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jamming out, and you’re jamming out a little bit too late into the game, I think.”
    â€œWhat if I was to jam out?”
    Mitchell said, “Watch this,” and fired across the room, killing a boy named Clay, whose locker was four down from mine. “There, see? Killing is fun. Jam out now, and you’re next.”
    â€œI quit.”
    â€œNo, Jeremy, it’s too late for that. Duncan, what would you guess Jeremy’s tally up to this moment has been?”
    Duncan calculated. “Four definite hits and five maybes.”
    Mitchell turned to Jeremy: “Ha! And you expect mercy from the world?”
    â€œI quit.”
    Mitchell said, “What do we have here-a Hitler-in-the-bunker scenario?”
    â€œCall it what you will.” Jeremy dropped his weapons.
    Mitchell said, “Execution time.”
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    Being married was wild. It was worth all the delays and pleas and postponement of pleasure, and you know, this isn’t some guidance-class hygiene film speaking to you-it’s me. I was me . We were us . It was all real, and wild, and it is my most cherished memory of having been alive-a night of abandon on the sixteenth floor of Caesars Palace.
    I doubt we said even three words to each other all night; Jason’s dewy antler-soft skin made words feel stupid. By six in the morning we were in a cab headed back to the airport. On the flight north, we didn’t speak much, either. And I felt married. I loved the sensation, and it’s why I remained silent-trying to pinpoint the exact nature of this new buzz: sex, certainly, but more than that, too.
    Of course, the Out to Lunch Bunch and all of the Alive! crew could tell right away that something was up. We simply didn’t care as much for the group as before, and it showed. The corny little lunchtime confessions over french fries were so dull as to be unlistenable; Pastor Fields’s team sports metaphors and chastity pleas seemed equally juvenile to Jason. We knew what we had, and we knew what we wanted, and we knew that we wanted more . Then there was the issue of how we were going to go about telling our families. Jason imagined a formal dinner at a good restaurant during which to break the news-between the main course and the dessert-but I said I didn’t want our marriage to be treated like a chorus girl jumping out of a cake. I’m not clear if Jason’s desire for a formal dinner was his concept of maturity, or if he wanted to shock a crowd like an evil criminal mastermind. He did have his exhibitionist streak: I mean, in Las Vegas he’d refused to close the curtains and he was always trying to sneak me into the change room at the Bootlegger jeans store. No go.
    So yes, we’d had a fight on the phone about this matter the night before my pregnancy test. Jason was angry with me for dragging my heels about announcing the marriage, and I was angry with him for wanting to be a-I don’t know-a show-off .
    And that’s as far as I got in my life, my baby as well. I don’t think I’ve concealed anything here, and there’s not much left to explain. God owns everything. I was not replaceable, but nor was I indispensable. It was my time.
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    Dear God,
    I am so full of hate that I’m scaring myself. Is there a word to describe wanting to kill people who are already dead? Because that’s what’s in my heart. I remember last year being in the backyard with my father. We lifted up this sheet of plywood that had been lying on the grass all winter. Underneath were thousands of worms, millipedes, beetles and a snake, all either eating or being eaten, and that is my heart, and the hate and the insects grow and grow blacker by the hour. I want to kill the killers, and I just can’t believe that this would be a sin.
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    Lord,
    My son described the blood and water pooling on the cafeteria floor, coating it like Varathane. He told me about the track marks left in blood by