He’d seen a gun only once before, at the disastrous party last winter that had earned him his nickname. It had been, without doubt, the worst night of his life. Most people probably thought the accident had been the worst night of his life, but for Trenton, that had been a kind of liberation.

Everything afterward—the pain and the pills and the metal rods holding his shins together and the wire in his jaw and the shitty power shakes that tasted like sand sipped through a straw—had been awful. But in the moment of the accident, the sheer blazing terror of it and the certainty, just then, that he would die, he’d found a kind of peace he’d never known, or at least hadn’t felt in years.

This is it, he had thought, just before the scream of metal on metal and the sparks and then the darkness. And he was, purely and simply, relieved. No more failing, no more f**king up, no more loneliness like a constant pressure on his bladder that he couldn’t piss or sleep or drink away.

And then he’d woken up. He had never thought about suicide before. But lying in the hospital, it had occurred to him that suicide was the only possible solution. Clean. Elegant. Brave, even.

Suicide, he decided, had integrity.

He supposed he could just shove the barrel of the gun in his mouth and fire, but Russian roulette lacked integrity. If you were going to kill yourself, you had to know, in advance, that it was going to work. Chance was for idiots.

That’s what Derrick Richards had suggested at the party: that they all play Russian roulette. Trenton had kept his mouth shut, like he did at every party, hoping that if he stayed quiet, no one would notice that he didn’t belong. Derrick was dumb enough to do it and his friends were dumb enough to follow along. Fortunately Derrick was so drunk he’d stumbled backward and sent a bullet straight through the window, and after that someone had taken the gun away and everyone had moved on to strip poker, even though it was December and flakes of snow were swirling in through the shattered window.

From upstairs, Trenton thought he heard laughter, faintly, and shoved the gun quickly into his dad’s desk drawer, where he had found it, where Minna had casually mentioned it would be—almost like she knew what he was planning and was encouraging it. Well. Why wouldn’t she? Nothing was worse than being a disgusting pock-faced freak with a sister who looked like Minna. He was sure she suspected him of being a virgin.

If only she knew the truth: that he’d never even been kissed. At least not in a way that counted.

The laughter stopped. Maybe he was hallucinating. Last night, before falling asleep, he thought he’d heard whispers, voices in the creaking of the floorboards, the sighing of a woman. He would have blamed it on the painkillers, but he’d stopped taking them. He was saving them up, just in case.

He opened the drawer and removed the gun once again. It was heavy. What the hell had his dad used it for? What had his dad used any of this stuff for? Pencil sharpeners in weird shapes, antique toys, old radios. Craziness.

He was suddenly aware that the whole house had gone silent. His mom had left, he knew, probably to go buy more booze. Minna had gone to the kitchen to make Amy lunch.

He could do it. Right here. Right now. Could bite down on the metal, taste iron on his tongue, say boom, and head toward that place of calm again, where he wasn’t such a nothing. Where he was nothing.

But he couldn’t bring himself to lift the gun to his mouth. He kept thinking of stupid Derrick Richards and his salmon-colored pants pooled at his ankles, comfortable as anything, his pale chest exposed, already curling with a man’s worth of hair, his fleshy thighs splayed like two fat white fish, losing hand after hand in strip poker and not caring. And Trenton, who wasn’t even playing, sitting stiff as an arrow, mortified, desperate that no one move or even breathe in his direction, because Angie Salazar was sitting on his right (he’d never even thought she was hot) and down to her bra and underwear, and every time she moved to take a card the fat swell of her boobs moved with her, and he could see where her butt was compressed by the chair, and imagine the heat of her thighs pressed together, and he had such a raging boner he thought he might die or, worse, explode right there in front of everyone. Bang.

When he finally couldn’t take it any longer, when it was too much, he’d gotten up stiffly, bowlegged as a sailor, holding his cup in front of his crotch, and hurtled into the bathroom. He’d slammed the door shut and locked it—at least, he thought he had, but in his desperation to get his pants down and release the explosion that had been building inside of him like some awful time bomb ticking away to social humiliation—well, he hadn’t double-checked. And so when Lanie Buck had stumbled into the bathroom less than a minute later because she had to puke, the whole party had caught Trenton mid flagrante delicto, if you could be in flagrante delicto by yourself—head back, pants around his ankles, c**k in his hand, eyes closed, and practically crying with the sheer, tremendous relief of it.

Splooge. Derrick had led the chant, and everybody had picked up on it. Splooge. Splooge. Splooge.

He hadn’t even buckled his belt before fleeing. As he walked back to campus, the snow stinging his cheeks like new tears, he’d known that he was finished at Andover.

Sometimes he fantasized about killing Derrick, instead of himself. But he knew he’d never have the guts for it.

There was a footstep outside, in the hall. Before Trenton had time to put away the gun, Minna pushed open the door, carrying yet another box.

“Oh,” she said. “Did you decide to help after all?”

Trenton had successfully avoided helping for most of the morning, claiming that his leg was acting up. He was pretty sure Minna knew he was faking, but she wouldn’t say anything; besides, she had no right, after what she had done.

That was life, Trenton thought: people knew your secrets, but if you had shit on them, too, they couldn’t rat you out. So everything evened out, piled under one huge shit sandwich.

Minna dropped the box, which was empty, and nudged it with a foot to turn it right side up. “You found Dad’s dirty little secret, I see. One of them, anyway.”

Now that she had acknowledged the gun, he felt he could safely return it to the drawer. He was relieved when it was out of his hands, and he opened a few drawers casually, so Minna might think he’d just been rooting around in the study, idly curious, when he’d happened on the gun. “I was just looking at it,” he said.

“You weren’t planning on shooting anyone?” she said.

“Not today,” Trenton said. He wasn’t sure if he was making a joke or not.