Dear Killer (13 page)

It was a question with only one answer. Of course we had to say it was evil. If we said it wasn’t evil, we would sound like psychopaths. It was a trap.

“Of course it was evil,” I said strongly.

She looked at me sharply.

“Explain,” she said.

I was stunned.

“Well . . . how could it not be evil? Suffering from whatever he suffered from—that’s not his fault. Wasn’t his fault. He was only a kid, we’re all only kids. Killing someone who barely had a chance to live—that’s evil,” I said.

They weren’t my thoughts. They were the thoughts of the people around me. But still, something about the words, even as they passed by my own lips, unsettled me.

“You . . . hit him in the cafeteria two weeks ago, didn’t you?” Dr. Marcell asked cautiously. I nodded.

“I did . . . yes . . . but that’s completely unrelated. I didn’t get along with him, but killing him—I wouldn’t wish death on anybody.”

Unless they deserved it,
I thought.

“Is this a really necessary conversation?” someone behind me whimpered.

Dr. Marcell ignored the plea.

“So he didn’t deserve death, even if he might someday do what you consider evil?”

“He didn’t
do
anything!” I shouted suddenly, standing up, slamming my palms against the table—and I realized I was right.

He didn’t do anything.

He hadn’t killed, cheated, lied, or stolen, as far as I knew. He hadn’t caused lasting harm to Maggie, even though she had been afraid. I was the one who had hit him. I was the one who had started putting things in motion. I had passed judgment.

I could give the blame to no one else. I could no longer say that it was all right because the death was not my judgment but another’s—

It was my own death. It was my own fault. I could tell myself all the excuses in the world, but in the end it was all my fault. He didn’t do anything, and I had killed him. I’d known it before, had realized it before—but suddenly it felt real to me, all too real and terrible.

I looked at Dr. Marcell, and all the anger and defiance melted out of my eyes even as distrust built up in hers. She glared. The space behind my sternum felt empty. My vision blurred. I collapsed back down into my chair. I closed my eyes and reminded myself to keep breathing. I felt empty, everything felt empty.

For the first time in my life, I felt like a murderer.

“It was evil,” I murmured. I didn’t hear if anyone answered me.

I sat back in volatile repose.

I sat in the small office with my legs crossed, leaning back in the chair, casually looking over the walls with their faded peach-colored wallpaper. Across the desk, a therapist leaned toward me. She was faceless to me. She didn’t factor into my life. I didn’t want to be here; I was here because I had to be. All the students had to go speak to a counselor, especially me. I had left philosophy early for this; the therapist had a lot of students to see, and apparently it was a mess trying to fit everyone into her schedule. I was grateful for the timing. After the class’s jarring beginning, I didn’t want to be in that classroom for a moment longer than necessary, not today.

“How are you feeling?” she asked with a touch of tiredness in her voice. She of course had already asked this question many, many times.

“Fine,” I said.

I didn’t really trust myself, not today.

I didn’t trust myself to speak like a normal teenager. I felt too much like a murderer, trapped between four peach walls, lounging—languid and nervous, all in one. I felt too much like Diana. I felt her bloodlust, her anxiety, her cold calculation.

“It must be stressful, being surrounded by this whole mess.”

“It’s fine.”

The faceless therapist was obviously dissatisfied, but I didn’t feel like giving her what she wanted. I looked out the second-story window behind her head, out at dark treetops just barely penetrated by midafternoon sun.

“Did you know Michael personally?”

“No,” I lied. The image of his crying mother came before my eyes.

“I was told you . . . hit him in the cafeteria not too long ago.”

“I didn’t know him.”

“Kit, I can’t help you if you won’t let me.”

“I don’t want help.”

“Kit . . .”

I stared back at her. Maybe she would see me as emotionally affected, scarred, unwilling to speak because I was in grief, instead of out of control.

Volatile repose. The words just kept occurring to me. It was a perfect description of me—quiet, calm, but on the edge of something vast and dark and dangerous and explosive.

“You knew him,” the therapist suggested firmly.

“Maybe.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“No.”

“This will take time to recover from, I realize. But you can’t recover if you don’t try.”

“I’m required to come here only once, right?”

She looked uncomfortable.

“I’d like it if you kept coming.”

“I don’t want to keep coming.”

“You need help, Kit.” She meant so well.

“I don’t want help,” I snapped back, and that was it, she wasn’t getting past me, not her or anyone else; I was ice and she was beating against me uselessly. I wouldn’t have it.

Maggie practically waltzed through the hallways. She knew she wasn’t supposed to be smiling, so she was trying to hide her grin beneath her black scarf, but she wasn’t doing very well. She floated through school like some sort of fairy, smiling all the way. Anger rose up in me. I was edgy to begin with, and her cheerfulness was pissing me off.

It should have made me feel better to know that even though there wasn’t a letter, I had delivered someone else’s justice and not just my own. But it didn’t. Her happiness just made me think about the murder more, and the more I thought about it, the more desperately guilty I felt. I followed her footsteps. She cleared a path where she walked, and I used that to my advantage.

We walked into the cafeteria and over to the table. The table where I had knocked Michael to the ground. I bit my lip and tried not to look at that space on the linoleum where he had been, that empty space.

Maggie sat down and beamed at me as I took my seat across from her. I couldn’t believe it. I looked away in a vague direction, gritted my teeth, and snapped my attention back to her abruptly.

“Don’t you feel
guilty
?” I hissed quietly.

“What?” she asked, her expression one of vacant, honest surprise.

“You know, looking all happy like that. He’s
dead
, Maggie. It’s not like he just moved away or something or went on a very long vacation. He’s
dead
.”

“I don’t care.” She smiled. “He never did anything but harass me. Why should I care that he’s dead? Why should I be unhappy that he’s gone?”

I gaped at her. “He’s . . . He loved you, Maggie. However crazy he might have been, he loved you. Don’t you have any pity?”

She didn’t reply. She just scanned her eyes over the cafeteria and laughed shortly. The same disturbing laugh as that morning.

“I don’t see why they all look so sad,” Maggie mused to herself. “It’s not like any of them liked him any better than I did. He was an arsehole, through and through.”

Those words came so easily to her now. The sharp, unkind words. I had persuaded her to say them before, but now that she was saying them with such anger, of her own free will—

I didn’t like it.

My heart churned.

She looked at me and smiled, trying to make me understand. But I didn’t understand. I was never happy about death. I liked the
act
of killing. It was precise. But after death—no, I never appreciated that. I could never understand her joy.

“Now that he’s dead, I can finally start to
live
,” she breathed blissfully.

My heart burned.

I would kill her too. Michael was dead by my hand, but I would still deliver his justice. I had accepted his request. I would not turn away now. It was the least I could do to, in some way, atone for his death.

She didn’t know it yet, but she would know it eventually. And she would hate me. And that was fine. They all hated me, close to the end.

My heart felt like it was going to disappear.

Something had broken inside me. It hurt. Before, my moral compass had been frozen at due north, completely neutral. But now the ice was beginning to crack, and things were beginning to unwind and unravel.

After school I found Maggie and three other girls in the first-floor bathroom. Maggie was leaning against the far wall, watching them warily as they talked. Their words were sharp, not openly aimed at her but meant to be overheard and hurtful, and they were standing directly between her and the door. They had cornered her here just before I arrived, and showed no signs of moving.

“What a horrible thing, that poor boy dying,” one of them said with a melodramatic sigh, twirling a piece of brown hair around her finger and looking pointedly at Maggie out of the corner of her eye. “Don’t you think, Annie?” she said, looking expectantly at one of her friends.

I hovered just outside the door, pressing myself to the wall next to it. There was a crack between the door and the doorframe just wide enough for me to see what was happening inside. With sharp, watchful eyes, I observed them, wondering if I should intervene. For the moment I would just watch.

“Yeah, awful. I can’t believe it. Everyone’s all torn up about it,” Annie drawled.

“Except,” the third girl chimed in, “I heard this awful rumor. There’s this one girl, I heard, who keeps on smiling about it.”

“Fucking crazy,” the first girl agreed with a shake of her head. “What kind of insane human being acts like that? She needs to be locked up, I swear.”

“Even if they didn’t get along, that’s no excuse. Honestly. Even the girl who punched him in the cafeteria two weeks ago is torn up about it,” Annie said, sighing.

“Anyone who can laugh about a murder is a psychopath,” the first girl said, and then pretended to think about that. “And a psychopath probably committed that murder,” she said lightly, as if she were realizing something.

I saw Maggie clench her fists. At first glance she looked vague and disinterested, but as I looked longer at her, I saw the way she scrunched her shoulders up, the way her left ankle was shivering with tense anger.

I slunk a step toward the doorknob, readying myself in case I needed to intervene.

I had protected her thus far, at great cost. I sure as hell wasn’t going to stop now. I had begun something, and I would see it through to the end.

Chapter 14

T
hat night, I chose a letter and got dressed in black leather. It was written on thin paper, and as I cleaned it of fingerprints and other evidence, I had to be careful not to rip the paper.

Dear Killer,

I don’t understand why she wants to go. I love her so much. I love her more than anything. And you’d think that’d be what she wanted—who doesn’t want to be loved? I would do anything for her. I’ve always been there for her. Always.

But she’s leaving me. I don’t understand, and I think I’m going to kill myself thinking about it. I’m going crazy. I can’t stand the thought of seeing her with anyone else. It makes me angry. She makes me angry. But I love her. No one can have her but me, or I really am going to kill myself.

Please. Please kill her. If I can’t have her, no one can.

Her name is Cherry Rose.

I recognized the name of my victim. Cherry Rose, an up-and-coming singer who sang a lot at clubs in the West End. After a quick internet search, I found that she was singing her first of a few gigs at the Ball tonight, a new club near Leicester Square. I needed to fit in, so I picked up a slinky black leather dress from my closet, the one I had bought three years ago on a whim but never worn until now. It still fit, just barely, though the skirt kept riding up and I had to pull it down every few seconds.

My mom was nowhere in sight, and as usual my dad was MIA. I left a note on the fridge for my mom—
Going to Leicester
—in case she worried, and then I left.

I needed distraction.

I took the subway to Leicester Square. I made sure to wear a sullen expression—I didn’t want anyone messing with me. I wasn’t in the mood. I had a long black overcoat on over the slinky dress, and I stuffed my hands in my pockets, deep in thought as the train clicked evenly through the city. I shouldn’t have been thinking, probably. Thinking is always dangerous when you’re me. I remember very little about that train ride except for the fact that the train was too warm and that the woman I was sitting across from wouldn’t stop humming loudly along to whatever music she was listening to through her earbuds. She was fat and had a pink shirt on and she looked like a giant piece of bubblegum. Funny the things you remember.

Leicester Square was busy. Everywhere you looked there was light and people. It was a violent cacophony of sights and sounds and smells; I felt small wandering through the crowd. Small and young. There were surprising numbers of couples in the square. They walked with linked arms, whispering in each other’s ears, hanging on to each other. I wove between them. I kept out of sight. I shivered. The night was cold.

The Ball, named for the large mirrored silver ball that hung over the doorway, wasn’t the busiest club on the square. Nor was it the most deserted. It was completely average, completely innocuous, with the regular assortment of couples and singles and groups of women in too-short dresses and men leaning against the wall waiting outside. The bouncer was drunk and easily distracted by pretty women and wasn’t paying much attention to the people walking through the door—lame, but convenient. He would be sacked later. It would be too late for Cherry.

I slid through the black doorframe behind a pair of sickeningly cheerful couples. Everything inside smelled like alcohol. The decor was sleek and new, but the floor was dirty and the music was too loud and the lighting overhead made everyone look narrow and wan. I stopped and stood still; people pushed past me, knocking against my shoulders. I ignored them. A level below where I stood, slightly belowground, was a rolling crowd of dancers, moving like one thing. I stood and watched them briefly, and then I turned my eyes and ears to Cherry Rose.

She was on a stage, and her name fit her perfectly.

She was short and thin, with high cheekbones and pale skin like a doll’s. Her hair was a bright, bright shade of scarlet, almost exactly the color of a cherry. Maybe a bit darker. She was wearing a green dress that made her green eyes seem brighter than they really were. There was something strange about her, something ephemeral. She sang into the microphone, holding it close to her lips as if she were about to kiss it.

I leaned over the railing, looking down on her, trying to figure out the words she was singing. Slowly, I removed my coat and hung it over the railing. I would try to come back for it later. Hopefully it would still be there. It wasn’t like it could incriminate me or anything—things like jackets got lost all the time and didn’t mean anything. And they couldn’t get fingerprints off it either, anyway. I had forgotten I couldn’t wear it while I was killing her, because it would be too bulky and I sometimes had to move like a dancer when I worked—oh well. No time to worry about it now.

Cherry, balanced on tiptoe, sang her heart out.

“Somewhere in the night, you’re calling, I’m calling—

Somewhere deep inside, I’m waiting—

The moonlight rips through me

Like claws on my skin.

I don’t know where I stop and you begin.”

It was a fast-paced song, lively, easy to dance to, backed with a strong beat and a growling guitar—but it was shot through with a deep melancholy. She sang it with fervor. As I watched her lips move, I imagined how she would die. Would it be with bare hands? Most likely. She was small enough that it would be easy. Most of my smaller victims died that way. Bare hands around her neck, bare hands smashing her head into something sharp, a bare hand jamming into her temple. Or maybe she would die by having something smashed into her. A pipe. A handheld mirror. A crack against the skull or neck, that would do it—

Cherry finished the song, and I walked down the stairs.

I wove through the crowd, occasionally stopping to dance for a few seconds so as not to arouse suspicion. I kept my eyes trained on Cherry. She didn’t have a clue. Just like everyone else. Not a clue.

She started into another song, and I considered my options. I looked around the crowded room. What options were there? Ideally, I wanted to make my way backstage—but how could I?

After a few minutes, I saw the way. A black door blending into the black wall and guarded by a hulking security guard with a handlebar mustache and a wide face. He wouldn’t be trouble.

As Cherry sang on, I meandered my way toward the guard. I wasn’t in any hurry. As I drew nearer, I slowed, blending into the crowd. I was close to the stage now, about five feet away. Close enough to see the dark roots of Cherry’s hair where it was growing back brown. And I could see now that she had dark circles under her eyes. That was a tired face. And yet she sang with such passion. It occurred to me that she was an unusual person, somehow, an individual like few people really were. For a few seconds she mesmerized me, and then I remembered what I had to do.

I moved toward the man and made sure no one was watching. His mustache twitched. No one was focusing on me, everyone was focused on Cherry—how convenient. I danced my way over next to the man—I was invisible to him. Tranquilly, making sure to seem innocuous, facing mostly toward the wall, I pulled a latex glove from within my bra and pulled it on. I stayed a bit behind him, staying in the shadows.

I quietly moved my hand up to pinch my fingers around his jugular.

He gave a small gasp and, as expected, went immediately limp, unconscious. As best I could, I slowed his fall. I looked frantically around to make sure no one noticed. No one did. Everyone was too occupied with other things. I let him sit on the ground and grabbed at the doorknob—locked. Damn. I dug my fingers into his coat pocket, looking for the keys. He wouldn’t be unconscious long. I had to be fast. I found them in the second pocket—cold metal—and dug them out. With calm fingers, making sure to touch the keys only with my gloved hand, I opened the door and dropped the keys behind me. The guard wouldn’t come after me. He hadn’t seen me. He had been watching Cherry.

Backstage was more deserted than I’d expected. Good. Deserted was good. This was all too easy.

I waited in her dressing room and looked over her possessions. I had both gloves on now, and as I drew my fingers across her things, I didn’t leave fingerprints.

She had only taken possession of this room earlier that night, so of course it wasn’t completely
filled
with her things—just scattered with them, here and there, enough to make it distinctively her room and not someone else’s. A slightly open lipstick on the edge of the counter in front of the mirror, a black jacket slung over the back of the folding chair near a window that showed a small view of a dingy alleyway. As I waited, I took in these and other things—a bag with a phone sticking out the top, a paperback romance novel near the mirror, an empty water bottle—and I looked at my reflection.

God, I looked tired. And weak. Dark circles lined my eyes, and my skin was pale and sallow, as if I were spending too much time indoors. I was too thin. My hair was a mess too. It was tangled around my shoulders like a lion’s mane. Gingerly, I ran my fingers over it. It was getting a bit long. A bit unmanageable. Maybe I should cut it. But no, maybe not. I had cut my hair when I was thirteen, and it hadn’t been my best look. It didn’t look chic like my mother’s when it was short. It just needed a trim.

It suddenly struck me that I was waiting to kill someone and I was thinking about hair.

The letter, tucked within the neckline of my dress, pressed suddenly against my skin, feeling like a brand across my chest.

I was waiting to
kill
someone and I was thinking about
hair
.

What the hell was I?

I looked at the mirror again and saw something very different.

Instead of seeing a pitiful teenager who needed to eat and get out more, the kind that you always felt sorry for, I saw a monster, little more than a skeleton, with big, white, sharp teeth and a rough mane like a lion and hands like long, grasping claws. I saw a nightmare. I saw the creature that hid in your closet and under your stairs when you were four. For a moment, I saw myself as terrifying. I felt shocked through, as cold as ice. For a moment, I was paralyzed. For a moment I saw what everyone else would see if they knew the truth.

But then I shook my head and remembered that I was a moral nihilist.

I wasn’t a monster, because there were no such things as monsters. They didn’t exist. I exhaled loudly. I was fine. There was no morality. I was fine.

But my heart was still beating like a jackhammer.

Unsettled, I walked across the room to the wall the door would open on to, so I wouldn’t be seen when Cherry came back in. A blind spot. My thoughts were whirling too quickly, my breaths coming too fast—

I closed my eyes and tried to relax and forget.

I shut everything out to a point where I felt like I was almost sleeping, and then Cherry came in.

She was quieter than I expected. She had been so loud onstage that I think I expected some sort of fanfare on her arrival. But she opened the door slowly, and when she came in, she was quiet and sat down in her folding chair silently.

I opened my eyes and stared into the door, the rest of my senses suddenly alert and waiting.

A harrowed-sounding backstage worker stuck her head inside the door and snapped, “Do you need any help, or can you pack up on your own?”

“I’m fine,” Cherry replied softly.

I heard the backstage worker move away, and I made my breaths quiet. Even though there was such a din in the hallway that I probably wouldn’t be heard even if I coughed loudly, I couldn’t be too careful.

Cherry seemed content to keep the door open for the time being. Over near the counter, I heard her moving. Packing up her makeup, throwing the water bottle away. I considered my options. I could wait, keep her in the room somehow, and murder her a bit later so there would be no one to hear us from the hallway, though I would undoubtedly be caught on camera leaving later than everyone else—or I could do it now, as quietly as possible, and escape through the small window in the corner of the room into the alley behind the building if need be. I wouldn’t be caught on the backstage camera if I did that, but I would probably be caught on a surveillance camera suspiciously coming out of an alley I hadn’t gone into earlier in the evening.

I realized suddenly that there was no easy way out.

Sure, I had found my way in, but how was I going to leave after the fact? How was I going to escape her dead body, how—

I was trapped. I had trapped myself. I didn’t know what to do. My breaths came even faster.

I pinched myself and reminded myself who I was. The Perfect Killer, for God’s sake. This was nothing. I could find my way out of this. So what if I was seen coming out? I could borrow clothes from backstage and be nothing more than a shadowy figure on camera. No one had seen me come in. The cameras on the way out would see nothing more than a silhouette. Sure, it would be the first time the Perfect Killer had been caught on film, but what would that matter if the Perfect Killer was nothing more than an indistinguishable shadow, quickly lost in the crowd of Leicester Square?

Still, I would be disappointed to know that I had stooped so low so as to allow myself to be recorded.

Perhaps it was best to do this quickly. It would save me the trouble of worrying about how to keep Cherry in the room while waiting for everyone to leave. Besides, I had never liked waiting much. Patience wasn’t one of my virtues.

Cherry hovered around the mirror. With a soft breath, I raised my fingers to the door, stretched out my arm, and pushed the door into the doorframe. It closed with a barely audible click. It was so smooth, so quiet, that Cherry almost didn’t notice. But she did notice, mostly because my reflection was now visible in the mirror. She gasped and dropped her purse onto the counter, then laughed softly, nervously.

“Who are you? What are you doing there?” she asked with only a touch of suspicion. So she was that sort of person. The sort of person who found it hard to perceive evil in anything. Those people irritated me.