After an hour of deliberation I have decided not to follow the words of John Niven and I will not “Kill my friends.” The only reason is because tonight I went out for pizza with one of these friends and they gave me all their pepperonis and brought me a straw for my Yoo-hoo. I am a simple man and small things like this please me…eh, I don’t like where this review is going. First off, I wasn’t drinking Yoo-hoo. I don’t like it. It tastes like watery chocolate. I don’t know why I lied. Second, my friend only gave me a half piece of pepperoni and fed the rest to the owner’s dog. Third, it isn’t exactly true to say I will not kill my friends because I’ve kind of already killed them all once.

When I was a young boy growing up in the Midwest I had seven friends. Their names were: Hickory, Stitch, Milo, Elvis, Frenchy, Wilborn, and Hilda. They were all Barbie dolls and I shaved the hair off all of them to make them boys except for the one named Hilda. I had found them all wrapped nicely in a giant bin on the corner of our street outside the supermarket. On the way home I named them. It was like an early holiday party. The reason I cut off all the hair is because I had asked for GI Joes for Christmas and not Barbie dolls. Anyway, I was kind of bored after giving them haircuts because none of them came with guns so I decided to attach them to the tree in our living room. I wrapped little pieces of string around each of their necks and fastened the ends to the fir branches. Just as finished my mother walked in the room to see the added decorations I had put on the Christmas tree. She shrieked and took them down. She immediately asked where I got them and when I told her she grounded me for the rest of the year and said I probably wouldn’t get any presents from Santa. I didn’t know what happened to the dolls after that. I cried. A few years later I learned what a noose was and realized I had accidentally hung all my friends. I kind of shrugged it off and tried to remember what I got for Christmas that year. My mother had just been bluffing about Santa not showing up.