near death. The webcams were unforgiving when it came to recording their dying moments, which would be posted on the site.
All the members were girls and young women, although opinion was divided on the question of whether a woman named Lucille Seville had once been a man. At the very least, she wore a wig, which they knew because the paramedics accidentally knocked it off when they were taking her away.
The rules of the Suicide Queens were extremely simple. They took turns, one of them every evening. A greeting on camera to everyone who was logged in, then the presentation of the pills. Usually this introduction occurred in front of the bed or the sofa on which the rest of the drama was to unfold. The first points awarded by the other Queens were for the number of tablets. More points could be scored for powers of persuasion, which were on display during the emergency phone call. Some members of the club screamed and cried hysterically. Others kept perfectly calm and said only, “I’m going to die very soon. Come and get me if you can.”
Valerie was one of the latter sort. She swallowed more sleeping pills than anyone else, and somehow or other she got hold of the really hard stuff. Her next step could only be rat poison. She washed the medication down with alcohol and kept her emergency call short. After that she lay on the bed, in full view of the community at home in front of their monitors, waiting for sleep to come. And for the paramedics. Sometimes they took only a few minutes, sometimes half an hour. Valerie claimed to have seen the light at the end of the tunnel a number of times already. She knew the movie of her life by heart, she said, because she’d seen it flash before her eyes so often.
No one could compare to Val. She took the most pills, stayed conscious longest, and at least once she hadn’t given the emergency services switchboard the number of her apartment. The paramedics had to go halfway around the block asking questions before they found it. Valerie almost died that night. But a week later she was sitting in front of her webcam again, back in the running—with the highest score since the founding of the Queens. Her smug demeanor told everyone that she thought the point of life was in the expectation of death.
Rosa had competed actively only once. She had spent days on Google, reading everything she could find out about committing suicide by taking sleeping pills, pages upon pages upon pages, until the idea almost took on its own kind of morbid romance.
She hadn’t even fallen asleep yet when the ambulance pulled up outside the door of her building. The only club member with fewer points to her name was a punk from Jersey who claimed that aspirin had the same effect as zopiclone and tried to convince them that she had fallen into a coma after the fifth tablet. Rosa had not taken part again.
A week later she met Valerie at Club Exit on Greenpoint Avenue. Valerie spoke to her as easily and cheerfully as if they had met out shopping. Val was wearing a T-shirt that said Your hardcore is my mainstream. Rosa would never have recognized her on her own. The distorted perspective of the webcam, the pixels, the poor lighting had given her a ghostly look that did justice to the name of the Suicide Queens. In real life, however, Valerie was a pale teenager like Rosa herself, with a black bob that gave her the look of a 1920s silent movie star. Like Rosa, she was thin and heavily made up, and at their second outing, at the Three Kings, it was obvious that she also thought much like Rosa. After half a dozen meetings, some by chance, some planned, she admitted that her appearances on the Suicide Queens site were all a hoax. The pills were magnesium tablets, the bourbon was apple juice, the paramedics were friends from the apartment on the floor above hers.
Rosa was both fascinated and disappointed. “How about the Queens and their code of honor?”
Valerie stared at her, astonished. “But they’re freaks!” she blurted out, and that was that.
In the end, Rosa’s admiration for the way Valerie coolly fooled a bunch of idiots who were tired of life—including Rosa herself—won out. During the online chats, the others were all eating out of Val’s hand and never thought