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rately as possible.
Cover design by John Godfrey
www.johngodfrey.net
When it is not in our power to determine what is true, we ought to accept what is most probable.
-- René Descartes
To believe something, one must imagine that it is more probable than not.
-- Cyrano de Bergerac
At times truth may not seem probable.
CHAPTER 01
I was seventeen, almost eighteen, the first time I killed someone.
It was kind of an accident, in the same way that bubble gum is kind of a food. I hadn't set out to kill him, honestly, but I wasn't exactly trying not to kill him either.
To be fair, the guy was trying to kill me first. That I had most likely broken his arm and nose before he tried to kill me would probably have been brought up by the prosecution at my murder trial, if there had ever been one. If there had been, though, I or my overpriced attorney (I'm assuming that if I had one, he would be overpriced) would have mentioned the extreme duress I was under. My father had recently died, my school life had gone completely out of control, I had more than a little bit of pepper spray in my eyes, and I was acting to defend my life and the life of the girl I was with.
But alas, there was no murder trial. There was hardly an investigation, really. As an average teenager, that night would have probably been the high -- or low -- point of my young, naive life. It would probably have been the topic of discussion in a lifetime of counseling and group therapy. It might have motivated a period of heavy drug use and the abandonment of friends and family, followed by an inspirational recovery that I might later write about in a best-selling autobiography, that would surely be described by Newsweek magazine as, "A haunting, yet uplifting story of tragedy and the re-discovery of life that every