The multiuse room is pandemonium. Craig is shouting from his director's chair, trying to get the cast and crew to implement his latest alterations to the script. He has completely "re-imagined" (his words) The Wizard of Oz, from Dorothy (Ze Mole, typecast) laying siege to the Emerald City with his ruby combat boots and "Toto" (a plastic handheld squirt gun), to the Wicked Witch of the West and the Good Witch of the North being estranged lovers.

Kyle and Kenny stopped by to give Stan moral support/taunt him. He's stage manager, which means he has to take the full blunt of Craig's "inspiration" (also his words), which means he is too busy to supervise his less responsible companions. They are currently climbing on the black metal mezzanine between the stage and the girl's dressing room (in reality it's the only dressing room, but as the girls have commandeered it for themselves, the boys have to don their costumes behind the scenery).

Correction: Kenny is up on the railing, leaning perilously over to dangle loogies over Craig's unsuspecting head. Kyle is leaning against the wall beside the soundboard, having declined the invitation to join his accomplice.

"C'mon, live a little."

Ha. Easy for Kenny to say. Kenny, who's somehow hit on life's cheat code for infinite lives. It's easy to be reckless when there isn't actually anything at risk.

Kyle, on the other hand, knows he is dying, is convinced he is not being irrational. Kidney failure at eight, hemorrhoids at nine, tonsillectomy at ten, appendicitis at twelve—he's running out of parts to spare. Kyle wonders about it, obsesses about it—what's it going to be that does him in? A bit of a stroke, a touch of the smallpox?

Kenny doesn't like to talk about it.

Every attempt Kyle makes to talk about death is rebuffed, the topic of reverted. Kyle remembers the last time, laundry day, when Kenny was sitting on the washer in his jeans and nothing else, flipping a Canadian penny he picked up somewhere, and when Kyle felt his throat constrict and starting worrying about dryer lint, he just rolled his eyes and smirked and said, "Hey man, heads, head, tails, in the tail. Eh? Eh?"

Kyle is jealous of Kenny's constant fatalities. Somehow, follow-through has terminated the threat. The moment it became a certainty Kenny would die was the moment Kenny could carry on as if he were deathless.

Kenny hops up onto railing around their platform and flails, trying to keep his balance. For a moment he strikes equilibrium and is suspended above the depressing two-dimensional gray house Dorothy is to grow up in, smirking that aren't-I-amazing? smirk that is nearly indistinguishable from his lets-go-have-sex smirk (Kyle is rather proud of his ability to tell them apart); and in that moment, before his tennis shoes—the worn ones Kyle spiced up by scrawled 'hard' on the right toe and 'luck' on the left, which Kenny then, with much sniggering, drew a sloppy red 'F' over Kyle's neatly printed 'L'—slip, and he falls backward onto the props... then, before the plunge, is when he looks the most immortal.