“All right, my turn,” said Ziggy. He clapped his hands together and ran a Keanu Reeves hand through his Keanu Reeves hair. “Well, not to toot my own horn, but I’m doing what I wanted to do when I grew up. That is, operating dangerous machinery at school, hanging out with all you cool kids, and making some Shakespeare magic. And, not to be clichéd or anything, but my favorite Shakespeare is Hamlet. Can anyone quoth me some Hamlet?”

“To be, or not to be?” half a dozen kids muttered in unenthusiastic chorus.

“To be, or not to be?” said Ziggy. “The ultimate existential question. What most people don’t realize—people who only know that line out of context—is that Hamlet is contemplating suicide.”

Sebastian had whispered something to Daisy that made her laugh—something I had never seen her do before. At the words “contemplating suicide,” however, they both went silent.

“Now, a lot of people think Hamlet is just a whiny little tool,” said Ziggy, “but you need to understand where he’s coming from. His dad was murdered by his uncle. His mom has gotten remarried to that very same uncle! Who wouldn’t be upset? If you ask me, he has every right to complain—even if it’s just through the fourth wall to an unseen audience. At first, he’s listing off the pros and cons of death, and honestly, it’s mostly pros. He compares death to a ‘little sleep,’ which doesn’t sound so bad. But then he wonders: Do we dream when we’re dead? And if so, would they be bad dreams? Nightmares? The fact of the matter is that our existence after death is unknowable, and it’s that sense of the unknown that truly scares him. The only thing greater than that unknown is the inevitability of death. So, if we all die, does it matter when? Does it matter how? Does it matter if our life is taken by another human being? Are we merely prolonging the inevitable? Hamlet is asking the big questions, and he’s not just asking them for himself. If you ever get a chance to read his soliloquy, note that he never says ‘I’ or ‘me.’ Never. So, when he says ‘to be, or not to be,’ he’s talking about life itself. He’s asking whether or not people should exist.”

Ziggy interlocked his fingers. Stared infinitely at the floor, through an invisible portal in time.