by Britney King
He was right. I understood then. He knew more than I thought.
“You and I,” he said, motioning between us. “We come from vastly different backgrounds, I know. But the common denominators are a keen eye when it comes to observing human nature and a conviction that justice is rarely served in a way that makes a difference to the wronged.”
“Oh good,” I remarked. “A philosopher.”
“Call it what you want. It’s what I’ve learned from observing you.”
“Observations can be wrong.”
“Maybe. But I recognize the look in your eye. And I know what it means.”
“What’s that?”
“Well…let’s see. Age twenty-one. Married. One child. Homeowner. Average debt—at least by American standards. Unemployed husband. Marginally desperate.”
“Any street corner palm reader worth their salt could have come up with that.”
His eyes shifted downward. “Your mother cut out on you early. You hate weak people. Your dad was a cop. And you share his penchant for seeing justice served.”
“Justice—” I said, thinking he had no idea what he was talking about. “That’s interesting. Justice for who?”
Henry laughed knowingly. “No rush. We’ll get to that.”
“I’m sure of it.” I plopped down into a seat on the aisle.
“Anyway, point is,” he said, taking the seat adjacent to mine. “You have talent. You can shoot. And you spent twelve years in martial arts.”
“More like after school care.”
“You really shouldn’t downplay your skillset, Charlotte. It goes against your diagnosis.”
“I don’t have a diagnosis.”
“Perhaps not,” he replied, his voice low. He glanced out the window, his eyes focused on the tarmac. “But you’ve killed before. As a matter of fact, you killed your college sweetheart a few years ago, although that wasn’t the last time, was it?” Before I could respond he looked back at me. “And the most notable thing about it is you didn’t get caught.”
My pulse quickened. Maybe it was nerves. Maybe it just felt good that someone else knew.
“Tell me,” he said. “What did you feel when you did it?”
I stared at him for a long time.
Eventually, his expression softened. “Hypothetically speaking, of course?”
“I suppose at the time I felt satisfied.”
“And now?”
“Now, nothing.”
Henry smiled. Something I had not seen from him, not before and I don’t think since. I almost smiled too. Just saying the words brought great pleasure. Like a release, only not just any release. Like a pressure value, tightly screwed on, had suddenly just blown wide open.
His eyes lit up. “The world needs more people like you.”
“I don’t know about that,” I told him. No one had ever said anything like that to me, I realized.
“You don’t know what you don’t know, Charlotte.”
“Clearly.”
“Men and women—people like us, who are different, who lack a conscience, who possess an absence of the ability to feel guilt—it’s a great equalizer on this planet. A necessity, honestly.”
“What is it you want from me?”
Dangling the proverbial carrot over my head, he went on to explain that he knew what I had done and was prepared to destroy me with his knowledge, essentially taking my family down with me, separating me from my daughter, just as my mother had been taken away. Then a funny thing happened. I was surprised to find I didn’t hate him for it. It was as though my whole life finally made sense, as though everything had led me to that moment.
Chapter Seven
Charlotte
The first time I killed a man, I was nineteen and a sophomore in college. Henry was wrong in his assumption that he was my college sweetheart, but he was close. We had slept together.
His name was Brad, and he was my roommate’s boyfriend. I liked him well enough. Not enough for a second date, but enough that if she had friends over, and he was in the mix, I’d share a drink or two with them.
When she asked if I minded if she dated him, I lied and told her I kind of did. Not because I cared. But because he wasn’t her type.
Megan was sweet and full of life. Brad was sadistic and harbored a secret hatred for women that, like most sociopaths, he managed to push way down deep. In other words, they were perfect for each other.
Megan was easy prey for a monster like him.
Brad was a perfect disaster for her and her idyllic worldview.
One night just after the start of the second semester, this became more apparent, when Megan called me from Brad’s fraternity house asking for a ride. I had been busy studying and wasn’t particularly in the mood for a rescue mission. It wasn’t like I hadn’t warned her.
Everyone at the party was well past the legal limit. She said I was her only hope. It was cold, and she didn’t want to walk. I mentioned that my car didn’t have heat and suggested a cab, but then she started crying and brought up that she’d covered the electric bill the month prior, when my waitressing job was slow.
I was between a rock and a hard place, and it only went downhill from there. The rest was drunk girl blubbering, and I couldn’t make out exactly what she was saying except that she and Brad had had a fight.
When I arrived, Megan wasn’t waiting on the curb like she’d promised. Five minutes became fifteen. A quarter of an hour bled into a half hour. I didn’t have heat in my car, nor enough gas to keep the engine running, so I was forced to either leave her and take the chance of getting another call, or go in after her.
I should have realized then that the evening wasn’t going to end well. Maybe I was bored, or lonely, or maybe I was pissed and looking for a challenge. Maybe it was all of those things.
But I got out of the car. Then I stayed. I eventually found Megan in the back chatting up a group of girls I didn’t know. I never have been one for small talk or superficiality, and I wasn’t at school to make friends. She told me she’d only be a minute. I should have left then. The same guilt that should have led me home instead led me to the keg.
My father was picking up extra shifts to cover my living expenses and tuition, moonlighting at concerts and sporting events, putting up with the exact kind of drunk crowd I was now mingling with.
I should have been back at my dorm studying, trying to graduate early, trying to save my dad some money. But I wasn’t.
“Excuse me,” a thick voice said from behind me. “I can’t get by.”
When I turned around, that thing they say happens, happened. Deep in the pit of my stomach, something took hold and refused to let go. He didn’t look like a student, but by then I’d had several drinks, and I wasn’t much of a drinker.
I moved aside to let him pass.
“Have we met?” he asked.
I shook my head and tried not to look him in the eye. I wasn’t there to meet anyone, and he looked like precisely the kind of trouble I was trying to avoid. He looked like there would be three kids and a minivan in my future.
“Are you sure?”
I shrugged.
“You’re Erin’s friend?”
Sipping my beer, I moved out of the narrow hall and into the living area, thinking I might suffocate. When I made it to the sofa, which was covered in happy drunks, he met me shoulder to shoulder.
“Erin—have you seen her?”
I had no idea who he was talking about. I motioned toward the stairs and glanced up toward the second floor. “Maybe check up there?”
“I have,” he said, clearly annoyed. “Twice.”
Scanning the room, I searched for a way out. “Sorry, I just got here.”
He ran his fingers through his hair. “She called me for a ride but I can’t find her anywhere…I might not even be at the right house, for fuck’s sake. She’s drunk and the music was loud. I think I got the wrong address.” He glanced at the drink in my hand. “Could be any house on this stre
et.”
“Good luck.” I started walking away. “I need to find my friend.”
“Sisters,” he said with a scoff, following close behind. “Do you have one?”
“No.”
He stuck his hand out. “I’m Michael, by the way.”
I asked if he wanted to take a shot. I wasn’t in the mood for conversation. Something about his fingers made me realize I just wanted to fuck.
“Will it get me your name?”
“Maybe.”
“Then maybe I do.”
I took his hand and led him toward the kitchen, where Jell-O shots were lined up on the counter. Eyeballing the spread, he said, “I think I’m a bit too old for this.”
I handed him a small plastic cup and took one for myself. “My grandma eats Jell-O. Is she too old?”
He smiled and then slurped it down like an oyster on the half shell. I watched the way his throat moved as he swallowed and felt a chill down my spine. Then I placed the plastic to my lips and followed suit. “Olivia,” I said after the third round.
“Olivia,” he repeated, surprised or suspicious or both. He leaned forward and pressed his thumb to my lip. When he pulled it away, he held it up. A bit of Jell-O was stuck to the tip. He popped it in his mouth and sucked the tip. “You wanna get out of here?” he asked glancing around the kitchen. He leaned in and lowered his voice even though the music was loud. The way he smelled made me weak in the knees. I mentally calculated how long it had been since I’d gotten laid. “I’m sorry,” he added. “This isn’t exactly my scene.”
I grabbed a handful of Jell-O shots, conveniently lidded, and shoved them in the pocket of my coat. With only a slight nod, he motioned toward the door. “What about your sister?”
He smiled. “I don’t have a sister,” he said, and I think I fell a little in love.
His car wasn’t a clunker like mine. When he opened the door for me, I thought about how low the bar had been set for the other men in my life, and how I needed to keep it that way. After he’d settled into the driver’s seat, he turned to me and raised his brow. “Where to?”
I pressed my lips to one another and gave him the satisfaction of pretending to think it over. “Your place?”
His apartment was not like the apartments of other boys. There weren’t posters on the wall or bongs littering the table. It didn’t smell like leftover food. Maybe it was because he was older, but I got the sense that he was different. I was worried he might not want to fuck.
But then he put on a record, Nat King Cole, something I’d never heard before. I don’t think anyone in our generation had, and I told him as much. He laughed, a full head back, throaty kind of laugh. “It sort of grows on you.”
Does it now? I smiled, but I don’t remember doing much talking that night. He did enough for the both of us. He asked me to dance, and he told me lame jokes. He told me what he did for a living and about where he grew up. Later, after we’d finally fucked, as he drifted off to sleep, he whispered that I should be careful. I was the kind of person he could easily fall in love with.
Even though the sex was actually pretty good, despite a slight vanilla touch, I knew then it would be the last time I saw him.
I laid there staring at the ceiling, wondering how long I had to wait before waking him from sleep to ask for a ride home. Finally, my pager went off. It was Megan, and it read 9-1-1, followed by the address of the fraternity house. I decided a clean break would be easier. It would be better that way. No awkward explanations, no half-hearted promises of seeing each other again. Quietly, I climbed out of bed, dressed, and walked the three miles it took to get back to the fraternity.
It was just after 3:00 a.m. when I arrived. The party was still in full swing, albeit the crowd a little thinner, a little more subdued. I found Megan in the bathroom with a bloody nose and black eye, naked from the waist down, semi-conscious.
“Megan—” I shook her hard. “What the fuck?”
She mumbled my name. Maybe she said why’d you leave? Maybe she begged me to stay. Her words were jumbled and unclear. As I wrapped her in a towel, I noticed the blood smeared between her thighs.
“Megan,” I hissed, searching for her clothes, for something to cover her with. “Megan—who did this?”
She mumbled inaudibly.
I took off my jacket and covered her legs. I started to tie it around her waist. “Where are your pants? Did Brad do this?”
“We had a fight,” she slurred. “I told you.”
I didn’t kill Bradley Simmons that night. I wish I had. He raped and beat Megan two more times. Each time she promised—she swore—she’d end things. Each time she didn’t.
After the third time, the last time, the time he broke her arm, I made sure I was in attendance at his next frat party. I made sure he drank more than usual and that Megan did as well. She should have known, they both should have, that alcohol and painkillers don’t mix.
Once Brad had passed out, I drove her home and tucked her safely into bed. Then I drove back to the fraternity house, entered through the back door, and found him in his room. I slipped my hands around his throat, feeling the weight of his head in my hands, how effortlessly his neck held it up. I thought about snapping it. Like a twig. I imagined myself, choking the life out of him just as he was doing to Megan.
But I knew that was risky.
I knew I’d leave a mark. Evidence. So instead, I placed a pillow over his face and sat on it, bearing down with the entirety of my being. He struggled, but only a little. The music was loud, the beat thumping in time with his movement. It was pure art, the give and take between us, a wonderful dance as his whole world stopped. It was too bad he couldn’t even hold out the entire song.
Chapter Eight
Charlotte
“I’m sorry,” I said to my father. “I don’t have a choice.” I’d just turned twenty and was, in essence, a full-blown adult. But in that moment, standing there in front of his recliner, I’d never felt more like a child. A girl, who, in four short months, was going to have one of her own.
“We always have a choice.”
Shaking my head slowly, I looked away, hoping it might stop my chin from quivering. “It’s too late to have an abortion.”
My father didn’t respond. When I glanced back at him, he didn’t look me in the eye.
“He changed his mind. He isn’t going to leave his wife.”
“I tried to tell you Char—they never do.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again, and it was the truth. I hated to disappoint him. I’d been on a roll lately, and this, while surely the biggest, was just one more in a long succession of letdowns.
“First the incident at school,” he said, reading my mind, “and now this.”
“I wasn’t learning anything I didn’t already know anyway.”
“Clearly,” he answered, bitterly. My father had saved every penny he could, a single parent, on a cop’s salary, to send me to college and the semester before, after the incident with Brad, I’d dropped out. My father reminded me of his sacrifice often.
I’d planned to finish school. I just found the whole thing so distracting, so ripe with possibilities. The truth is, I’d never felt more complete, more whole, than I did after I killed Bradley Simmons. Nothing, not even sex, had ever brought me that much satisfaction. This lasted for days, the high, the fullness of it. Even as Megan cried day in and day out, even hugging Brad’s mother at his funeral, throwing dirt on his casket, I’d never felt more alive. I replayed the act over and over for days. It took about two weeks for the high to wear off.
When it did, I knew that I had to find that feeling again.
I just had to pick my next victim. But what could make me feel as strongly as Bradley had? I didn’t yet know.
And then, over drinks with Megan weeks afterward, I let something slip. I told her I was glad he was dead. I was glad he couldn’t hurt her anymore. Maybe it was the way I said it, but something for her seemed to click. “You drugged me,” s
he said, her voice edged with wariness. “That night. The night that Brad died.”
I didn’t deny it. I simply put my switchblade to her throat and asked her to write a note. Megan was found hanging from our doorjamb the following day. She’d been so distraught after her boyfriend’s death. No one seemed all that surprised.
After that, I grew bored with school. Decided I had to get out of that town where nothing ever happened. I needed to see the world. I applied for a job as a flight attendant and was shocked when three weeks later I got the call.
“I’m going back to waitressing,” I told my father. “But after…I plan to fly again.”
“Things never quite work out the way you think they will, Charlotte.”
I knew what he meant. Or at least I thought I did. I hadn’t been flying long, just about three months, when I met Dan, a captain on a crew I flew with regularly.
It was the first job I didn’t hate. It helped that I was out of Dad’s hair, and I was doing something he could be proud of—not college-level proud, but proud nonetheless. Then I met Dan. And then, just like with school, everything changed.
What had started as a one-night stand quickly grew into a fling and then into an unwanted and unexpected pregnancy.
I might have been young, but I wasn’t all together stupid. I knew Dan didn’t want another child. His own children were nearly grown, not so far from my age. So I told him not to worry and scheduled the abortion for a random Tuesday on a sunny day in May.
I showed up for my appointment and was surprised to find the clinic was roped off. Cop cars and ambulances lined the block. From across the street a familiar voice called my name. It was my father’s. He asked what I was doing there.
Looking for you, I’d said. Something we both knew was a lie.
You shouldn’t be here, he told me. Just an hour earlier, he explained, a gunman had entered the clinic and shot and killed eleven people.
When I called Dan to tell him, he told me it would be fine. We’d think of something. Over the coming weeks, I couldn’t bring myself to make another appointment. I didn’t really want to have to face my dad. More than anything, I was probably afraid.