Just Kill Me by Adam Selzer

Author:Adam Selzer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

Ten minutes later we’re in one of the bedrooms in the nursing home, and Cyn is nudging an old man’s shoulder as he sleeps. He looks up with an annoyed scowl from beneath a push-broom mustache.

“What the hell?” he asks.

“Mr. Sturgeon?” she says. “Do you really want to be gone before chemo can start?”

He blinks and turns over a bit. His skin is leathery and tough, like the wrinkles have to fight for every dent they make. But they fight hard. Aaron Saltis has a misshapen face that looks like it was busted out of alignment in one quick fight with a blunt object. Mr. Sturgeon looks like he’s been beaten down slowly, by degrees, for eighty years.

He looks up at Cyn, then says, “You mean that shit about making me a ghost?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m an atheist,” he says. “I don’t believe in ghosts.”

“Well, when we say ‘ghost,’ we don’t mean, like, your soul,” I say. “Just, like . . . energy. The reeks and fumes of your puddled brain.”

He stares at me for a second, then says, “The what of my what?”

“Look,” says Cyn. “Do you want a quick, painless death tonight, or what?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah. You’re damn right I do.”

“Get up and hit the bathroom first,” she says. “As a favor to me. The less there is to leak out when your muscles relax, the better.”

He gets out of bed and uses a cane to hobble into the en-suite bathroom.

Everything sort of seems like a dream to me at this point. Cyn and I stand awkwardly in his room, looking at his stuff; she reads the titles of the books on his shelves out loud. All nonfiction, mostly by cable-news loudmouths. I tuck a corner of his bedsheets back in, just because, and wait for the flush sound. He’s old, and it takes a while. Cyn takes a book from the shelf, flips through it, and writes a response to something in the margins.

When Mr. Sturgeon is ready, we put him in a wheelchair and sign him out at the desk. Shanita smiles and says, “Thank God for you.”

She totally knows what we’re doing. I’m sure of it.

It’s sort of reassuring that she so clearly thinks it’s a good deed.

So we push Mr. Sturgeon out to the van, set him up in the back seat, and start driving him away.

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