Becca, Becca, Becca. The girl had no idea of the beast she had poked in me, but the good news for the both of us was it would be over very soon.

I may have been the only one who knew just how fragile Becca’s act of perfection was. The only one that knew that she was a lot more like one of those borderline homeless “artists” on the beach who stack rock towers up like games of JENGA while amazed tourists watch instead of the cool, calm and professional architect of a dream life she liked to pretend she was.

Becca was in the middle of LSATs or GREs or one of those grad school test things girls with rich parents take too seriously and I knew Daniel was down in New York for work for a few days. It was the perfect time for me to drop by just before midnight on a rainy night and spill my guts with my two-pronged attack of life-crushing information about Daniel and her dad.

The few sentences Becca told me a few years back, just before our friendship disintegrated, after a night of partying as the sun rose kept replaying over and over in my head like a song on a scratched CD as I drove up to her apartment near downtown Boston.

Years ago, Becca told me about how the pressure of maintaining her “on paper” perfect life made her feel like she was going to explode from the inside sometimes and how it made her think of the handgun her dad had bought and trained her to shoot with, resting in the back of her closet. How sometimes she thought about how if something really bad happened in the midst of her unbearable stress from school, she feared she might turn to that gun and end it all.