The following is an excerpt from Make Sure You Die Screaming by Zee Carlstrom. They grew up in Illinois and now work as a creative director in Brooklyn. You can subscribe to their Substack, which needs exactly two monthly subscribers to pay for Carlstrom’s NBA League Pass subscription.
Make Sure You Die Screaming follows a nonbinary narrator who, after a corporate burnout and personal trauma, steals a car and leaves Chicago to search for their missing conspiracy theorist father in Arkansas. Teaming up with a chaotic companion, they navigate a surreal, emotional road trip through America’s ideological and economic divides. As they confront their past and the scars left by capitalism, gender expectations, and family dysfunction, the journey becomes both literal and deeply psychological. It is now available to purchase from Flatiron Books.
We rage out of Chicago around four in the morning, hurtling south toward Arkansas because my mom needs help kidnapping my father. Actually, that’s a lie. A truer reason: I’ve been looking for an excuse to leave the city, planning my escape, biding my time, and Arkansas seems like a reasonably good place to hide. The kidnapping-my-father thing is a new development, a situation I do not entirely understand. Normally, I ignore Mom’s calls, but I was pretty fucked up last night, and my phone kept buzzing, and it was after midnight, so I thought… well, I don’t actually remember what I thought. Remembering has sucked since I got this fun new dent bashed into my skull.
Anyway, we are drinking. We are driving. We are making good time. Once we clear the suburbs, the Stevenson Expressway turns into I-55, and the grasslands roll into an endless brown blur. I’ve heard Indiana called America’s Hallway, but Illinois is Chicago’s Doormat—an unwelcoming strip of dirt, good only for wiping the shit off your shoes on your way to the Magnificent Mile. This is the Land of Lincoln, the Prairie State, and while they already burn these prairies every few years, I wish they’d do a better job. Scorch the earth and be done with it. Salt the fields, stanch the rivers, roll Illinois up like a sleeping bag, and send the white folks back to wherever we’re supposed to be.
This is the place I am from, but I’m from it like the Asian carp is from Lake Michigan. Invasive and destructive. I am a virus with great teeth, upturned nostrils, overpriced shoes, an ironic fashion mullet, and mild oral herpes. I guess you could call me the World’s First Honest White Man, but I don’t identify as a man anymore, so you’d probably call me other things first: pale, mesomorphic, alcoholic, workaholic, successful, violent, queer, pessimistic, autophobic, unheroic, semi-effeminate, sexually deviant, socially confused, normally repressed, compulsive, repulsive, and photosensitive. That’s an incomplete list, obviously, and probably a bit overdramatic, but I am in the mood for drama. I am floating near the cold center of a vaguely erotic black hole, sucking space and time, trying to find something to hold on to that I won’t destroy.
In other words, I am simultaneously experiencing a breakdown as well as a breakup. You might think these two things would cancel each other out, but they do not. If that sounds shitty, it is. If it sounds sad, it’s not. If anything, it’s hilarious. I am learning to laugh and smile and scream in the face of devastation. Plus, the drama gives me an excuse to self-medicate. That’s part of why we stole this car from my ex-boyfriend.
We race down the highway with a cop car in the rearview. An unsuspecting highway patrolman, maybe, but I can’t seem to shake him. I can’t even try to shake him. He’s been barreling behind us for the better part of fifty miles, and I can’t risk doing anything suspicious or overtly elusive. I slow down, and he slows too. I change lanes to dodge dawdling trucks, and so does he. A waking fucking nightmare, but also kind of amusing. I keep telling myself this state trooper would pull us over if he knew about my crimes, and he hasn’t, so he doesn’t. That is the logical conclusion, but my father taught me never to trust things like logic or perception or the cold solidity of fact.
My father is a fool, but he is also very persuasive. He has a kind of lunatic charisma, like Alex Jones with less emphysema. I don’t know how or why he has wandered away from my mom again, but I do know the word wandered makes it sound like he’s got Alzheimer’s or some other diagnosable excuse. And he doesn’t. Not really. There is something wrong with him, there must be, but he’s been tested many times for many things: bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, OCD, PTSD, whatever the doctors can think of. I’m not sure how he manages to beat these tests, but he comes out spotless every time. And here we are.
When Mom called me from Arkansas, I was lounging on the damp red futon I’d been Airbnbing for thirty-three dollars a night. The futon was located in the basement of a blue-haired elderly woman with sparkly tooth gems, seven large dalmatians, and the questionable business model of running a low-rent motel for the downwardly mobile. My living space was cordoned off from the rest of the basement with floor-length white curtains, like an army hospital. I’d been crashing there for two weeks—since leaving my ex—because I enjoy pretending that I’m still as poor as I was growing up. Wait, sorry, that’s not totally true. The real deal is I recently burned my entire life to the ground when I took my vow of radical honesty, and now I need cheap places to hide in case I can never find work again.
Either way, I didn’t hate the Airbnb. It fit my limited needs, and I met a self-proclaimed garbage goth who was crashing on the other side of my curtain. Her name is Yivi. She screams in her sleep. I’d bring her McChickens and Hot Cheetos whenever I stumbled back to my futon in the middle of the night, and we’d stay up talking about Freddy Krueger and techno-feudalism. Yivi’s twenty-two, addicted to pills, and on the run from a very bad guy she calls Big Gravy. She’s also great at drinking and my new best friend, which is why she’s mumbling in her sleep right now in the passenger seat of this stolen car.
Mom is calling me again, but I’m way too sober for a conversation. Buzz-buzz-buzz. Answer-quickly-asshole. I can’t safely drink with this cop on our tail, and thirst makes everything worse: my mood, my irritable ass, these headaches I can’t shake. I wish I were back in that cozy Airbnb basement, sipping Birthday Cakes in the damp dark, staring blankly at my curtains while Yivi hummed along to the Love Island theme song.
Instead, I’m out here, braving the real world while my iPhone rattles on the dashboard of my ex-boyfriend Clinton’s BMW M2. This fancy-boy car was a gift from Clinton’s CEO father on his thirtieth birthday. Blue paint job, silver racing stripes, sticky leather seats, fuzzy red steering wheel cover. It’s an adorable shit-box, terrible for long drives and long legs, but Yivi’s even taller than I am, and she doesn’t seem to mind.
Clinton, on the other hand, was my malevolent short king. Five-foot-five with thighs like Thor’s thunder. A sour German-Irish dude from Chicago’s North Side. We met in college. He liked the Blackhawks, and I liked his Mastercard, his Gold Coast apartment, and his enthusiastic alcoholism. We got along because Clinton’s family doesn’t know he’s queer, and neither does mine. Also, Clinton’s a big-time liar like I used to be. The difference is he grew up too wealthy to ever feel bad about the lying. He used to tell me I should lie more, lie to get everything I wanted, and he was right. Lying got me promoted, earned me my clients’ respect, landed me and Jenny a corner office. But it also mutated into a real nasty habit.
I won’t go so far as to say I’ve spent the past ten years living a lie—lest I seem a humongous cliché—but I will say I’ve been living a few thousand of them. Big ones, small ones, fat ones, tall ones. A never-ending semi-Seussian litany of tactical falsehoods. But that’s all over now, and I might even be glad. Approaching happy. Another humongous cliché is the truth will set you free, but that one, I’ve recently learned, is horseshit. What the truth will actually do is tank your career, eradicate your remaining interpersonal relationships, bash your skull in with a baseball bat, and then set you free.
Excerpted from MAKE SURE YOU DIE SCREAMING by Zee Carlstrom. Copyright © 2025 by Z.S. Carlstrom. Reprinted with permission from Flatiron Books. All rights reserved.