“As I was escorted outside by the officers, my friends looked back at me with blank expressions. I don’t think they knew what to say to me. I had lied to them about my home life. They had always been there for me and probably would have understood if I had told them the truth from the start, but it was too late. All the lies I had told them about having a perfect family had been shattered by that one incident.”

“And you told me the biggest lie of all. You told me you loved me,” It was my turn to wince like he’d slapped me. “I don’t remember saying that” “You would if it had been true. You would feel something”

“If only someone had told me about the confidence-boosting nature of guns, I’d have been shooting them all my life.”

“My best friend in all the world really did have a boyfriend and had never told me. My best friend was sharing me with someone else and I knew whatever she had been giving me was only what she had left over from him, the scraps, the tokens, the lies. I had fought for this friendship, worried over it, made sacrifices for it, measured myself against it, lost myself inside it, had little to show for it but this bewildered sense of betrayal. Now I knew that I had never been the one she loved, I was a convenient diversion, a practice run until the real thing came along to claim her.”

“I had to face the fact that I had been using my gay friends as props. They were always supposed to be funny and entertain me and praise me and listen to my problems, and their life was supposed to be a secret that no one wanted to hear about. I wanted them to stay in the “half closet.”

“And this was perhaps the first time in my life that death occurred to me as a reality. I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it—it, the physical act. I had thought of suicide when I was much younger, as, possibly, we all have, but then it would have been for revenge, it would have been my way of informing the world how awfully it had made me suffer. But the silence of the evening, as I wandered home, had nothing to do with that storm, that far off boy. I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.”