Cracked Ice
A South Park fanfiction by Alice

I love ice.

I suppose it's good that I live in a place where it's winter eleven months of the year, because there's lots of ice.

I love the cracking sound when I step on it. It makes me feel in control for once in my life. How I can break something instead of it breaking me.

Ice always looks prettier through chemically enhanced vision.

Sharp tingles of danger shoot up my legs as I walk on it, and I love those, too. The thought that with one misstep my feet could fly out from under me, I could crack my skull open, bleed till I can't bleed no more. Or I could find a weak spot and fall straight through into the frigid black water waiting beneath my feet.

The thoughts make me smile.

But then it reminds me of how I got out here in the first place, and of her. Fucking bitch.

They made me go to counseling. I knew I shouldn't have left my stash in my locker like that. They know I'm high all the time as it is. They were just waiting for the opportunity to bust me.

They think they know me. They think I'm just another stoner cokehead pill-popper, my drug use a desperate cry for attention and/or help.

I wish it were that simple.

Most kids, they use drugs to escape reality. To get them feeling good.

Me, I use drugs to make me normal.

Everyone thinks this glazed-over, hollow look in my eyes is from the drugs. Well, let me tell you, it sure ain't that.

Let me ask you something real quick. You ever died? You ever experienced the worst pain you'll ever know, until finally it's over, only to be flung back to earth mere hours later?

You ever have that happen more times than you could even hope to count?

Trust me, I've seen things I'd give my soul to forget.

If I hadn't lost most of my soul already, that is. Dying will do that to a guy.

Those things, they're burned into my eyelids. Waiting for me to blink, just for a second, so they can pop out and gobble me up.

After a few days without sleep everything sort of blurs together.

Drugs work just as well. Don't matter what kind, so long as I don't have to feel anymore.

And there was that bitch, that counselor, asking me all sorts of questions like she knows me. She don't know shit.

"How is life at home?" she asked.

Home? What home? I wanted to say. That place with my parents beating on each other all the time, that place my brother's been missing from for close to three months now, that place that has my baby sister convinced she's trailer trash, forcing her into the whorish hick stereotype I've tried so hard to get her to avoid?

That place ain't home. It's a fucking asylum.

"Home is great," I told her with a slow, easy grin.

"You know," she said in her cotton ball voice, frowning primly. "You know, in order for this to work properly, you're going to have to be completely honest with me."

I just shrugged.

"Are you high right now?"

"As a kite, ma'am."

I figured there's no point in lying about this because, really, when am I not high? She'd have been able to tell if I was clean if I had been screaming bloody fucking murder every time I so much as blinked.

Gotta keep the demons at bay somehow.

She sighed, made a note on a pad of paper, her pen dancing prettily across the page. "That's going to have to change," she muttered. I didn't know if she was talking to herself or me.

"Kenny," she said, eyes flicking back up to me under glasses I was pretty sure she didn't actually need. "I'm going to ask you a serious question and I need you to tell me the truth. Have you ever considered or attempted suicide?"

I laughed. I couldn't help it. I laughed out loud, and then I laughed some more.

"Look," I said when I was done laughing. "You don't know me. You don't know where I come from. So I don't expect you to understand this. But I've already commited suicide on three separate occasions. The problem ain't killing myself. It's staying dead."

She stared at me for a minute, before scribbling another note on her pad. I could tell how hard she was struggling to keep her composure.

I leaned forward, resting my arms on her desk, the whole world tilting along with me.

"You ever die?" I asked her. "You ever cease to exist, only to have no one care? No one notice you're gone? You ever have your best friends see you slash your own wrists until all the blood is gone, only to have them not speak a word of it next time they saw you? You know how that feels?"

"No, I don't suppose I do," she said, all nervous.

"You ever kill yourself because your life is more of a hell than the real one will ever be?" I hissed.

"No."

"Then you don't know why I use. And if you don't know, then you got no hope in trying to stop me."

Then I walked out. Got up and walked out. I'd rather be expelled than have to go see that bitch again.

That's what led to me, here, wandering this ice in the middle of this pond, the sunlight close to blinding me, my head a total fog.

Someone's calling my name. I look around to see a shock of red hair at the shore.

"Why weren't you in school?" he's calling.

I start drifting towards him. "I got expelled."

"How come?"

"Drugs."

He nods knowingly, as if that explains everything. I resent him for it. I'd like to go over there and punch that pretty face of his into a pulp.

"What are you doing out here?"

"Walking on thin ice. Looking for weak spots."

"Ken," he sighs. "Not this again."

That stops me in my tracks. "What do you mean, again?"

"This is, what, the fifth time you've gone out to kill yourself?"

"Fourth," I correct.

"Whatever. You don't need to keep doing this to yourself. It's fucking you up even more than all those drugs you insist on poisoning yourself with."

"In my defense, I've never O.D.'d."

"That's because with the tolerance you've built up it'd take as much blow to kill you as it would an elephant."

"Fuck you," I call, tugging a hand violently through my matted hair. A good amount pulls out. "I need something. I can't just live the way I do on my own. Afraid of my own shadow."

"There are better ways. And you don't have to fucking kill yourself, man. It's not proving anything. Only messing you up more."

We have a staredown for a few minutes. I give first. I sigh, walking towards him.

"Let's go," he says. "Let's go ho–"

I've found my patch of thin ice. My foot, then my leg, then my body, breaking into the water with an earsplitting crack. The sudden frigid temperature immobilizes me, forces the air out of my lungs. I'm not even fighting it, numb and sinking as my body screams for oxygen.

I look up to the surface and I can see him staring down at me, his hand plunging through the water, reaching for me, lips mouthing my name over and over, but his cries fall on deaf ears.

I smile dazedly up at him, reach up and brush my fingertips against his, making no effort to grab hold. A second later and I'm out of reach. I'm sinking deeper now, and black spots are covering my vision, and I'm still smiling.

Bye, I think, my head surrounding with a stream of bubbles as I exhale the last of the air out my nose. See you next time around.

The End.