Much in the way my hair never looks better than on the day I’m getting it cut, I was my best self on the way to a mental institution. My friend told me she thought I should go and I didn’t have anything else to do and wanted to kill myself so I decided to give it a whirl. I drove myself there with another friend who promised to take my car back to my house, but instead left it, along with my house keys, on the other side of town without telling me, and my phone died while I was locked up so I had to crowbar open a window to get in to charge my phone to figure out what the hell he had done and why. But that was later.

As an experiment, a very rich man gave me one hundred million dollars, with the stipulation that I’d let him kill me in ten years, about ten years ago. For some reason it kind of slipped my mind. That’s how I am: taxes catch me by surprise every year; I forget plans until the last second and rush out of the house; once I left my private jet in the Cayman’s because I went back commercial by mistake. The only thing that was on my mind when I got the text reminding me about my agreement was the excruciatingly drawn-out remodeling of the left side of my mansion (when facing the mansion). It was a fairly nice text, as texts about your eventual murder, from your eventual murderer, go.

Freshman year did not go well for Andy Hamlin. But he was home for the summer now and could relax and put it all behind him. Sophomore year he wouldn’t throw up in his dorm room hallway because he wasn’t living in a dorm. He wouldn’t get kidnapped and imprisoned in an old lighthouse and fall in love with his captors because after they received the ransom money they had let him go and promised not to do it again. And he wouldn’t get abducted by aliens because, well, what are the odds that would happen twice to the same person?