Wearing a good suit-jacket over a pink dress-shirt that fit tight to the muscles on his hard strong chest. He’d locked arms with his friends – walking home drunk – but feeling very depressed. Chiefly because nobody cared about him, or at any rate, if they did it didn’t make him happy. He was homesick, too – first semester so far away from his family – with only “friends of meat and wine” as the Chinese saying goes, to keep him company. They would party together: dance, sweat, drink, hook up, and try to get attention from each other. He’d raped a girl at one of those parties, but he scarcely noticed that it happened – he was just as drunk as she – only a bit stronger, which was why it happened. Besides which, she was still his friend – he’d seen her just last night and said hi.

That was Thursday night.

But there was something in him that always cried out against it all – livin’ it up, that is. Because there really was no point to it. And it wasn’t just that life was pointless – nobody minds a pointless life. The problem was that it wasn’t really fun anymore. He raped the girl last weekend more from habit than from anything else. (He’d slept with her consensually before, you know.) It’s just a shame that her cycle of habit didn’t happen to line up with his. More to the point, he did all of it out of habit these days – hung with his buddies, laughed, got As and Bs in school. And there was nothing wrong with that, either, if only it were fun like it used to be.

But it wasn’t really fun anymore.

He was walking back from somewhere way off-campus with his buddies and a couple of inebriated girls. Suddenly, it all became a bit too much to bear. He wanted to either vomit or drink something. He slipped his arm out from under his buddy’s and started to lag behind. Then he slipped into a building somewhere along 15th street, produced his laminated false id, and bought a shot of vodka.

It was there, in the bar, where he met his girlfriend. They quarreled all the time, and there was no reason not to quarrel now. He sat down across from her in disgust. “What are you doing here?”

She didn’t smile or reply, but the skin around her eyes and on her forehead contracted a little.

“Too high and mighty to talk?” he laughed – and downed the vodka.

“Steve –” She must have sensed something was wrong with him. She was, after all, his girlfriend. But then she stopped. You know how these things are. They’d been fighting a bit too much, lately.

He walked away from the table without saying goodbye.

All he needed was a gun with one round of bullets. He emptied his pockets to buy the gun, and then begged a shot of vodka on credit from the seller. The big black man guffawed, as if to say that a kid who empties his pockets to buy a shitty old revolver in a plastic bag would need a hefty bit of collateral before he could get any credit.

He ground his teeth, and almost broke down crying with frustration. That’s the way those bastards are. Just like the rest of the world, if you think about it.

He went to a public toilet, sat down on the dirty lid, took out the gun, and looked into the barrel. His Dad’s chubby baby-face with its puzzled little eyebrows over the cloudy grey eyes looked back at him. He blinked and lowered the revolver. He’d forgot about the old man.

The old man had been good to him. Even after Mom started carrying on with other men, he’d still call Steve into his downstairs den and teach him how to carve beautiful little squirrels out of wood. They’d have such times together. Until Steve got too old for that sort of thing. But even then, Dad would smile and asked questions about school… That counted for something. But it wasn’t helping him now.

He turned the gun from side to side and looked down the greasy barrel again. He saw his girlfriend looking back at him this time. She was grinning, which was no surprise. She hated him, after-all.

And in point of fact, his family didn’t love him that much either. They were – well – they weren’t to blame, the old man had been good to him, but however you cut it, life just didn’t feel that good anymore.
Maybe it’d be fun in the future? He’d get married. Get a good job. He’d eventually get to like his wife just from sheer habit. They’d have nice kids.

He squinted into the barrel and saw his girlfriend with her red lips parted in her mocking smile. Pretty little teeth she had – all sharp and white like a puppy’s. He’d learn to like her from habit. Ha!

A little dark humor makes everything go down easier, eh? He’d been drinking too much; he was crying.

You know, it wasn’t even really fun that he needed. He needed meaning, something worth living for. He needed to care so deeply about something or somebody that – well, that it’d be worth sitting the whole night on this d—d toilet staring at the cigarette butt in the corner of the trashed-up stall, just to help ‘em.

But there was really only one person that he cared about that much. And he stared and stared for hours and hours at the ash-eaten end of the cigarette butt on the dirty yellow tiles of the boxed-in floor, but, still, still – that young man didn’t feel good.

And so he cocked the gun, and put the bullets in his heart.

They uncovered his face at the funeral, and it shone white against its pillow of dark red velvet. Everybody cried to look at it, and their tears mixed in the curling locks of golden hair that framed his handsome face.

“God always takes our best,” the parson said, with a tremor in his honest voice. And Mama wept, and cried, and whispered. But Daddy stood silent with his grey head bowed and his worried little eyebrows drawn together so tight. And the old man wondered – if he had somehow done something different – whether Steve might not have killed himself.