I remember very little of my teenage years. The more time passes, the more I have trouble distinguishing between real and imaginary events. Like everyone else, I had a miserable adolescence. Not just because of the boredom, but also for the lack of clear answers. I couldn’t exactly go around asking people to explain why life was worth living. That would have raised suspicions. So I put the question aside, on grounds of reasonable doubt. And it’s a good thing I did since nowadays I can barely remember those years. Definitely nothing happened to justify the effort of covering my tracks after a major crime. In other words, I decreed that all teenagers were stupid and everyone deserves to be cut a little slack.

I can summon up a few names from those days: Roy and Carol Anne, Eva, Stephanie, and Hurteau and Frosty. If I really pushed myself, I could probably list a few more, but for the most part those were my “dog years.” I spent more time with animals than with people. None of these people really deserve to be punished. I’m not one of those pathetic individuals who never gets over their horrible childhood and spends years cultivating revenge fantasies, only to finally go after the little local bully with a machete or turn them down for a job. I’d probably be perfectly happy to read their names in a story of a sex scandal involving farm animals, but mostly just because that’s my kind of news story, no matter who gets caught with their pants down. When I seek vengeance, it’s rarely for a crime against my own person.

I guess what I’m saying is that Fiset didn’t deserve to die. At least, not right away. It was an accident. Every murder leaves its mark, scars a soul; mine will never be unblemished again. So you have to be careful not to waste your opportunities. But at the same time, what’s done is done; there’s no going back. At least, when I see what happened to Fiset’s big brother, who’s in prison for rape, I figure that what I did gave Fiset the younger an easy out. He’ll live on in memory as a saint. Death is cleansing. It makes us better people than we actually were. People miss you. Trust me, I know, since every single one of my “projects” after Fiset concerned a terrible person who richly deserved their fate. And yet I haven’t read a single bad word about them after they were eliminated.

But for now, I’m a regular teenager, busy learning a number of things I’ll put to use later, about people who commit unpardonable acts. When a chasm appears, we grow stronger so we can leap over it. On one side, there you are; on the other, the land we cannot quite reach. Neverland.