To look at him, you would never guess his true nature. His face is smooth, freckled. His eyes are pale blue with long, dark lashes that any woman would envy. His pale blonde hair has bangs that hang over his left brow, which he continually sweeps back with his left hand. He is slight of build, but wiry, strong. Shingling rooftops year-round has resulted in an almost unnatural glow to his naturally fair skin, which never burns but often freckles and always appears dark bronze. His nose is aquiline, almost hawkish, but it suits him. Many describe his features as innocent; others claim he has an old soul. When he chances a look at you, you can’t help but stare into his eyes. They look pained, anguished, pleading, as if he was begging for someone to save him. But when I looked at him, I saw him for who he is. I couldn’t help it. I knew him. I had lived with him for more than eighteen years, and his secrets are my secrets. But the secrets that caused me great shame, did not cause those same feelings in him. He is incapable of shame. He is incapable of the pain or anguish you often read in his eyes. He is my son, and he is incapable of feeling remorse for the crime he committed just two days ago. The crime I didn’t stop but could have if I didn’t love him so damn much. You see, just two days ago, my eighteen-year-old son held a gun to my head and pulled the trigger.

The gun felt right in my hand. I didn't expect it to, I'm not a sociopath, but it just didn't feel wrong--I didn't pause to wrestle with my conscience or against divine intervention like happens on TV when people hurt their families. It was just the feeling of my finger pulling back the trigger, the switch catching, physics taking motion. Mom's face was something to observe, her eyes widening. I fel like how scientists must feel when they experience the world like this when they're watching cells divide under a microscope, fear multiplying a hundredfold beneath the fabric of her skin, the tears pooling in her eyes, the fear festering in the corners of her mouth. Her eyes went wide, a sound escaping her ajar mouth in surprise.

I know I sound insane. I think I might be. I don't know. The only things I do know are that I'm eighteen years old, and I've known for a long time that I'm different from other people. And I don't think that makes me special--being different isn't better or worse, I've at least been conditioned to know that from the self-esteem seminars they rammed down my throat at school and at grief counselling. I used to say being different is an ever-present sensation of watching the world through a mirror that never reflects you. Like when Tommy Schultz broke his leg in second grade, everyone gathered around yet I never quite copied the constructed concern on my peers' faces properly. I understood, even then, that I was observing a frequency I wasn't tuned to receive.

Ever since Dad died, the world felt less like a mirror that ignored me, and more like a thousand tiny telescopes pointing straight at me. I didn't grieve right. My voice broke too much because boys don't cry, but I was a sociopath because children should mourn. I eat badly and I'll never move on. I eat too well, and the bereaved shouldn't be vain. I laughed and I was hiding something. I didn't and I was a suicide risk. It was fucking exhausting, all of it, and I wanted to squeeze something until it broke, feel its liquids pool at the pressure points to the moment where the bones snapped.

The shingling work helped, I think. There's something satisfying about the repetition, every nail placed exactly where it should go, each shingle aligned with the one before it. The world reduced to manageable, logical components. And the sun on my skin, pure and untethered from meaning as the light shone and bronzed me, covered me in freckles like a solar disease: I was changing, evolving into a different version of myself with each passing day on those rooftops.

When I pulled the trigger, I was curious. Would she cry? Would she beg? Would she finally look at me with something other than that careful analysis in her eyes? Would she treat me like the other mothers treat their sons, with that reflexive love, that biological imperative to protect?

Or would she do what she actually did?

She lowered herself slowly, breathing, accepting, prostrating in front of me like I was a fucking God and not her son, not something to hold, but something to keep at an arm's length on a shelf and call it holy love and devotion. She was full of bullshit, and I was full of bullshit, and the gun was full of nothing because I was a fucking coward who hadn't had the balls to even put a blank in the fucking chamber.