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 tried 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 person, young and old, must read.” My life wouldn't move in that direction, though.
Being put in a situation where you have to decide whether or not to probably kill someone to protect your own life should have affected me profoundly, but it didn’t. It bounced off me like rain off glass.
Around two weeks later, when I killed someone again, this time much more deliberately, I was affected even less. There was no murder trial for that one, either.