You would have thought he'd have snapped back in high school. Some might have said that buying the gun from that army surplus store in LA constituted snapping, but in the end it had all been just a game, the strange waking dream of a boy who played Counterstrike too often to realize there wouldn't be any restart button. He couldn't have been serious.

Maybe it wasn't so much a snap as a long, slow stretch. Things got better sometimes. They let him up on stage at prom after he shyly suggested giving her that award, out of some misguided impulse of gratitude. Fucking misguided all right -- she'd hardly even spoken to him since high school went out with a bang.

But college sucked a little less; moving into the honors wing of Stevenson, meeting a few guys in his Autocad class who weren't total dickheads, getting stoned for the first time. There were even some losers on campus who were freakier than him, better targets for the assholes, and it was easy to pretend he was almost normal.

You would have thought he'd learn to be cool, laugh it off when Sigma Pi ransacked his room and threw his monitor out the window, quit acting like such a dork around the girls on his hall, maybe even sit in the pub and not get hassled by some big neanderthal calling him a shrimp.

You'd think, if he made it through noogies and swirlies and flushed homework and ripped shirts and stolen lunches in high school, that being blown off by Buffy Summers to go hang out with Queen Nerd Willow wouldn't have floored him like it did. But it was the precise moment that her cool blue eyes lifted up and through him to smile at Willow -- Willow , who'd carried a lunchbox until she was 14 -- that any hopes of a normal life burned out and died. As Buffy floated away from the lunch table they'd been sitting at so cozily just seconds ago, Jonathan knew. With Buffy, with the world, he'd always just be the little nerd in the background, not even good enough to be Platonic Guy Friend like that sucker Xander Harris.

You'd guess a tech head like him would go for the weapons again, really take them all out this time, just like Buffy had imagined he would last year. Jonathan was smarter than that. He took out the calfskin-bound book from the Rubbermaid container under his bed, and flipped to the page he'd bookmarked last year when he stole the volume out of the school library, rubbing his fingers over the thin pages that felt like Bible paper. He didn't envy Buffy's beating heart. He envied her life.

The words were easy to him. He'd whispered all of the spell but the last word every night since he'd discovered it. The symbol began branding itself on the flesh of his thin shoulder as he finished. Imperium mei. The power is mine.