Never Saw Me Coming

by Vera Kurian

  “I was thinking about it,” I said.

  “Definitely come!” Kristen chirped.

  “Open bar,” he said brightly. “My parents don’t mind if I bring whoever as long as we’re dressed appropriately and mainly stay outside.”

  I wondered what he wore to dress appropriately. A toga and a golden laurel halo.

  “As you know,” he said, adopting a formal tone and pressing his hands together. “We’re having an upcoming election. I hope we can count on your vote.”

  “Where do you stand on funding for student groups?” Yessica asked coolly.

  “I think all funding for student groups should be cut,” he said, not missing a beat. She frowned. “That money is coming from increasingly rising student fees, which disproportionately affect our neediest students. Student fees are my number one concern.” It was comical how conflicted Yessica looked. I laughed, but so did Charles even though he was sort of laughing at himself.

  We said our goodbyes and continued to our dorm, exiting Albertson into the muggy night. “Will you go to the party if we can get a ride?” I asked, careful. If I went, I didn’t want Yessica there. The less people who knew me at the party, the better—no one would be checking up on me.

  She wrinkled her nose. “Chlo, the guys at that party were total bros.”

  “Oh. Yeah. But they’re not all like that—like that gentleman you were talking to for two hours.”

  “He was just there because of his roommate, like me! And if Terrible Charles turns out to be an alt-righter, he is not coming into our room.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it.” I had no idea about Charles’s actual political values, and as hot as I thought he was, he had a girlfriend. At least for now, anyway. Add that to my to-do list after the more pressing issues.

  9

  Andre had been hanging out with Sean, Marcus, and Dee the first time he received a mood log. Marcus was a junior who had quickly sought out Andre and his roommate the first week of school, bringing them welcome packages from the Black Students’ Union. He took the two freshmen under his wing, introducing them around and inviting them to the regular cookouts he held in the backyard of his rowhouse. He was so politically involved that Andre felt embarrassed around him; he was always bringing up names of people that Andre got the sense he was supposed to know but didn’t, and it seemed like everyone else knew those names.

  At the moment, they were hanging out in Marcus’s backyard, drinking sweet tea mixed with cheap rum, talking about the protests—not just the big October one, but the one coming up that weekend. “You guys should come,” Marcus said, opening a box of Cheez-Its. Andre tried to steal a glance at Dee, the girl sitting directly across from him who hovered in the same circle of friends. She was a sophomore with an acerbic wit and eyes that reminded him of a deer—probably way out of his league, but what was the harm in trying.

  “I’ll go if you guys are there,” he said. He opened his mouth, trying to find a nonawkward segue. Dee had mentioned working at the Daily Owl and that they were always looking for photographers—specifically that they wanted more minority representation on the staff. He wasn’t sure how people schmoozed like this—did they just come out and ask for jobs? Did working at the Owl pay anything, and was it crass to ask? He needed a job.

  Just then, he felt the vibration from his smartwatch. Furtively, he excused himself to use the bathroom. The watch asked him what activity he was currently engaged in. Socializing, he selected. The watch asked him to rate how much he felt of each of the following emotions: happy, anxious, angry, excited. How happy was he right now? Andre puzzled over this.

  How would a psychopath answer this question?

  Well, they were probably hardly ever happy. Or maybe they were only happy during the exact moments when they were getting what they wanted. He said that he was not very happy, and figured that he shouldn’t be anxious, either, even though he was in real life, because he had somehow found himself almost accidentally committing fraud via smartwatch, and because of the presence of hot girls and upperclassmen who were cooler than he was. He said he was not angry, then paused when he was asked if he was excited. No, he should make it seem like very little ever made him excited. His finger shook a little when he pressed on Submit. His smartwatch vibrated, but nothing exploded and no alarms went off. But he did realize how late it was.

  He popped back outside. “Guys, I have to head out,” Andre said.

  “Hot date?” Sean called after him.

  “Nah, I was supposed to get something done by 10 p.m. and forgot.” Well, he hadn’t forgot so much as he didn’t want to leave the party, in particular because he wasn’t sure what awaited him at the psychology department. It would be his first experiment or survey.

  Andre headed toward that part of campus, not pausing when his phone rang. It was his mother. “What’d you call for, Pooh?” she asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said, trying to sound casual. “I wanted to know if maybe you knew a professor here. Dr. Leonard Wyman? He teaches psychology, and I met him, and he seemed so familiar. I wondered if he had been to our house or something.” It wasn’t that far-fetched. His mother was a nurse, and his dad an EMT, so the variety of friends who cycled in and out of their house for social events were often affiliated with the medical field.

  “Mmm, don’t think so. Let me ask your father.” There was some muffled talking, then his mother said that the name didn’t sound familiar to either of them. But then she wanted to ask about his classes, his dorm, his friends; he felt bad about it, but had to cut her short because he had found his way to the psychology building, which looked eerie from the yellow cast of nearby streetlights. The whole concept of talking to his mom about college stressed him out. He always felt she was one question away from figuring out what he had done.

  The few years after Kiara had died, he spiraled. He would cut class to watch TV or hang out with friends his parents disapproved of. Fistfights led to vandalism, which led to joyriding in “borrowed cars.” And even as he did all these things, he knew they were wrong—he was just so angry. Angry at Kiara, which made no sense. Angry at his parents. His flirtation with juvenile delinquency landed him in a special school, a behavioral rehabilitation program, and he was diagnosed with Conduct Disorder. Conduct Disorder was diagnosed in children when they exhibited persistent antisocial behaviors that often took the form of violating social or legal norms; it was often a precursor to a later diagnosis of Antisocial Personality Disorder. When Andre was a junior and first received a packet from a program that was interested in recruiting him, the Multimethod Psychopathy Panel Study, he had laughed it off, showing it to his brother. His brother, rolling an enormous blunt, thought it was hysterical, because of course Lil Pooh didn’t really have Conduct Disorder, and of course there was no chance he was a psychopath. You should fake out their asses. So that’s what it started as: a game.

  Andre participated in a number of phone interviews and questionnaires that he answered with the help of the internet. It wasn’t like there was a blood test that could tell you were a psychopath. It was diagnosed off questionnaires, interviews, and therapists’ assessments. And fuck that counselor who diagnosed him with Conduct Disorder not a year after the death of his sister. He didn’t feel bad the day the program called for the parental interview and Isaiah, taking on a formal tone, completed the entire interview pretending to be their father, embellishing stories so ridiculous that Andre cried silently from laughter, his face stuffed into a pillow.

  The program stopped calling and Andre forgot about it for months until things got real. He came home to find that his mother had opened a thick envelope addressed to him. His first reaction was to be mad at her, but she turned to him with tears shining in her eyes and he realized that the letter must have been something upsetting about him. Silently she handed him the letter. He had been admitted to John Adams University. He had been given a full scholarship, coveri
ng all four years. “Baby, how did you do it?” she had asked. “Raim, get down here!” His grades had been in a tailspin for the past few years, but he had decently salvaged what he could his junior year. But not enough for anything but the University of the District of Columbia. And with their financial situation, he would probably be working and attending part-time while racking up student loans.

  In a flash, his father was there, also skimming the letter. They were both looking at him expectantly. It was surprising how readily the lie came: “It’s...part of their Ancestor Scholarship,” Andre said. “Remember that project I did on family trees? Anyway, Adams has some program where if you can trace your ancestry back to any of John Adams’s slaves, and you write an essay and everything, you can win the scholarship.”

  His mother was holding her hands together over her face in prayer position, tears brimming over her eyes. “Oh God, Andre, this is—we’ve been so stressed about college, with your father’s back surgery and everything—this is...this is like a gift from God.”

  When she pulled him into a hug, Andre, horrified, thought, Wait, Mom, wait! But then he looked over and saw that Raim Jensen, his stoic father, had fully teared up. That was what did it. He had only ever seen his father cry once—about Kiara.

  And so began a little snowball of a lie that kept rolling into a bigger one. It ran from complex machinations (intercepting any packets or phone calls that came from the program), to difficult ones (getting Isaiah to comply), to ridiculous ones (hoping and praying that his parents never bothered to Google and find out that John Adams never actually had slaves).

  This was why he approached the first assessment with trepidation. Andre climbed up to the sixth floor, hearing voices very faintly. It sounded like they were coming from downstairs, at the north end of the building. He went down a tiny hallway with flickering lights and walked past two experiment rooms until he found his, the last one. The little room was as clinically white and blank as a lab in a science fiction movie. He set down his book bag and locked the door. The building gave him the creeps.

  On the computer, he clicked through some consent forms and demographics. Then came a long survey, or perhaps it was a series of surveys, because some of the items seemed to be grouped together. The more he clicked, the more the tension left his shoulders. Some of the content clusters he could answer honestly—others gave him more pause about how he should be answering them. Women should be protected by men. Was he supposed to agree with that, or disagree?

  But then a noise from outside his little room pierced across the air, muted but still incredibly sharp. It was a scream that made Andre’s entire body freeze, his pulse jack up in his chest, his ears perk. It was like the scream of an animal caught in another animal’s sharp jaws.

  There—another scream, then a loud thud. He thought he heard the word help. Andre scrambled from the office, poking his head out into the hallway. Maybe someone was watching a movie?

  But then it came again—another scream, a bang that was clearly coming from a few doors down, from another one of the little experiment rooms. There was a light coming from beneath the door—something that definitely hadn’t been there when Andre had arrived. He heard a miserable cry, then a scraping sound moving up the door—someone was lying on the ground, trying to unlock the door. Maybe another research subject had had a seizure or something.

  “I’m here!” Andre cried, pulling the door open. Beneath the garish fluorescent lights of the little room was a young man struggling and gurgling on the ground, blood pumping from his neck at a violent rhythm. Blood was pooled on the ground making him slip, and sprays and jagged pops of it littered the walls.

  Andre didn’t even have time for a cohesive thought, just a general sense of Oh shit! as the guy—a student?—made eye contact with him, his mouth opening as he reached out.

  “Help!” Andre screamed. He ran forward, pulling his sweatshirt off. Why had it been so long ago that he took first aid? When had that been—fourth grade?

  The guy gasped as Andre pressed the sweatshirt to his neck. It was the cause of most of the bleeding, but there were several other stab wounds—two just under his collarbone, one straight through his ear. “Is anyone here!? Help!” Andre screamed.

  Shit, shit. Andre fumbled for his phone, trying to keep the pressure on the wounds (even now he could feel the blood soaking through the thick cloth of the sweatshirt). His bloody thumb slipped over the smooth surface of the phone and it clattered onto the floor. Andre reached for it, then realized that someone was standing just outside the hallway. Thank God. “Help me—I think he’s bleeding to death!” Andre shouted.

  Two things happened at once, their simultaneity somehow terrifying. Andre realized that the man in the hallway might have been the one who did this, and at that same moment, the man raised his hands into the air, smiling a little wryly as if to say, Good luck with that. Then he turned and walked down the hallway, apparently not in a hurry.

  Stunned, Andre scrabbled for his phone and managed to call 911.

  “Nine-one-one, what is your emergency?”

  “I’m in the psychology department at Adams! There’s a guy here who’s been stabbed.”

  “You said he’s been stabbed?”

  “Yes, he’s bleeding everywhere. Tell me what to do!”

  “Can you tell me your exact location?”

  “Sixth floor, um, turn right when you get up the stairwell. Am I supposed to elevate his head?”

  “Can the victim talk?” the operator asked.

  “Hey, man,” Andre said, shaking him gently. “Can you see me? They’re coming.” Helpless, Andre looked behind him through the doorway, wondering if EMTs could possibly arrive in time. The guy’s eyes had started to take on a glazed look.

  “Did you see what happened?”

  “No, I heard it. I heard someone scream for help and then some thudding noises.”

  “Can you tell me your name?”

  “Andre. What should I do!”

  “Andre, you’re doing great—just hang in there. Help is on the way.”

  10

  “Hey,” the cop said, setting a Coke down in front of Andre. “This might make you feel better.”

  When Andre reached for it, his hand was shaking. He had said he felt like throwing up, and they had provided him with a trash can. Andre was sitting in an office chair, one cop crouched in front of him, buddy-style, another one standing up, a notepad out. “I’m Detective Bentley,” the buddy one said, “and this is Detective Deever. We’d just like to get your statement so we can figure out what went on here.”

  Andre took a tentative sip, but the second the sweetness touched his tongue, he thought of the terrible gurgling noises the guy had made just before the EMTs had shown up. Zombie-like, he had agreed to go back with the police to have his statement taken. This also involved one of the forensic techs taking samples from him: the blood on his arms, his hands. They had taken his shoes and his shirt and given him a faded MPD T-shirt to wear instead.

  Now he sat in the Homicide Office. Homicide: as soon as he saw the words on the door, he realized that there was no way that gurgling man could have survived. That guy was dead, and it wasn’t until then that it truly hit him that here he was in front of the police, a Black kid who happened to be a diagnosed psychopath, or actually faking that he was a psychopath—not that that made it any better—who just happened to be within throwing distance of a violent stabbing. Oh dear God, what I have I gotten myself into, he thought, imagining desperately, for a moment, calling his parents. But what could he even say?

  “It would really help us out if you told us everything you saw or heard—start from the beginning.”

  “I was on the sixth floor of the psych department—”

  “And you were...?” Deever interrupted.

  Andre wondered if this was the sort of thing he should insist on having a lawyer for. But w
ouldn’t insisting on a lawyer make him look suspicious? “I was doing an exercise for one of my classes.” He contemplated how much he was willing to lie. Maybe they wouldn’t care about the stupid program. Maybe they would only care about the stabbing. Maybe all they wanted was the information and then they would leave him alone. Bentley had kind eyes—Deever did not. “I pretty much know exactly what time it was when he first screamed. I know because I looked at my phone probably two minutes before—9:48.” Bentley nodded. He was white, with muscular, hairy forearms. “The scream was coming from that room. He screamed a few more times and I think he was trying to get out of that room, but couldn’t turn the knob.”

  “He couldn’t open the door?”

  “I think—” Andre’s mouth felt dry. “I think he had too much blood on his hands. But I thought maybe someone had a heart attack, so I opened the door and he was in there bleeding everywhere. I put my sweatshirt folded up on his neck to apply pressure.”

  “What was the state of the room?”

  “Normal. Like a desk and a chair and a computer, and a whiteboard. Actually, wait, there’s a window.”

  “Right when you got there was it open or closed? Did you touch the window?”

  “I didn’t.” He tried to imagine it. “It couldn’t have been open the whole way because I saw my reflection. Maybe it was open, I don’t know. There was blood everywhere.”

  “Did the victim say anything?”

  Andre shook his head. “No, other than when I heard him scream.”

  “When you say you heard him scream, was he just making a noise, or did it sound like he was screaming at someone?”