The phone calls come in slowly. Wayne Lo has a gun. Wayne Lo has a gun and he's shooting everyone he sees. (But it can't be Wayne Lo, I just saw him in the dining hall earlier this week, eating the crappy food right along with the rest of us. Shit, I played basketball with him a few weeks ago. We broke into the gym for a rousing game of three on three. Me, Myla, and Wayne were all on one team. He's just a kid like me, like Myla, like all of us stuck in our self important, arrogant world.) I am dying inside. Everything, the whole world I know is gone. I am so cold. I can't breathe. I want to be sick. And I know that this is the point, the moment from which I have become separated from everything that has happened before now. This is why I left home at the age of fifteen, forsaking my last two years of high school, the senior prom, grad night, my friends of childhood, but mostly the comforting warmth and familiarity of the order of life in my small suburban world. I made my way on the path that I distictly and explicitly chose for myself, a path that is not recognized by the majority of the world, the world that is not here at this college with me, the employers, the parents, teachers, institutions, the people who believe that the years of high school are the 'golden years,' 'the best years of your life.' These people who I walked the halls of high school with, who planned the spring formal, the winter formal, who ran for student body president, who joined the young Republican's club, and the people who I saw in the post office, the mall, Tower Records. To them, I ceased to exist the moment I dropped out of high school and moved to Massachusetts to go to college. It is for this now that I am here. It is for this that I ran out to the grassy meadows, and into the pine thick forests of this unfamiliar landscape in my earliest days here and cried for the Los Angeles that I had lost, because I never really had it to begin with. I greived for a Sunset Strip that died sometime in the late 70s, for the strip malls that I walked in comfortably, for the loss of the smell of smog and the rush of driving in the back of an open bed of a pickup truck down the 57 freeway, going 75 mph, with the wind blinding me, and laughter light in my eyes. It is this moment that I have been building my life up to, with every tiny discovery of the way the world works outside of my sheltered childhood room of brown carpet and green tweed wallpaper. Each small dissapointment, each fall from grace, every slip from innocence, they were paving the road to this gully being ripped out from inside of me. I want my past back. I want it back right damn now. I want the pain to stop, it is hot in my belly, like devils riding on spiked tires up my veins to my heart, deadly and sharp. The phone rings. Wayne Lo has been contained. The police have him. Stay in your house. Don't come to lower campus. We will let you know what has happened later. We will call a community meeting soon. We will call you. The voice of the official institution has spoken, giving me some small feeling resembling hope (and yet completely different from it) that I might know what happened sometime soon. And soon is very far away right now, like a winter in Alaska, soon is very cold, distant, filled with glaciers and oil slicked penguins, slippery, soon falls away from me. Soon is a concept that I no longer understand; it throws me back into the trap of waiting and holding, trying to believe that morning might actually come after some undetermined amount of time has passed. And time, (my watch ticking the only sound accompanying the smolder of our collective cigarettes in this dark winter room,) has left me. The phone rings again. Nacunan has been shot. I turn. I'm melting into this wall. If I just hold onto this wall, I can slip back, run through the fields behind the church, around the corner from my house in California, with the seering July sun on my back, blinding white my eyes, and meet my sister to catch ladybugs and put them in jars. I can fall away from this coldness that won't leave me. That's the problem with the East Coast, it's too damn cold. If it wasn't so cold, I could forget the first week that I was here, at this college, frightened at this new world I'd chosen for myself, sitting in the Writing and Thinking Workshop with Nacunan, the hot August rain thundering outside, hearing his musical voice prompt us to freewrite on the subject, "beauty is always bizarre." Beauty is always bizarre. Is death beautiful? Because this is the most bizarre moment I've ever had, caught between an inhale and a tear, listening to the sad motion of Myla's sobs, held prisoner to the telephone, as the bottle of vodka slowly works itself out of Justin's hands and falls, empty, onto the cement floor.