The difference is oxygen, kindling, and luck.
And the oxygen in this case was the contagiousness of ideas, the awful stickiness of self-murder that most of us failed to understand in that critical first wave. We were living in the age of the meme, after all. Children pledging themselves to Slender Man, leading their classmates into the mossy woods, kitchen knives in hand.
*
The Carpenters of Madison, Wisconsin, were the ones that people noticed first. On May 15, young Brad Carpenter, sixteen, fashioned a noose from an extension cord and hanged himself in the attic of the three-story Edwardian his parents had renovated six years earlier. His mother found him dangling, a stack of his underwear, laundered and folded, in her hands. Two days later, Todd Billings, seventeen, captain of the ski team, put a plastic bag over his head at the exact moment that Tim O’Malley, fifteen, mathlete, sliced a vein, then another, bleeding out into the bathroom sink. All were firstborn sons. Each drove a hand-me-down car. Todd died with his braces on. Brad’s last regret was that he wouldn’t live to see his acne clear up.
Each had written somewhere near the scene of their death the symbol A11.
What did it mean? Why those numbers, that letter?
In the next eight days, three more teenagers in Madison would die by their own hand—concern rising to panic among parents in the area. Wisconsin residents took to watching their children while they slept. They suggested that younger kids potty with the door open. Three counties over, the homecoming queen swallowed a bottle of pills, washing them down with vodka and Red Bull. At the southwestern tip of the state, five girls on the swim team made a suicide pact and jumped from the city hall clocktower.
CNN took notice. The New York Times published an exposé. Mental health professionals held hurriedly scheduled town halls, answering questions from corralled teenagers and their parents. People took to crossing themselves whenever their children left the room. Twitter and Facebook put headers on their homepages, listing phone numbers you could call. But still, we thought of suicide as a local phenomenon, even as we admitted that technology may have increased its reach.
In Travis County, Texas, Nadine Ort came home from work and found her sixteen-year-old daughter with a garbage bag over her head. The next morning Nadine’s hair had turned from gray to white. Around the country, strangers held each other in public, crying until they were numb.
Delaware was next. Hawaii. On May 21 there was a cluster of twenty-five in Nebraska. A week later, forty-three teenagers killed themselves across the state of Missouri. If there were an emoji for this growing crisis, it would be the openmouthed scream. Newspapers filled with photographs of parents falling to their knees, their lips spread in an impossible O. All that nail-biting work, the investment of time, love, money. The sheer willpower it took to keep our children from suffocating in their cribs, from running into traffic, all those nights felting costumes for the school play, the hours spent driving them to playdates, hosting sleepovers, all the tears, the fights, pushing them to do their homework, the extracurriculars, soccer Saturdays, the onset of adolescent hormones, voices changing, hair growing on private areas, taking and retaking SAT prep courses, all the bullies and broken hearts. All of it wiped away with little more than a gesture.
Those of us yet untouched saw footage of their windy funerals and held our kids closer. We felt their foreheads and asked if they were feeling okay. We smelled their breath and looked at their eyes under bright lights. Was it drugs? Were they sad? Hopeless? They shrugged us off—teenagers to the end—and said they were fine. Some, though, broke down crying, racked with nerves, tired of fighting, drawn toward the ledge of some dark mystery—like sailors caught in a whirlpool, sucked down into the depths.
We held them and wept, fear building in our hearts.
Things were picking up speed.
In the next few weeks, when the trend had become first national, then global, we scoured the internet for theories. We read the news and analyses, as if our children’s lives depended on it, which, of course, they did. We hushed our spouses on the way to supermarkets, turning up the radio whenever we heard the words cry for help. We read articles about the terrible costs of cyberbullying, about the perils of sexting. But these were but trees in a forest we couldn’t yet see.
A11. What could it mean? Why did it keep appearing in suicide notes, scrawled on walls, written on bathroom mirrors in blood?