Excerpt of The King by Steven James

When Corey Wellington woke up at 5:14 a.m., he had no intention of killing himself.

Over the last twenty years the thought of taking his own life had, in fact, crossed his mind many times, but never as clearly, as distinctly, as that first time, when he was a junior in high school and Caitlyn Vaughn stood him up at prom, and everyone knew about it, and it felt like someone had knocked his feet out from under him and hit him with a baseball bat in the gut at the same time.

In retrospect it seemed silly, childish even—feeling so devastated by something so inconsequential—but at the time it’d felt like his entire world had crumbled.

That night he’d gone to his father’s den in the basement and taken the key to the gun cabinet from the desk drawer where his dad kept it, where he thought it was safely hidden from his two curious children.

Corey had opened the gun case, loaded one of the revolvers, and then sat at the desk for a long time with the handgun cradled in his hands.

It felt cold and heavier than it looked.

Wonder, dreams, hopes, all those things that make life livable seemed to be slipping away like a stream of spent possibilities. There was nothing he could think of that he looked forward to: not summer vacation or his senior year or seeing any movie or listening to any song or playing any video game or being with any girl.

It was as if everything that lay on the horizon of that moment held nothing but the promise of more rejection and despair without any hope of healing. Yes, a girl can do that to you. Yes, she can rip out your reason for living, just like that, with one glance, one comment, one prom-night giggle when she blows you off and then jokes about it with her friends.

He’d raised the pistol and slid the end of the barrel into his mouth. Can you ever really know the reason behind an action? Can you ever really tell for sure why you did one thing instead of another? That, yes, this is why you quit your job, bought the Toyota instead of the Ford, ordered spaghetti rather than pizza, didn’t pull the trigger when you had the chance.

Maybe it was cowardice, maybe it was some strange breed of courage that kept him from putting a bullet in his brain that night, but at last he’d replaced the revolver and ammunition in the cabinet, and no one had ever known that he’d had a gun barrel clenched between his teeth and his finger pressed against the trigger on prom night.

In the months that followed, thinking about how close he’d come to ending it all had frightened him, and he’d found a persistent heaviness lurking on the edge of his thoughts. Eventually, he’d started taking meds to quiet the depression and keep those thoughts of irreversible solutions away, but still, over the years, it had stolen one marriage, two jobs, and any number of friends from him.

But not since that night in high school two decades earlier had the thought come to him as overpoweringly as it did today: Kill yourself, Corey. Take your life. This is something you can do right now. This very day.