Can't We Be Sybil About This?

I had a Psychology class in my Junior year at Fredericksburg High. I loved it. Who can care about algebra homework when you have a paper on sexual deviation due on Monday? The chapter on criminal psychology was interesting, too, and it was right around the time the "Beltway Sniper" was shooting folks in and around my town so we spent a long time going over false empowerment and all that; but my favorite was always mental disorders -- the penultimate of which is Dissociative Identity Disorder.

People call it "Multiple Personalities" usually. It's fascinating, the reality of it. Sure, it's used as a cheap plot device in a lot of bad fiction to the point that most people start to question whether it really exists (like amnesia), but the mechanics of it are downright admirable.

You see, in some cases when a person's body is experiencing some severe trauma his mind just decides that it's not going to deal with this, so it ducks back into the dark recesses of the brain and invents on-the-spot a new personality or character to take your place and handle the trauma (typically when your mind gives up you throw up and pass out, but it's the rare cases when the mind makes up an imaginary friend to take its place). This usually crops up in cases of repeated trauma, like a girl being consistently raped by a relative; the alternate personality will take over and handle it and leaves the "real" personality with no memory of what went on. You just wake up a few hours later, thinking you were asleep while "somebody else" was dealing with the pain of reality.

This creates massive havoc in the brain's infrastructure, but the real problem is the one associated with all coping mechanisms. As someone who drinks to forget his problems will soon start drinking for no reason, a person whose brain splits off into multiple personalities to avoid dealing with problems will start doing it for no reason. Coping mechanisms are addictive, and people with DID can go their whole lives without consciously realizing that their life is being shared between two or more identities who simmer below the surface and struggle for control.

If those problems could be solved, the concept has a high value for consumer application, as I see it. There's been many times when I have to deal with crap and I wish I could just stroke off and have someone take over my body and I can wake up later with problems bypassed. Times like when I have to write stupid huge essays or for some reason have to sit around for hours to wait for something, it would be nice if some broken part of my psyche could take over for me.

Obviously, when I got in that fight or shot guns that well and couldn't consciously account for my actions the first thing I thought of was that maybe my dream had come true and I had formed a separate identity to defend myself. I suppose if someone were to have a split personality, the ideal would be to have one that could put four attackers on the floor in seconds or tag three bullet holes in a straight ascension in center-mass of a target ten feet away; it's just not realistic. I didn't show any of the signs of Dissociative Identity Disorder. I was never missing any time, I was always painfully aware of how unusual the world was becoming. I hadn't pulled the genetic lottery winner, my brain was all Chris all day.

If there ever was a time when I'd want to be able to leave my body behind and let someone else deal with this for me, it would have been now. My father was dead and I didn't seem to care, he'd left me more money than any 17-year-old should ever be accountable for, I'd assaulted four teenagers and nearly punched a cop and all the people who should have cared didn't, my powers of observation seemed to be running on overdrive, I could shoot a 9mm semi-auto like it was a squirt gun, and now that squirt gun was sitting in a box under a plastic bag filled with ammo behind me as my car sat parked in someone's driveway while the red and blue lights of a police cruiser spun around. A 16-year-old girl sat in the seat next to me, watching my face and expecting me to tell her what to do.

All I could do was stare at the rear-view mirror, past the police officer stepping out of his car, past the unlit street and shadows of mailboxes and sidewalks, hoping I could see into the inky darkness of the back of my mind. If ever there was a time to have a split personality, this was it, and boy was I trying.

Knock on Wood

Trying to ignore the fact that there was now a -- well, two lethal weapons in the back seat of my car, we stopped at a Wendy's in Lorton before the expressway so we could have the some food since it was around 4pm and we hadn't eaten since breakfast.

I got a spicy chicken sandwich with fries and Dr. Pepper, Amy got a double cheeseburger with a side salad and a milk.

"Milk? Are you 16," I said as soon as she'd ordered, "or 6?"
"What's wrong with milk? It does a body good."

I fought every instinct to make a lewd joke about that.

"Besides," she continued, "they make them in these cool bottles now and offer them at all the fast foods so hopefully there'll be fewer fat kids running around in the future."
"I don't think it would be hard to stop fat kids from running around," I said as our trays were served up.

We found a table and unwrapped our sandwiches like Christmas presents, Amy asked if I'd told my mom about anything. I told her I hadn't yet, not because I wasn't sure if she was "one of them" but because I was never sure if I wasn't making too big a deal about everything.

I felt like too much attention was being put on me when Amy was around, so I asked her if she told her parents where she was going today.

"Did I tell my dad I was going an hour upstate to shoot guns with a boy? No, I didn't." She jabbed at a tomato slice from her salad with her fork.

With a boy. Was that a joke about what this might look like, or what it was? I didn't know anything about either. Jeez, she's 16. Well, I was 17. Maybe she was going to turn 17 soon, because if not I was going to become two years older than her in a month. I could ask her when her birthday is, but I don't want to keep bringing that up.

I realized just then that I hadn't said anything in quite a while, and pulled my eyes away from Amy's salad. "So what did you tell him?" I asked.

"That I was going to the mall with some girlfriends. He doesn't like to deal with girl stuff so he doesn't keep track of my friends well enough to know I don't have any girlfriends," she said.

Her hair kept falling from behind her ear and into her face. The streaks of color had mostly grown out and were fading. I noticed she wasn't wearing the "I'm a punk" wristbands she used to wear, and her shirt wasn't heralding any bands or 1980s fad. She wasn't using pencil under her eyes anymore either, it made her face look more innocent.

"What about your mom?" I asked. I never heard her say anything about her mother in the few times the conversation wasn't on me.
Amy held her lower lip in her teeth for a moment before saying, "My mom left about six years ago."

Ah crap.

"Oh," I said. "Sorry."
She shook her head, "No, it's alright. She had a breakdown or something, said she couldn't live with my dad anymore and at first said she couldn't even look at me. She moved out, never got around to filing for divorce. After a few months she started talking to me again, she calls every once in a while. Kind of distant, still, but I dunno. My dad's been different since then too, he left the Marines and started doing construction. Sometimes I think he did something that freaked the hell out of her, but he never talks about it."

"Wow." I didn't know what else to say.
Her face flushed for a moment. "Yeah," she said.
"Do you have any siblings?" I asked.
"Nope, only-child-syndrome; just like you."
Just like me.

"But anyway," Amy continued, "since he keeps his distance from me I get plenty of freedom. If I wanted to I could be doing all kinds of wild stuff."
"Like driving an hour upstate to go shoot guns with a boy," I said. We both laughed, I was glad I could bring some levity to the conversation at last.

Amy pulled a napkin around in front of her. "I don't have a pen," she said, "but this makes, what, six?"
"What? The shooting?"
"Yeah, the shooting. I'm not like an expert, but you shouldn't be able to shoot like that on will."
And so the conversation was back on me. "Might bunch it together with the fight thing. Maybe something is just different with my brain where I memorize all the stuff I see in movies, like fight scenes and gun fights, and it all simmers there under the surface waiting to be summoned up."

Amy snuck one of my fries.

I thought for a second and said, "Maybe I'm some weird Remembers-Everything Kid, and the FBI or NSA has been paying Mr. Comstock to keep an eye on me and stop the word from getting out until they could figure out a way to use me."
Amy frowned, "And your dad got close to finding out so they killed him?"
I shrugged. "Maybe he just died. People die. Maybe this is all just some crazy way for me to keep my mind off of the fact that my dad is dead."

Amy looked disappointed, "I asked you about that before, at Starbucks, and you said you thought this was real."
"Maybe I wanted it to be real, maybe I wanted to keep going on not even thinking about the reality of the situation and keep my brain in fairy-tale land, maybe I wanted to get you to keep talking to me."

This conversation was entirely too deep to be taking place at a Wendy's.

"You think I just talk to you because I think you're a ninja or Batman or Jason Bourne or whatever it is any given minute?" Amy asked, defensive.
I didn't say anything.
"I talk to you," she went on, "because this is interesting, and you're interesting. And because you talk back, and don't just think I want to borrow your chemistry notes."
"You don't take chemistry."
"You know what I mean."
"You didn't drink your milk."
"Are you mad at me now?"

I pressed my back against the chair and leaned my head back. I don't know what I'm mad at.

"No. I'm just worried, I think, that if this whole thing is real. If there's some big, government... thing going on here, and it now involves me and guns..." I trailed off.

"What?" Amy asked.

"...then it's only going to get worse."

Amy set her elbow on the table and plopped her chin in her hand. "You should knock on wood," she said.
"You should drink your milk," I said.
"I'm serious."
"The table's formica."
"That's not wood?'
"Laminated plastic composite."
"You should find some wood."
I stood up, we were both done eating. "Come on," I said, "you can take your milk to-go."

And we were gone. I pulled out of the parking lot and could see the sign for the highway onramp when a bright light filled my vision. I looked up at my rear-view mirror, the car behind me was flashing brights. "What is this?" I said to myself, angling the mirror to get the light out of my eyes, then more lights came -- these ones red and blue and spiraling. The car behind me was a cop, trying to pull me over.

I swore, and tried to pull over but the road I was on had no shoulder and I didn't want to just stop in the lane, so I flashed my brakes and kept going slowly until I got to a road I could turn into. It was a residential road with houses on both sides onward as far as I could see in the dusk light. I pulled into the first driveway, and the police cruiser stopped on the road behind my car.

"Were you speeding?" Amy asked.
"No, I don't kno--" I was reaching for my car's registration when I suddenly remembered the gun in my back seat. And the hundreds of bullets. And the knife. I might as well have stopped and bought some crack rocks and strapped a dead hooker to my trunk.

I should have found some wood.

A Buyer's Market

Always in threes. When I tried to shoot like a normal person, I couldn't get more than two shots off before the recoil had kicked my aim all the way off the target. But when I turned my brain off, stopped thinking about the muscle movements and just tried to shoot on instinct -- like how I tie my shoes on instinct or throw a baseball without thinking about all the different arm and hand movements that come together -- three shots in a straight line.

I killed the silhouette guy at least 10 times.

"There's something I should probably tell you about myself," I said as Amy came back into the range.
"What?" she asked in stride, pulling one of the ear cups from away from her ear.

I looked at her flatly and calmly for a moment.

"I'm Batman," I said in all seriousness.

Amy made a face, "I thought you were a ninja."

I turned and looked at my perforated paper target, "Ninjas don't use guns," I said.
"Neither does Batman," Amy said while poking a fresh box of ammo into my chest.
"Oh yeah," I said after trying to keep my fictional vigilante ducks in a row, "well he should, they're freakin' sweet."
I moved Amy's free ear muff back to her ear and let off three more shots, this time with one hand.

She pulled one of my earmuffs away and said, "I think he got a bit turned off on them after his parents were shot in front of him." Then she let go of the earmuff and it sprung together and cupped my ear. Ouch.

"Ah yes," I said loud enough to breach our ear protection. "Dead parents, the great call to action."

Three more shots.

After about two hours altogether Amy had enough shooting, and by the male-female transitive property so had I. We went back into the store and returned the eye and ear protection, and set two emptied handguns on the counter.

"How was it?" the guy asked me. He was a portly guy, had a big gut squeezing between his two suspenders. Fifty, balding, uneducated.
"It was... the same as usual," I said when I remembered that I'd told him before that I went shooting all the time. Keep your lies straight.
"No, I mean the USP. It's a clean shot, isn't it?" His accent was a bit thick, didn't sound like Virginia. Georgian, if I had to guess. The state, not the country.
"Oh," I said, "Yeah, I took right to it." Amy smiled and walked past me to go look at the pocket knives. There was another customer, a guy wearing an orange camo hunting coat, looking at the knives as well, between squeaky drags through the straw of his Taco Bell cup.

The store owner wiped the gun I was using down with a rag, oiled the slide and cleaned the barrel, then affixed a metal trigger lock and placed the gun back in the glass case behind a tag that said,

USED
H&K USP
$580

"Is that cheap?" I asked the guy.
"Hell yes," he said in a snort, "new ones go for over a grand." I stepped over to look at the unused handguns and verified that.
"Why are used ones so cheap?" I asked, "Do they wear down or something?"
"Naw," the guy said with a wave of his hand, "People think they gotta buy new so it'll still be 'pristine' or whatever. That's bunk, though. It's just like buying cars. You buy a new car just so you can say nobody's driven it before, but a used car'll be broken in a bit. A brand new gun won't shoot as good as it could, it doesn't have the grease worked in and the barrel hasn't been set from the heat yet."
"Set?" I said, looking down at the used USP I was using. I wanted that gun.
"Yeah, set. The heat from cartridges firing will make the metal warp a bit, so a new gun is made with the intention of having it warp a bit. Like making a cotton shirt too big because they know it'll shrink."

"So there's no problem with buying a used gun?" I asked. Amy was still looking at knives. The Taco Bell cup guy was looking over at me now.
"As long as the gun is maintained and there's no defects. And trust me, I maintain all these guns like they were babies."

Sure, grease them down and scrape out the soot. Just like a baby.

"So..." I started, trying to shift back into the smooth guy who talked my way into renting a handgun while underage. "Could I buy this one?"

He frowned. "Did you happen to turn 18 in the last two hours?"
I frowned too, "Even if I pay with a lot of twenties?"
He laughed, "I'd love to, kid, but there's no way. The age limit for using the range is just a rule here, but the age limit for buying is the law. As lax as the gun laws are here in Virginia, I could still lose my store license or go to jail. Not happening. Shame too, because I have a bunch of accessories for this gun that're on sale this week."

Well, I hate to pass up a sale. I thought, maybe Amy was 18 now and I could give her the money and she could buy it. I called her over and asked if she was 18 yet.

"No.." she started.
"You're 17 still? Damn." It was a really pretty gun.
"Actually, no. I'm 16 still," she said a bit sheepishly.
"You're sixteen?" I said a bit too loud, then quieted down. "How are you a senior, then?"
Amy sighed, "My birthday was like the day before the cutoff and when I changed school districts in 7th grade I'd already had a bunch of classes from the 7th grade here, so they put me in 8th."
Huh.

The store owner looked a bit annoyed by now. I shrugged at him, and headed for the door with my rolled up paper target. "We can take these, right?" I asked as I was walking out the door.
"No matter how old you are," he said with a grin.

In the parking lot, we both walked toward my car when over my shoulder I heard someone call, "Hey, kid." It was the guy with the orange hunting jacket, he'd replaced his Taco Bell cup with a lit cigarette he was puffing ably from. Amy and I stopped, without thinking I moved my arm around her waist and edged her around so she was behind me. "What?" I said.

"You said you wanted to buy a used H&K?" he said, then gestured with his head over to his beat-up pickup. I handed Amy my keys and our rolled up target sheets and told her to put them in my car. She looked up at me with concerned eyes for a moment, then took the items from my hands and backed toward my car.

I crossed the parking lot toward the orange jacket guy and when I was close enough said, "Yeah, why? Are you selling one?"

He smiled, "As it happens, I am. I have a USP about two years old that I was going to try to sell here, but he told me he wasn't buying any because he had one already and didn't think it'd sell. I was hoping you were going to buy it in there so he'd take mine finally, but I figure if you want one so bad you could buy mine."

He opened the drivers side door of his truck and pulled a metal case from under his seat and unlocked it with a key from his chain. In it was a retail box with an all-black USP printed on the lid.

"It's black?" I asked, trying to keep myself positioned so I could run or kick this guy in the gizmos if he did anything weird.
"Yeah, black so it doesn't catch the light if you're trying to be sneaky, I guess," he said, took a drag from his smoke, and said, "but I just used it for target practice, of course. Cleaned and oiled it regularly. Great gun still, I just don't use it very much because I like Sigs and wanted to trade it in for a P226."

He took it from the foam fitted box and handed it to me, unloaded. I looked it over, it was just as slippery as the one I'd used. The sights were in fine condition, and there was no rust under the slide. I dropped out the magazine and pulled the trigger, it clicked normally. The serial number wasn't scratched off either.

"Hasn't been used in any shootings?" I asked.
He laughed and said, "Nope. I told you, I'm a Sig man."

It felt the same as the gun I'd just fell in love with, it just didn't have the movie-riffic silver slide.

"How much?" I asked, trying to imagine how much cash was in my wallet.

"How much was the one inside?" He asked, looking at the store's door.
"Four eighty," I lied.
"Then how's four fifty sound? He was only going to give me $400 for the trade in anyway."

"Does it need a registration or permit or anything?" I asked, hesitating.
"No, man. This is Virginia. Don't need a permit to carry, a license to own, or a registration to buy. Just need a concealed weapons permit if you intend to walk around with it tucked in your pants or something." What a great state, I thought.

I paid him, took the gun back to my car and avoided all of Amy's questions, then walked back into the gun store as the truck was pulling out.

The door chimed behind me as it closed, the owner behind the counter looked annoyed again to see me.

"You said you have USP accessories on sale now? How about I buy some while they're on sale, and when I come back next month when I'm 18 I'll be all set."

Ten minutes later I walked back to my car with a plastic bag filled with five boxes of low velocity hallow points, three extra clips, a cleaning kit, and the graphite-handled five inch pocket knife Amy had been looking at, for the hell of it.

Lucky Shot

I'm leaning over a glass counter, the edge is digging into my stomach. Amy is standing next to me, watching expectantly over my shoulder. A salesman stands behind the counter, each hand hovering a few inches from the two selections my eyes are darting between. I like the silver one; Amy had her eye on it since the beginning. The other was silver and graphite with clean lines; the light hit it beautifully. There was a gold piece down in the case that actually looked kind of nice, but was way -- way too tacky. I scratched my chin, they were both so expensive. I shifted my weight between my feet and sighed, then pointed at the one on the right; the silver and graphite one. "This one," I said to the store keeper, "the H&K. I'll try this one."

"Ok, sure," the man said. "How many boxes of ammo do you want?"
Umm...

Amy's big idea for Saturday was to go shooting. She'd gone online and found a gun store with a pistol range in Lorton that would let you rent their guns for the range. We drove my white '99 Honda Civic, it took about 50 minutes on I-95 which took us right through Quantico. From the highway all you could see of Quantico was the dense woods of the USMC base on either side of the road but somehow it still felt creepy to me. Somewhere behind those trees was a University with a lab that my Dad worked in for over 25 years and I'd never even been there. I kept driving, but I knew somewhere beyond the forest and brick there were probably answers to questions I haven't gotten around to asking yet.

When we got to Lorton we stopped at a branch of the bank where most of my money was and I withdrew a few hundred dollars, all in hundred dollar bills, so when the man at the gun store told us that we had to be 18 years old to use the range I could hold up a few hundreds and say, "even if I pay with twenties?" That worked, well enough, and now all I have to do is choose a gun when I know nothing about them. Amy picked hers in a snap; she'd told me her dad was in the Corps when he was younger and that he had a Beretta 92 that he let Amy shoot a few times, so she was the resident expert. I just picked the one that looked the coolest, which was apparently a Heckler & Koch USP with a silver slide.

"It's a choice weapon," the shop guy had said, "they made them especially for the US Special Ops."
"Neat," I said, feeling kind of silly.

Amy wanted us, or me specifically, to go shooting because she figured that if I am indeed able to fight unusually well -- maybe I'm also able to shoot unusually well. Short of picking random fights, there's no easy way to test my fight skills again, but testing my firearm skills is only a rental away. It all seemed kind of dumb to me. I grabbed the gun I picked and a box of .45 ammo and sauntered into the shooting range with stupid huge earmuff things on my head. Amy followed behind me with two paper sheets with plain-looking black silhouettes. The indoor range was otherwise empty, with about 15 firing positions all in a row. I set my gun down on the platform inside one of the positions and Amy set up in the one next to it. I figured out how to attach the target sheet onto the metal clips and sent it back a few feet with a rickety-sounding electronic pully. Amy slid bullets into the clip of her gun in silence, and I tried to emulate her as if I knew what I was doing. After about eight rounds, the resistance of the spring was making it near impossible to slide any more bullets into the clip; I figured they must use machines to load them to capacity, or maybe it was just because my hands were shaking. I was holding little explosives in my hand, lead and steel wrapped around explosive powder. I wasn't even holding the gun but I was sure I was going to somehow make these bullets explode on their own and take my hand off. The earmuffs made my quickened pulse echo back into my ears. I gave up on loading more rounds and slid the half-full clip into the gun to a satisfying click. Amy was just watching me with a half smirk on her face.

I set the gun back down and gestured to Amy for her to go first. She didn't understand, and pulled the muff away from one ear and said "What?" which barely made it through my own ear protection. I freed one of my own ears and said, "You take a few shots first." I hoped my nervousness wasn't showing.

She smiled, and stepped back into her firing position. I had to step out of mine to see what she was doing. She pulled back on her gun's slide, held the gun straight forward with both hands, held her breath, and pulled. A loud bang tore through the concrete room and a lead bullet tore through the paper hanging about 6 feet away from her. Mister black target man had a fresh hole in his shoulder. Looked easy enough.

I went back to my partition and picked up my gun. It felt heavy now, the cold metal sucked the heat from my hand. I was holding a lethal weapon. I could freaking kill someone. It's a creepy feeling.

I held up the gun as Amy had, pulled the slide back as Amy had, and pulled the trigger as Amy had. Nothing. Stupid safety.

I flicked the switch on the side of the gun from a white S to a red F and readied again. I held my breath, aimed at the middle of the target's featureless face, and squeezed the trigger. The gun bucked loudly in my hand and the empty cartridge sprung out as the slide kicked back; the cartridge spun through the air, bounced off the partition wall to my right, and popped me right in the cheek. It was hot, as if it just been party to a controlled explosion of magnesium and sulfur. I screamed and swiped at my cheek, it scared the hell out of me. Nobody ever seems to talk about the flying cartridges or show them in movies. Those little buggers have a mind of their own. Through the muffs I could hear Amy laughing, I turned around and saw her behind me covering her mouth and giggling, but she wasn't looking at me. I followed her eyeline over to my paper target which dangled happily from the clips in perfect health. I hadn't even hit the paper. What the heck?

"What the heck?" I said, pulling down my ear protection. "How did I miss? How could it be that complicated? You point and shoot."

Amy shrugged, still giggling, and went back into her position and began popping more rounds into her target.

I growled and picked my gun up, fired through five more rounds. A few of them hit the paper, one actually hit the target... in the arm. This was surprising. It seems like if you aim at something and shoot, you should hit where you aim. There shouldn't be too much more to it. Sure, it should be hard to be super-accurate or to shoot with one hand, but the bullet should go in the general area of where I point.

I finished my rounds and dropped the clip out, angrily sliding more bullets into the clip. I went through all of those, and another clip, and another. My box of ammo was half spent. I dropped the gun and stepped back. Amy was having a blast, it seemed.

"I guess that answers you question," I said once she'd stopped and taken off her earmuffs. "I'm not Jason Bourne."
"Yeah, you don't have the shoulders," she said.
I pointed at my depressing target, "Or the weapons training."

"Well," she said in deep thought, "when you got in that fight, were you thinking about what you were doing or just doing it?" She was holding the gun still, down at her side.
"I didn't think about it, I was too freaked out by the guy about to smash my face in. It was like an instinct. Like watching a bunch of action movies was just burying all those fight scenes into my subconscious."
"You've seen enough gun fights, too. Maybe they're down in your subconscious," she paused for a second. "So don't think about shooting, just pick up the gun and shoot. Don't think about your arms or aiming. Close your eyes, take a breath, open them, and shoot."

So I got back in my firing position and slid my ear covers on. I slid a newly-loaded clip into the gun, and set it down on the platform in front of me. What a waste of time.

I looked up at the target, the lifeless outline of a man was mocking me. Don't think, just shoot. That's what they told soldiers in World War 2 so they wouldn't have to consider the fact that they were going to be killing human beings. Just shoot. Shoot the damn gun.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, as Amy suggested. Eyes still closed, I took some more deep breaths and visualized the target hanging in front of me. I imagined he was that Mexican kid, about to punch me -- no, about to shoot me. He tracked me down and brought a gun, he was going to shoot me right in the face. He was going to shoot me then shoot Amy -- just like he shot my dad. I could see the stupid little grin and stupid little pesudo-mustache so popular among people in the midst of puberty. He shot my dad. He killed my dad and he's going to kill me.

I opened my eyes, picked up the gun and slowly let out my breath as I unloaded three shots in rapid succession. Three cartridges fell gracefully to the ground and danced around my feet. I put the gun down, felt my arm pulsing. I looked up at my target, finally, and there they were. Three holes, in a straight line, from the heart up to the base of the throat, all equally spaced. He didn't look so happy anymore.

I turned around to Amy who was staring, mouth open, past me and at the target. I pulled off my ear muffs and said, "Can you go get me some more ammo?"

Delivered Fresh

Amy and I went right from school to my house, she apparently didn't mind consistently skipping all her classes after lunch.

"All my important classes are in the morning anyway," she'd say.

We decided to stop thinking about all of my "problems" for a while and have some time off. If my school administrator was pulling a paycheck from the government to keep me out of trouble, he still would be after the weekend so there was no need to go nuts trying to figure everything out at once. Since my mom was gone we could hang out for a while at my house.

It took 'til about the time I'd ordered a pizza and paid for it myself that I realized I had a girl over to my house. That is, I knew Amy was there, but it didn't set in after all this time that I had no idea what was going on with Amy and I. We were spending a lot of time together, but it all seemed to be focused on figuring out my life. We never talked about anything else, and she seemed oddly interested in the whole thing.

And now there was a girl in my house, eating pizza I paid for.

Since she hadn't seen it, and it was one of my favorite movies, I elected to watch The Bourne Identity. I put the DVD in the player and turned on the TV while Amy curled herself into my living room couch. The TV was on the wrong input so I went through the settings to change that, then went through the DVD player settings to make sure all the display and sound settings were right.

"Geez, did you memorize the instruction manuals for this stuff?" Amy said between bites of supreme hand-tossed while I futzed with the menus.
"Eh.. no. I'm just good with interfaces," I said.
"Good with interfaces? Can you put that on a resume?" behind me, I could hear the grin in her voice.

I looked over my shoulder. "I dunno, I've always been able to figure these kind of things out. Setting watches, setting up electronics.. I can just do these things."

"That's got to be one of your least interesting super powers."

I started the movie and thought about how I could afford a TV about 10 times nicer than this one. I could afford a lot of things now, but somehow I couldn't bring myself to spend any of the insurance money. All the food and stuff I'd bought lately I'd done so with money I already had. As long as the money stayed in the bank, maybe everything could stay the same. Plus it was earning about 6% in a money market savings account. Just the interest on that is more than I could make in a real job straight from high school. But then, I'm supposed to be watching the movie and not thinking about these things for now.

Amy pointed out some of the similarities that I'd referenced, like the surprise ability to beat people up and the weird amounts of money coming from nowhere. There was scene I was dreading, though. Matt Damon and Franke Potente in a hotel room in Zurich or Paris or somewhere. They're on the run from the CIA people hunting them down, he dyes and cuts her hair, it's romantic, and they start making out. As aware as I was about Amy being there, for that scene I was very aware that she was sitting right next to me. Nobody said anything for a while, a tension seemed to hang in the air.

Teen drama!

It was dark when the movie ended. I got up and threw the paper plates away and stuck the leftover pizza in the fridge. Neither of us had said anything yet.

"Well that was good. I'll have to see the second one soon," she said at last. I just looked at her for a moment over the kitchen counter, thinking about what happens to Franke's character in an early scene. I for once worried that I might be going about everything completely wrong.

"So I guess I'll get going home now," Amy started, "my dad doesn't like me out late without reasons."

She got her coat and walked toward the door, which I was holding open. "Ok, bye then," I said as nonchalantly as possible. As she stepped through the door she stopped and turned around.

"Oh, I almost forgot," she started, "I had an idea for something we can do tomorrow. I'll walk here in the morning, we can take your car." She smiled and walked away.

I closed the door slowly, and looked back at my empty house. It smelled like oregano.

White Rabbit

Nathan Comstock was showing an account balance of $8,876 in checking, $43,605 in savings. That seemed a bit high for a school administrator, but then what do I know about grownups and realistic amounts of money? That was also as far as I probably had time to check while crouched in front of Nathan Comstock's desk in his office in what could be described as a bubbling cauldron of law-breaking.

What I was after was his entire banking history, and fortunately modern banking websites make this easy by allowing you to download your transaction history log files to use in Quicken or Microsoft Money or whatever. I navigated to the Export option, selected an ambiguous filetype that wouldn't be restricted to some financial application, and downloaded it to the desktop.

So.. now what? Shoot, I probably should have thought ahead about these kind of things. I had to get the file out of there without leaving evidence. I could email it to myself but that would leave traces (you don't want to leave traces when you're infiltrating bank records), and I didn't bring a USB drive or a blank CD with me. Could this PC even burn CDs?

I moved some papers out of the way of the desktop's tower and examined the cover of the CD drive, squinting to make out the small little emblems. DVD, Compact Disc, CD-R/RW.

"Bingo," I said again to myself, soon thereafter realizing I need to stop saying bingo.

After some searching I found a blank CD in a desk drawer and stuck it in the CD drive. I started burning the file onto the disk, it seemed to be taking forbloodyever. I cracked my knuckles as I watched the progress bar drag across the screen. Amy was still standing outside the door, blocking the window. I saw her bobbing back and forth slightly, probably more nervous than I as she was on the front line.

While I waited I started fixing the items on the desk that I'd disturbed; I was wiping the keyboard keys off with the sleeve of my shirt when I heard a light tap on the door. I stopped moving entirely for a moment, then inched toward the door. Some lady was talking to Amy, I couldn't make out her voice. I heard Amy say "was supposed to talk to him about" something, her back still covering the narrow window, she began tapping furiously on the door with a knuckle. This lady must want in.

Nowhere to go, the window going outside didn't open and there were no closets to hide in. My heart began racing as I darted around the small office. I heard the doorknob jiggle, so the only thing I could do was turn off the computer's monitor and dash to the opposite end of the room, tuck myself against the wall that the door was now opening against.

The door opened swiftly, catching me off guard and pinning me against the wall. I grabbed the doorknob on my side and held the door open, if it closed I'd be standing there pressed against the wall of my principal's office for no good reason. I heard rustling papers around the desk. I peeked through the door's window and saw an office assistant hovering over Mr. Comstock's desk, lifting documents and folders as if searching for something. I ducked away from the window, and noticed that to my right, through the gap between the inside end of the door and the door frame I could see out into the hall, Amy was standing right there looking both confused and very nervous. I waved my free hand, as much as I could wave it in the few inches I had between the door and the wall, to get her attention. Her eyes, darting around, finally met mine. Her eyebrows shot up and she covered her mouth quickly to mask a gasp. I tried my best to mouth "hold the door open" but she couldn't read it.

I slid closer to the door frame and waved her toward me. She stepped across the few feet between us and I whispered, "hold the door open". The recognition came over her face, and she stepped forward and leaned in the office and extended an arm to hold to door. I slowly released the handle and felt her take the weight of it.

After a few moments, Amy said aloud, "Is there something I can help with?" Her voice trailed off as she seemed to realize she might have made a mistake, if she stepped away from the door and it stayed open it might look suspicious.

"Not really," the woman said, "just looking for Mr. Comstock's wallet. He needs his ID for a police report."
Behind the door, I was smiling but I knew Amy wouldn't be. Her voice shaking slightly, she asked "did something happen?"

Papers stopped rustling for a moment. "Oh, nothing serious. Just his car was vandalized. Oh, here it is!"

A few seconds later, she was out of the room and the door swung shut, and I uncompressed from the wall and finally began breathing regularly. Just then, the computer speakers made a slight jingle noise and the CD tray ejected from the computer. I grabbed the disk, returned to computer to where it was when I found it, and slipped out the door and fell into step behind Amy who was walking as casually as possible out of the office suite.

Returned semi-safely to the school's main hallways, I was about to laugh when Amy turned on her heel and hit my shoulder with her open palm.

"Ow," I said despite a general lack of pain.
"What the hell was that?" she grunted under her breath. "I thought she was going to go in there and catch you with your hand in the cookie jar."
I rubbed my shoulder, as society seemed to demand, and said, "That's not my fault. You did great, though. There and on the phone. That was really great."

She stood there a moment, looking cross. "I thought the call about his car being vandalized was just a distraction," said Amy.
I smiled again, "It was a distraction. But if it turned out to be a phony call it might have been suspicious coming just moments after a call luring him into logging into his bank account."

Amy sighed, and started walking again. "So how did you know about his car?" she asked.
"That it was vandalized? It became quite clear to me after I threw a hammer through the rear windshield."

Back in the library, where none of the librarians seemed to care that we weren't in class (so long as we weren't eating or shooting up the place), we headed to the computer lab and sat down at one of the open computers far enough away that the screen wouldn't be clear to passers by. I logged into a guest account inserted the disk I burned, noting that the CD was covered with my fingerprints, and navigated to the bank transaction history file. The file opened in Excel, and described every transaction in both accounts from now dating back as far as I could go (two years).

After some inspecting, I'd located his paycheck direct deposits from the school. They were clearly labeled as deposits from the Fredericksburg School District and were consistantly a $2200 deposit every two weeks.

"Almost $53 grand a year," Amy said, "that's.. I don't know. That's more than a teacher makes."
"Yeah, but it's not unusual for a principal I think. But he's almost got that much in his accounts right now. Between the $8,876 in checking and the $43,605 in savings that's almost exactly a year's wages. That's a lot to have accessible, and not in a retirement account or something." I'd done a bit of research into finances when I'd gotten a $500,000 check hand delivered to me by a bonded currier with an off-duty cop.

I kept looking through the transactions, sorting them by deposit amounts.

"Woah," I said.
"What?" Amy said, leaning closer to the screen.
"Look at this. Besides the direct deposits from the school, every month there's three other direct deposits in a row. Every month they're for different amounts each, but look if you add them up..."

I selected the three deposits from this month ($1301, $2134, and $2565), and and added them together (with a sum() formula in Excel), together they equaled $6,000 exactly. I did the same with the three deposits the previous months, all different amounts but totaling $6,000 together.

"So he's making an extra..$72,000 a year on top of his school salary?" Amy asked.
"That's what it looks like. These deposits go back as far as the transaction history." I said.
"Does it say who the deposits are from?"
"No. That's the weird thing. Direct deposits have to list the issuing bank's account holder. It's the law. All these have is an account number. The only people who could issue deposits without disclosure would be..." I paused when I realized what I was about to say. The weight of it bounded against my mind and pulled my jaw down.

Amy spoke up, "What, Chris?"
I closed my mouth and bit my lip. Finally, giving into the conclusion and seeing no alternatives, I said it.

"The government."

Sneakers

The biggest thorn in the paw of my grand plan to stop going to school was that my mom would probably notice that I wasn't going to school. I'd either have to explain all the weird things going on with me, pretend to go to school every day and find something else to do, or play it like I couldn't focus because of my dad and if I failed classes I'd make up the credits in the summer and get my diploma in the mail. That one seemed like the easiest.

It wasn't an issue, however. When I got home my mom was running around the house packing suitcases.

"Are we going somewhere?" I asked, setting my car keys on the kitchen table.
She stopped in place and stood up, looking at me for a moment.

"I am," she started. "I've been talking to Aunt Cathy on the phone and I don't think she's doing very well, with the divorce and then your father. I'm going to spend a few days out there with her until she's feeling better."

Cathy's my dad's sister and I suspected always a bit batty. She didn't come from Delaware for my dad, her brother' funeral; said she wouldn't be able to drive herself, and nobody could go pick her up.

My mom continued, "Would that be ok? I mean will you be ok by yourself for a while?"

She must have noticed that I was doing alright with everything. My dad died in January, it was now March. Seems like enough time to me.

"I'll be fine," I said. "Nothing major going on, just school. Are you leaving tonight or tomorrow?"

Nothing major going on. Nothing major! I was almost surprised at what I was saying, it seems like I should be more obviously concerned about mysterious money and a weird conspiracy to get me off the hook for knocking four guys into the hospital. Perhaps I was hesitant to trust anybody, even my mom.

She left early the next morning, before I would normally had left for school. Before she left she told me not to throw any wild teenage drug parties. I told her I wouldn't know how if I wanted to. She left, I went back to bed.

It's a marvelous feeling to sleep right through the opening bell for school. Skipping school is one thing, playing sick is one thing, but just not going to school is another feeling entirely. It felt like freedom, like taking charge of my life.

I woke up again around 10, and sent Amy a text message saying I'd meet her in the school library during lunch. I spent a while not thinking about my problems, just sitting around the house. I longed for my innocence again, when I had two parents and my biggest concern was -- hell, I had no biggest concern.

I marched from the school parking lot into the building and straight into the library. I'd missed three classes already, freedom bells were still ringing in my head. Classes were out for lunch and teenagers loitered around the building dealing with their own fragile little lives. I didn't pay attention to whether anybody was noticing me as I walked through the school.

The library was big. Not Breakfast Club big, but one of the largest rooms in the building nonetheless. Fear of school shootings had changed the standard library design from halls of tall bookshelves to long hedgerows of waist-high shelves bisecting the room at angles. Tables were spread wherever there was room, and librarians stood vigilant behind the front desk making sure nobody was talking too loudly or eating any food.

Amy was at a table in the back of the library, sneaking chips from her backpack in defiance of the no-food rule. I pulled up a chair across from her.

"You just get here?" she asked.
"Yeah. Someone took my parking spot." I said. I hadn't had time to eat, but her chips weren't too enticing. I hate Fritos. Curly little disasters.
"I thought you said you'd be coming to school," she was splitting her focus between me, her Fritos, and the Newsweek in her hand.
"I said I'd be coming to school, not going to classes." She rolled her eyes.

"So," she said after a minute, closing the magazine, "what's your plan for snooping Comstock's bank records? Should I be wearing a repel harness and kevlar?"
"Shoot," I said, "I forgot to plan that." I thought for a second. "How's your phone voice? Can you sound like a grownup?"
"I can," she said, her voice a bit thicker and sounding like a WASP.
"Good," I said, "now give me a notebook and a pen."

After lunch was fourth hour. Amy and I were in the same study hall, a class typically spent sitting in silence or doing homework due that day in hours five or six.

People tell me that in the West coast they're called periods. When I say fourth hour, I mean fourth period. Follow?

Anyway, it was fourth hour but Amy and I weren't in class. We were in the administrative office, suspiciously hiding in an empty office down the hall from Mr Comstock's. Nobody was currently using the office, in it were only a built-in desk and a telephone. The lights were off, only a small amount of light filtered in through the rectangular window in the door.

Having finished writing, I slid the notebook over to Amy, sitting behind the desk. She read through it briefly. "Can you do it?" I asked.
She nodded, then asked, "How do you know what bank he uses?"
"New England Federated? He has a mug from there on his desk."

She smiled and shook her head, picking up the handset and dialing the school's primary phone number. As it started ringing she handed the handset to me and said, "You should ask for him."
I could hear the phone ringing in the main office just a few feet away. I took it and asked why.
"They might notice if I call twice as two people."
"Huh. Smart," I said, putting the handset to my ear just as an office worker answered it.
"May I speak to Mr. Comstock, please?" I said, trying to sound nonchalant.

"Just a moment," the voice on the phone said. I handed the phone back to Amy and said, "connecting."

Amy took the phone and nestled it to her ear with her shoulder and picked up the notebook and pen.

"Hello, is this Mr. Nathan Comstock?" Amy said after a moment in the slightly modified voice we'd worked on. She crossed a line off of the notebook.
"Hi, this is Sarah from New England Federated Bank's fraud monitoring department. I'm calling today because our computer has flagged some suspicious-looking activity on your account and I'd like to verify with you whether they were authorized charges or not."

I swallowed hard. I really hoped he had an account at that bank and didn't just collect free mugs. Amy's eyes darted back and forth for a moment, then crossed a line off of the page.

"Ok", she said into the phone. "First I'll just need to verify your identity. Could you confirm your home address, please?" she wrote something down, "and could you verify the last four digits of your social security number?" she wrote some more.

She continued reading, "Thank you very much Mr. Comstock. Now regarding the suspicious activity on your account I'm seeing two separate charges this morning at a Citgo station in Bowling Green totaling $53.49 together and then shortly after a charge of $478.88 at a Circuit City store in the same town. Can you verify whether you authorized those purchases or not."

She smiled, "You didn't? Ok, sir, I'm going to mark this account for fraud investigation and for the time being we will remove these charges and restore the balance to your account. Are you around a computer right now? Ok, can you log into your account right now and verify these charges no longer appear?"

She nodded to me, it was working. I peeked out the window for a minute.

"Uh huh," Amy said into the phone. "Great. So I'm going to get started on processing the investigation request for your account and we'll cancel your current debit card and mail you a new one, but if you could go through your account history online for a few minutes, just looking for charges you don't authorize, that would be good. If you see any other unauthorized charges you can call me directly by dialing New England Federated's toll free number and pressing extension 7129."

She read him the 800 number I'd gotten from the phone book, reminded him to look right now for unauthorized charges, said goodbye, and hung up. She leaned back in her chair and sighed like she'd just given birth. "That's not easy!" she said.

"You did great," I said, "Now just one more call to make."
"And why can't you make this one?" she asked, hand on the handset.
"Because I sound like a 17 year old boy. It's much harder to tell female ages based on voice, and you need to be a parent for this one."

She sighed again, picked up the phone and pressed redial. This time she was in full WASPy mother voice.
When someone in the office picked up, Amy spoke into the phone, "Hi there, I was just at the school picking up my daughter for a doctor's appointment and in the front parking lot, that's the staff parking lot, isn't it? Yes, mm hmm, well when I was driving by it looked like I saw a group of young men wearing football jerseys apparently vandalizing one of the cars. One of them had a hammer I think, they ran away when I drove by but it looked like they were doing something to a grayish tan Sebring. I hope they weren't---" and she trailed off, pulling the phone away from her mouth. Then she blew into the microphone, and then hung up.

"Damn dropped calls," she said to me with a grin.
"Ok, I said. "It's on. Just have to wait for the call and hope it comes soon enough."

We both pressed against the door. A few minutes passed, but just down the hall a phone rang. A few seconds later, Comstock's door swung open and he ran down the hall past us.

"Amazing," I said.
"I'll watch the door," she said, "one knock means danger and two knocks means mega danger."

We crossed the hall, I slipped into Comstock's office and Amy stood in front of the door, blocking the window with her body. I stepped behind the desk and my heart sank when I saw a blank monitor screen. I sat down at the desk, and pressed the power button on the monitor.

The screen took a few seconds to cycle back to power, but the black screen soon quickly snapped to full color. Internet Explorer was open, and I was looking at New England Federated's website. Comstock was still logged in.

"Bingo," I said to myself.

Leads

It was only 1:30 or so, but I went right from school to the nearest Starbucks. I would have gone home, but my mom could have been there and I didn't know how to explain that I was done with highschool and that nothing in my life was making any sense at the moment. I sat in a hard wooden chair in the back of the shop with my back to the wall, my hands spinning a warm cup of coffee, milk, and sugar, and my brain running in circles.

I kept telling myself that I must be overreacting, that I must just be manifesting some weird emotions over my dad's death. I never seemed to show any emotion over his death, never screamed at the sky and asked God why or broke furniture in my basement. I just, I suppose, dealt with it. People around me were probably wondering why I was so passive about it, afraid I was internalizing it and was going to explode someday. Explode like, collapse a larynx and break a nose.

Maybe that was it. I was just holding it all in, the massive weirdness of the life insurance money had distracted me from my grief and I never noticed it until it broke free and broke the nose of whoever was closest to me. Maybe.

Amy got there around 3:20, maybe she got out of her last class early. When she walked in the door she smiled at me, held up her index finger and got in line at the counter. I whistled, and pointed at the iced passion tea lemonade sitting across the tiny round table from me. She held in a laugh and walked over, sitting across from me.

"How gentlemanly," she said.
"That's what you got last time, so it's 'your drink', right?" I asked.
"I guess. I also like the gingerbread latte, but they've probably stopped doing those now that Christmas is just a memory."
"Probably," I said, sipping my gingerbread latte.

She was going to try to talk me out of leaving school, say I'm overreacting, echo the voice in my head.

"So," she started. I gulped. "This makes four things now," she finished.
I sighed in relief and said, "yeah."
"Well, your dad's strange passing and the insane amount of money; and now you wailed on those guys like you're a samurai and Comstock let you off without even a call home? That's four." she thoughtfully chewed on the end of her straw.
"I said 'yeah', not 'yeah?'."
"Oh."
"Yeah."

I thought a minute, about what I'd realized before she got here, but she cut me off, "You don't think this is like, repressed angst for your father or something? I mean all these weird things, they're not like a coincidence y'know? There's some... thing going on."
I looked at her. "Totally," I said.

"And actually," I continued, "there's five things. I also, since the 'fight' have felt.. different."
"Different how?"
"I don't know, it seems like I'm seeing things different; thinking differently. In Mr. Comstock's office, I was paying attention to everything, making assumptions about him and his life based on tiny things like eyeglass pad imprints on his nose and that all the fancy books on his shelf had never been opened. I usually don't know what color people's eyes are if I've known them for years. Now I'm remembering eyeglass pad imprints? Who notices those things?"

Amy thought for a moment, then she smiled and covered her eyes with her right hand. "What color are mine?" she asked.
I sighed and said, "Green. And your ears are pierced twice but you only wear one pair now so the upper piercings are going to close soon. Your shoes are Vans, gray and blue, with the laces tied at the top and the ends tucked in. Your keys are in the left outer pocket of your jacket and there are two keys on the fob besides your car and house key."

She looked at me silently, probably trying to figure me out.

"The guy to my right," I continued, "two tables over, is a smoker and either cheats on his wife or recently lost a lot of weight. He's about 38, 188 pounds, and works in an office within a quarter mile of here. The lady behind you is either married to or the mother of someone who recently became blind. There are nine people total in this place, two exits (one with an alarm) and unless the Brinks truck pulling into the parking lot is for the place next door, there's between three and five thousand dollars in the safe right now."

I drank the last of my coffee.

"Umm," Amy started, "so, yeah, five." She bit her bottom lip for a moment, and looked around the room. "Cheats on his wife?" she asked at last.

"Yeah, or lost weight. Actually, yeah, cheats on his wife. His wedding ring is loose, it moved a bit when he moves his hand, he probably takes it off a lot. He also keeps eyeing the brunette behind the counter and gave you two glances when you came in. He might have just lost weight since he had his ring sized, but that suit is tailored nicely but is at least two years old. Cheats on his wife."

"This seems familiar somehow," Amy said, looking back to me.
"Well," I said, "it's kind of exactly like a scene in The Bourne Identity."
"Never saw that," she said.
"Really? It's the best movie ever. This guy is pulled from the Mediterranean with no memory and two bullets in his back, later finds out he was a CIA hitman but botched a job and got shot. Before he figures that out, he wonders why he knows all of the license plate numbers on the cars outside a diner he's in and all that. You'd be Franke Potente."
"Ok," she said, "is it possible that you're a CIA hitman and don't remember it?"
"Not likely," I said.

"So you're serious about leaving school?" she asked.
"Yes."
"So we should put together these mysteries and try to figure them out. Maybe get some leads."

Ok...

So we put everything on the table, started jotting things down on paper napkins. There were five points of weirdness but only two of them had workable leads. My dad dying, the only connection could be that it had something to do with the Corps. The money, there's nothing to follow up on. Whether or not I demonstrated an abnormal physical proficiency with that fight, there's no loose ends. Same story with my suddenly acute attention span. The only thing with a lead was Comstock's abnormal behavior.

"There is something," I said.
"What?" Amy asked.
"When I was in Comstock's office, he got a call from someone. I could almost swear they were talking about me. It was right before he told me I was in no trouble, but it almost seemed like he didn't want to. On the phone he said 'I don't know if I can make that float,' and 'it's going to be expensive'."
"As if someone was paying him to get you off the hook?"
"And he was ever-so-subtly trying to ask for more money because he went totally off the book and could get in trouble." I said, circling "Comstock" on the list of leads.

"So who would pay to keep you out of trouble?" Amy asked.
"My guardian angel," I said. "Someone who either really likes me, or doesn't want a lot of attention on me or the fight."
"And how do we figure out who that is?" she asked.
I crossed my arms and thought for a minute. "Bank records," I said, "I'll need to see his bank account."
"Aaaaand, how do we do that?" Amy asked, "Hack the bank database with our magical CTU computers?"
"Looks like I lied," I said, "looks like I will be going back to school."

Quoth the Raven

After that particularly delightful conversation with Mr. Comstock wherein I was let off the hook for being attacked and defending myself like any rational person with Spider-Man powers would, I left the administrative offices and found myself in a mob. Much of the school was still on lunch break, and dozens of students were standing around the main hallway milling about and talking excitedly amongst themselves. They'd probably gathered for the show, ambulances and stretchers and all that.

"There was a fight upstairs in the back hall. Like six guys got sent to the hospital."
"Who started it?"
"I dunno, the ones I saw were all those gang dudes."

As I took a few more steps into the crowd a few faces began to turn toward me. Fingers pointed, voices hushed. Rumor spread through the masses like a ripple, and people yet again had a reason to single me out. Fantastic. I started cutting through the mob and heading toward the door when Amy wedged her way through to intersect with me.

"You're here," I said as she fell into step with me. A trail of "it was him?"s echoed behind us.
"I'm everywhere," she said with a grin. "Did you see the fight? And did you just come from the office?"
"I was the fight."

We'd broken free of the largest part of the crowd and ducked into one of the side halls by then.

"You mean you were in the fight? Ohmigod are you ok?" she looked me over, trying to find where I'd hidden the pints of blood I should have been leaking.

Am I ok? I considered that for a moment. A long moment.

"Yeah, I'm fine. Somehow I just put four kids in the hospital."

She looked in my eyes, trying to find which part of that made sense.

"I don't know," I said before she could say anything. "I physically ran into a bunch of those Mexican gang wannabe guys, I said some stupid stuff to them, they put me against the lockers and as the ringleader was about to cave my face in, I like freaked out and went allkung-fu on them and was about to clock Officer Rhodes in the face when I blacked out."

"That's... " Amy started, "... different. So you beat them all up?"
"Yes."
"All of them?"
"All of them. Broke a nose and collapsed a windpipe, I'm told; though I could swear I felt a wrist break and the guy I kneed in the back will probably have some coccyx fractures once they x-ray him."

I looked around, people in this hall were starting to look at me, too. I grabbed Amy's arm above the elbow and started walking toward the door to the student parking lot.

"Have you taken karate classes or something?" she asked in stride.
"No; and that's what Comstock asked me right before he told me I wasn't in any trouble and that they wouldn't even tell my paren... my mom."
"That seems unusual."

We stopped in front of the door. "Everything seems unusual now, and it doesn't seem to wanna stop. I'm done here, for now."
"Done with what?"
"Done with school, I'm not coming anymore. It was bad enough with all the 'his dad died' stuff, now people are all going to know that I uncharacteristically kick ass."
"You can't drop out, school's done forever in like two months!"
"I don't need to drop out. We need 22 credits to graduate and with all my A.P. English classes and those dummy computer classes I tested out of I've got 21 as of this semester. There's two months of school left and I just need to pass two of my classes. I can do that without trying, so I will."

She stood with her mouth open. I pushed the door open behind me with my foot and stepped backwards through it.

"I'll talk to you later," I said, grabbing the door for a moment as it swung shut. She just looked at me.

My cell phone buzzed as I was getting into my car. I pulled it from my jacket pocket and flipped it open. Black-against-green letters spoke of a new text message from Amy:

"starbucks @ 3.30"

I sighed, flipped the phone shut and tossed it into the passenger seat. I looked up at my high school, hoping I'd never see it again, then drove off into my future.

Catch and Release

Principal's office. Ice bag on my head. My head still hurts, and is now kind of wet.

At my school, the role of dealing with students typically reserved for a principal is split up among a small fleet of "administrators" who are assigned to certain students seemingly randomly. I understand this is common now among modern high schools. The administrator I was assigned to was Mr. Comstock. Replacing the first 'o' with a 'u' has always been a popular teenage antic around here, and is one of the reasons I loathe admitting that I am, in fact, a teenager.

I'd never had any real disciplinary issues here and as such, I'd never been in this office before. I'd spoken to Mr. Comstock only a few times in my life, even though it seemed like he'd been around me forever. When I was in elementary school, he worked there in the office somewhere; he transferred to my middle school during my second year there, and he and I started at this high school at the same time. He must either be very easily dissatisfied or so horrible to work for that he just gets slid around the system so nobody has to deal with him for too long.

I'd apparently broken one person's nose and collapsed another's larynx. Someone had seen those Mexican kids hassling me and had gone to fetch the nearest adult, who went to fetch the nearest (and only) police officer on site. Said police officer arrived on scene just as I was tossing one kid -- the one whose larynx I collapsed -- onto another. When I came to, I was taken to this office and left alone. Through the glass panel of the closed, probably locked, door I saw paramedics reeling stretchers down the hall.

Mr. Comstock had been on the phone since I got there, with various people including the police. I was just sitting there with a sore head. He hung up the telephone and looked to me, looking frazzled and anxious to speak to me. Then he told me about the collapsed larynx and broken nose before the phone rang yet again. He apologized and answered it.

"Yes?" he spoke into the handset parked on his face.
"Yeah.. he..it's here," he continued, spinning his chair around and facing the window.
I looked around at the pictures in the office, each with a smiling teenager in front of the same grayish backdrop; other students of his who donated wallet-sized prints of their school pictures. In any other job, having a collection of photographs of underage minors would seem somehow inappropriate. The desk between him and me was littered with papers of various colors; a keyboard with an impressive flat screen monitor sat in the corner next to a black and silver Swingline stapler and a navy blue New England Federated Bank mug stuffed full of capped roller ball pens, probably Bic.

Comstock was still one the phone. I guessed he was probably in his mid-forties. There were no rings on his fingers, and he had deep pinkish eyeglass pad imprints on the bridge of his nose which he rubbed occasionally. I noticed a bottle of saline drops on the shelf behind the desk, and figured he must have just switched to contacts now that the contacts-are-for-chicks stigma had finally worn thin. He must be petty. I looked back at the flat screen monitor again, it was a Sony and the school's computers were all Dell; he must have bought the monitor himself and brought it in so he'd look better than everyone else.

On the shelf in the back were a few books, a book of Yeats poetry and three Tolstoy books; all of their spines were in perfect condition. This guy seems to spend a lot of time worrying about what people think about him.

"That would seem a bit strange," he said to the phone, "I don’t know if I can make that float. It's not my job. It might be expensive." There was a pause, and he hung up.

"Ok," he said to me at last. "The student handbook specifies that fighting in school results in suspension or expulsion, you probably know that."

I sighed, and started to unscrew my predicted life outline from the wall of my mind.

"Obviously," he continued, "that doesn't make any sense. If we followed that rule, some kid who gets punched in the face for no reason and pushes back would have to be punished for it. I guess we're trying to raise people to get punched and just stand there, like Jesus or something.

"Except in, like, Sharks versus Jets style fights or 'you kissed my girlfriend' - 'no you kissed mine' fights, usually in a fight there's one guilty party and one guy getting pummeled. Punishing someone for getting attacked is just dumb. So we usually don't. It's in the book because it's hard to explain the stance of 'it's ok to get in a fight unless you're a bad person' in print." He stopped and thought for a second.

"So. You certainly put the hurt on those kids, but you obviously didn't go down that hall looking for trouble. Plus, we found the vodka or whatever that is that Marcos had. That's illegal, bringing alcohol into a school. So four gang-types with contraband alcohol attack you, a kid with no administrative record or any history of violence and who recently suffered a death in the family which might explain the unusual torrent of aggression, and as far as we're concerned we've got no real beef with you. The kids' parents might press charges against or sue you, but that seems unlikely. They'll be going from the hospital to the police station."

"Huh," I said, a bit surprised. My head was starting to clear up.

"You probably don't want your mom finding out about this anyway, so on the administrative front I can just pretend you weren't even involved."

"I guess I could get in fights more often," I said.

He let out a tight laugh. "The way you tore those guys up, I'm surprised to hear you haven't been in any. Have you taken karate classes or something?"

Umm.. no. "Umm.. no."

"Weird. Well I guess there's no telling how someone will react when he's about to get pummeled on. The fight or flight response is pretty powerful. I read a story about some guy who was mugged, never thrown a punch in his life, but he put the mugger into a coma. He says his guardian angel helped him. Weird stuff."

Hmm. Guardian angel.

The Turn

"So.. you could buy a house, you know," she'd say.
"A big house. And a car," I'd reply.
"Or a small house and a medium house. Right next to each other," she'd add, after some thought.
"Or the House of Representatives. And a car," I'd say finally.

This went on and on.

I'd told Amy pretty much everything; she'd been more interested than shocked or anxious for a loan. Through the weeks we'd gone over all the details, formulating theories about mysterious deaths and mysterious sums of money. Ideas floated around such as that my dad was not a medical researcher but a secret agent who'd been killed in action, or perhaps he was a robot assassin from the future, or he was a hologram and never really existed. All three seemed equally likely.

It was nice to be able to talk to someone, though. After a few weeks the dead-dad-kid stigma started to wear off at school, but the break from contact seemed to make people question why they ever talked to me in the first place. I suppose I'm just not that interesting and the few recent things that seemed to make me interesting -- I'd elected not to tell anybody. Except Amy.

Nothing notably weird happened for about a month. One Thursday at school I was lost in thought while walking through the halls during lunch. I find when I don't have something particular to think about I end up thinking about everything; hallways, lockers, and people just blurred through the periphery. I'm usually able to stay above the surface enough to avoid running into people or falling down a flight of stairs, but apparently not so much today. It was lunch time, so most people were either in the cafeteria or outside in the cold trying to hide the fact that they're smoking. For this, it was surprising to find four poser Mexican gang drifters standing around one otherwise-empty hallway.

In Fredericksburg there wasn't much or any gang activity, but as in any suburb there's plenty of poser activity. The town's close enough to Washington D.C., however, that some of the posers have friends who have friends who actually are gang members, and so after taking classes at their blue ribbon schools and dropping their books off at their five bedroom houses, they play make-believe that they're gang members. Nothing new.

I should say, I didn't so much "find" them as I did "walk right into one like an idiot."

I wasn't looking, I walked right into one of them as he was making some elaborate gesture in the middle of some I'm-sure-hilarious joke. I was walking pretty fast, and the one I hit was jarred back a foot or so and dropped the clear plastic drink container he was holding.

"Ay, watch where you're going, son!" the one I hit said, the others turned toward me and fell into their stereotypical straight-from-the-tv behavior -- slowly surrounding me and watching the first one, the one I hit, apparently their ringleader, for instructions. I opened my mouth to apologize and hopefully slide my way out of there when I noticed what was spilling out of the container the first guy dropped. It looked like orange juice, it smelled like rubbing alcohol. Oh, the sweet rebellion. I couldn't help but laugh, which probably looked like I was laughing at them. One guy standing to my right pushed me suddenly, and chimed in, "Something funny, son?"

They all say "son" too often.

I swallowed my laugh, but couldn't help but say, "I'd be less obvious if you poured the vodka right in a bottle of orange juice. Putting it all in a clear bottle.. it's trying too hard." Man, I should have shut up.

The first guy didn't seem to like that. "Maybe you should mind your own business, bro," he said, looking me up and down. I guess I wasn't his son anymore. I probably shouldn't have said that out loud either. I gotta say, I'd never been slammed against a locker before. It's not very awesome, the handle goes right into the small of your back.

Two of them were holding me against the locker wall by the shoulders, a third stood off to the side, and the first guy was standing front of me, swinging a tightened fist toward my face in slow motion. Wait a minute…

Something weird happened alright. While that fist was coming at me, the first violent action ever to be taken against me, something snapped in my head. The world slowed down, got mushy, and stopped. Walls in my mind suddenly crumbled, and everything I thought I knew about anything changed in an instant. A thousand images and sounds suddenly splashed against my brain like buckets of paint being dumped on a canvas. That, and my body was numb.

Something else snapped too, the guy's wrist. Like I'd been possessed, and with a perverse clarity I grabbed the clenched fist in mid air with my left hand and turned it counter-clockwise. Before I knew it, I'd forced his face into the same locker with my right elbow. He was soon on the ground, and with a foreign quickness I'd shed the hands now groping at my arms and neck and put the side of my palm into the throat of one of them, my knee into the back of another, and the gasping weight of the second onto the fourth. They were all on the ground now. My head hurt.

My head hurt, and apparently I was a ninja.

Voices echoed behind me, distant and distorted. My head was pounding harder, like ten glass bottles had been broken over my head. I stumbled against the opposite wall, groping it for support. Through a fog I felt a hand grab my shoulder and another grab my opposite arm. Without pause I'd pivoted on my heel, freed the grip from my arm, and was preparing to push an arm out of socket when I realizing that just below the tuft of shirt I was now grabbing was a shiny yellow badge. I was holding the left arm and right shoulder of our school's very frightened police liaison.

Right then is when I passed out.

Cats and Bags

Not even a death in the family can keep you from public school for as long as you'd like.

A week after my net worth increased by something like thirty zillion percent I was back in school. To be honest, I was starting to look forward to going back. Somehow, sinking into familiar routines seemed like the most amazing thing I could have done. Sitting around the house or walking around the neighborhood was doing me no good, not with the compounding mysteries flooding into my life from all angles.

Monday morning, I walked those halls again and let myself slip into the empty anonymity provided by a crowd of peers. Freshmen with their stupid-huge backpacks, Sophomores telling inside jokes so satisfied that they're cooler than at least one group of people, Juniors walking with their noses in books and looking distraught over all the stress they're under, and Seniors leaning against locker doors, their backpacks long since abandoned and only carrying few things absolutely necessary to get through the day. Life seems so much easier when peer groups are categorized so rigidly.

Anonymity went out the window when I entered my first class and sat down. From the second I walked in the door, hushed conversations were severed; I felt forty eyes digging into me and trailing me as I slunked into the first empty desk I saw. I darted my eyes around, everybody avoided eye-contact. I sighed and lined my pencils up on my desktop while the room sat in a still, thick silence.

They had to have heard about my dad's death, but I hoped the word hadn't gotten about regarding my ill-gotten gains. It shouldn't have; I didn't tell anybody. Still, if everybody knows I'd need to hire a bodyguard or twelve. I tried to imagine how much bodyguards cost, I remembered reading somewhere that a legitimate executive security firm charges about a thousand dollars per day. I could get a bodyguard for five hundred days, and then I wouldn't need them anymore. Spending all your money to keep people from getting your money, that should have been a Twilight Zone episode. Hell, it probably was. By the hundredth episode they had to have been repeating their hubris-related ironies.

I decided it'd be cheaper to fly to New Zealand and start my life over and surround myself with people who don't know or care about whether I have a father or what insane amount of money he may or may not have left me. Actually, it'd probably be cheaper to have anybody who knows about the money assassinated. I pondered the options for a moment, I could spend a lot of time trying to track down an actual hit squad, or I could just float the notion around the gang neighborhoods and wait until something catches. Hey, maybe Yakuza…

The teacher walked in the classroom with his coffee cup freshly warmed up, this finally drew some of the attention off of me and it cut me from my daydreaming. He started to begin the typical class-opening procedures when he noticed everybody's silence, and followed the sight-lines and finally saw me. He, too, stared at me in silence for a moment.

Maybe I could just start passing out hundred dollar bills for people to pretend they aren't so freaking uncomfortable around me. I drew a breath and prepared to say something when the door opened again, a girl took a step in and read my name from a piece of paper. She was an office aide, and had a summons for me to come to the counseling office at my earliest convenience.

Oh God.

I'd been to the counseling office twice before, a customary meeting in Freshman year so I'd know who my counselor was and for her to find out if I had any brain problems I'd like to talk about, then again in Junior year to talk about colleges and application deadlines. I still couldn't figure out if the counselors are supposed to be academic or social counselors or both. I can't imagine there's a path of psychology education that includes recommending colleges.

Her chair was uncomfortable, and there was a bowl of mixed hard candies positioned on the desk square between me and her.

"I heard about your father, of course," she started, "First, I'd like to offer my sincere condolences."
I grinned weakly. I'd already had a week and a half of sincere condolences.
"I've notified all your teachers," she continued, "so they'll be understanding and will be able to work with you regarding assignments and such."
"I'm sure gossip got did the job before you got there," I said, looking out the window at the parking lot. She smiled.
"Yes, people talk." She dropped quickly to a too-sincere look of empathy, quite a talent; "Is anybody making you uncomfortable or hurting your feelings regarding it?"
I looked back and forth between her and the candy. "Not yet."
"Oh. Ok, good. Well just understand that people, teenagers and children specifically, tend to focus their attention through inappropriate avenues when they're actually just uncomfortable or intimidated. If someone gives you trouble or makes you feel bad.. or worse, you can let me or an administrator know. Or a teacher."
I really wanted to leave. "Ok," I said simply.

There was a slight pause.
"So, were you and your father close?" she asked finally.
Oh, God.
After I was through with that mess, I slipped out of the counseling office and debated going back to class or going home, when my own name pulled me from my thoughts.

"Chris?" a girl's voice said from behind me. Someone my age was talking to me? I turned around, it was Amy Westborne -- a girl I'd known slightly for a few years, we'd had a few classes together and talked occasionally. She was about fifty feet away, walking toward me.

"Yeah?" I said loud enough to cover the distance.
"You're back," she said, now a bit closer. She was speaking like I'd just gotten back from Disney World.

Amy was my age, thin, and borderline punky. She had neck-length dark blonde hair with streaks or lines, whatever you call them of redish and.. darkish. I never understand girls and their hair, but whatever it was, she looked good. When I first met her she dressed rather clean-cut, but over the years she transitioned to worn punk-style thrift store-style shirts that probably cost $28, jeans, and those cloth wrist things that punky girls always wear. Looking at her, you'd know she'd never done a rebellious thing in her life, but she carried herself well enough that you'd never consider her a poser.

Not that I ever paid a lot of attention to her or anything…

"Yeah, I'm back," I said, now standing in the middle of the hallway.
"That's good," she said, stopping just a few feet from me. "Coming from C.O.?" she asked, looking at the door to the counseling office.
I looked down at the floor, not wanting to direct the conversation to its inevitable climax of awkward condolences and uncomfortable silence. "Yeah," I finally said, letting my voice trail off.
She nodded, interested. "Oh, because of your dad and everything?" she asked, also interested.
She wasn't patronizing me. That was new. "Yeah," I said, a bit taken aback.
She made a crooked grin and said, "Yeah, they did the same thing when my grandpa died last year. A lot of attention you really don't want."
"Yeah," I said. I looked around for a moment, and back at the hallway leading to my classroom. "Everybody seems like they're afraid of me. I've been through half a minute of one class and I'm already sick of it here."

She smiled. "People are just nervous. They think you're going to be scratching at your wrists and writing bad poems, and if they talk to you you'll just explode a bunch of gross emotions all over them."
I smiled. "Seems like it."
There was a pause, though not altogether uncomfortable. "Ok," she said starting to step in the other direction, "well don't feel bad. I'll see you in fourth."

I watched her back up and I nodded, distant. She turned around and walked toward the classrooms. The conversation was over. The first decent conversation I'd had since forever was over, and I felt myself sinking back into depression. I had to get the pretty girl to say more things to me.

"Uhh.." I said, trying to think of something. She was still walking.

"He left me half a million dollars," I said, uncomfortably. I bit my tongue.

She stopped and turned back toward me. "Huh?" she asked.

Crap.

Ill-Gotten Gains

The day after the funeral was an interesting one. I was excused from school that day, as well as the entire week before. Life's little blessings.

I was a senior in high school, and I was rounding out my secondary scholastic career with a resounding squish. It wasn't that I was a poor learner, or that I just didn't like school, it was moreso that for those 7 hours a day I could have been doing something much more constructive, like sleeping or banging Batman action figures together and providing my own sound effects. My grades were always "disappointing" because I myself considered a life spent leaning over a geometry book to be "disappointing." All I cared about was to pass, graduate, and never get myself associated with a group, club, or activity that would at all insinuate to an observer that I cared about anything. I remember one girl in my class who joined and chaired every club she could squeeze her name into, thinking it would be good for college. She went to a state school and cried every night because she wasn't in an Ivy League school, then she finally transferred to an Ivy League school and now makes a disgusting amount of money; almost as much money as her therapist makes, the one she sees three hours a day twice a week now. Perhaps most startling here is how on Earth I know all this, but if I had to choose one hobby of mine as my favorite, it would have to be finding out which people who were insufferable as teenagers are now living hallow and insipid lives that will spiral down into manic dementia in coming years. Current tally: all of them.

Anyway, the day after the funeral my mom was scheduled to meet with a lawyer (ours, hers, or theirs, I gathered) to go over the will. His office called early that morning to request that I be there too, which was kind of weird and was a gigantic imposition to my already-planned day of staring out my bedroom window and reconsidering everything I ever knew about anything. Lawyer's offices and A1 paper is no way to spend any amount of time.

"It says what?" my mother asked.
The lawyer registered her shock, "It is a bit… unconventional, but -- yes. A year and a half ago your husband increased his life insurance payout from $250,000 to $750,000 and altered his will specifically stating that, upon his death, $500,000 of it should go to Christopher regardless of his age."

I was entirely speechless. I'd heard of families receiving a nice payout for a death like this, but that was always for crazy-ritch people. Wasn't a life insurance policy meant to make up for how much money the person would have made if he were alive and working? We definitely aren't a $750,000 household. More importantly, how did I just go from having $112 dollars to my name to having $500,112 in seven seconds?

Mom seemed to be dealing with that and a few hundred other little bombshells. Increasing his life insurance by half a million dollars was odd, not telling her was odd, requesting that most of it was odd, and doing so regardless of my age was really odd.

"Isn't it illegal to give inheritance to someone under 18?" she asked.
"Not illegal, just rather stupid. Different states may treat it differently, but it's certainly possible. Usually in situations like this we'd put the money in a trust until the child turns 18, especially since Chris turns 18 in only four months, but the will is specific," the lawyer said.

"Maybe for college?" I said, finally able to speak.
They both looked at me, the lawyer glanced back at my now speechless mom and back at me. "A decent university is about $40,000 a year," he paused, uncomfortable; "Were that the case, he probably would have wanted the money left in escrow or at least just given to your mother."

And just like that, I entered lower upper class and my mom entered upper middle class. The weight of this never seemed to soak in. It, along with the death of my father just seemed to swarm around right above me, out of my grasp. I spent the next few days trying to figure out what had happened, but the mysteries just kept stacking up no matter what way I shuffled them.

The weirdest thing of all, as if any of it could be sorted, is that when my mom checked my dad's account histories she found that he was spending almost all of his pay on the new insurance premiums in the months since he increased his policy. It's almost like he knew he was going to die.

Don't Ask Questions

A lone gunshot cut through the silence of the darkened corridor. Ok, no it didn't -- but that'd be a heck of a way to start a story, wouldn't it?

Truth is, I never know how to start telling a story, especially this one; but seeing as this will probably be the most important story I'll ever tell, I guess I'll start at the beginning.

My name is Christopher Daniel Baker, the Daniel comes from my father (his first name), who I should tell you (since this is supposed to be the beginning of the story) is dead.

Chipper way to kick off a tale, I know, but it's pretty integral to the story and by the end you'll know what I mean more than you do now. I was seventeen when he died, and that's pretty much when my life got interesting. I was watching a crappy movie on the Crappy Movie Station when the call came in; the movie was called Python and Wil Wheaton had just been eaten by the titular snakie when our phone rang, my mom screamed. The coming weeks were weighed down by funerals, family visits, will readings, and the crushing and belated realization that my dad was dead.

It was an accident. Daniel Baker, my father, was a research scientist at the Marine Corps University Research Center in Quantico, Virginia. If you didn't just gasp at the word "Quantico" you must not know what it is, so I'll elaborate. Quantico is a city in Virginia that sits right on the Potomac River and is, more interestingly, the home of the largest Marine Corps base in the world. The city itself is just a small town, population 561, to house officers and their families and is guarded at one end by the actual Marine base and on the other by the mighty Potomac. Access to Quantico is understandably tight, and although it is the home of the FBI Academy, a DEA Academy, the "University", a cemetery, a full golf course, and a Marine base from which an assault upon half of Eastern Europe could be mounted - if you can't justify setting the corner of one toe onto Quantico territory, you're legally obligated to accept four or five bullets in the chest. Quaint little ‘burb.

Google Maps doesn't even have satellite photo coverage of Quantico. They have pictures of the White House, Area 51, mysterious hovering cars, and Egyptian Army bases, but not Quantico.

As I said, he worked in the M.C. University (which is mostly about instilling patriotism and all that into Marine officers and to hold a 9-week seminar explaining why Corps uniforms include a useless little sword) in the research center, which uses the University's government and "educational" qualifications to perform all manors of medical, training, and warfare experimentation (their educational status lets them write off most of their expenses, and their government status lets them keep most of their expenses off the books entirely - a double threat for the bookkeepers). All I was allowed to know was that my dad worked there, and that sometimes he would wear a white lab coat when he'd get off late and not want to change "at the office". I wasn't allowed to tell people where he worked, but in northern Virginia, nobody asks.

I grew up in Fredericksburg, Virginia - 30 minutes from Quantico, 60 minutes from Washington D.C., and 120 minutes from Langley. In school, we never had any "Who is your daddy and what does he do?" games. Half of the kids wouldn't be told where their parents worked until they were old enough to keep a secret, if ever. Some of us wouldn't be afforded the decency of being told exactly how our fathers died.

And that's how it was. A man in a uniform with an insincere brow explained there had been an accident of undisclosable circumstance, that Daniel Baker had done great works for his country, and that his death had been unfortunate. They offered to bury him in the Quantico cemetery, otherwise known as the "Don't Ask Questions" cemetery, but it turned out that there was a plot reserved for him and the family by my grandfather (his father) in the cemetery where he and my grandmother were buried. There was a nice little ceremony, it was snowing on that January afternoon, my knees were shaking - but I don't think it was the cold. The whole thing was closed-casket, and for all I knew the thing could have been empty.

It's a destructive notion, not knowing how your dad died or even that he had died. His death was only on paper - conceptual. He was there in the morning, and then in the afternoon a phone rang to say that he wasn't anywhere anymore. It's an idea you just want to fight, like being trapped in a paper bag that's only there because someone tells you it's there. You want to tear at it and beat it with your fists, but you can't even be sure it's there. That night I lay in my bed and stared at the ceiling with my eyes dry and bulging trying to understand what made my father dead. Was it the casket under six feet of dirt? Was it the blue and pink Death Certificate signed without regard by the State Registrar? Or was it simply the fact that we all acknowledged it?

Don't ask questions.