Read Lights Out for Free Online Page B

snapping at people, or in his room alone, cranking his stereo, getting pissed off at the world. When he was depressed he couldn’t get out of bed. Sometimes he got so down that he thought about killing himself. He had several plans for how to do it and might have actually gone through with one of them if it hadn’t been for Christina.
    Ryan had had a crush on Christina for years. They went to kindergarten through sixth grade together at the Holy Family School, and then they went to the same junior high and high school. In eighth grade Christina was so beautiful that Ryan, like most of the boys in the school, was too intimidated even to talk to her anymore, but she was also his biggest masturbation fantasy. Practically every time Ryan jerked off- which meant about three times a day - he imagined that Christina was standing in front of him in her school uniform, unbuttoning her blouse, letting her short plaid skirt fall to her knees. Before he could imagine any more he’d start coming wildly all over his stomach.
    In high school, when Jake and Christina started going out, Ryan was jealous as hell. It just didn’t seem right to him that an asshole like Jake should get a great girl like Christina. From the very beginning Jake treated her like dirt, always bragging to guys on the baseball team about other girls he’d fingered or fucked. Ryan wanted to tell Christina the truth about Jake, but he didn’t want to upset her, and he didn’t think it was his place to get involved.
    After the Pirates selected Jake in the first round of the amateur draft and Jake got his five-million-dollar signing bonus, he bought Christina a huge rock and popped the question. Then he went off to play in the instructional league, and Christina stayed in Brooklyn and went to the New York City College of Technology and studied to become a dental hygienist. They saw each other a lot during the off-season, but most of the year they got together only once in a while, or just talked on the phone. Christina was upset that she couldn’t see Jake more often and that he kept putting off setting a wedding date, but it was hard to leave a guy she’d been with for so long, who was making millions of dollars a year, and was bound to make even more.
    One night Ryan decided that without baseball he had absolutely nothing to live for. He was about to swallow a handful of Advils and end his miserable, pointless, stupid life, when he realized that OD’ing on Advil might not kill him - it might just fry his brain, make him into a retard or something - so he decided to jump in front of a subway instead. He was in his car, driving toward the Rockaway Parkway station, imagining the great relief he’d experience as the subway wheels decapitated him, when he decided he was hungry; so he pulled over in front of Flatlands Bagels and ordered an everything with chive cream cheese and a cup of black coffee. He had no logical reason to do this, because in a few minutes he would be dead, his head severed by a speeding L train, and a bagel with cream cheese wasn’t much of a last supper. Later, he decided that stopping there must have been fate, or God must have stepped in and made him do it, because he knew that if he hadn’t pulled over at the bagel store he definitely would’ve killed himself.
    He took the bagel and coffee to go and headed back toward where he’d parked, around the corner on Ninety-second Street. It was starting to rain, a stiff wind coming in off Jamaica Bay. He was thinking about how he’d stand at the far end of the platform to catch the train at its fastest so the conductor wouldn’t have time to see him and brake, when he saw her. He felt like he was in one of those romantic scenes in movies, when the guy and the girl see each other in slow motion. She was walking toward him, starting to smile, those great eyes lighting up. She looked even more beautiful than the last time he’d seen her, at a party after high school graduation. As they started