BELLA

“Where you goin’?”

CHRISTOPHER

Kimmy asks as he’s almost through the door.

“I just need some air.”

BELLA

“You’ll freeze to death in that.”

CHRISTOPHER

“I’ll be okay.”

BELLA

He kisses her on the forehead and walks away.

The story ends with an ellipsis …

(After a beat:)

CHRISTOPHER

(To Bella) Go on. Let me have it.

BELLA

It’s very powerful, Christopher.

CHRISTOPHER

The ending isn’t right.

BELLA

It works.

CHRISTOPHER

But do you think it’s an actual ending?

BELLA

Why wouldn’t it be?

CHRISTOPHER

I worry that it doesn’t feel inevitable. You always talk about that in class.

BELLA

He walks out into the night. I think it’s wonderfully interpretable.

CHRISTOPHER

Do you think he’s coming back?

BELLA

No.

(To the audience) I tell him that his sentences are stunning, that his dialogue is sharp and essential.

(To Christopher) Sometimes you mix your metaphors, but even that feels honest because your narrator is a freshman who’s also probably prone to mixing his metaphors.

CHRISTOPHER

That’s not intentional.

BELLA

Well it works.

CHRISTOPHER

It’s clumsy.

BELLA

There’s nothing clumsy about it. It’s tragic and mysterious and your prose is beautifully restrained. You manage to make me root for a murderer and I can’t explain why. His hard actions completely define him. He gives his mother the fucking murder weapon, and yet you never editorialize or beg my sympathy in any way.

CHRISTOPHER

You’re also pretty high.

BELLA

Just accept the fucking praise, Christopher.

CHRISTOPHER

I accept.

BELLA

(To the audience) The next phase of the evening is cloudy, dreamlike.

I remember carefully placing Christopher’s manuscript back in its stationery box.

I remember opening my refrigerator and removing the three clearly marked hypos from the butter cubby and giving Christopher a quick tutorial on their sequence … I remember him repeating this sequence back to me with a detached, clinical authority.

I remember asking him to help me to my bedroom because I’m now high on Percocet.

I remember Christopher helping me lay down on my bed.

I remember having cottonmouth and feeling like my face is plagued by a wolfish, permanent grin.

I remember that lying down takes forever and telling Christopher that I want him to have my first edition of James Salter’s Light Years.

My mind is overcome with memories …

The lake I swam in as a girl …

Our family’s summer home in Michigan, its gutters choked with leaves …

As he is about to inject the sodium pentobarbital, Christopher asks me if I’m absolutely sure that I want to do this.

“I’m absolutely sure,” I say.

He gives me the first injection. I feel the slightest burn pass through the back of my hand and enter my vein. I start to count to thirty. One … Two … Three … Each number is a building I must scale with my bare hands. Four … Five … Six …

I remember Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium … second-grade field trip … the brilliant moon jelly pulsating in its tank … but I want to see the giant female octopus … she will live longer than any other octopus … She will mate only once … Seven … Eight … Nine … Oh, there she is …