~~(Note: not for the easily offended.)~~
There were no shades of gray in the world of Alan Sharpley, aged 20. Blaguards, they were, soulless collegians who bragged of their weekend conquests at Tuesday's fraternity meetings. It shocked him when one "raised the bloody flag", bragging of having had a menustrating woman leave evidence on his bedsheets, the ultimate affront for which she would pay, he said, and the crowd screeched and whistled its approval. From between his legs he lifted a section of the sheet, still red with the blood of a woman who'd given the gift of her body only to be mocked by a jeering crowd, her dried fluid held up for the contempt of the brethern. Cretins, Sharpley thought, and he knew to avoid them, cocooning himself in the warm spa of self-congratulation and thanking God that he was not like them.
After graduation he took a job as a dental hygenist several states away, in Tempe, Arizona. He soon met an alumni of the same college and they became friends, both having fond memories of alma mater if experiencing her in utterly different ways. Brett Sanford was wild but not unfeeling, immoral but kind. It was an odd experience for Alan, who'd grown up in the atmosphere of traditional morality where white hats and black hats were consistent in their coloring. For the first time he'd met someone apparently kind, considerate, even generous but who had sex with strangers and drank till he dawn. There was a cognitive dissonance.
Brett introduced Alan to buddies considerably coarser than himself and they went to bars nightly in a kind of mutually assured descent. Once, after buckets of beer and IVs of 151, they headed out to the 7/11. Alan had a bad feeling, an intuition. It was pride, he decided in retrospect, that made him ignore the feeling. To go home now, tired and drunk, would be a weakness. But the whispering... Myers, a bad seed for sure, was carrying and was saying something to Brett. Brett was shaking his head, like he was crazy but...what was it? They were going to rob the liquor store. Myers said he'd been in there, he knew the guy, he'd give them the liquor because he was just working there for the summer and wouldn't care.
For years Alan cursed that decision, wishing he'd listened to that inner voice, wishing he hadn't gone along with it and paid the consequence of a year in prison for accessory to armed robbery. It was his personal history's conventional wisdom that pride had led him to ignore his guardian angel's voice. It served him well until...until he wondered what might have been. What he would've become without getting caught, without the sentence that caused him to clean up his life, without finding God anew and losing his pride and stopping the decline of descent with his faithless but not unlovable companions. Was it not the gospel's message, that good comes of evil? Did not God continue to love him even as he punished him? Could it have been the devil who'd whispered, "go home now"? For it was Alan himself who'd busted them, Alan who'd accidentally tripped the silent alarm.
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