There was blood everywhere. It just kept pouring out of her and I didn’t think it would ever stop. I could smell it, metallic-like, a mixture of salt and rust filling my nose. The hollow-point did exactly the type of damage Jason’s dad had said it would do. Most of my mother’s face had caved in, and the bullet had triggered some synapse that made her jaw slowly open and close, open and close, open and close. I prayed it would stop, but it didn’t. The back of her head was gone, and most of her brain had seeped out of the gaping hole onto the floor. I tried pushing it back in with my hand as though this might somehow help her. It squished between my fingers and I think I may have vomited then, and though I already knew that she was dead, it was at that exact moment that I fully accepted the truth of what that really meant. My mother was gone. She was never coming back.

I lifted her up and held her in my arms because I knew there was nothing else I could do. And so that’s what I did, holding her tightly while rocking her back and forth and howling with tears, my right cheek pressed tightly against what remained of hers, continually telling her that I loved her. I’m sure the police eventually pulled me away, but I don’t remember that happening, or much of anything else. I remember being taken to the police station and changing out of my blood-soaked shorts. I remember being asked a few questions. And at some point, hours later, my wrestling coach, Mr. Khoury—who was every bit of a father to me as my own, and maybe even more of one—came and picked me up. Everything else is lost.