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school shooter. And Griffin Wilson knew drugs are only a patch. After drugs, you’re always going to need
more
drugs.
    The problem with being Talented And Gifted is sometimes you get
too smart.
My uncle Henry says the importance of eating a good breakfast is because your brain is still growing. But nobody talks about how, sometimes, your brain can get just
too big.
    We’re basically big animals, evolved to break open shells and eat raw oysters, but now we’re expected to keep track of all three hundred Kardashian sisters and eight hundred Baldwin brothers. Seriously, at the rate they reproduce the Kardashians and the Baldwins are going to wipe out all other species of humans. The rest of us, you and me, we’re just evolutionary dead ends waiting to wink out.
    You could ask Griffin Wilson anything. Ask him who signed the Treaty of Ghent. He’d be like that cartoon magician on TV who says, “Watch me pull a rabbit out of my ass.” Abracadabra, and he’d know the answer. In Organic Chem, he could talk String Theory until he was anoxic, but what he really wanted to be was happy. Not just not-sad, he wanted to be happy the way a dog is happy. Not constantly jerked this way and that by flaming Instant Messages and changes in the federal tax code. He didn’t want to die, either. He wanted to be—and not to be—but at the same time. That’s what a pioneering genius he was.
    The Principal of Student Affairs made Tricia Gedding swear to not tell a living soul, but you know how that goes. The school district was afraid of copycats. Those defibrillators are everywhere these days.
    Since that day in the nurse’s office, Griffin Wilson has never seemed happier. He’s always giggling too loud and wiping spit off his chin with his sleeve. The Special Ed teachers clap their hands and heap him with praise just for using the toilet. Talk about a double standard. The rest of us are fighting tooth and nail for whatever garbage career we can get, while Griffin Wilson is going to be thrilled with penny candy and reruns of
Fraggle Rock
for the rest of his life. How he was before, he was miserable unless he won every chess tournament. The way he is now, just yesterday, he took out his dick and started to jerk off during morning roll call. Before Mrs. Ramirez could hurry us through the S’s and the T’s—people are answering “here” and they’re answering “present,” too slow, snickering and staring—before Mrs. Ramirez can rush down the aisle and stop him, Griffin Wilson shouts, “Watch me pull a rabbit out of my pants,” and he sprayed hot baby gravy all over a bookcase full of nothing except a hundred
To Kill a Mockingbird
s. He was laughing the whole time.
    Lobotomized or not, he still knows the value of a signature catchphrase. Instead of being just another grade grubber, now he’s the life of the party.
    The voltage even cleared up his acne.
    It’s hard to argue with results like that.
    It wasn’t a week after he’d turned zombie that Tricia Gedding went to the gym where she does Zumba and got the defibrillator off the wall in the girls locker room. After her self-administered peel-and-stick procedure in a bathroom stall, she doesn’t care where she gets her period. Her best friend, Brie Phillips, got to the defibrillator they keep next to the bathrooms at the Home Depot, and now she walks down the street, rain or shine, with no pants on. We’re not talking about the scum of the school. We’re talking about the class president and the head cheerleader. The best and the brightest. Everybody who played first string on all the sports teams. It took every defibrillator between here and Canada, but, since then, when they play football nobody plays by the rules. And even when they get skunked, they’re always grinning and slapping high fives.
    They continue to be young and hot, but they no longer worry about the day when they won’t be.
    It’s suicide, but it’s not. The newspaper won’t report the actual numbers.