I don't own Rent. I just own a whole bunch of depressing plans. Have fun.

….I'm sorry, guys. I've treated you like shit. Especially you, Mimi. You deserve better than an asshole like me. I never meant to hurt you, any of you I wish that I could do everything over, live in poverty again. There's a shot in hell that I would've been a good person.

I'm sorry I came over here to kill myself. I thought you'd be the only ones left who would care.

This is what I saw.

The toilet seat was closed. The faucet was dripping one water beat per fifteen seconds. Yellow lined paper with slanted school boy graffiti trembled from a quarter inch of duct tape on our mirror. Benny was in the bath tub, fully clothed, his khakis and Brooks Brother's button down adhering to his lean body with since-drained water. His dead and deadly beeper sat innocently at his feet.

Oh, God. Not again.

A nice little burning sensation began seeping in from my temples and shamelessly lashed across my forehead. The late December light flared in through the tiny bathroom window, bright and excruciating. I hadn't had a migraine since I was on smack. It's easy to forget what a bitch they are.

I opened the medicine cabinet and fumbled for the aspirin. I settled for a bottle of pain killers left over from Mark's biking accident, spilling them out of their plastic confinement and popping three dry. Benny's body—soul?—made the room creepy. I couldn't stop staring at it.

Stop looking at me, I heard him say. God, I wanted to hear it.

Okay, time to runaway from your problems. Just walk out of the bathroom and close the door behind you. There are times when I really love that little voice in the back of my head. I obeyed orders, closed the death chamber, and leaned against the wall with closed eyes. The pills weren't chipping away my headache yet, but for now I was safe.

Click. Screech. Stomp. The front door opened. Shit.

"Hey, Rog!" Mark walked in, all smiles, dragging along a Charlie Brown Christmas tree. He dropped in a corner not filled by our usual paraphernalia and twirled a knob on his camera. "I just ran into Mimi. She'll be up in a few minutes, Said she was going to borrow some lights from the club—"

"Mark."

"Yeah?" He looked happy. Does it qualify as criminal activity to pull death into Christmas? With every vein in my brain banging against my skull, I crossed the room and lay my hands on Mark's sharp shoulders.

"I've gotta tell you something, and I don't want you to freak out, okay?" He nodded blandly. This happened too often. Deep breaths. Be strong. Be the good guy. "Benny electrocuted himself in our bat tub."

Mark's eyes slowly expanded to twice their usual size. "Was—was it an accident?" he stuttered hopefully. It sounded like he was pleading with me. Way to go.

"No, buddy. He left a suicide note." I could feel his shoulders quivering under my palms. "You okay?"

"Yeah. No. I think I might throw up." He walked like a zombie into the kitchen and dug his elbows into the counter over either side of the sink, staring down. "Do you want to call 911, or should I?" he called weakly.

Who actually wants to call 911? "I'll do it."

"Thanks."

I was searching for the phone when, as promised, Mimi came in, a thread of red lights tangled in tow. She shed them into a pile next to Mark's tree and came over to kiss me. "Hey, baby! What's wrong?"

I remembered the time she dragged her slippers across my rug and shocked my lips with a kiss. She's good with surprises. I touched her hair. "Mimi, Benny committed suicide in the bathroom," I said softly. Her face scrunched. I bit my lip and went on. "It's okay. I'm gonna call 911. I don't want you to go in there. Okay, sweetheart? I want you to stay out here."

Mimi thudded onto the couch, fixing her enormous eyes down on our old newspapers. "We drove him to suicide," she said distantly. Mark retched in the kitchen.

I grabbed the phone. "I'll be right back." Closing myself into my room, I tapped in the numbers with one finger. "Lousy bastard couldn't even kill himself in his own damned bathroom," I mumbled. "Hello?"

One hour later, Benny's body had been veiled in a white sheet, briefly blessed, and carried away. The rest of our makeshift family had convened for the event, and with the exception of his Burberry raincoat and lingering presence, our landlord was gone. Maureen and Joanne sat gravely on the couch, probably discussing our future eviction or some other wildly shallow subject. Collins studied Benny's note, blinking too often as he realized that ten years of philosophical experience couldn't draw meaning from the words. Once in a while, he glanced over at Mark, who had propped himself against a wall, batting at tears under his glasses and softly speaking into the phone.

"I'm sorry. No, one of us know, Alison. Yeah, I'm gonna miss him too…"

Mimi sat alone on the edge of our industrial aluminum table, dangling her feet off the side like a little girl. I stepped towards her, slipping beside her, and curled an arm over her shoulders. "How're you doing?" I murmured.

She looked up at the ceiling. Her dark and lovely eyes were dewy and I watched, infatuated as they sparkled off of the last remaining taste of sun in the room. "I don't know," she said minutely. Strange. Mimi's five foot three and weighs about a hundred and five pounds, but she's always been able to fill a room. She's like fire. "I really don't know. Benny was the first guy who ever bought me roses or told me that he loved me. I was just trying to remember if I ever told him the same that."

Her legs dangled more vigorously, her hands gripping the table top. The surface of the aluminum felt unusually cold. I tried to reach for her fingers, but my motions were ended in midair by thick jealously over a dead relationship. "Did you?" I asked instead. Once again, the words seemed unusually frigid as they fell out of my mouth. But I didn't mean to hurt her.

Mimi slowly, purposefully faced me with pearls of water strung on her eyelashes and infected blood ticking through her skin. A living piece of poetry. "I can't remember," she whispered. "I just can't remember. And it sucks, because he used to be so nice to me…"

"And then he treated you like shit," I finished for her, regret dripping over the syllables. Mimi looked betrayed.

"He was a person, Roger." Dart, dart, dart. Remorse, regret, resolution. I'm a circular cork board. Mimi looked cold. I wanted to hold her, but she was piercing me. Piercing herself. "I can't be happy that a person's dead. He told me that he loved me, Roger. He told me that he loved me. He told me—he told me—he--"

Her tears took over in time for me to hear Maureen finish a tangent over our telephone. We were all taking turns making calls. I'm not sure who assigned Mr. Grey to our resident drama queen.

"You bastard!" she screamed. "You cold, heartless bastard! If I'm glad he's dead, it's because he doesn't have you to deal with!" It would have been wrong to tell her not to end her sentences with prepositions.

She slammed the phone with all the strength she could muster from her rage and banged her boot on our floor. "That asshole!" she seethed. "Do you know what he asked? He asked about Benny's stocks. His stocks! His son-in-law killed himself, and he's trying to deal with business!" Maureen's breath beat, faster and faster, explosively as she denied tears from her cheeks with angry hands. "And here I am, telling myself that it's all my fault, and—I didn't even like the guy!" she sobbed. "What the hell is wrong with me? I can't even control myself over someone I hated, this is fucking ridiculous! I have to go."

She found her handbag through the sea beneath her eyelids and swerved out the door. Mark and Joanne both made moves to follow her, but Collins just shook his head at them.

"Let her go," he said wearily. "Just let her go."

A zing of apology shot into Joanne's eyes, and she reached to the floor to pick up her purse. "I can't. I'm really sorry. I just can't. She might get away again." Her patent leather pumps clicked as she walked to the door with her black coat in tow. She turned back to look at us. "I'll call when we get home." Mark gave a halfhearted nod, but she hung in our decrepit doorway for an excess moment. "I'm so, so sorry."

Her coat twirled onto her body and the door closed behind her. Collins finally threw down the note. "Fuck," he muttered, leaning back into the grimy depths of our couch. "A note in the bathroom mirror." Frustrated and grievous, he looked up at the rest of the remaining parties. "I need a drink."

He gathered up the coat that Angel had bought two Christmases before and fell to his feet. He glanced with bloodshot eyes at Mark and me. "Care to join me?" Mark didn't even meet his eyes. They stayed fixed on the floor as his head swaggered from side to side. No.

Collins stared at me. I stared at Mimi. She was still chasing tears off her face with her coat sleeve. I was too guilty to go drinking in honor of a dead philanderer. "No thanks," I said quietly.

"Mimi?"

She automatically lifted her face. "Yeah," she said hoarsely. "Yeah. I'll go." She didn't look at me when she tightened her coat to spiral off the table and walk gently to the door, shivering. Before she stepped out to the nightlife of New York, she paused, looked at Mark's crunched form, and hugged him with conviction. They held each other for a minute, quietly whispering a conversation I couldn't hear. Perfect pitch is pointless for listening to things that matter. My girlfriend and best friend relinquished the other from their arms. Collins ushered Mimi to the door, waving to me. The wood banged behind them. And then there were two.

I sat stupidly on the side of the table. Abandoned by a little girl. I contemplated my shoes for a while, and when I looked up, Mark was hovering over me.

"You okay?" he asked. I shrugged. He sat down next to me.

"She loved him," I said absently.

Mark nodded, a smile beginning to lace his lips. "He loved her."

"I guess."

"He wasn't such a bad guy, Roger." The words hung heavily in the air and swayed over my head. Untruth.

"Why was he such an asshole, then?" I snapped. You can't buy into all of this 'he was such a great guy' crap just because the bastard's dead.

"He was jealous of you." Mark was looking at me, remarkably clear-eyed. I looked back. "Always was."

Benjamin Coffin the Third, the rich and successful financier was jealous of the punk, bad ass rebel without a cause. What a novelty. "Why?" It almost felt like I was being fed a sympathy lie that I didn't need.

Mark's shoulders rose and fell. "He wanted to be a jazz singer."

"Benny?"

"Yeah. He drew the line between ambition and dreams, but that's what he always wanted." Mark shrugged again and sighed. "He never stopped humming or playing records or scatting when we were roommates. It actually pissed me off after a while."

"Was he any good?" The fact that Benny had any artistic inhibition left me awestruck.

"He was great. He had a hell of a voice."

It was odd to hear everyone talk about him in the past tense. Everyone's words sounded much more final than they usually did as they graced the room. "Why didn't he go with it?" I asked.

"He liked safety." Mark scrutinized a paint-chipped wall and allowed a tear to fall down his face. "He didn't like chance. So he didn't do it. And you did. That's why he was jealous."

"Because I'm broke and have no prospects?"

"Because you're brave." Before that set in, Mark shifted his feet back onto the floor and started walking toward the bathroom. "I'm gonna go clean up."

What was there to clean up? "Why? There's no blood."

"Why did Maureen change the light bulbs after April died?" Mark countered quietly. "Just getting a fresh start."

I'd forgotten that she'd done that. "Want some help?"

He paused. "Would you mind going out and getting some bleach?"

Complete sterilization. Whatever made him happy. I wanted those skin cells off of the bath tub, too. Just so I wouldn't have to think about him in the shower. "Sure, buddy." I grabbed my jacket. "Be back in a few."

I wasn't. I took my time, pacing back and forth in the all-purpose deli to select a pint of generic, store brand bleach. Gripping the bottle tightly, I went to check out with the tired-looking lady who calls everyone honey. The loft's empty silence would be scratched by Mark's maniac scrubbing. I knew that he'd pour all the white drippiness over the sparkling tub when I got back. The floor would be swept; the mirror would be polished to a painful reflection. He might have even demolished April's lipstick note from the shiny surface. Benny's coat would be stashed in a seldom visited closet; Mimi wouldn't see it when she and Collins returned in their intoxicated haze.

"One seventeen, honey," the tired voice whispered. I dug into my jeans and extracted two wrinkled singles.

"Eighty-three cents is your change." She passed me a handful of tarnished coins and tucked the bleach into an unnecessary plastic bag. I took it from the counter.

"Have a good night."

"You too, honey."

Christmas bells and icy air assaulted me as I stepped out the door. A string of dying green lights shuddered against the Life Café's window. It was pretty shitty of Benny to die during a holiday.

I strolled down the sidewalk and stretched my thoughts back to my now ex-landlord. He was gone for good. Now what? Mark and Mimi were weepy; Collins was depressed; Maureen was pissed; Joanne was indifferently sad; I was bummed. And baffled. So Benny had been jealous of me. For the fact that I was willing to sacrifice heat and food and comfort for my dreams. I'd always thought that Benny was a coward, but that was because I thought he was an asshole. Some things just click together inside a jealous mind. But Mark was right. Benny was afraid of being homeless or underfed. Was he afraid of being unhappy? Mimi would probably still be going out with him if he wasn't afraid.

Benny the Brave. I thought of him wearing a red cape over his Ralph Lauren suit. A red cape, my girlfriend, and a jazz band. He was an asshole; he wasn't an asshole. He wasn't an artist; he was a wannabe. He wanted his dreams; he went with his ambition. I have what he wanted, I thought suddenly. The bleach bounded around in the bag. I revisited my thought. I was right. I had his dreams. I had everything. Except for the red cape.

I was nearing the loft. As I waited for the walk sign to change, I looked up through our windows, which were screaming to be washed, and saw a light glowing. The sun had set, but the rectangle of our rental was glowing. I strained my eyes; Mark had set up the Christmas tree on top of my amp. The lights were threaded through the pine needles. Most of them still worked. It looked pretty.

The cars stopped moving. I crossed the street. The rich, ring-y voice of a strapping young tenor washed over me from our corner. His bare hat was at his feet. His clothes were transparently threadbare, but he was singing his heart out.

"Cigarette holder, which wigs me—over her shoulder! She digs me! Out cattin'! That satin doll!" His voice trilled over the bright, bouncy twenties tune. Jazz. "Baby, shall we go out skippin'? Careful, amigo! You're flippin'!"

I dropped my eighty-three cents change into the hat and went home.

This struck me on an incredibly gloomy day last January. Please give me feedback. If you liked it, tell me why, if you hated it, tear me apart, babe. Just press the little blue button. It'll take you thirty seconds.

Until next time—

XD