He’s never taken a test in his life that he hasn’t aced. Eighteen years old and he’s already in grad school, but, look. Look how dumb he really is. How can somebody so smart be this stupid?” Each word seemed like the bite of a shovel digging down into Walter’s grave and grudgingly unearthing him. But Walter didn’t want to be unearthed, did he? What was happening? He’d just blown his head off with a Remington 870 that had a 12-gauge deer-slug in the chamber. “What an asshole. What a shit-for-brains blithering moron.” The person berating him was his twin brother Colin who sat next to Walter’s bed, reading MAD magazine. Colin’s kinky tumble of fire-orange hair—identical to Walter’s— glowed around the shape of his head from the lamp beside his chair. Where am I? Walter thought. “You’re in the hospital, Brain-child, in case you haven’t figured it out,” Colin told him. “And, no, you didn’t die. Jesus Christ in a hot-dog stand, Walter. Where’d you get that shotgun?”
