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his out-box. “Pay attention to what you’re doing. Care about it more.”
    That’s easy for him to say. People pray to him. They curse me.
    I thank Jerry for his time; then I get up and tiptoe across the floor to get my shoes.
    When I walk back into the reception area, the woman who accosted me earlier about her pancreatic cancer is walking toward me, apparently Jerry’s next appointment. As she passes, she turns and spits in my face.
    Behind me, Hostility bursts out laughing.

CHAPTER 4

    I’m in Duluth, Minnesota, eating a glazed Krispy Kreme and watching a forty-four-year-old biology teacher pace back and forth on the rear porch of a house where his seventeen-year-old star biology student lives. The dilemma he’s facing is that his student has told him she’s interested in having him teach her private biology lessons at home. Her parents are out of town for the weekend and here he is, on her back porch at nine in the morning while his wife thinks he’s off fishing. He knows if he knocks on the door, he’ll be heading down a path that could possibly ruin his career and destroy his marriage.
    Except his star pupil is so amazingly hot. She has perfect tits and an unbelievable ass and natural blonde hair that smells like honey and eyes that understand him and lips he just wants to suck on and she’s seventeen and he’s never had sex with a seventeen-year-old and she says she wants him to teach her everything he knows about sex.
    Everything.
    When was the last time anyone said that to him?
    Certainly not his wife, who hasn’t had sex with him in more than three weeks, and even when they do have sex, it’s perfunctory and passionless. And he wants passion in his life. He needs passion. And this young woman, this nubile student, with her intelligence and her wit and her fair skin and her succulent lips and her soft, husky voice, personifies that passion.
    It’s so disappointing.
    Searching for his bliss when the key to finding happiness resides inside himself rather than inside a seventeen-year-old girl.
    At this point in his life, at this crossroads, he has multiple fates in front of him:
    1. He can turn around and walk away and go back to his dreary, passionless life with his dreary, passionless wife and masturbate every night to questionably legal teen pornography;
    2. He can turn around and walk away and rededicate himself to his wife and to his career and continue along the reasonably happy path he was assigned at birth;
    3. He can knock on the door, have a passionate affair with his gorgeous student, then lose his job, his marriage, and his house before drinking himself into depression and bankruptcy.
    I’d like to help. Give him a nudge in the right direction, tell him to take what’s behind Door Number Two, but that would be breaking the rules.
    So I just sit there, eating my Krispy Kreme, keeping my suggestions to myself, watching forty-four-year-old high school biology teacher Darren Stafford pace back and forth on the rear porch, trying to figure out what he should do. I’m rooting for him to make the right choice. I really am. But I don’t have much faith in his decision making. Number one, he’s horny. Number two, he’s male. And number three, he’s human.
    He knocks on the door.
    Next I’m in Compton, California, standing outside a liquor store at seven in the morning and eating another Krispy Kreme as a fifteen-year-old kid is paying a homeless guy to buy him a pint of whiskey and a couple of forties. The kid is about to embark on a path of drugs and alcohol that will lead him in and out of juvenile hall and then prison for the next dozen years for theft and robbery and drunken driving, until eventually he’ll end up with a charge of vehicular manslaughter, which will put him behind bars until he’s thirty-five.
    Not the fate he was born with, but I can’t give him a heads-up.
    The homeless guy, on the other hand, is unaware that if he refuses the money from the kid, it will improve his