I put my Winchester down next to me in the living room, sat down, took off my boots, and put my head in my hands. I wasn’t shaking and yet I had the feeling I was. I felt strange. I’d done something stupid, the kind of thing you do when you’re a teenager. It’s an age when you like to see how far you can go. I say that now, I didn’t think it at the time, because I wasn’t thinking about anything. It was cold now, because my grandmother was mean with the heating. I thought to go raise it a notch, but then I’d have to go back past a place where I never wanted to set foot again. If I left the house, it was the same problem. So I switched on the TV. Waiting for it to warm up, I went and raided the kitchen. I emptied the cupboards of everything I thought I could eat easily. I took a six-pack of beer too, I deserved it. My footsteps echoed strangely, I’d never noticed that before. I took the cap off a bottle with my teeth because I’d seen people do that in movies, and I lay down full length on the couch, hanging over at both ends. I didn’t stay long like that. I stood to turn up the volume on the TV. Someone had shot the President. What I found amazing about the news was that a guy had actually done something like that. The news they were giving out mentioned a lone gunman. I couldn’t get over it. An ordinary guy had had the strength to decide in his own head, all alone in his corner, “I’m going to shoot the President of the United States.” I guessed thousands of men had had that idea before him, but he had done it and, incredibly, he had succeeded. I didn’t yet know how far he’d succeeded, at that point they were saying only that the President was seriously wounded. I was green with admiration and envy. Envy because this guy was going to steal the limelight from me. It was supposed to be my day of fame but, even in the local rags, that was all they were going to be talking about. How could something like that have happened to me? I continued listening to the various reporters and commentators getting really worked up, and knocked back beer after beer. By the sixth, I’d kind of changed my mind. I thought it was a good thing that Kennedy had been killed that day, I might pass unnoticed, or they wouldn’t be so mad at me, or whatever. To be quite honest, I was starting to chicken out slightly.