Sex, Marry, Kill

by Travis, Todd

  “Can’t, I got other stops.”

  “All right, bud. Another time, then,” Birkland held out his fist for a bump. Darin bumped it back and jumped off the back porch. Birkland turned around to go back inside.

  “What the fuck …” He stopped in shock as he looked inside. “Holy fucking shit. What’s she doing here?”

  Something in Birkland’s voice stopped Darin. He climbed back on the porch and stared over Birkland’s shoulder, inside the house.

  Linda Sue Harris had entered the front door of the house and parted the crowd like Moses splitting the Red Sea.

  “Is that who I think it is?” Birkland asked.

  Linda Sue’s hair was loose and free. Her white cotton shirt was unbuttoned deep, showing much in the way of cleavage, and her skirt was hiked up enough to flash a bit of thigh.

  “Yeah,” Darin said. “I think it is.”

  But it wasn’t just the way Linda Sue was dressed, Darin thought, but how she walked and moved. She prowled on into that party like she owned it, like a lioness sizing up a herd of gazelles. She grabbed a drink from someone, winked at whoever it was and drank it down. She threw the cup to one side and grabbed the nearest boy and started dancing to the party music. Dirty dancing. She ground her hips on his legs and pelvis, her hands on his backside.

  “Christ, look at that, she’s dry-humping Tony right there in my living room. Fucking Linda Sue Harris is dry-humping Tony Hartzler at my party, this is unreal.”

  “She must be drunk or high,” Darin said.

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing,” Birkland grinned. “Better living through chemical dependency, I’m all for it.”

  Linda Sue moved on from Tony Hartzler and grabbed two more boys and danced with them. The crowd cheered as she worked both of them.

  “This is fucking unbelievable. I gotta get in on this!” Birkland said. “Sure you don’t want to come in?”

  “I’m totally sure.”

  Birkland headed inside fast and joined the crowd around Linda Sue, who grabbed him. He dove in for a deep kiss and she returned it with fervor. Birkland held up his arms in triumph as she kissed him and the crowd cheered once again.

  Darin brought out his phone and started recording it all.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  They all got together again the next day, Saturday, at Shakes’s house in the afternoon, and watched some of the footage Darin had. Shakes put it up on the big screen television. Linda Sue partied hard, dancing and drinking with the best of them there, transformed into someone nearly unrecognizable.

  “Holy shit,” Shakes said. “Holy fucking shit.”

  Darin noticed something seemed different about Shakes, but he couldn’t put his finger on exactly what it was. Faye, too, seemed a bit different, her hair or something. Ed was quieter than usual but other than that he looked the same. Valerie had her sunglasses and usual wardrobe of dark clothes on.

  “So what happened after this?” Faye asked.

  Darin didn’t answer right away, not until Valerie looked toward him.

  “What happened?”

  “She pulled a train,” Darin said.

  “A train?” Ed asked. “What⁠—”

  “That means she fucked everyone at the party, Ed. Every single guy who wanted her, got her, one right after the other. They call that a train. Birkland sent me a text later saying she wouldn’t stop, and eventually he had to kick her out of his place. He later heard that she got busted at some bar, for underage drinking and solicitation, which means she propositioned some cop and got arrested for it. And she wouldn’t stop even then. I heard her folks took her to the mental hospital over in Highland Falls.”

  Ed put his hands over his mouth.

  “I guess this means the purity ball is out of the question for her,” Shakes said.

  “It’s not funny, Shakes.”

  “It’s a little funny, come on,” Shakes said. “And the good news is, we now know the game works!”

  “It’s not the game, man.”

  “What else could it be? What are the odds that we enter her name to have sex and then she has sex? Do you know what the statistics are?”

  “Shakes, she got dosed with X or some shit like that, that’s all that happened. It wasn’t the game. She got a bad dose and went nuts, it happens. Did you do it?”

  “Me? Where would I get X? You’re the drug dealer, not me. And how would I even do that? I was here all night, with these guys!”

  Darin figured out what it was that was different about Shakes. He was wearing a black T-shirt. He never wore the color black, he favored plaids and khakis, but today he wore jeans and a dark T-shirt and it made for a different look.

  “We were all here when it happened,” Faye said. “Except for you.”

  Faye, too, wore darker clothes. And she had more makeup on, especially around her eyes. Darin didn’t know her that well, but it didn’t seem like she wore makeup that often, she hadn’t had any on yesterday. Now she did.

  “Well it wasn’t me. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”

  They watched footage of Linda Sue as she made out with a girl and the party cheered her on. Other people there also filmed it.

  “That’s really naughty,” Ed said. “Naughty and bad.”

  “One of these guys must have slipped something to her at the game, then,” Darin said. “Whatever it was, it was strong stuff and it sent her off the deep end.”

  “Why do you think that?” Valerie asked. “You’re sure it wasn’t Sex, Marry, Kill?”

  “Come on. Seriously? We put her name into a weird online game and she suddenly turns into a huge hose monster? What are the odds of THAT happening? C’mon, Shakes, give me those stats.”

  “Okay, you got me there. The odds are pretty stacked against it, I will admit. Yeah, odds are way, way out there. Probably a coincidence, when one thinks about it. Had to be a black swan mathematical anomaly. Likely we had nothing to do with it, okay.”

  “We had nothing to do with it?” Valerie asked.

  “Probably not. But so Linda Sue Harris turned into a hose monster, so what?” Shakes said. “Who cares? The world needs hose monsters, too. And she was awful, come on, it couldn’t have happened to a better person, in my opinion.”

  “And she’s a PK, right?” Faye said.

  “Yeah, she is. Exactly! Which means this was bound to happen at some point.”

  “PK?”

  “Stands for Preacher’s Kid, Ed,” Shakes said. “PK’s nearly always go bad at some point and turn into thugs or hose monsters. It’s like, a freaking law of nature. The pressure to stay pure and good, twenty-four-seven, it gets to them and boom! They crack and break bad, just like in that TV show. If it hadn’t happened last night, it would have happened when she got into college.”

  “So it’s a coincidence, what happened?” Valerie asked.

  “Has to be, Val,” Shakes said and smiled.

  Darin for some reason didn’t like or trust that smile. It didn’t seem genuine. Like he said that, but he didn’t believe it himself. Something about him seemed off, and not just the new colors he wore. But before he could say anything, Faye’s phone dinged a message. She checked it and gasped.

  “What’s wrong?” Valerie asked.

  Faye dropped her phone and put her head into her hands. Her shoulders shook. The kids all stared at each other.

  “Faye, what is it?”

  Valerie picked up the phone, looked at it.

  “Oh, no.”

  “What is it?” Darin asked.

  “Show them,” Faye said from under her hands, voiced choked.

  “Are you sure, they⁠—”

  “Show them!”

  Valerie handed Faye’s phone to the others. She had received a text message with a photo attached. The photo was of Faye, in gym locker room, changing her clothes. She was in her underwear and had her back turned.

  The text with the message read: “YOU FAT FUCKING BITCH, I SAW YOU LAUGHING AT ME AT THE FUNERAL
. I AM SENDING THIS TO EVERONE I KNOW! DON’T YOU EVER LAUGH AT ME YOU CUNT!”

  “Damn,” Darin said. “Who⁠—”

  “Tracy fucking Jones, that’s who.”

  “Faye, I’m on this like white on rice. I can hack into her account, get it off and pull it down whenever it appears online. It takes some time, but I can write a program that will finesse it so that I get pings when it pops up anywhere and then I’ll⁠—”

  “Start the game,” Faye said.

  “But⁠—”

  “I want to play the game,” Faye said. “Let me play the game!”

  They sat silent for a moment. Shakes typed into his keyboard and brought the site up. The bridge appeared with a wail, just as it did before. Shakes glanced at Faye.

  “You’re not going to kill her, are you?”

  “Would it work?”

  Darin shook his head. “Guys, I don’t buy any of this⁠—”

  “If I knew for sure it’d work, I’d probably do it.”

  “I don’t like this,” said Ed.

  “Give me the keyboard. Give it. I’m not going to select kill, though she deserves it,” Faye said. Shakes handed her the keyboard.

  “So what are you gonna do? You gonna make her have sex with the whole football team?”

  “And how would that make her day any different from any other day? She’s already a slut. No, I want for her to get married to someone mean and move far away.”

  Faye clicked on MARRY and the site swirled until the boxes came up.

  “You need me to look up her birth date?” Shakes asked.

  “I know her birthday already,” Faye said as she typed. “I used to go to her birthday parties when we were in elementary school. I went every year up until middle school. She used to be my friend. She used to be nice.”

  She hit enter and the box for the INTENDED came up. She typed it very quickly and hit enter before anyone could read it and the screen whirled again.

  “THE WILL OF THE CIRCLE SHALL BE DONE!” read the screen.

  “Hey, that was too fast, whose name did you put in there?” Shakes asked.

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “Come on, spill. I wanna know.”

  “It’d better not have been mine,” Darin said.

  “It wasn’t anybody here.”

  “Come on!”

  “No. Never mind. It’s stupid. Can you really get that picture of me offline?”

  “I can get most of them. You can’t ever get all of them, especially if it goes viral, but I can do what I can.”

  “Please. If you can, please.”

  “I’m on it. Protect the circle, yo. Okay, I need some Red Bull and my laptop, stat. You guys are welcome to hang out here as long as you want, watch movies, play games, whatever. Ed, you up for more Grand Theft Auto?”

  “Yeah, I think I’d like that. Yeah.”

  Shakes switched his television over to the game and tossed Ed a controller.

  “I’m out,” Darin said. “I got things to do.”

  “I have to go, too,” Valerie said. “I told my dad I’d help him with some errands this afternoon.”

  “No problemo. You guys want, swing by here later,” Shakes said. “It’s Saturday night, after all. We can do more pizzas, movies, the whole thing. Party-time, Sam Hobart-style. Text me.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Valerie left the house with Darin and they walked down the street. She didn’t walk too close to him, but kept up. Darin glanced over his shoulder at the house. He had, for some reason, the irrational fear that Shakes was watching them leave. Why that would matter, and why he’d be afraid of it, he didn’t know. Valerie just trudged alongside him and when they turned a corner, she turned off the music in her headphones and took off her sunglasses.

  “You don’t live in this direction,” Darin said.

  “You’re right. I don’t. And I don’t have any errands to do, either.”

  They kept walking, comfortable with each other.

  “What do you think happened to Linda Sue? You really think she got a bad dose of some drug or something?” she finally asked.

  “That’s the only rational explanation.”

  “So it wasn’t what I did, it wasn’t me?”

  “You mean, did submitting her name in an online game somehow make her pull a train with the football team and a bunch of alumni ex-jocks last night? I don’t think so. It’s ridiculous, and how would that game MAKE her do it? How? Nah, she got dosed by some asshole, that’s what happened. There’s a lot of fucking douche bags who do that to girls, especially at parties and ball games. That’s the only thing that makes sense.”

  “And it’s just a coincidence that I did that on the same night she got, uh, dosed?”

  “WE played that weird ass game. Wasn’t just you, we were all there. We were all playing, if you call it that. Yeah, I think it was a coincidence. Coincidences happen. They happen in real life all the time.”

  “But if it’s real …”

  “It’s not, I’m telling you.”

  “I guess we’ll find out if Tracy Jones ends up married, like, real quick.”

  “I guess we will. But she won’t. It’s all a joke.”

  Valerie walked along silent for a few moments. “You know what’s weird?”

  “What?”

  “Even if it WAS me, if it was us, because we put her name in that game, I don’t feel bad. Not bad at all. I feel … glad, kind of. Is that weird?”

  “I dunno. Maybe not, I mean, you didn’t like her, right? It’s not right to feel glad about something like that, but it’s sometimes natural. I mean, I didn’t wish Healy dead, but I sure as hell wasn’t depressed when I found out he was gone. I hated him.”

  “I don’t think it’s just that. I mean, I generally don’t feel … glad … about anything, but I remember feeling glad back when I could, I remember what that was like … and this, it feels different, somehow. Feels kind of, I dunno … forbidden. And …”

  “And what?”

  “It’s stupid.”

  “Stupider than thinking some silly online game turned a virgin into a slut just because we asked it to?”

  “Maybe. This morning, when I got up … I put on makeup. I combed and teased my hair and … put on shadow and eyeliner. And lipstick.”

  Darin glanced at her. He thought she’d looked a little different, and with her sunglasses off now, he could tell. She’d put makeup on and she looked pretty damn good.

  “You’re right, a female putting on makeup in the morning, that IS weird.”

  “I know you’re joking, but it is weird, for me. I never wear any of this shit, I haven’t since my mom died. I refused to do it. My dad keeps buying me the latest stuff, but he doesn’t really notice that I don’t use any of it, it’s just something he does because he thinks he has to. And I definitely don’t do anything with my hair except to untangle it and let it hang, that’s it. It’s been my personal choice since I was fifteen.

  “But for some reason, this morning, I put product in my hair and teased it up, I picked up lipstick that had been in a box for years and … put it on. Eyeliner. Blush. I barely remember doing it, too, it was almost like I was asleep or something while it was happening, like I was outside of myself. I just watched myself do it and had to stop myself from doing more. And I didn’t even wash it off, either. It’s like, I can’t.”

  She stopped, looked at him. “I know how it sounds, but I know something’s wrong, something’s off, somehow.”

  “You don’t look off. You look … actually, you look great. Pretty.”

  She brushed that off. “Faye did it, too, did you notice? She was wearing more makeup than usual, and her hair was styled. And something was different about Shakes and Ed, too. I don’t know what it was, but something.”

  “What are you saying? That they’d also gotten a makeover, or what?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just saying that that something’s different. I know myself really well, all I do is spen
d time with my pain and emptiness, it’s all I have in life. I know every inch of my own personal misery. And something new is there, and it’s not something that comes from anywhere inside of me. It’s telling me to feel glad about Linda Sue, and wants to see her to suffer even more than she has.”

  “But like I said, that’s human and natural …”

  “Not for me, it isn’t. Not at all. I don’t usually feel much of anything. That’s my own personal fuckery. That hasn’t changed all that much after three years of intensive therapy and prescription medication. The only time I’ve felt anything that could be described as positive was when I listen to my favorite music. And when I decided to kill myself those two times. That’s the only time I felt happy. This … what I feel now, this gladness … it isn’t happy. It doesn’t come from anywhere inside of me, it’s not mine. It’s only pretending to be. It’s dark and twisted and … alien to me. You don’t feel it?”

  Darin stared at her before answering. “Last night, when I watched Linda Sue at the party when she was … getting down to it, there was something. It was kinda like what I get whenever I watch online porn or anything like that. I mean, it was a like a live porn show, right there in front of me. And it was kinda sick, what was happening, but … compelling, too. Birkland invited me in, and there was a part of me that really, really wanted to. I’m sure I could have taken a number and gotten a ticket on that train, if I wanted. I still think about it. But I just thought that’s kinda a guy thing, too. That’s what guys do. We think about sick sex stuff like that.”

  “It’s not, though. I don’t think it is. I think it’s something else.”

  “Man, I don’t know. When I was younger, I used to think about twisted, evil shit all the time, I’d want to burn everyone’s house down, all sorts of stuff, just because I was pissed at life. I didn’t, but I thought about it a lot. It’s just how our minds work. We imagine evil shit.”

  “This isn’t that. I know it’s not.”

  He didn’t respond. Just looked at her. He liked looking at her.

  “What are you doing later tonight?”