Over the past weeks and months, a number of readers have asked me why I don’t eat chocolate. Do I have some kind of allergy? Did I eat too much of it as a child? It’s a bit more complicated than that. And while this story is hard to believe, it’s as true as anything else I’ve ever made up.

I blame myself, and I always have. The student loans had piled up over the years, as they ordinarily do, but I wasn’t doing anything about them. Four aimless years were turning into five, but at least I had finally decided what to do with my life. My summers had been spent — wasted, really — wandering. One year it was backpacking around California. Another and the one after that it was Europe, exploring castles. These trips were meant to be educational, and I suppose they were, but they weren’t cheap, and were financed with credit cards that had been all too easy for a jobless student to obtain.

So with no money, and nothing saved up from summer jobs that never were, and with mountains of debt, I started my “adult life” as a mere continuation of my ill-spent, over-spent youth.

Writing was my passion, and it had to be some kind of calling. I had written volumes during those trips, and if faeries had followed me around from place to place, they might have gathered up the scraps of paper I had left from one corner of the world to the next, and they might have even published them. They were left behind for a reason, though — they were just plain bad. I’d been told as much in California by a woman in a pickup truck who had driven me to the bus station. She wrote for the local newspaper, she told me, and could she read what I’d written, she asked. And told me it was just immature scribblings, and I had a lot to learn. And I suppose she was right. She was kind enough to buy me a bus ticket to Phoenix. I was working my way back east.

That was a few years ago, and so many credit hours ago, and so very many miles ago. If my writing had been immature because I had been immature, surely I had grown up since then. After graduation, I thought about going back to California. The pickup truck lady — her name was Debbie — she was getting paid to write and there had to be something to that. It could lead to something more interesting, couldn’t it?

Everything I owned fit nearly in a medium sized backpack. Even the credit card statements and student loan bills that were beginning to arrive by mail fit neatly into the front pocket. They could be ignored for the moment, couldn’t they? All I needed was a job, and I was about to find one.

Hitchhiking across the U.S.A. would have to be considered one of the most interesting and romantic things a young man could do, if it weren’t one of the stupidest. I suppose it all depends on who picks you up. It’s a roll of the dice, and it really is a huge gamble you take with your life, getting into a stranger’s car. And how can I complain about stumbling onto the first “grown up” job I was ever going to have.

They don’t train assassins. The notion that there are government agencies and secret organizations training young men and women to be killers, it’s just the stuff of bad novels and action movies. It starts with a nice looking middle aged man in a Buick, and did I need a ride? And if I’m hitching a ride, I must be in some kind of financial mess, he guesses correctly, and could I use a job? The craziest part about it was that he told me right up front what he needed and how it was supposed to happen. He seemed to honest about it that I couldn’t help feeling I could do this “job” and turn my life around. Oh yes, ten thousand dollars would have done that quite nicely.

She had been cheating on him, he told me. She was the love of his life, he told me, but things had changed and she had been sneaking around behind his back. She had broken his heart, he told me. He wept as he told me the story. They had grown children. They went to church, and he was a respected leader in the community. A divorce would take away his dignity, he felt. It would destroy everything he felt he still had left, he told me. I couldn’t breathe as he told me all of this. He seemed to desperate, and he was confiding in me, a complete stranger. It had to be this way, of course. You don’t share a murder plot with anyone but a complete stranger.

My heart was pounding, and I accepted his offer. I was almost afraid not to, I knew so much about this man. But I didn’t, I realized. His car had Ohio license plates and he sounded like he was from the Midwest, but he picked me up in Connecticut. There was something that didn’t made any sense about this. I began to fear for my own life, but something told me that I had crossed a line and could not turn back. The plan was very simple. I would receive ten thousand dollars up front, along with maps and pictures. The man had just arrived in Hartford for a “business trip” that would last another nine days. I was to fly to Columbus and take care of business. Whatever expenses would be covered by the extra thousand dollars he hastily placed in my hand. He never wanted to see me again and wanted to settle everything now, he told me.

But what if… what if… There were so many questions and concerns and why did this man trust me at all? And what was going to happen to me? I was already wondering if he was planning to have me killed as well, and started feeling sick, physically ill. We pulled over to the side of the road and I opened up the car door and threw up on the ground.

He trusted me, because I reminded him of himself, he told me. He remembered hitchhiking coast to coast on a dare, the summer after high school graduation. He remembered the thrill of the road, the people he met, and when he got to the part where he met his wife, he just began sobbing. They finished the journey together and formed this bond that would last for– forever, he thought.

Would I do this, he asked me one more time. I told him I would. He simply told me to do my best. I started to laugh when he pulled more money from a pocket inside his jacket. Hadn’t he given me enough? Another fifty would get me to the airport, he told me. He was going to drop me off right here and he really was on a business trip, he insisted, and he really did have a meeting he needed to attend.

And that was that. I found myself a few minutes later riding in a taxicab to the airport with eleven thousand dollars in my pocket and a picture of a stranger’s wife. No problem. The cab driver was good enough to pull over to the side of the road so I could open up the door and throw up one more time.

The rest of that day was just a blur. I arrived in Ohio and rented a car, which was a little bit nerve-racking with a credit card on the verge of cancellation for being over the limit and behind in payments. The man’s house was just a half hour’s drive from the airport, and was easy enough to find. And then I started wondering if this really was the man’s house, if this really was the man’s wife I had been sent to murder.

Murder, the word hung in my head with a nauseating brilliance that made me throw up again. I was going to kill another human being, wasn’t I? I had taken the man’s money and I had promised. It wasn’t going to happen today, though. I checked into a nice, clean motel room a few blocks away from the man’s own house and spent the night. My nerves would be calm in the morning, I told myself. They certainly couldn’t be any more frayed, not ever.

I went for a long walk the next morning and got the lay of the land. The man had a nice house, I saw. I walked past the man’s house, and it was such a surreal experience. I was done throwing up, though. His lawn and the neat row of flowers planted by the sidewalk were safe from being vomited on by the boy who was about to destroy the peaceful calm of this neighborhood. And I was. But how? There had been no training, there was no instruction manual for what I was about to do. I walked back to my motel room and thought for a while. I surprised myself at how sinister my plan was, but in a way it was actually going to feel right.

It’s amazing what you can find when you look through the yellow pages. Want to be a delivery boy? Simply look for a costume shop in any city and a uniform can be had for a very reasonable price. But what to deliver. The man had told me that his wife loved chocolates. He had told me a story about their first week traveling together and how she had been craving chocolate. There was a certain brand from California, and when she joined his journey to the west coast she became obsessed with the idea of having this certain kind of chocolate. He had been beaming as he told the story, a smile so big I thought his face would break, such a contrast from the tears he cried and the rage he shared when his story moved forward more than twenty years into the future.

I was fortunate to learn that I would not have to fly to San Francisco and buy a box of Ghirardelli chocolates, that they could be found in one of Columbus’s many gourmet food shops. And that second easy part of the plot was done. Next I needed something poisonous enough to turn delicious candies into deadly weapons. I chose arsenic, and I had a pretty good idea about where to get some.

The Ohio State University is a fine academic institution, but like any large college, there are students who just want to party. And if you want to party with the chemistry students on a Friday night, all you need to do is attend class with them on Friday morning. It was Wednesday morning and I wasn’t willing to wait for the weekend parties to meet the student body. I was bold and daring and I really wasn’t, but I think I put on a pretty good show. I found the chemistry department and hung out in a hallway outside one of the classrooms where a lecture was taking place. I was actually pretty shocked at how easily I obtained a deadly poisonous substance. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised at a student willing to take a couple hundred dollars in exchange for something the University was just going to buy more of.

The hardest part of the puzzle was still before me, and I’m thinking of becoming a surgeon with the skills I have found I possess at cutting open chocolates and replacing nuts with poisons. Or could I become a plastic surgeon with the skill it takes with a heated Exacto knife to gently replace the bottom of a candy so seamlessly you would never know it had been touched? No, those weren’t even the hardest tasks I faced. I spent three hours wrapping that damn box in cellophane. The longest three hours of my life, it seemed. I wanted to be able to finish the job that evening, but I was running out of time. Besides, there was still more preparation required.

It occurred to me that I really had no interest in being caught, so while my disguise was clever enough, it was not quite complete. I found makeup that would give my face a wrinkled appearance. I found that white paint and powder in just the right combination gave my hair a salt and pepper look that would convince anyone. The moustache was just the right color, too, when I was finished with it. This delivery man was a good thirty years older than myself, and that was just perfect.

It was Thursday afternoon when my plan went into action. I filled my car with Mylar balloons to give the impression that more deliveries were to follow. Several of them would come with me to the door, along with the package of chocolates. There was a yellow sports car parked in the driveway and another inside the garage. Was this going to be a two-fer, I wondered. I couldn’t believe I was doing this, but doing it I was. I walked right up to the door and rang the doorbell.

I heard both a man’s voice and a woman’s inside while I waited. It was a very long minute before a woman in a bathrobe answered the door. Was this Cindy Baker, I asked, and it was. Her husband had sent these balloons, I told her, and a box of chocolates. He was sorry he had to be away, but he wished he could brighten her every day. The poem was as corny as could be, but it didn’t need to be Shakespeare, after all. That was so sweet, she told me. She reached into the pocket of her robe and as she did it fell open just slightly. There was nothing at all underneath and I glanced quickly away from the body she had just been sharing with another man. I gave her a minute to cover herself back up and when I looked back I saw that she hadn’t. She stood there in that doorway with her robe just hanging open. I glanced away again and she laughed. She was offering me a tip but I was embarrassed and hurried from the door back to the car. She couldn’t have made my job easier, I realized.

I could hear both of them laughing as I drove away. I was anxious to get out of my disguise, which I would find some way of burning completely. The years were washed out of my hair and off of my face. I was young again and a completely different person when I walked back down the street an hour later. The car was still in the driveway, and there was silence inside. I had no way of knowing what I had done, how well, how thoroughly. I went back to my motel room and ate some take-out dinner I had bought. I stayed in the room and watched the television that entire day.

The next morning I ventured back out and went for my long walk through that quiet neighborhood. And still quiet, it was. And I studied that house as I walked by that one last time. How interesting that the sports car was still in the driveway. And even more interesting that two newspapers were lying on the front stoop. I wondered what tomorrow’s newspaper might contain.