The space between Cory's shoes and the bottoms of his pants, which dragged the ground, were as empty as he felt at times. He was a shadow. A dark observer in the distance. And where he walked, light dare not follow. He was a true nihilist. Nothing he could accomplish would matter, and everything he could think to try, would fail; only adding to his sorrow.
As he woke up, pulling on the nearest pair of black pants and his favorite Deftones concert shirt, he would wrack his mind for something that he could change. Anything he would be able to control. As he fell back on his bed in a thump for a few moments peace before school, his mother began her all too familiar lecture of "getting to school on time." Cory would groan and get out of bed loudly enough for her to hear. He'd sulk half-way down the stairs until he heard the door slam which marked his mother's satisfaction. Then he would grudgingly re-trace the steps back to his solitude.
His teenage wasteland was quite messy compared to the night before. Papers were spread all over the floor like tiny, crumpled, fallen soldiers. The desk by his window was emptied, aside from the broken lamp which was separated from it's shade. A ringing in his ears ruined the silence. As he reached for the only source of noise around, his fingers ran across the grooves he had carved into the wood a few nights before. Cory's sleep had once again been interrupted by Amber. She was the only true friend he had in recent years. The single person who felt it courteous to listen when he spoke.
"Hey Cor, why aren't you at school babe?" her words filled the room and bounced off the walls in all the time it took for this to register.
"It's too damned early Amber. Mom's out. I'm not coming."
"You say that day after day, and where do you always end up? That's right, school. So get your lazy ass out of bed and come downstairs. I'll drive you there since you're half-sleeping anyway. Besides, how do you expect to get into college? Being such a slacker and all. You won't."
"Whatever. Give me ten," a bit irritated with her tone.
"Two," and the line went dead.
In the time it would take them to drive to school, they couldn't even listen to 'Comfortably Numb,' once. The systematic monotony of Cory's day sickened him. He woke up, and everyday he could her his little sister dancing around in her cheerleading uniform, which he thought to be more of a Halloween costume. His mother burning breakfast because she was too busy kissing his father... which sickened him more than schedules. His dog barking at his neighbor's cat in their endless qualm. And the same person he always saw in the mirror stared back at him, with the same bags under his eyes.
It was 7:46 in the morning last time he had checked. And sure enough, at 7:48, Amber seemed to lay down on her horn until she saw some form of life emerge from the Californian beach-front home. The one thing Amber and Cory had in common, was that they had both moved from big cities and been edged into a world of easy-going surfer guys and their ditzy giggling girlfriends.
Amber had moved from Australia when she was three years old. For a while, she and her parents lived on a little street near China Town in New York, New York. It was her father's job which had brought them there. After her father's death, seven years later, they made another move because her mom couldn't stand the city's confusion without him. Although Amber loved it there, she could find something to be grateful for wherever she went. Life in her big city moved faster than it did on the west coast, but she had adapted.
Cory on the other hand, he had been on the brink of full acceptance for about a year, but the past three have been unbearable. He was born and raised in downtown Chicago with the smells of hot dog and sewage filling his tiny little nose everywhere he went. But at age 12, when he first moved to California, those smells were changed into salt and sex wax.
He had few dreams or aspirations, but his hopes were lifted into the clouds whenever he saw Amber's face. For the past five years, Cory had realized that she was different. Special. The kind of person the lucky few come across once in their lifetimes. He began to fear, however, that she would never feel the same way about him. Amber had her own thing going. Plenty of friends. Grades he couldn't even fathom attaining on his semester reports. A smile that lit up the room, and sometimes forced him to simper as well. What would she ever want to do with him? A thought that often crossed his mind while thinking about her romantically.
"CORY! Damn boy. Don't just stand there, hop in!" Great. He had been daydreaming again, looking like a mindless idiot.
As they pulled into their student parking lot, which closer resembled manic heaps of gravel, he dreaded getting out of the car. Cory couldn't stand the entire social aspect of school. Apart from the fact that he was pretty much considered an outsider, the scene baffled him. Finding it difficult to keep track of which ground to worship under the feet of whom. He pretty much had his heavy metal, which plays on a broken CD player on CDs so mortally wounded they now skip. His elaborate gothic sketches where the characters mirror himself. And his spot under the tree where he sat during his free time.
First period meant pretending to listen to his physics teacher without falling asleep: a difficult task in which he was beaten by his eyelids more than not. The rest of the morning proved to be just as drab as the rest. It was a thursday, the only day of the week that Amber didn't have his lunch period.
At the same time he cooly sat in that familiar seat outside of the school's torture chamber, she was in calculus. "DOL." Those where the letters Cory had just skillfully painted on the outside of the lunch hall. Each figure was a beautiful red. They stood proud, beginning at his belt-level and extending far beyond his head. The building was a light sand color, aside from the statement.
Now, while one might speculate, coming to believe the so called 'blank stare' in Cory's eyes, one is also often wrong. His ability to keep up his collected front served him greatly when he got into trouble. It enabled him to think of excuses and pass them off as actualities. He knew exactly what he had been called into that office for. It was his 'last strike.' Psh. Whatever. He had even made a point to sign his work in the same bold lettering. Cory had been trying to get kicked out of that school for the past three years. Now that he was in his senior year, it might finally happen, giving him little alleviation. Most normal people would have been nervous in his predicament, but not Cory. His flavor was relief. And he drank the moment in.
"I have to what?!" he was stunned. How could they force this onto him? They had no right.
The next morning, instead of attending school, he was to see Dr. Ghaznawi. A psychiatrist who worked out of a run-down building in San Diego. Pieces of bricks were scattered all around the circumference of the structure as if the wind had chipped away at the garrison. The door almost seemed as it would fall off the hinges when he flung it ajar. The first few floors of the establishment looked more like a house than an office building. It was an old high-rise complex that had been turned into an office for private dicks, cheep psychiatrists, and injury lawyers. The wallpaper was jaundice with age, peeling in the corners, and sporadically slashed for no reason.
Cory was greeted by a figure in the distance. A shadow. Just as he viewed himself.
"Oh. I'm so sorry, " flicking on a light, "I had forgotten that these lights weren't on. Come. Come upstairs and we'll get started."
He did as instructed, and soon found himself releasing every detail. Everything about that night he and Tyler had been out at a party. He remembered the simplest intricacies of the wee morning hours' events. The music was high, just like they were. It was at the old mansion on Raven's Avenue. The boys had skipped school earlier that day. After all, it was just another friday. They were 14 years old. What important events in history would a scholar entrust them with?
They left around three in the morning. Cory's parents had been calling non-stop and threatened to call for a search party. Fearful of such authority finding them in that state, they climbed into the car belonging to their friend's parents.
"After Tyler was thrown from the car I got out and stood over his body, watching the skin purge it's insides. I..." he paused, whimpering a bit.
"Go on. I want to hear."
"I, well, I started yelling at him. I knew he was dead. God. I'm so stupid! I could tell by the way his body was contorted and his chest no longer rose. Dead. But I stood there, feet apart, eyes fixed, screaming. The other car didn't even stop! It just backed up, and went on. I screamed about how we should never have gone to that party. About letting me drive. About letting me live! I still shouldn't be alive. Look at me. But mostly, I just yelled at him about dying. About things that weren't even his damn fault! And I went on like I was mad! I stood on the yellow line in the center of the road. The line that I had crossed. But I couldn't cross back over to where he lay..."
"Were you driving?" She asked such stupid questions. Cory didn't mind. He could take as long as he wanted to respond, and he did. It was silent in the room. The walls were tinted pink, but it was hard to tell in the way the light shone through the windows and washed out all of the colors.
"I drove us both into hell. The only difference is that he's six feet closer than I am now."
DOL. Death Over Life. That's how Cory felt anyway. He was Death, standing over the Life he was responsible for the destruction of.
"Well," putting a cheery and abrupt ending to the session's moment of intense frustration, "I think this session has been quite productive. I'll see you again in a couple of days. It might give you a chance to think about things."
Although Cory nodded in accordance with everything she was saying, his eyes shown the dark thoughts which were weaving through the ripples of his brain. Each thought was pulsating through his body emitting a sense of nobility and courage through his skin. Dr. Ghaznawi had a slim figure, she had little room for such things as courage. She gave no feedback on anything Cory had to say. In fact, he wasn't entirely positive she was listening to a word he was saying half of the time.
As Cory's shadow floated across the street to his father's station wagon, his mind wandered elsewhere. It was his fault, he thought. Everything was his fault. Each time his parents got into a fight, it was about him. Whenever Amber wasn't smiling, it was because of some cruel thing he said to her but didn't mean. Tyler's death existed because of what Cory, alone, had done. Just then, a black '67 Camaro zipped past him, jerking at his body and forcing him back into his abrasive reality. That was the car. The very moment that he decided what must be done.
He slid into the front seat of the station wagon, feeling the hot leather on his thighs and back. He had a loose grip on the metal in his hand. It was cold, distant. As he allowed it to unite with the car, it caused a vibration all around his body. His mind returned to that night years before. Cory knew that he shouldn't be driving in this state. It was dangerous; not only to himself, but to everyone else on the road. He could ruin someone else's life. All it would take was one smooth transition of the steering wheel's direction, and there would be someone who could feel the friendly, caressing chills which handled his corpse.
He drove straight home, as quickly as he could, trying to run and hide from his dark thoughts. As he pulled into the garage and turned the car off, his mind returned to his previous plot. Strolling through the den, Cory grabbed a piece of virtuously white paper.
Cory was never much for words, he didn't know how to express himself. When Amber found him the next morning, his lips blue and his hands gripping a piece of paper and an empty bottle of sleeping pills, she wept. The paper contained three words: I kill people. She kissed his lips. They felt cold and tasted salty with dried tears. No one knows how dar she ran, just like no one thought Cory was audacious enough to accept this as his end.
Don't make the mistake of thinking this is a story about love, because it's a story about the human dependance on meaning and purpose. Cory felt  he had none. And without him, Amber adopted the same feeling as her own.