Last summer, PETA set up its best stunt yet: a VR game at the mall that allowed you to realistically slaughter farm animals, just outside the food court. The animation was top-notch; the sound effects were painfully loud. Barf bags were provided.

Kevin didn’t need a barf bag. Kevin wasn’t phased. Kevin was a dweeby teen who weighed 100 pounds and wore wire glasses—but behind those frames were eyes that never blinked.

Kevin was so unaffected by the cows and piggies’ cries that he returned to play the game seven times. When the PETA lady caught onto him, she nearly smacked him with a “Cows are People Too” brochure. “Sick fuck,” she mumbled, just inches away from a mother and her thumb-sucking son.

As Kevin scurried off—in the direction of the food court, mind you—his face fell into a frown.

I didn’t plan on talking to him. Not at first. I just wanted to follow him. I just wanted to see if he was going to order something—and if so, would he go for a salad or a burger?

He strode past Chick-fil-a, Sbarro, Chipotle and toward the men’s bathroom. Before he could slip out his range, I tapped on his shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

He turned around. I couldn’t think of an appropriate follow-up.

“You’re probably wondering,” he said, “if I’ve killed before.”

I told him I was wondering no such thing. “That surprises me,” he answered.

“Ok, now I’m kinda curious.”

Kevin was not a murderer, but he had reflected upon murder more than most. It revolted him intellectually but not physically. In fact, not much made his tummy turn. When he was eight years old, he had peered over his babysitter’s shoulder as she watched an ISIS beheading video; he hadn’t even flinched. Subsequent encounters with evil and gore had laid bare the extent of his apathy. Now, at eighteen, he was disgusted by his historic lack of disgust.

His difficulty with emotions had led to difficulty with friendships. In childhood, his grosser tendencies had endeared him to a sizable band of rugrats. When those boys became men, he was left in the dust.

“I’ll talk to you, Kevin,” I told him—trying to seem grave, dutiful. “If you want someone to listen.”

The food court became our meeting place. He did eat meat, I learned. As we spoke, he played with his food—dissecting chicken nuggets and stabbing slabs of steak, trying to coax out a dribble of blood.

Rarely did we engage in idle chatter—instead, I schooled him in social cues, fielded his questions about “the standard psyche,” discussed with him the horrors he had forced himself to witness. The answer to “How did that make you feel?” was almost always “It didn’t.”

One Friday night, when the food court was crowded with rowdy teens, we took our business to the Noodles and Company. The waitress said we “made a sweet pair,” mistaking the intensity in our eyes for love. I asked him if he’d ever been on a date. Once, he said. The girl was cute and they got along fine, but he spent the last 45 minutes of their dinner interrogating her about her experiences with sexual harassment. She never texted him back.

“What, exactly, did you want to know?”

I gave him the intel he was seeking. Lewd catcalls, gritty details of subway gropings—I shared it all. This solidified our silent pact—no such thing as “too far,” not in our world.

Our conversations inevitably turned to career aspirations. Kevin had just graduated high school; he didn’t want to go to college because “the professors wouldn’t like him,” and he didn’t want to get a customer service job because “the customers wouldn’t like him.”

“How about you use your powers for good? Become a censor, or a child porn reporter.”

I saw the first trace of emotion in those lifeless eyes. Anger.

“Those jobs require numbness. I’m doing all this”—he gestured in the direction of the PETA kiosk—“because I want to seek feeling.”

We scrolled through LinkedIn. Eventually, we landed on something up his alley: an administrative position at the local oddities museum. Low risk, high reward: on slow days, he could stare at the two-headed skeletons and violent true crime videos, willing his heartbeat to quicken.

I promised Kevin that I would help him compose a cover letter. “I’ll bring you an example tomorrow,” I said. Scouring the annals of my computer, I realized that I had never actually written one. I had only ever worked at a summer camp, and I had gotten the gig via my art teacher, who had demonstrated an inappropriate sense of affection for me.

I surfed the web for templates. All of them seemed as dry and indifferent as Kevin himself. I got bored, navigated to Instagram, Twitter, and finally—strangely—Tumblr, which I hadn’t logged on to since ninth grade. I scrolled past an account of a teenage girl’s tryst with a math teacher that put my former flirtationship to shame, grainy footage of disembodied genitals, cartoons of animals that would make PETA reach for a rope.

I felt lightheaded. It was all coming across as parodic. I opened Internet Archive.

It didn’t take long for me to find the ISIS video Kevin had mentioned. I traced circles around the play button with my cursor, my hand shaking. “You’re not watching this because you’re bad. You’re watching this because you’re good,” I told myself. Then I clicked.

I was retching within minutes. After the head fell, I hurried to the shower. I cranked the hot water and scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed. At one point, I pushed the curtain back so I could see my body in the bathroom mirror. The building fog crowned me with an ethereal aura. I looked so innocent in my nakedness, so pure and pink and raw. I thought of the beautiful nude girls PETA posed for their ads, contorted to look like sheep or chickens.

I stared until water began to pool up on the tiled floor.

I fell asleep on the toilet. In the morning, I printed out a WikiHow article for Kevin; a block away from the mall, I realized I had forgotten to bring it with me.

Instead of turning back, I showed up empty-handed. “Damn,” Kevin said. I couldn’t tell if he was genuinely disappointed in me or simply contorting his facial expressions to approximate disappointment. Maybe he was foreseeing a dark future in which he, penniless and permanently stoic, slept on a deflating air mattress. Maybe he was imagining me poked, prodded, and drained like a farm animal.

“Kevin?” I asked. “If I was killed in front of you, would you feel anything?”

As soon as the words left my mouth, I knew that I would never be able to help him. Run, run away, I wanted to tell him—but he was already describing the specifics of my envisioned demise, so I stayed quiet, rapt, the perfect distance from the chill of evil. Go on, Kevin, go on.

Brittany Menjivar is a writer based in Los Angeles. The above store is excerpted from her new book, Parasocialite, and is available now from Dream Boy Book Club.