Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock

It is Leonard Peacock's eighteenth birthday, and he has a plan. In his backpack he carries his grandfather's old gun and four wrapped gifts for the four people who mean the most to him, because today he intends to say goodbye and then end his life. Across one long day we meet those four people and slowly learn the trauma and betrayal that brought Leonard to this morning, all in his sharp, lonely, darkly funny voice. Letters written from an imagined future are folded into the story, small lifelines insisting things can change. When a teacher named Herr Silverman notices how close to the edge Leonard is, the day bends toward the possibility of a different ending.