“Well, I don’t know,” Ray said. He was still smiling, like we were going to have some kind of interesting fucking debate.

“This isn’t Fox & Friends,” I interrupted him. “I don’t care about your opinions, Mr. Lampert, because you are a cesspool of a human being with the moral compass of a gnat.” He was squinting at me through his busted, swollen eyes, trying to tell if I was joking, if this was some fun read, hashtag the library is open. Bunny had both hands clapped over her mouth, just watching. “You think this town loves you, but have you noticed you don’t have any friends? You’ve built a child’s idea of a rich man’s house and you live in it like you’re the king, but what are you king of? Money you don’t have? A daughter who doesn’t like you? No wonder your wife drove into traffic, you’re a fucking joke.”

And then I got up, and I left, and no one stopped me.

I do not know where, in a genetic sense, my intellectual bent came from, but I can remember exactly when school began to seem less useless to me. I had always been a reader, and novels provided me much company throughout my boyhood, but school itself held no appeal. The adults there were using the same bad scripts as social workers, like they were telemarketers cold-calling the youth. All the lining up, all the tiny, incremental punishments, pull a green card, then pull a yellow card, but if you pull the red card…Or later in high school the elaborate demerit system: five tardies equal one unexcused absence, and three unexcused absences equal one demerit, and three dicks sucked equal one I couldn’t care less about any of this. Even the schoolwork itself, the worksheets and Scantrons, textbooks instead of real books, it was all so meaningless and bizarre. Why were we all doing this together, and so obsessively?

But there was a day in early April of my junior year of high school when our biology teacher came into class on fire, so excited that he exploded at us, holding up a newspaper and stabbing at the text with his finger. What so excited him was a finger bone that had been found in the Altai Mountains in Siberia in 2008 had now been genetically analyzed and found to be neither Neanderthal nor Homo sapiens in origin. She, the study called her X-woman, was from a third hominid species, Denisovans, named after the cave in which the bone was found, who had diverged from our lineage about a million years ago, and her finger bone had been found in a cave where both Neanderthal and Homo sapiens remains had also been found, along with stone tools. More startling, while the modern Eurasian populations shared up to one percent genetic material with Denisovans, consistent with the theory that we shared a common ancestor, in Melanesian populations the figure rose to four percent, indicating more recent genetic exchange between Denisovans and Homo sapiens in that part of the world. In another study, bones found in Croatia indicated Homo sapiens and Neanderthals had interbred. The picture, hazy as it was, was that there had been many kinds of humans living, fucking, competing, and killing each other at the same time.

Our teacher, who was a young man, perhaps in his late twenties or early thirties, and who had some kind of rockabilly undercut, much too stylish a haircut for a teacher, was in a kind of rapture about this, and he kept interrupting himself, trying to explain to us why this was exciting. “It’s such a deep assumption in our culture that there was this steady and inevitable march from ape to man, that it was this clear progression, but it was chaotic! I just think it says so much. And it really puts xenophobia in a different light, as some kind of possibly helpful mutation. I mean, we were in direct competition, but also interbreeding, with different species of humanoid animals. Doesn’t that just blow your mind?”

It did blow my mind. And I connected it, rightly or wrongly, with a sensation I had often had with my own father, when he was drunk enough, where I would stop recognizing him. His face, or his eyes, would become too strange, and suddenly he was no longer a man I loved but one I wanted urgently to murder. The idea that this was a human impulse and not a moral failing on my part as his son but some kind of genetic adaptation, a holdover from a time when we decided whom to fuck and whom to kill based on whether they were the same or other, was deeply comforting to me and intellectually freeing.

Questions that had always bothered me, about slavery, about the Holocaust, about the Armenian genocide and the Rwandan one, about the human ability to look at another human being and decide, nope, I think that kind of human is an animal, suddenly coalesced into a powerful shape of interdependent facts and observations. Human beings were murderous because it had been necessary for our survival. Human beings committed genocide because we had evolved to commit genocide. Human beings projected themselves onto animals, and then retracted that sympathy, and then projected that sympathy once more, confused about the line between what was like us and what wasn’t, because for thousands of years we had been making exactly those judgment calls. Violence was not something that had infected us, some alien thing that could slip into our bloodstream and cloud our judgment via ideology or mechanization. It was not gray-eyed Athena tricking Ajax into murdering sheep. It was sewn in. We were violent, murderous animals, by design.

So I was not entirely surprised when a group of boys jumped me behind the Rite Aid as I was getting off my shift. I was tired, but I was excited because I was about to go meet Anthony. If we got caught, fuck it. I hadn’t spoken to Bunny since that night in her house, and I didn’t want to. I didn’t want her to apologize for her father, to try to explain him to me. And I didn’t want to have to apologize for myself.

While Matthew Shepard had been murdered when I was a child, it was still a story very much in the zeitgeist. In 2007, Ryan Skipper was found dead of multiple stab wounds and a slit throat, and his murderers had driven around in his blood-soaked car, bragging of how they’d killed him. So I understood that other men would want, and possibly would try, to kill me. But it had not occurred to me that it would happen in my hometown. In some sense, I think I viewed North Shore, even then, with the child’s eyes with which I had first seen it when I was eleven. It seemed to me too good a town to harbor such violence, though I kept being proved wrong. Donna Morse’s murder. Bunny beating Ann Marie. Yet I still assumed that if such a thing were to happen to me, it would happen to me in college, or in my adulthood, when I was living in a glamorous metropolis. I just hadn’t imagined I would be getting off work at Rite Aid, still wearing my blue smock, lighting a cigarette.

The one I recognized first was Ann Marie’s boyfriend, Tyler. “Hey, faggot,” he called to me in the parking lot. And so I knew what they were there for, but I did not know how far they meant to take it. I paused, and perhaps because I was very tired, I sighed dramatically and said, “What do you want, honeys?” I had never let myself talk like that except in private, and it felt thrilling and dangerous.

“We wanna talk to you,” one of the other ones said, a boy named Jonah whom I had taken English with sophomore year. I remember we read The Great Gatsby. “Just come here, we wanna talk.”

I started toward them. “Listen guys, I—” But by then I was close enough, and Tyler socked me in the face. The pain was as sudden and real as when you bark your shin on a coffee table, and for a moment I could not understand what had possibly happened. He hit me again, and I went down.