An unbranded brown shoebox containing something laid on my bed. It was wrapped in a thick layer of scotch which looked like it had been undone several times, giving the idea that someone had changed their idea repeatedly about what to put inside, or maybe it had just been passed through a lot of hands. My name was scribbled on the top of the shoebox in a sharp and not pleasing calligraphy, but the most fascinating thing was that there wasn’t a senders name and it didn’t really happen often to me to receive anonymous mail. Well, if we don’t count free insults from some homophobes that still hadn’t put a stone on the fact that I was actually gay and he politely preferred to put it on me. Who knew? Maybe in the box there would be an amputated finger or some psychology books to heal or even some strange sex toy that people had assumed I liked because I was gay. I went over the avalanche of thoughts and conspiracy that was burying me and I sat on my bed. The springs on my bed squeaked and the bedcover rustled. With my nails – and a lot of patience – I ripped the scotch from the shoebox edges and lifted the cover with my hands trembling in a mix of emotion, anxiety and fear.
Okay, it didn’t absolutely contain anything I expected.
Inside the box there were some audiotapes. They were of various colors: blue, white, black, red… each one marked with what it looked like silver non-fading pen. There was a number on the side of every tape, from one to thirteen. The last tape was marked only on one side and I wondered why. The thing was turning curious but definitely creepy at the same time. Luckily I was an old songs lover so my dad finally agreed – years before – to buy me a tape player. I had literally consumed all the audiocassettes people gave me as a present, and I loved the one my mom gave me before she died: it was a Barbra Streisand tape.
I was happy to have the chance to bustle with that machine once more. I put the tape in with the number one scribbled on and pressed the play button, absolutely impatient of knowing what would come out from the speakers.
Seriously, it could have been a bad joke, maybe some porn sounds, but I was home alone and, if it was really just a joke – most likely hypothesis – I could just throw it all.

A strange rustle.

It was a recording.

Then a voice came out from the speakers and I almost screamed.

It couldn’t be?
Hello everybody, Blaine Anderson here, if you recognize me. The tape crackled and it felt like all the air had been sucked out of my lungs. Nausea grew in my stomach and I suddenly felt sick because Blaine Anderson had killed himself a few weeks ago. He had swallowed a handful of pills and left this world without an explanation, not letting anybody realize he was suffering so much.
The purpose of this tape is to tell the story of my life or, better saying, the thirteen reasons why it ended and if you got them it means you’re one of the reasons why. Don’t freak out now, I’m sure almost none of you did what he did meaning to bring to this. Maybe you should have just thought. Maybe. Oh, and there are rules, obviously. You can’t complain to me anyway because I’ll already be dead when you receive the tapes, so just play the game and don’t create troubles, okay?

Pause.

I had to stop the recording because it looked absurd from too many sides. First, I couldn’t be one of the reasons Blaine Anderson killed himself. I hadn’t done anything, I was brooding at the speed of sound but I couldn’t find any reason. Blaine was beautiful and lonely and he had this deep voice which caused me to shiver. I couldn’t have hurt him, I refused to believe so. Secondly, was he playing with his potential murderers? The one who pushed him to suicide? Suddenly being on one of those tapes scared me to death.
If the box had reached me it meant that somebody else had listened to those tapes and found out the truth. Someone else knew I was on those tapes. Maybe I should have thrown them, maybe I wasn’t part of it and the box had just been sent to me as a horrible joke, seeing the comments I had aroused the couple of times I had been seen talking with Blaine. Yeah, maybe it was it, I was innocent.

But what if…

Play.
Rule number one: Listen. It won’t take long I promise, I know each and every one of you and I perfectly know you’ll be curious now. You wouldn’t know how to stay away from something like this anyway. Rule number two: once you’ve finished listening to every tape, rewind them and put everything back into the shoebox, then send it to the person on the tape next to yours. If you don’t do so I can guarantee that I made copies of these audiocassettes and they will become public. All of your nightmares will be of public dominion and I don’t think this is what you want. The thirteenth person can bring the tapes to Hell with him so maybe he would have the chance to give them back to me. Oh, I forgot! He exclaimed, spicing everything with a distracted laughter that made me shudder for how much it seemed to have him next to me. Into the shoebox there is also a map. Every tape corresponds to a place which I suggest – but not force – you to visit. You could find it interesting. Maybe. Enough chatting, let’s begin, are you ready?
I swallowed hard.
‘No’ I wanted to answer.
Hello Santana Lopez, it’s a pleasure not to see you again.
It looked all so unreal that it seemed impossible. I mean, Blaine Anderson, one of my school mates who had killed himself a few weeks before, had left some tapes with the reasons of his death and 13 people – me between them- where claimed to be the guilty ones. Now it was our time to listen since it looked like we hadn’t done it enough.
But what if I didn’t want to listen?
I didn’t have that much of a choice.

Play.
A rustle in the background, as usual.
Ah, Santana, you don’t need to put on that grumpy face. I know you won’t understand what are you doing at the beginning of my list and I know you will be turning up your nose, but don’t! Don’t switch off! You need to listen, because everything started with you. You’re the first reason, San. A pause and a sigh. I felt like I was violating a private atmosphere so I shifted uncomfortably on the bed where I sat. Do you remember when – as children – we thought we were straight? Ah, yes, if anyone didn’t notice it by now, Santana Lopez is a lesbian and I am gay. Which means a lot, actually. We thought we were straight because everyone was so interested in the other sex and so we thought we should do as the majority of the people and ask a person of the opposite sex out. So we did it, do you remember that?
I went through the same story too, but it had been a relatively brief phase of my life because my love for fashion and musicals and most of all the huge crush I had on Patrick Swayze after watching Dirty Dancing yelled gay from all around. So it didn’t take that much time to realize I was interested in boys. Blaine had to find it out in the worst way, instead: going on a date with a girl and realizing there was nothing really attractive in her.
Sadly, I knew it.
I don’t know how we found each other, but being friends with Sam Evans brought me to go out with the quarterbacks and cheerleader, you were actually a cheerleader. I admit it; I can recognize beauty and you were beautiful. You really were, indeed, you really are since I am the dead one. I asked Sam whether you had a boyfriend and he said no winking at me. I can still remember his allusive tone of voice that completely fell on nothing. Then, he gave me your number and pushed me next to you for the whole night while you were looking at me with a really confused and scared face. Curiosity overtook us, I guess. We exchanged numbers – even if Sam already gave me yours, and we promised to text each other like good kids at their first experience. I wonder why, but you really didn’t look like that could be your first experience. By the way we started exchanging texts which went from the simple getting to know the other to the ruthless flirting. I’m really sorry to inform you I imagined to text Zac Efron all the time. Yes, Zac Efron, any problem? I had a huge crush on him during the High School Musical era. Be honest, who didn’t? Anyway I think I was in love with the idea of a relationship. I liked the text exchange, the hidden glances, staying up all night sending messages to each other, you just… weren’t right for me.

Pause.

I took a few seconds to metabolize the idea of a kid dealing with his first relationship with another person whom he’s not actually attracted to. I think most people would have just gone mad, but maybe Blaine didn’t realize that. Moreover, it had been the beginning of the end, from what he had said, so I wished with all my heart to have been there to save him. I wanted to be the one whom he could have his first experiences so that I could bring peace to that confused spirit that kept coming out from him, also by the broken tone of the voice of the tape. Maybe we could have gotten to know each other, in another life, while being young and go out, play, fall in love…
But it hadn’t gone this way. Blaine was dead and letting my imagination travel didn’t do any good. Neither to me or to him. I had to finish listening to those cassettes and find out what I had done, no matter how horrible it was. Who knows, maybe when I finished I wouldn’t be able to look myself in the same light again.
If I kept going on playing and pausing the tape every ten minutes it would have taken a month to finish and I wasn’t sure I could handle it.
Thinking about it how could an old story still burn so painfully to be one of the reasons of his suicide? Was it so important?
Pressing that goddamned play button would have given me the answer.

Play.
I’d like for you now, if it’s possible, to take the map and go to my old house. I lived at 234 Sunday Street before moving to another part of the city. As I said before you can find the map inside the shoebox – hoping that none of you lost it, but I doubt it – and you will just have to follow my instructions to reach the various places. Of course, only if you have the possibility to move.

Of course I did, my need to listen to Barbra Streisand’s audiocassettes had been so urgent that my father had had to buy my a portable tape player, one so old that it seemed impossible for it to still work, but it was mine and so I could follow Blaine stories’ traces. I wanted to touch everything with my hands, to understand, because the sensation of something more that I was missing was too frustrating to just ignore all this.
I knew I had to be responsible in some way and I wanted to know why but jumping right to my tape wouldn’t have been right to him. If I really hurt him – all together with the other, obviously – I owed it to him.
Use the map as a battleship champ. You just need to go to the point D-3 then you can reach it comfortably by the bus number 27 if you’ve got the chance to take it, or you can just walk. It’s a beautiful district, or it was, I don’t know which is the right verb to use here.
Pause.

Looking at the map I succeeded finding the D-3 point and I realized it was too near to my house. I had never known he had lived so near to me. I probably didn’t know a thing about Blaine actually, but I never thought that maybe I should have. I just needed to turn left after reaching the end of my street and then go straight on. I could do it.
I took all the audiocassettes and managed to put them into the many pockets of my coat, I removed the tape from the player in my room and put in into the portable one. I recovered my headphones from my MP3 and connected them with my Walkman, then placing it into one of the pockets and took out from the dresser my half-finger gloves and a wool hat. Then, I glanced at the room looking for my scarf because it was almost impossible to go out without it. The ice age was covering the town because of a weather front coming from the Atlantic Ocean.
I couldn’t believe it. I was procrastinating thinking about the weather while in my pockets I had thirteen reasons of the death of a boy. I pressed down the hat on my head and ran downstairs. I caught a glimpse of the blue cloth I was looking for and I grabbed it together with the keys, running out of the house and wrapping the scarf around my neck, feeling anxious and my breath transforming into steam clouds that I broke walking into them.
I was following the map of a suicidal. I was following thirteen potential stories and potential murderers.
And I didn’t even have any relationship with Santana Lopez.
Play.
I never thought it could happen to you, Sam.
Pause.
Wrong side of the tape, great. I turned it and press the play button.
Play.

... the right verb to use here. I remember when you came to my house, dressed as a cheerleader, after school, and you were looking around awkwardly. Or embarrassed. I don’t know. I only know my parents weren’t at home as usual, too busy with the work at their new shop. But I didn’t suffer from solitude, at least not yet.
Lucky you, I thought, because when my father was stuck in his garage all day I suffered a lot.
We sat on the sofa watching repeats of My Wife and Kids without paying real attention. I was too busy thinking about where I should have put my hands, whether or not I had to pretend to stretch just to hug you or maybe holding your hand. The horrible thing about all this is that… I really didn’t feel like doing any of it. Not with you. And I didn’t know how this could be possible; my classmates didn’t seem to think about anything else. I almost believed you for a while. But let’s keep this for later.
How many stories did you have to tell? How many reasons to take your life away? I kept walking with an expressionless face. It was making me curious but it gave me goose bumps at the same time for how sad and creepy it was. It was a dead voice, the voice of a dead boy. Of course, even when I was watching a Michael Jackson concert on DVD he was dead; but it was a different kind of dead. I knew Blaine. Blaine and I…

I remember you kept that serious face also when you decided to set with your legs around my waist. My first kiss, in fact, was you. You leaned on me and – with the look of one who doesn’t really know why she’s doing what she’s doing – when your lips touched mine the sensation was good but, at the base of my stomach, I could feel a bad feeling pulsing inside me. You had to go. And that’s what happened, practically. I kindly pushed you away and told you I didn’t feel well and that it would have been better for you if you just went home. I thought I hurt you but your face was exactly the same as mine, you just couldn’t admit it. So, next day, at school, while I was still trying to figure out why I didn’t feel the strong desire to kiss you or touch you as I expected, you had already told a bizarre version of what happened. A rumor that was spread through the whole school in just one morning and that would have been the beginning of the enormous mountain or ground destined to bury me alive.
Blaine probably didn’t remember but we had gone to the same middle school so I perfectly know what he was talking about. The rumor had reached me too through notes or chatting in the corridors, I didn’t remember perfectly, I just knew I heard it.
I had to turn right now, I had reached Sunday Street.
I looked for Sam, the only one I considered as a friend in the new city where I had moved during the summer, to ask him why the hell did everybody looked at me like I had some sort of strange thing on my face. He answered with a shrug and looked around suspiciously. Then I remember he took me by the shoulders and dragged me to one of the room where the janitors kept their brooms and stuff.
“Man, it has been an awful move the one with Santana, really.” He told me, his forehead was corrugated.
I wasn’t sure I did understand what he meant, but I guessed San had told him everything, or at least, the real version of the facts.
“I know I shouldn’t have told her to leave, but…”
Sam shook his head in a reproaching way.
“Come on, kissing and touching her – Her first times. And then you tell her you’re a faggot? It’s the worst excuse ever, man. She’s destroyed.” He explained.
Gay, I thought, a faggot? I hadn’t even realized it myself, how could she have gotten to the right conclusion before me? She had felt the same of course, the same wrong sensation. But I hadn’t kissed her nor touched her; I hadn’t even felt the desire to do such things that was exactly the problem!
“Sam, I didn’t do those things to her, I’m not that kind of person.” I tried to reply but he waved my answer away with his hand.
“The point is that you did it and then make her leave with an excuse! Come on, man!” he hissed, keeping his voice as low as possible.
“An excuse?” I asked, more confused than before. I was starting to understand the problem, San, and it all started because of you. But what had I done to you? I really don’t understand.
“Yes, the being gay bullshit. You used her, mate.”
I turned up my nose.
“What if it wasn’t bullshit?” I answered. Maybe I could be honest with my only friend or at least that’s what I thought.
“What do you mean?” he asked, his face was a confused mask.
“I am not… attracted to Santana.” I explained, repeating what had been running through my head for weeks.
“It’s possible not to be attracted by a girl.” He shrugged again. “But it doesn’t mean that…”
“Listen, I’m only telling you what happened. You don’t have to believe me; I’m trying to tell you one really… important thing. I think I am gay, Sam, is that a problem?” I asked, naively and ignorant about the effect that the word gay had on the world.
“For all the ones out of this room it is, Blaine. Really, and I am really sorry, really, forgive me…” he murmured lowering his glance on his hand. I followed the line of his eyes and I saw that with his palm he was pressing a button on the desk: the old interphone that the janitors used to use for the service communications to the school. It had become obsolete so a new one had been installed but the old one was still working. That meant that the whole school had heard every world of what I had said. It didn’t matter if they were in the bathroom, in the courtyard, in class or smoking. Everyone knew.
And it had all begun because of you, Santana, and I know this wasn’t what you wanted but it is what happened and it has been where it all started.
I stopped in front of the number 234 and I looked at the house. It was clean and bright as if no one had ever lived there. As if that wasn’t the horrible cave of the worst of the consciousness. Blaine had found out everything on his own, in the wrong way and spread around the school. I didn’t get whether or not Sam had done it purposely but I knew it had happened because I had heard that conversation, too. I knew it; I was at my biology class when it had been transmitted.
And from that moment on Blaine had been more isolated than usual, labeled as faggot, slut, gay, tramp, fake. I had heard all those nicknames in the corridors but I had been too worried about protecting myself to care and just now I understood how selfish I had been.
“I’m so sorry.” I murmured to the empty house. The tape on the audiocassette had gone on in silence, then a whisper.
The beginning of the ground that has slowly covered my grave.
Sam Evans, don’t think I let you aside. You’re next.
End of part one.

I wondered again what I did to be in one of those tapes.