by Lana Hartley
“You seem… distracted,” Firmin says, treading lightly. Firmin must have a strong idea of what I do. He never asks. I don’t suppose that he wants to know, but I can tell that he wants to say something. “I don’t suppose that with this many files, that your procurement could be a team effort? Is that what is distracting you?” Firmin takes a longer swig of his whiskey. He wonders if he’s crossed a line, asked too much with that word ‘procurement' when he means that I murder.
I find it enchanting. My affections for Carrie have distracted me so much that my stoic private investigator seems almost concerned. I grant him a smile, and while I know I am charming, I wonder if he sees this as genuine.
I’ll let him suffer. I like Firmin, but I’m not exactly a congenial man and I take more pleasure out of his minute pain than a thousand professional or even friendly interactions I might have with him.
“I am distracted, yes. But not so much that I won’t be able to complete my work.” I take a lingering sip of my drink. “The procurement, and this operation, will be alone.” Maybe I should bring Carter in on such a big plan. There’s a lot of students to kill at this bonfire party, but I don’t want to share Carrie just yet, don’t want to share this plan. It is my gift to her. My method of acquiring her. I will separate her from anything, anyone that prevents her from being mine.
Carrie isn’t ready to understand why she’ll like my present, but I’m preparing myself to help her understand. My hands are shaking just thinking about it, about her. The soft curls in her hair, the gentle ivory of her skin, and those eyes. Her eyes that are haunting in their purity and the mystery that lies beneath.
I retrace my conversation and look to Firmin polishing off his drink. “I see,” he says, gripping the highball glass a little too tightly. “Apologies for my intrusion—”
“Nonsense, Firmin, I enjoy your lively company.” A wicked grin spreads across my face. My smirk is cruel, and I decide to assuage his fears further when he trembles at putting his glass down. I press my hand to his shoulder, letting him know that this is not a domineering touch but a kind one. “I would never harm you, Firmin. Your invaluable services and your professionalism make your company quite enjoyable.” It feels strange to compliment someone with so little ulterior motives. I only want him to feel comfortable, and not in the way I would with a victim before I slice into their side and watch them gasp.
Hmm.
“Good evening,” I say to him, removing my hand from him.
He gathers his coat and briefcase, nodding and leaving my study.
I don’t follow him out. I see the wheels in his mind turning. Is it good to be liked by someone like me? He’s asking himself.
There are certain advantages to the working relationship Firmin and I have.
What about Carrie and her perhaps perilous attraction to me, and my possibly fatal affections for her?
My throat tightens at the thought. I have stronger emotions toward her than I’ve ever had for someone. Even stronger than the urges to kill. I know I would never harm her – an odd declaration for a person that so enjoys harming others.
But I don’t want to hurt Carrie.
I want to have her.
Carrie
Ashley almost trips over a branch. Her free hand reaches out for mine, her beer sloshing. “Shit, sorry!” she says, and then she sees me. I used to think Ashley was not as terrible as the rest of the Westwick Prep graduates, until I saw her making a foreign exchange student her slave last year. I don’t feel bad bristling at her pink claws against my skin. I almost pull back and let her fall over, but I don’t want to be as cold as these people.
“Watch your step,” I say matter-of-factly.
Ashley rolls her eyes and takes a big gulp of her drink. “Why are you even here? I mean, you can’t be having fun.”
“No, I absolutely hate this party and everything like it.” I shake my head and start to walk away.
“Take a beer, damn. If you’re gonna be here, you don’t have to be a buzzkill.” Ashley waves over someone who’s carrying two cans.
I don’t really have a reason not to drink the beer. I’ve tried alcohol before. My parents offer me wine with just about every meal. I smile when I see it, Pabst Blue Ribbon. I assume this means we’re drinking the cheap stuff, ironically, and I can’t decide if that’s amusing or not. I pop open the tab.
“Thanks.” I nod to Ashley and the guy. Perry, I think his name is? I mean, in their own backhanded way, they’re trying to involve me. Even if I’m just a buzzkill. I take a big swig of the beer.
It tastes fucking awful, but the more I drink the less I mind. It’s chilled and has a little kick after every drink. I walk towards the water, pulling off my shoes and tossing them near where everyone else has theirs. I watch the water and listen to all the sounds around me fade out to nothing.
I’ve just graduated high school. I’m starting college in the fall. I should be excited. But after the sounds creep back into my consciousness, I just feel annoyed all over again. I wonder for a second what it would be like to not feel so displeased.
Laurel laughs, sputtering out some of her beer when Perry lifts up her towel and shows everyone Jonie’s hairy legs. “Jonie, please, who are you kidding with not shaving your legs? No one thinks that’s empowered, that’s your first visible step in giving up on yourself!”
“Shaving is a huge waste of time,” Jonie says, her eyes cast downward. She tries to snatch her towel back from Perry.
Jonie is mousy and has a surprisingly squeaky voice. Two things that already didn’t help her fit in at Westwick Prep, and she wanted to fit in. It’s made her time at school painful to witness. Laurel and her crew invite her to everything, bully her, and then treat her like their personal whipping girl. I used to feel bad for Jonie until she took personal advantage of her rung on the ladder being a few steps up from the bottom. She took every opportunity to pick on Tabitha until she transferred schools.
I despise being around these putrid people. I realize now that I’m clenching the can of beer that I’ve totally finished, and I have to pee.
Laurel’s father’s beach house is open, so I traipse up there to pee. I can’t believe how quickly one beer went through me, and how I’m already starting to feel a little sloppy on my feet. I’m careful to swerve past the line of sight of my fellow graduates, easier now that the sun has gone down and the bonfire isn’t getting all that well tended to. Everyone else has had way more than a single can, I’d wager. Yet they aren’t going to be pee… at least I’ll get to be away from everyone for a moment.
I start to feel much soberer after I empty my bladder. It was only the slightest buzz, anyway. But something is different. I’m not sure what I’m seeing until I get closer to the fire.
Bodies.
Bleeding, lifeless bodies across the shore. Panic should set in now, but I just feel a cold need to know if they’re dead now…or will be. Where does this eerie harshness come from? I reach down and press my ear to the hearts of one of the bodies before me. No heartbeat. No breath. I look at my dress and see blood on the white fabric.
I hear one screaming voice, someone still alive.
I recognize them.
Laurel.
And I feel…I don’t know what that pang in my stomach is, but I look in the direction I hear Laurel’s voice coming from. It’s getting closer to me. I look down at the blood crossing through the water. I think I forget to breathe.
Why do I know it’s him?
I step closer. Jeremy is dragging Laurel’s body across the beach. I see him stab her. Drop her.
Come towards me.
I pick up my phone and start calling 911. I am barely listening to the dispatcher, though. I alternate between looking at my toes in the bloody sand, wave lapping over it and mixing everything in the moonlight and the dying firelight, and toward Jeremy. He is walking toward me now, Laurel discarded. I keep up with answering the dispatcher’s questions but I’m barely paying attention.
I lo
ok right in Jeremy’s piercing green eyes and lie on the phone. No, I didn’t see anyone.
Why would I lie?
Why do I want to touch him?
Jeremy
“So much blood,” Carrie says, her voice nearly drowned out by ocean and the wind.
Darkness cloaks us both, the fire flickering down to almost nothing. The teenagers hadn’t been tending to that fire as well as their booze. I barely needed the mask I wore tonight. I’ve cut them all down but Laurel, and of course, Carrie.
Laurel screams. I barely hear her cry out, her voice seeming distant even though she’s in my grasp. Hers is the final body strewn along the beach tonight. I sink my blade into Laurel’s side several more times, cutting and twisting her insides, but my eyes are on Carrie.
I watch her pick up her phone.
She’s called 911, like a good little girl.
The logical thing to do would be to finish off Laurel and leave. Instead, I toss the shivering shell of Laurel, quickly losing blood, into the water and walk towards Carrie. Her white gown is covered in blood, water, sand. Her bare feet I see, just barely against the moonlight, sinking into the sand, mixing with the blood on the shore that the waves keep lapping up.
“Yes, I’m at Zala Point Beach, my name is Carrie Winters,” Carrie says to the emergency responder on the other line. I step closer, mesmerized at the blood and water washing over her toes. She’s looking at it, too, through slivers of moonlight. I don’t bother being stealthy as I move closer.
Carrie’s eyes look right up into mine.
Her hand goes over the phone’s receiver. “Hello?” she asks quietly, and I move from the tiki torches and awnings that were hiding me and into her line of vision.
Shouldn’t she be afraid?
How am I supposed to think logically and leave when Carrie seems to be totally unafraid? I know her life is fairly depressing, but I don’t think that she has a death wish.
Her hand moves from the receiver and she looks right into my eyes. Mask or not, darkness or not, I know that she recognizes me. “No,” she says, and I almost shake at the sound in this moment, so close to each other. “I didn’t see anyone.”
It’s unmistakable. Carrie is looking right at me, and lying. Does she think I’m not real, that she’s imagining me?
The sight of her in a wet white dress, the wind whipping against her, the blood on her dress, her skin, it makes my chest tight and I ache for her.
I am real, Carrie.
“We’re sending a unit now,” I hear from the phone.
Carrie just hangs up.
I still have the blade in my hand, but I point it toward me. I touch the side of Carrie’s face with my hand.
Her mouth forms a little ‘o’ and she reaches out and puts her palm flat against my chest. The touch is like a defibrillator, the electric current so strong. The crashing waves around us sound louder. The salt taste in the air stings more. I hate to leave now, and I want to swoop her up and hide her away, mine forever. I watch her close her eyes and drop her hand. I want to kiss her, but instead I tear my hand away from her cheek and leave, disappearing as quickly as I appeared, into the night.
I feel the weight of her hand on my chest still, like I’m some demon and she’s an angel burning her touch into my skin. My hand itches to feel her silky skin again, but I head back home.
I didn’t fuck anyone after I killed Lorenzo Sirvio. I’m not fucking anyone after I killed Carrie’s classmates. My cock is so painfully hard I almost worry that I won’t be able to drive, but I find my composure.
I can’t explain it, but when I saw Carrie, I knew she was mine. No more than I can explain how Carrie seems to recognize me in some primal way when she’s seen me.
Carrie
“Don’t ask my baby anymore questions.” Mother bellows the request so loudly in front of the police officer that I wonder if there are cameras around recording this grieving mother act.
Everything just…happened. Those bodies…
There can’t be reporters around yet, are there? And in the hospital? The staff must keep them away from patients.
That’s what I am, a patient. I look down at my white dress, sandy, wet, and covered in the smudges of blood I got when I checked some of the bodies.
Bodies. I keep saying that word in my head.
“Ma’am,” the officer says to my mom. His tentative breaths add to the nervous energy all around us. I know he doesn’t want to overstep his bounds, but my mother could test Ghandi’s patience. “She is the only survivor that we can talk with. The only other victim with a pulse is unconscious in the ICU, and your daughter seems to have sustained no injuries—”
“Carrie is likely in shock,” a nurse says, handing me a hospital gown. “You change in there and we’re going to check you out, baby girl, make sure you’re okay.” The nurse pats my arm. I should feel upset about what happened. Comforted by the nice touch. I smile quickly and let my face fall as soon as I turn from her.
I enter the room where I’m supposed to change and hear my father’s voice; he’s on the phone. When he spots me, he walks from the room, voice exasperated as he attempts to be both pushy and quiet. “Okay, but I should be able to sue the school for the pain in suffering my daughter was exposed to, or the beach, Parks and Rec, who is responsible here, Larry?” My father is talking to the family lawyer.
Pain and suffering sounds like what I should legitimately be faced with now, but mostly I’m just tired. I want to be home, curling up next to Jeremy’s coat.
My brain wraps around the idea that Jeremy did this. I saw him. I should tell the police, but I know I’m not going to.
This is the first time in my life that I’ve actually considered that I might not be a good person.
The nurse walks in. “Sweetie, if you’d like to take a shower, the officers just need to take a few samples and we can clean all this blood of you,” the nurse says. She speaks softly, like I’m fragile.
I don’t feel like I’m going to break. I don’t feel anything more than tired. “There’s blood on my hands,” I say, stretching my fingers out before me.
For a moment I think about running to the shower and washing off any proof that Jeremy was there. I want to protect him, but something tells me that he doesn’t need my protection. Why did Jeremy kill all those people? Why didn’t he kill me? More importantly, why don’t I just tell them? I did nothing wrong. They think I’m in shock. Maybe I am.
“Bring the officers in, and then I’ll wash this off after they get their samples,” I answer. I look at her without smiling. Maybe the smiling is just too inappropriate for the moment. I’m used to smiling because I think that’s what people want to see.
The police officer that my mother is hounding walks in, my mom in tow like a Chihuahua ready to bite his ankles. Mother is sobbing profusely, giant crocodile tears all over her cheeks, mascara running like a murky black river beneath her eyes. “Hasn’t she been through enough?” she wails.
“They need samples and a statement,” I say.
“Yes, Ms. Winters,” the police officer says slowly. “If you could just tell us what happened, then we could let you rest.” He pulls a curtain and in that brief privacy I’m a specimen they need samples from.
“Okay.” I hold my hands out while they swab and scrape everything they need, take every picture, tag everything, it is all happening in slow motion and very far away from me, at least in my head. When their evidence bags are full, I sit on the bed and the curtain is tugged back.
There’s another cop in the room. I see Mother look at him and adjust her cleavage. That’s a new level of low for her, I think when she walks over to him and starts flirting.
My father reenters in the room, and he doesn’t pay attention to us, just sits in a chair. My mother doesn’t stop flirting. The officer pulls out his notepad, looks at our little family unit, and sighs.
“I remember that I went to the bathroom. Everything was fine when I left, and a few minutes later when I ca
me back, there were bodies everywhere. I checked some to see if they were breathing or had heartbeats. There was a man, he had a mask, I just forgot in the shock,” I offer up because that’s true and it means nothing. I don’t want to say anything about those green eyes, about recognizing him, about him touching me.
About how I saw Laurel’s body.
“I heard Laurel screaming and I went back to her—” I pause before I say, “body.” She’s the only other girl who’s still alive. Not because she’s supposed to be, I figure. When Jeremy saw me, he tossed her aside like garbage. I still remember how the handle of his blade whispered over my skin when he touched me. How I felt his racing heart beneath my palm. “I heard her screaming…I…I didn’t see anything else.” I take a deep breath. “Can I see Laurel now?”
“Yeah, sweetie, let’s take you to her in ICU after you get cleaned up, we’ll get you washed off and then you can see your friend.” I hear sadness in the nurse’s voice. I want to tell her that I’m not upset about Laurel. That Laurel is not my friend. I want to see her because I need to understand why I’m not upset, why I’m not scared, why all I care about it seeing Jeremy again.
I want to understand. Understand my strange reaction, or lack of any real reaction. I want to understand why Jeremy did what he did. I want to understand why I have this attraction to him, and what it means.
The nurse turns. “Give Carrie some privacy,” she insists. My parents look confused for a second, and I think my father actually forgets I’m in the room with him again. My mother shakes her head and stomps out, clacking her heels and tucking her arm around the cop she’s targeting.