Lucky Save

“I’m just trying not to think about it. And they keep bringing it up to me! Why are they doing this?!”

S 

unday morning, on the fifth day of quarantine, I woke up to 12 missed calls, three voice mails, and 17 texts.

All the calls were from the same person. Manny. My heart sank.

This was bad.

Manny was 16 and had a history of depression, but he was in a good school and was doing well. Then quarantine happened.

Manny was having a very difficult time, cooped up for so long with his family. I hoped that the calls were just distress calls — fighting with his parents, stuff like that — but I knew they weren’t. Manny wasn’t an alarmist. If he called me 12 times in one night, something was wrong.