Note: So. While we’re waiting for some birds and other dark things to take flight again, I set myself to work on this one— again. I originally planned this to follow Trial & Error; not because the two are meant to go together, but because they are spiritually linked, I feel.
Just so you know, this will visit life after a traumatic event so it’s not a happy story. I don’t know if I’ve done it justice—almost certain I didn’t— but we’re still pushing through and keeping busy.
So let’s go.
I’m saved on 22 June, two days after my sixteenth birthday. Other girls get big parties, spend the day fretting in front of the mirror, trying to get every last detail picture perfect. I spent mine hunched in a cage, covered in my own filth. Waiting to die.
There’s pictures and video online, of me being escorted across the lawn of the house by men in blue windbreakers with FBI on the back. When they take me out I look like a ghost; a pale and miserable creature clutching a shock blanket, head jerking bird-like, trying to look every which way. A motivated reporter decides to go for the closeup, catches the way my lips quiver, the way my eyes blink against the brightest light I’ve seen in weeks. The light I’d thought I’d never see again.
There’s the hospital. Mom sits by the bed, holding onto to my wrist even when she has to get up to get something, straining, as if I’ll disappear again the moment she lets go. Dad stands on the other side, hands buried in the pockets of his slacks, an impressive frown on his otherwise stony face. His expression never changes the entire time I’m there. What he’s worried about, I don’t know. Already he’s decided to drown what happened in silence, hoping it will stay down in the deep.
There’s no trial. When they breached the house, the monster raised what they believed was a weapon and SWAT opened fire. Six rounds, center mass. Mom keeps saying that’s for the best; this way we can start to heal, move on with our lives. There’s something insistent about the words, about the way she holds my gaze, bright and wide-eyed, that makes me think neither one is interested in talking about what happened. To them, the ordeal ended when the cops riddled my tormenter with bullets when he raised his stereo remote. Talking about it would only be picking at scabs that have just begun to form. Whose, I can’t say.
Between the two, I am my father’s daughter. I become flat and smooth, a mirrored surface in which they see what they want to see.
By day, at least. But this careful poise leaves me when the TV goes dark and the lights go out and I’m forced to go upstairs. Because even the familiar walls of my childhood have become a menacing presence. Too contained yet too exposed. To lock the door means more precious seconds to escape the window’s horrible potential. To bar the window means I’m cornered. Blocking both means I’m trapped, looking at the moving shadows underneath the door. Will the absence of light make him pass me by? Or will it draw him in? Questions and considerations no amount of reassurance can wrestle from my mind’s clutches.
When sleep does overtake me, he’s there, lowering himself into a crouch before my cage. I shrink away from his blank expression, from his dark eyes narrowed in fearsome thought as he studies me, trying to decide if this is the day I’ve grown fat enough for the oven. I whisper incoherent pleadings but I know he can’t hear me over the continuous stream of guttural voices and chugging guitars. As his probing fingers thrust through the steel wire, I wake kicking and screaming in sodden sheets.
School will be good for me, Mom says. Get back to normal. Dad stays quiet on the matter. I wonder if he knew. Like Mom’s chipper waves, the hall’s tide breaks around me with lingering looks and whispered comments. In their eyes I see the impossible math problem I have become. I don’t blame them. I feel impossible, too. A confused extra against the moving background of a movie without anyone around to tell me what to do or what the next line should be.
Drifting along on the current, everything has a touch of the surreal. The surface of my appointed desk feels like alien terrain beneath my fingertips. The faces, the voices, the scraping of chair legs seem to scream, pulling at nerve endings chewed ragged before long. Even the blackboard, once the center of tedium, turns treacherous when the yellow scrawls slither into a crude depiction of his nightmare workshop. Trembling, it holds me fast until the bell shatters the quiet and then everybody is looking up at me, standing behind my toppled desk.
During fourth period English we have book reports. Not me, of course. Take all the time you need, the teacher tells me. The smile is sympathetic. But in her eyes, I see the same burning questions. I tell her thanks and take my seat while one of my fellow students comes up and works her way through her report, sweating and crinkling the paper as she goes. I used to be like that. Mortified. Even felt embarrassed in someone else’s stead. So bad I had to skip through awkward scenes in movies. I can’t argue with the recollection but it feels distant, not my own, as I watch the girl fumble and stammer through her speech. From beneath the flat, smooth surface, I take in her flushed face, the sweat on her brow, without a qualm. But when she’s done, I see the loose floral print shorts and all the heat goes from me and I’m up and out the door, clutching a hand to my mouth as I bolt for the restroom. Vomit oozes between my fingers as I reach the stall, spews from my mouth as I kneel before the porcelain.
Heaving, I watch brown streaks dripping down, chunks bobbing on the water’s disturbed surface. Beyond, beneath, I see my predecessor lying on a stainless steel table, her floral print shorts rucked up to her grime-streaked thighs as her legs jerk under his rough ministrations. Her marbled eyes never leaving mine, not even when her head cocks as its lifted from the table, falls back down with a bang.
There’s a gurgle as the rest of my breakfast comes up in a rush.
They find me during lunch, buried in a forgotten nook, hoping to be overlooked. Mom says they helped out a lot while I was— During. They volunteered with the search, helped organise the vigil, put up flyers. Mom says they came to the hospital, which I don’t remember. Looking up at them, I wonder if that’s how I used to be. Eager and unafraid to reach out for the unknown. They lower themselves around me in a cloud of scents and a trailing of hair. Eyes wide and bright with love and concern wherever I turn. They’ve been calling, they say. I know. I’ve been dodging the calls, the unending texts that end in question marks, looking for answers I can’t give. I finally tossed the phone in the drawer. But now the same questions fill the air around me, all at once at first, faltering along with the hopeful smiles. Until one of them asks the question I get the most.
It’s easier to lie, so I do. Then I’m forced to listen as they talk me up on things I’m not sure I even care about anymore, before moving on to the usual. All of it to a melody with gaps in the places I used to play. On and on and on, lips move and white teeth gleam the way his knives did, even in the greenish light, and then one of them squeals and I jolt and then the conversation halts and the realisation dawns just before I push to my feet and go, fleeing the cloying, suffocation closeness that once meant belonging.
Am I ungrateful? I don’t want to be. I know what they’ve done for me. I’ve seen the flyers. Some of them still adorn the telephone poles, corners curling in the breeze. Looking at my own smiling picture, I felt like I was staring at a ghost. Or maybe it’s the other way around. I left it up there. Maybe the girl in the picture would still make it home someday.
After P.E., I feel a hand on my shoulder and I’m galvanised, screaming while I swing away. Locker doors slam and bang as five girls wrestle me up and pin me to the wall. Crucified between them, I wail and sob, spittle dripping from my lip while the other girls kneel on the ground in a protective circle around my assailant.
There’s a meeting. My parents nod and agree. Afterwards Mom comes up to talk with me but when the first words come up, her hands fly up from a lap like startled birds and she gets up to get my father— who never makes it up.
So I’m outsourced. Made to suffer through long silences with the therapist mom has picked out after thorough research. The woman is pretty and nice enough. She inquires about friends, about the problems at school, about hobbies I no longer give two shits about. I can feel her, running fingers over the smooth surface of my shell, looking for a way in. She thinks she’s being clever, trying to wear me down as she’s doing. What she doesn’t understand— what no one seems to understand— is that there is no before all this. There’s only the cold dark of his basement, in which all I used to be and all that I could’ve been has putrefied. If she cracks me, what will flow forth is not just the black and bitter sludge I’ve been forced to swallow. It will be all of me. What will remain will be an empty shell, broken and empty. But I show up every week, desperate for the solace her prescription pad promises.
Mom doesn’t put up much of a fight when I start going to friends’ houses again, eager as she is to get me out there. Like the others, she’s still waiting for the girl on the poster to come back. So are my friends. If they even are my friends anymore. All of my life has become a puzzle with pieces that have warped and bent, and no longer fit. Only I’m the one that’s warped and bent. I’m the one that no longer fits. I see them shooting glances, daring each other to ask me. But nobody ever does. Everybody wants to know but at the same time, they don’t. The same nervousness that permeates the house, now hangs over these parties I stumble through. Who is this stranger? Who returned in my stead? What happened to me? Why can’t I just be me? Drunk and high, I have to laugh at the absurdity of it all. Move on, open up, let it go. Which is it?
Which is it?
At some point I start watching the movies. On my laptop, with my headphones on, I linger over pertinent scenes. My thumbnail is pinched between clenched teeth seeing keys slide into locks at last, engines starting at the last possible moment, shaking fingers managing to push shells into barrels just as all seems lost. Scores of police bursting through the door as the monster rears up on its hind legs. Again and again I replay these split-seconds, wondering what if? What if these questing fingers bumped the knife from the table? What if these hands never reached the gun? When the FBI took down the monster, he had been wearing his leather apron. He had the remote in his hand. How long would it have taken him to get down the stairs? Ten minutes? Five? How long to start? How close was my escape?
Four months later I call and cancel the appointment with the therapist for the first time. The pills aren’t working anymore and despite my best efforts, I can feel her nails digging into my shell. I use the money to buy some liquor and trade the pills with a guy at the motel parking lot for something that does work. Staring at the plastic bag in my hand, there’s a faint stirring of unease. But I need peace. I need rest from the world. From myself. From him.
When I wake up in the hospital and the doctor tells me I OD’ed again, I feel a mild disappointment. It’s not that I’m looking to kill myself, despite popular belief. But the alternative seems such a bother that not making it might have been a relief. Looking away, I find Mom. This time there is no hand on my wrist, no tether holding me down. Which tells me everything I need to know, really.
With rehab looming large, I run away twice. The second time I make it all the way to California. Six months later, the cops raid the place I’m staying at with ten others, some of them old enough to be my father. When the genuine article shows up to collect me, he doesn’t disappoint, driving us back in his usual silence, the only evidence of his displeasure his knuckles, white on the wheel. At some point Mom calls and he hands me the phone. For fifteen minutes she yells at me. She doesn’t understand how I could do a thing like that, after— She almost gets it out. Then she just goes on yelling, until I get sick of it and hang up. She’ll have plenty of time to scream at me when we get home.
But he doesn’t take me home.
During the group sessions, I listen to the stories. Some of them are every bit as horrible as what I carry. But I don’t reciprocate. I see the sour looks, the head shakes. Even here, I’m not doing what I’m supposed to do. The counsellor tells me as much. The next day I chew the silence for a full minute before the words come out for the first time. I tell them that he was going to skin me. I tell them that I had seen him do it to two others, stuck in my animal cage. Hands go to horrified faces. The counsellor tries to stop my story but I override him, voice turning high and wavering as I tell them how I tried to block it out, shutting my eyes, pressing my fingers in my ears but I could still hear the banging of the bodies on the table, the rough tearing sounds, as he peeled them bit by bit.
After rehab, I decide to go back to school, get a degree in psychology. I don’t care for the title, what I crave is understanding. Rationale. Before one of my first lectures, the professor tells the class that nine out of ten students are sitting here for the wrong reasons. In time, I’ll learn that I am one of those nine. Because I’m not here for the knowledge to help others. Even with my darkness exposed, I’m not free of it. I need to pick it apart, find the means to render it inert. I can only watch in disbelief as my fellow students grow compassionate in the face of the monster. In an unguarded moment I start a discussion with one of the professors that unravels, stopping just shy of a screaming match. In the silence that follows he studies me from the depths, and I know he sees the truth. When the class is over, he tries to approach me but I flee from the hall and don’t return, leaving another tainted place behind.
Online I see them flirt with disaster. I tell them to be careful, to know what attention they’re drawing, to take precautions. The response is about what you’d expect: I am a karen, a downer, a crazy bitch. I have no business telling anybody what they can and can’t do. They accuse me of being an anti-feminist; a hater of women. I know this is pointless. I know this isn’t their fault. But still I can feel them out there, wolves among the sheep. Obsessing over that one picture, that one TikTok dance, that one IG story. Like he did.
I take back to the socials, but this time it’s not to caution or inform. With what I’ve gleaned from my studies and the recent news articles, I have profiles and calculated guesses, which I use to comb through users and posts, filtered by geotags. It’s painstaking work, enough to drive most people insane, but I’m highly motivated. My study becomes a chaos of maps and photos and printouts, tied together with various colours of yarn. Same spiders, different webs. Tons of unconfirmeds, a handful of possibles.
But then there’s him.
I find him in January. What I find about him is sparse but seems to fit with the timeline of a string of gruesome murders along the east coast. The FBI haven’t connected these yet or if they have, they aren’t saying. But I know. One of the last posts is a picture of him and the family, taken while on vacation. They’re standing on the beach, grinning with happiness. He’s good in hiding, I can tell. But eyes don’t lie. I met the monster’s gaze through the wires of my cage every day for seventeen days while he weighed my fate. I’d recognise it anywhere.
I quit my job, sublet my apartment. I move into a room three blocks from his picture-perfect suburban house. I watch him. Learn his routines. Learn about his colleagues, his friends. Slip into his life the way the monster once slipped in mine. When he puts the garbage out, I’m waiting to steal it. Sift through the offal, looking for secrets. On the rare occasions where everyone is gone, I break into the house and drift through the empty rooms. I drink and eat from his fridge. I bury my face in his clothes and rummage through his underwear drawer. I lay down on his side of the bed. Before I leave, I relieve myself on his toilet. It’s not just information. I need to sniff the predator’s scent. I need to know. I need to know everything.
He’s close now. I can tell. He’s wound tight the last few days, snapping at the wife and kids. Tomorrow, day after. Next week at the latest. I’ll be there and kill him. Or he’ll kill me. Either way is fine with me.
I always end up reading your stories with my writer hat on, so that I can try to learn a thing or two. Excellent, as always.
You really slip into the skin of the character. It was tense.