don’t know, whatever, as anyone could be. Stumbling in my inability to make rational decisions, I walked down the center of the street, a thousand thoughts sizzling my mind, searing themselves into every neuron with their brilliance.

I realized, then, that everything in the world was a waste of time. Everyone in every city or small town was all the same, with the same beliefs and the same fakery to try to show themselves to the world in some weird way. Every town had the same fakery and the same assumptions, and it’s all everyone else’s fault.

That’s why I hate everyone else. We’ve got six billion people in the world, and in all my travels, I have yet to meet anyone who’s really all that different from anyone else. My mom used to tell me that it’s only because I haven’t taken the time to get to know anyone better yet, but frankly, I don’t want to get to know anyone better. I already know what I’m going to find, and I blame everyone else for screwing up the world.

See, that’s the real reason that I’m so screwed up, now. Not because of all that psycho-bull-crap stuff I said earlier, about not being encouraged in school, as if anyone’s really going to be that different from everyone else because they weren’t creative enough in finger-paints. When I was in third-grade, I got sent to the principal’s office because I drew a picture of a dinosaur ripping people to shreds. They said it was too violent, and that I was deeply disturbed. In reality, I was never actually disturbed up until that point, when I was forced to fit into the same cut-out mold that everyone else had to fit into. That’s the root of all my problems.

The worst thing is, the problem isn’t just with my home, or my state, it’s a nation-wide problem. I’d try to go to another country and see if the problem is world-wide, but that would be too conformist. Everyone goes to Europe to find the depth or meaning of life that they can’t find in the United States, as if they’re not still standing on the same land, just another part of the earth. Or maybe I’m wrong, but I doubt it. People are people everywhere.

The only way to escape all the fakery and all the lies and all the constant fitting in (not that I’d want to fit in, mind you, but even loneliness has become a cliché), has become the human condition, and if that’s the way it goes, I don’t want to be a human. Suicide is the only way out.

This note has become more of an autobiography than anything else. That’s really not what I meant to do, by the way. I guess I wrote this just to have something on paper, you know, so that it would be like a little part of me lives on even after I off myself. You know, that probably sounds contradictory, but it’s not. After all, I don’t really want to be dead; I just want to get out of this life and out of this world. This is the only way I know how to do that.

Anyway, I guess you can send this note to my parents back in the city, so they know it’s not really their fault I got taken away and then hung myself. Or, you could keep the note for yourself, so you can shake your head and tell people that since you took me in, you never really knew what sort of kid I was, anyway, and that isn’t the reason you became foster parents. Maybe the cops will confiscate the note. I don’t know.

Just to help with the investigation, though, nobody helped me. I found the rope in the garage on my own. I’ve got plenty of half-finished homework if you want to check the handwriting, or you could just take my word for it.

This is just another meaningless suicide.