Make no mistake about what happened that night: Gene was murdered. Cold, lifeless, totally stabbed to death. Murdered.
It was ironic, honestly. As ironic as a murder could be, anyway, because if he were able to choose any way to be murdered beforehand, Gene would without a doubt choose the one he had succumbed to. The thought of it was already so outlandish and hilarious: death by stabbing but the knife is a ding dong and the knife stabs someone's butt? Choosing to be killed that way was so absurdly and comically Gene, it was so easy to imagine him coming up with that himself before anything even happened.
Louise popping the dark question in the lieu of a slow, casual work day, spinning on a booth stool aimlessly. Tina stumbling with her words to answer the question, being made uncomfortable with the topic's morbid nature but eager to give it thought and respond. Mom not at all caught off guard by the bleak conversation starter, being genuinely interested and pondering in her usual cheerful and flamboyant fashion about how she'd choose to be murdered. Something about dying in an evil Tom Selleck's arms, probably. Dad being the logical party pooper, encouraging everyone to dismiss the random grim question, something about "I don't think this is something customers want to hear," and being made uneasy by the thought.
And then, suddenly, Gene would have the genius idea. He would shout it, such being classic Gene fashion, but instead of keeping his cool as he usually does with his incredibly masterfully crafted jokes, the boy wouldn't even be able to contain himself. The stool he'd be sitting on would be abandoned as he'd fall backwards onto the floor, feeling none of the sudden impact as he'd be too busy howling in laughter at the silliness of the idea. Everyone else would be an afterthought during this bit of hysterical laughing tears, but it was still easy to imagine their reactions. Louise probably shouting in approval at the stupid answer, Mom genuinely stopping to think about it, Tina just hearing something about a butt. Dad's exasperated grumble of his son's name, as he usually says it when Gene says something about totally hilarious about ding dongs.
It was so, so easy to imagine this exact scenario. In fact, it was such an accurate depiction of himself and his family that Gene could pretty much convince himself that said situation had actually happened at some point in his life.
It's really what makes his death so ironic in the first place. For such a hilarious, goofy concept, it really wasn't that funny to actually experience. And sure, it was a murder, but for a situation to be as absurd as his one would expect it to be at least a little funny right?
Well not exactly. It wasn't that funny when a weird well-dressed man had suddenly just… appeared in the middle of the woods right behind him when he was walking the long way home. Even less funny when the man totally knew Gene had perched himself for what could have been a few hours on the man's high tech toilet, of which HAD to have been private property despite being in the middle of the woods. Not funny in the slightest when the man could tell before Gene had even moved that he'd want to make a break for it, leaping atop the boy and slamming him to the ground with his weight, the contents of his backpack crushing into Gene's back, effectively making the escape attempt a failure before he'd had the chance to even execute it. And when the man had flipped Gene over on his stomach, chucked off his purple bag, and told him that as long as he wouldn't tell a soul about what the man was about to do, nobody would be going to jail? Not very funny.
The events leading up though were nowhere near as ironic as the actual murder though. Not even close. Anything that had been the usual for the boy had been completely flipped on its head.
Because whereas Gene would usually take every opportunity he could to take off his shorts to revel in the hilarity and invincibility of the action, having them shoved down then in the cold, tense air made him gasp in a feeling of dread and vulnerability he couldn't quite understand.
Joking and flaunting about being sexy even when his parents had emphasized that he did not know the full extent of what the word meant, yet feeling something so terrible and foreign it could only be described as a deep visceral sourness in the way a fruit shrivels when the man's hands had traveled up and down his sides and above him had made a noise that Gene couldn't quite (and frankly didn't want to) put his finger on. That repulsed, horrible feeling increasing tenfold when Gene had licked the palm flat against his mouth attempting to silence his distress and the man above him made that very same noise AGAIN.
That tactic usually worked on his sisters when they'd try to silence him with their hand. They'd promptly remove it from his face, disgusted by the action. Gene hadn't expected for the exact opposite effect to happen then. He imagined his face has turned a sickly green when the man had done that, like the noise had somehow poisoned the boy. Poison to weaken him, foreshadowing his murder.
That silly idea of a hypothetical murder Gene could've come up with himself. Dingdongs in butts… Not serious in the slightest. Hard to not laugh at just the thought of it. It was so stupid. So so stupid.
Yet somehow, he'd been stabbed, poisoned, suffocated, crushed, and impaled all at once in the frigid darkness that night. No living thing there to acknowledge the boy's anguish except his assailant's hand, tears rolling down between fingers and pitiful cries garbled behind callous. Besides, what would he have done if someone saw him anyways? Saw him like… that? How would he have even explained it, if he could've? "I'm being killed in five different ways by an evil dingdong in my butt, and instead of trying to help myself or laughing at how stupid it is, I'm crying about it"? What type of murder even is that? It wasn't even kind of funny when put like that. Just really pathetic. And gross.
Gene's bottom lip threatened to wobble between his teeth, eyes boring forward, not particularly focused on anything. Stubby fingers clutched the keyboard atop his lap tightly. His bedroom was nearly silent, save for quick, heavy breaths leaving the boy through his nose and the sound of his own thoughts.
He'd never felt confusion and humiliation like that before. It felt… different in a way he didn't feel he was supposed to understand, if he even could. Maybe didn't want to try to understand.
What was there to understand though? He was murdered that night, now a mere corpse, and nobody was ever going to know. Not Louise, not Tina, not Mom, not Dad. Because even if his murder seemed so, so silly in thought, as if Gene had come up with it himself, he knew they'd never want to know about it. About the sudden exposure, about the noises, about the low, slimy whispers in his ear, about the repeated stabbing, about the suffocation. About that small, small, small feeling Gene had felt that entire time. They would want to hear about a murder, he knew. But this one was different, having all those weird, horrible foreign factors that he couldn't try to wrap head around. So many thoughts attempting and failing to rationalize the experience, spinning in his head with a speed that made him sick the same way he'd get sick on the Scramble Pan with his sisters. This was different, and maybe Gene didn't know how just yet, but what he did know for certain was that for whatever new, terrible color of murder this was, his family could not know of it. They couldn't imagine him like that, see him that way.
All Gene could do was stare ahead in the silence of his room amidst the rest of the ignorant, blissful sleeping household, and convince himself that he was murdered, killed by a mad-man he'd trespassed in the darkness of the woods. That's what it was. Murder. After all,
What else could it have been?