Chapter 4

There were some shuffling sounds coming from the hallway as several people peered into the room, shocked at first by the sound of a single gunshot, then secondarily taken aback at the scene within: a young man kneeling over a girl, holding a bloody knife in his hand, the girl on the floor in an expanding pool of blood, and me, standing literally with a smoking gun in my hand, my genitals exposed, my shirt bloody.

“She’s dead. You ... you killed her,” said Jarden, looking up at me and then the growing crowd. I was speechless.

A moment or so later, campus security arrived, two young men thoroughly unprepared for the scene that greeted them. Pulling their revolvers, they stammeringly ordered both of us inside the room to drop our weapons. Jarden carefully laid his down on the ground. I was stunned by the recent turn of events and looked blankly at them, finally complying after the third demand, my revolver clattering loudly on the linoleum floor.

Both Jarden and I were then cuffed and seated, one guard checking Lisa for a pulse while the other contacted a supervisor via his walkie-talkie, requesting back-up, ambulances, and quite possibly the National Guard for all I paid attention.

My attention was on Lisa, whose life had been snuffed out by a single errant shot. Just moments ago, after Jarden caught Lisa and I flagrante delicto, he cried out, “You cheating bitch!” and moved into the room, raising his knife, preparing to strike.

As Lisa released the still impressive length of my half-flaccid penis from her mouth and drew her hands up to her mouth in an expression of horror at being caught (and, perhaps, to dab a bit of misbehaving semen attempting to escape her lips), I bound out of the chair, arms wide, “take it easy, young man.”

Jarden swung out wildly at me with the knife, penetrating through my button-down light blue Oxford dress shirt and an inch or so into the soft, fleshy area just south of my rib cage. Crying out sharply, I fell back against a filing cabinet, clutching my abdomen, then awkwardly opening one cabinet drawer in search of help.

Lisa had arisen and was ready to flee the scene when Jarden spun around and saw her. He moved quickly and pinned her up against another file cabinet, his face mere inches from hers, speaking quietly as he brought the knife up to the center of her chest.

“You disappointed me, you fucking slut!” and with that, he thrust the knife into her, its narrow blade piercing her flesh and entering her heart. In a single second, I saw the light of life leave her as her eyes became glassy and lifeless.

Finding my revolver, I pulled it out and aimed it at him. For the first time in my life, brought on perhaps by the emotional rush of the situation, I used the incorrect gender form of a word, screaming out, “You bitch!” while aiming the gun at Jarden’s back and pulling the trigger.

Jarden spun away to prepare for an attack by me, and in that split second of moving, saved his own life as the bullet shot forth from my handgun (unregistered, unfortunately), narrowly missing him and instead penetrating Lisa’s lifeless body in the exact same opening created by his knife. As Lisa slumped to the floor, Jarden crouched down over her, and it was then that somewhere in the recesses of my mind, I registered voices and faces nearby.

No alarm bells went off in my head as I answered questions asked by the police when they arrived a short while later. It’s quite possible I was still in shock at what happened. I simply don’t know. I do know that I recounted the events of the night with startling detail, except that Jarden’s story and mine did not match up. He claimed that I became belligerent when he entered the office, that a struggle ensued, that I tried to stab him, but instead, I got cut, and then when Lisa tried to defend him, I yelled out at her and then shot her in cold blood.

That matched the audio of what people heard in the neighboring office, my “You bitch!” doing nothing to help my cause. There were inconsistencies in both of our stories, it seemed, and so the District Attorney’s office decided to prosecute both of us. For Jarden, they charged him with negligence leading to death. For me, the charge was involuntary manslaughter since there was an absence of pronounced malice toward the girl and a second charge of reckless endangerment, which was pared down by plea bargain from illegal possession of a firearm used in the commission of a felony.

The fact that the bullet tore through her body in the exact same location as the knife wound was incredibly unfortunate luck for me. It was all the jury needed to hear to convict me.