EPT---
When someone’s holding gun to the back of your head, you can only think in optimistic shades. Maybe a little bit of sky blue, white clouds dancing around your vision, God and His Children wallpaper smiling at you—but no, you are a self-professed agnostic, your sins unforgiven, unacknowledged even, because you believe you are perfect. God is not using 22 muscles to smile, not using 47 muscles to frown. God is staring at you with a blank stare, the stare of 17 9x19mm hollow points.
“Somehow, I think this is the end of a beautiful friendship.” Christiansen Dodson is behind you in the bathroom mirror, wearing a clear plastic raincoat that fits him like a condom on Ron Jeremy—stretched and entirely too small. Of course, you don’t notice the raincoat. You focus on where his arm suddenly vanishes behind your black hair, and your mind’s eye, the one that filled in the letter a in the first sentence of the previous paragraph, it paints a picture. And if that picture were worth a thousand words, your mind’s eye would be saying “you’re fucked” five hundred times.
The cold ring presses more insistently upward into the soft spot at the base of your skull, the place where the bullet will first traverse the brainstem, cutting you away from your body, then enter your medulla oblongata, obliterating your primal reactions, and finally kill your cerebrum, your center of consciousness and perfect control. At least you’ll die a perfect, rational, angel—unimpeachable, secure in your little ivory tower, in perfect control of your last, fleeting thoughts. Is a goal worth living for a goal worth dying for, you ask yourself.
“I know, you don’t want to die. Nor do I. But it is something we will all have to go through, something we will all have to experience once in our lifetimes.” A rite of passage, that’s what Chris is telling you. Perhaps it isn’t so bad after all. Perhaps there isn’t that much of a difference between living and dying, between breathing and coughing out your lungs convulsively as your CSF and blood mix with used Equate in your bathroom sink. Still, something about what he says spooks you. Maybe it’s the fact that up until about twenty seconds ago, you thought Chris Dodson had already finished his rite of passage and was doing some R&R in a pine box beneath Dodson Mills Baptist Cemetery.
“I know that if you die, they won’t find your body for at least a few days. Thank goodness your parents are in China. Or if I snatch you, it’ll take 24 hours for the search to commence. We’re going to have some quality time together, finally.”
You are in your Happy Place, as your school’s Violence Prevention Program taught you. You refuse to let the aggressor provoke you; you refuse to let the harassment succeed. You are a special, unique, wonderful individual, not what they say you are. You are ascending the seven step ladder of nonviolence and tolerance toward that happy place with cuddly teddy bears and God and His Children, His Children of all races, creeds, and sexual orientations, dancing beneath the rainbow.
You hear the safety. Snap back to reality. You know that sound because you bought this gun for Chris Dodson to use two weeks ago, a secondhand Glock 17, donated by the Reagan Administration to some Nicaraguan death squad commander whose body was strung up by the Sandinistas and whose head ended up being mailed to his family with a live grenade inside. You’ve heard the story a half-dozen times from various relatives. “What do you want,” you manage to croak. Dodson barely moves his head, just enough so that you can see one eye and two zits appear in the mirror.
He grins. A few moments from sending a hollow point into your brain, and the little pimply-faced bastard has the temerity to grin. “I want you to confess, Ben. Right here, right now.” A small recorder dangles from those hospital-blue rubber gloves. Knowing that you’re dead anyhow, regardless of whether you confess or not, you stare up at the almost-green, not-quite-yellow light of your energy-efficient light bulbs, screw your eyes shut, and—
