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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.
I'm getting ahead of myself, though.
If what I'm trying to insinuate is that I'm not a normal teenager, I have to confess that I was painfully normal for most of my life, up until the moment my father died.
It was a usual night; a school night.
I was putting off an English assignment. The document I was supposed to be writing was opened on my computer, but I was watching a movie on TV instead. I don't even remember what it was called, some B-horror movie on cable about a giant mutated snake was eating people. Said snake was in the middle of eating Wil Wheaton when the house phone rang.
Twelve seconds later, I heard my mother screaming downstairs.
He'd had a heart attack at work, and died on the way to the hospital. He was in his forties and by all accounts seemed perfectly healthy. He hadn't had a full physical in a while, but it wasn't like he ate nothing but cheeseburgers. He smoked in college, he'd told me once, but hadn't since.
Daniel Baker, my father, was a research scientist at the Marine Corps University Research Center in Quantico, Virginia. That is, until that night. Then he was just dead.
The nature of his work demanded a large measure of secrecy. I had a very small idea about what he did up there in Quantico, and we were given no clue about what he was doing when he'd had the heart attack beyond that brief, emotionless phone call.
It's not all too unusual, where I grew up, for such secrets to infect people's lives. I'd lived in Fredericksburg, Virginia my whole life. Quantico -- a se