On the morning the last Gibson son accidentally killed himself while masturbating — it was Trevor this time, and slipping in the shower, like Colton — the two paramedics arrived knowing exactly where the laptops were, and the tissues, and the bottles of hand lotion.

Landon, the youngest, had gone first, a swallowed gulp of water drowned him while he violently cranked himself in the bathtub, and when they found him, afloat in the cloudy swamp, his small body giving off the chlorine odor of a public swimming pool, the paramedics had been so disgusted by his erection and the Japanese cartoon pornography on the laptop beside the tub that they had left the room, gagging.

We’d watched them all summer, through pinched blinds from the house across the street, us girls drawn to them, gripped by our first up-close glimpse at boys our age unfiltered, so raw and free of shame. To us, choked in training bras, bound and hidden in the long skirts and ruffled dresses mother approved, their gymnastic nudity, their indulgence of their basest desires, they were feral and alive and we could not look away.

Brooks was second, falling off the roof while masturbating in the cool night air, tumbling, scraping down the rough shingles and sinking — we imagined in the throes of pleasure — until the sharp point of the Gibsons’ iron fence punctured his stomach. When the two paramedics arrived and surveyed the nude body, the sustained erection, and the cracked phone blaring auto-played episodes of MILF Hunters, they rolled their eyes.

They’d be back the next morning for Bryce, who crashed his Jeep head-on into the namesake oak tree at our neighborhood entrance on his way to school. The two paramedics smiled as they approached the accordioned car, thanking god that this death had been a regular one. But when they made it to the window, they recoiled and heaved, seeing Bryce’s penis; he was driving nude from the waist down — his pants and underwear riding shotgun — his phone in the dashboard mount displaying a zoomed-in image of Alexandra Daddario’s nipple.

For weeks, we tried to find significance or meaning or romance in the Gibson boys’ deaths. We attended the funerals. We cataloged information in composition notebooks, studied the angles of their devious grins in yearbook photos. Us girls wanted poetry. We craved beauty from tragedy, we squeezed and squeezed at these deaths, desperate for a drop of heartbreak or longing. But none emerged. The boys at school who’d known the Gibsons confirmed they were abhorrent pornography addicts who were unpleasant to be around. None was literary or tortured, all were defined by their addictions to online sex and self-pleasure. The air at school wasn’t haunted by the weight of their absence; it was lightened and relieved.

Mr. and Mrs. Gibson made a large profit selling their big house and used the funds to pursue their dream of opening a smoothie shop in Myrtle Beach, which has won awards and spawned four additional locations.

Us girls grew up and moved on, went to college, moved to big cities, started careers and families of our own. But every now and then we remember the Gibson boys, and the nights we spent watching them angrily jack themselves off in their beds — five boys in five rooms too dumb to know everyone can see in when you have your light on at night — and, alone in our offices or our cars, we search our memories one more time, looking for some uncovered piece of melancholy grace, but we always come to the same conclusion: it was a net positive for the world that they died. Those boys were so nasty.

In January 1896, the Lumière Brothers premiered their film L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat, known in the United States as Train Pulling Into a Station, a groundbreaking 50-second silent film. It’s become film legend that at the screening, the audience was so overwhelmed by the moving image of a life-sized train coming directly at them that people screamed and ran to the back of the room. But in fact, there had only been one horrified audience member: James Taft, an American businessman on vacation in Paris, so frightened by the footage of the train that he’d wailed in abject terror and shrieked, “God save me, I beg for mercy and entry to heaven,” as he ran away from the screen while the other moviegoers howled laughter at him.

“Says here in the Arts section you were scared like a child at that movie,” James’s business partner, Samuel Pep, said the following morning in the office. “Says you embarrassed yourself heartily and have become a laughingstock all across France. Le Bébé Américain they call you. The American Baby.”

“No,” James said, “that’s a mistake. That’s not true.” He was tired from the transatlantic voyage and wanted to put that terrible night behind him. “Let us get on with our work.”

“Says here you brought great shame to all of America. Made the nation look weak. Seems you’ve given the French fuel for their condescension.”

“I assure you,” James said sternly, “that report is a sensationalist fabrication. I am not afraid of movies and I am not afraid of trains. Give me that stack of mail and let me get on with my day processing orders.”

“Those aren’t orders, they’re cancellations. I arrived this morning to a pile of post from loyal customers cancelling their accounts. No one wants to do business with Le Bébé Américain.”

James balled his hand and pounded it on his desk. “It’s libel, god damn it.”

“Seventy-nine witnesses all confirmed what they saw: you, crying and apologizing to God for your many sins.”

James glared out the window of his immaculate office, looking down at the filthy street beneath him, pocked with rats and tramps. He knew that if he lost his customers, he’d be begging for pennies in those awful alleys. “I’m no coward,” he said. “And I’ll prove it. The train from St. Louis arrives at ten. Meet me at the station.”

*

Taft stood on the tracks at Union Station, facing forward with his knees bent like a boxer. Seven hundred spectators had gathered to watch the international embarrassment redeem himself and, by proxy, all of America.

Steam rose over the hill and the crowd cheered. The horn blared, the earth rumbled.

“Stop,” Samuel Pep called from the platform. “This is a real train. In France you saw a motion picture.”

“Shut up,” Taft said as the locomotive’s mean black grill rounded the bend and charged towards him. “I was there and you were not. None of you were there in that cinema. This is what it looked like. This here is a cinema and this is a motion picture and I am not afraid.”

“Get off the tracks,” Pep begged while the crowd cheered the thundering train.

Taft shook his head and smiled, staring forward. “I love movies,” he said. “I love the cinema and I am not afraid of it. I know the difference between real life and the magic of the silver scree–“

The two-hundred-ton train plowed into James Taft, grinding his bones and veins and intestines into a gruesome red paste.

*

Le Petit Parisien ran Taft’s obituary on its front page, under the headline La Crêpe Américaine, The American Crepe. They said the world’s first cinephile had been violently slaughtered by a train in Chicago. But they confirmed, based on the testimonies of hundreds of eye-witnesses, that he’d died a brave and courageous death.

It’s 5:59 and your staff pounds on your office door, demanding you make the decisions you’ve been promising since the morning check-in meeting. “At the end of the day, we’ll do what needs to be done.” “At the end of the day, there’s just one course of action.” “At the end of the day, I, as CEO, will make the call.”

Your six senior vice presidents punch the door; they mush their noses into the window and scream, begging you to execute on a game plan to handle the health and PR crisis unfolding in real time, after the plant in Ohio discovered lethal amounts of roach poison were mixed into hundreds of thousands of packages of Milk Chocolate Toffee Almond Chunk Cookies. “At the end of the day, we’ll do what’s right for our customers and partners,” you told the team at the 10:00 meeting before racing out, dripping sweat. “At the end of the day, it’ll be clear what we need to do,” you said at 11, then sprinted out of the conference room and into a bathroom stall to hyperventilate between your knees.

Monica Toro screeches into the glass of your window, flicking blood from her lips, “Hundreds of people are dying every minute. Make the call, god damn it.”

You shut the blinds and try to catch your breath. Pepperidge Farm was supposed to be an easy job. It’s bags of cookies, for god’s sake. You didn’t sign up to deal with messes like this.

But you went to business school. You’ve read the case studies. You know a solution to this rapidly escalating crisis exists; you just need time to locate it.

You straighten your tie, smooth your jacket, and open the door. Your executive team glares at you, waiting for leadership during this time of crisis.

“At the end of the day,” you say, “it’s clear that first thing in the morning we’ll do what needs to be done.” Someone says our cookies are shredding the stomach linings of kids all over the country, making them drown in their own blood. “That’s not ideal,” you say, “and first thing in the morning, I, as CEO, will make the call.” Someone tells you to do something now, because if you wait all night thousands of elderly customers will eat the cookies and die violent, painful deaths. You sigh and look back at the team. They have no idea what it’s like to be CEO, to have all this weight on your shoulders. “First thing in the morning, it’s my decision. I’ll see you all then.”

You take your briefcase and walk outside, drive yourself to Dave & Buster’s, drink beer and play games alone all night, taking your busy mind off all that work stress. At home, drunk, you open a package of Milk Chocolate Toffee Almond Chunk Cookies and enjoy a midnight snack, knowing that at the end of the day, you’ll know what to do first thing in the morning.