Dear Killer (12 page)

“He was a good kid, you know. People said he wasn’t. But he was a good kid. If you
really
knew him, like I knew him. If you knew him, sometimes, just sometimes, he was so good, so lovely. . . .”

Her words melted into tears. Her husband came over and put an arm around her waist. He didn’t look at me. It was odd. She was strange. I supposed my idea of what a mother should be was somewhat skewed—this woman believed so blindly in the goodness of her son, and I found it hard to reconcile this idea of a mother with my own mother, who had no such illusions about me.

“Come on, let’s go,” her husband murmured, and led her away. She didn’t look back at me, just went on, leaving me behind. I imagined—correctly—that we’d never meet again.

I walked away from the lamppost and moved on.

I came home late. I wandered all day through the streets of London, trying to avoid returning. I walked through Brixton for a while, and then Westminster, and then somehow I made my way to Notting Hill, and I stayed around there for a while because I hadn’t been in that area for years, not even for a murder. Some streets were lined with tall white houses and reminded me of my own, but other streets were colorful little jewels, and I tried to find those. When I did find them, I took my time. I walked slowly, absorbing the color of each bright house. I tried to let them make me happy. But wherever I walked, Michael followed. I imagined him watching me, gazing from street corners, sneering from windows, laughing from the steps of houses. His image chased me through the city.

I was haunted by a memory, too, not of Michael but of a time before I knew Michael, a memory of the room where I had spent so long training with my mother—only a snippet, really. I was twelve, and I knelt over her, fist pressed to her chin at the end of a sparring match—I had won. She gasped beneath me. I remembered the anger and pompous victory that ran through my veins, burning—and I remembered the look in her eyes, defeated and wondering, as she proudly pronounced that I was done with my training. She lifted me up high in celebration—and I remembered that even though I had killed before that, the moment I knelt over her on the mats was the moment everything truly began.

It was the first moment I had become Diana.

The memory shocked me through with something akin to fear.

I watched the sunset from a street corner near Westminster Abbey, among crowds of tourists who stared at me, almost in awe of my beautiful taffeta party dress. I was an island, though; I didn’t see them. I watched the sunset by myself. It seemed monochromatic to me. Everything mashed together in the sky to make one unappetizing, oversweet shade of salmon pink.

Home wasn’t comfortable anymore. But eventually I had to return, because I was tired and I had to sleep, no matter how much I didn’t want to. I felt like I wanted to stay awake forever.

My neighborhood was quiet, and the sky had long since turned dark. The rows of clean white houses on either side of my street stood gracefully, presiding over neatly trimmed window boxes and shining front steps in the mellow glow of the arching streetlamps.

At almost the exact moment I got home, my father happened to come home as well.

He parked his big, dark, expensive car with the clean silver wheels and old license plate outside the front door and stepped out onto the curb the same instant I was mounting the steps—and just for politeness’ sake, I turned to say hello. But then I was quiet. Maybe it was spiteful, or maybe it was self-defeating, I really didn’t know, but either way I wanted him to notice me before I said a word.

As he stepped out of the front seat, he was staring at the ground, thinking, maybe. Like always, I was mostly invisible to him. It was only when he walked around the car to get his briefcase out of the passenger seat that he saw me. I couldn’t see any emotion in his eyes; if it was there, it was invisible.

“Hello, Kit,” he said politely.

“Hello,” I replied.

He opened the car door and turned away without another word. He shifted his weight from his right foot to his left and then back to his right again.

Didn’t he know? Hadn’t he heard? A boy had died. It was all over the news. Hadn’t he even thought about it? Wasn’t he even going to ask me what happened?

To my surprise, words rose up within me—words I wanted to shout at him, throw at him, make him listen to.

I am a murderer! I wanted to say. I am a killer! I am dangerous! Half of London is talking about me and my work, and sometimes I wonder if you even know my name any longer. I’ve punched and
killed
a classmate. I’m going to kill another. I’ve killed over fifty people. I’m famous. I have blood on my hands that I can never wipe away. I can think of a thousand ways to kill you just in this moment. I’m your
daughter
, I wanted to say, but when you see my face, I swear you don’t even believe it.

He walked up the stairs and put his key in the lock when I made no move to do the same. I crossed my arms. I had so, so many things to say, especially now, and all of them were trying desperately to escape from my lips. I couldn’t say any of them. I felt like if I tried, I wouldn’t be able to stop myself once I began.

So I just said, “Thank you,” as he opened the door for me, and I went upstairs before I had a chance to hear what he said in reply.

Late that night as I tried to sleep, I couldn’t. I could hear voices, taut and anxious, emanating from my parents’ bedroom, just below mine, and I knew my mom was explaining some of the things I couldn’t say. She would be explaining Michael’s death and my involvement in his discovery—she would give my father the official story, the facts, the things he needed to be aware of in order to be respectably informed. He never knew anything besides the official story. He lived in quiet ignorance.

She would explain the events of the past week because he hadn’t been home at a reasonable hour since Michael’s murder, and then they would say nothing more to each other.

I wondered what he thought of it all. I wondered if he even thought anything.

By Saturday my mom had started giving me the silent treatment and stopped throwing things, but on Monday I was still nursing a long cut on my arm I had sustained the previous Friday when she broke a vase when I was standing next to her. Her injuries were worse than mine; the bandages on her wrists and arms were caked through with blood in places, and on Thursday I had sat with her for two hours trying to dislodge a piece of glass from deep within her palm. On Monday, I hid my cut with a long-sleeved sweater, put on a morose face, and went to school.

After I had hit Michael, the stares had been scandalous and gossipy.

Now the stares were pitying and wary.

The hallways went silent around me—they were quieter than usual to begin with. But as soon as I passed, there was dead silence—no one spoke, no one moved. I had seen a murdered body. I was special. In the worst possible way.

Well, perhaps not in the
worst
possible way. I wondered what they all would say if they knew I was the one who murdered him.

My heart went cold.

Murdered him without a letter.

Before I knew it I was at homeroom.

I stopped outside the door and hovered there. I was early. I had to go in, of course. But part of me, a large part of me, didn’t want to. There were two monsters in there. One was Maggie, the other was Michael’s distinct absence.

But there was no helping it. I walked inside.

The first thing I noticed was that there was nothing on Michael’s desk, the one he
always
sat in during homeroom. I had imagined that people would leave things there. Flowers, notes. I suppose I had this image of bouquets and pictures and letters overflowing from inside his desk, petals falling onto the floor, a display like I had seen once where someone had died in a car crash by the side of the road. That was what people did for dead people, wasn’t it?

But there was nothing there. Just an empty desk that people gave a wide berth and stared at with wide eyes.

The second thing was Maggie. She was sitting alone, five feet from the nearest person. She was leaning back in her chair, hair loose and curly and wild, collar neat and crisp, feet up on her desk, angled toward the door so that she could see the people who came in.

Her expression was one of defiant happiness.

Our eyes met.

“Hello,” she said.

The room suddenly felt twice as silent as before. A chasm opened up between Maggie and me. I felt far away. Outside, a tree moaned in the wind, silhouettes of leaves flying by the open window like a fake backdrop from an old movie.

“Hello,” I replied softly.

I walked to her desk and stood in front of her, hands in my pockets.

She took a minute to think about what she was going to say.

“He’s dead,” she said simply, her voice barely above a whisper.

“Yes . . . he is,” I replied, my voice even quieter than before. No one looked in our direction.

She tipped her head back, hair flowing down, and breathed in. And as she exhaled, a small laugh escaped her lips. A laugh that could almost be mistaken for a gasp. Cold and merciless.

“He’s gone,” she murmured happily, just loud enough so that only I could hear, as I stared on in horror.

I had philosophy just before lunch. I probably should have been dreading it. But I wasn’t. In fact, I was rather excited for it, in a morbid sort of way. Perhaps “interested” was a better word. I knew Dr. Marcell was suspicious. No one else seemed to be. So how would she act?

I took a seat near the back of the room. At Michael’s seat, yet again, there were no flowers. Just an empty space where he had been and was no more.

Making a point to look miserable, I listened to the bell ring like a church bell and watched the students settle into their seats. In the front of the classroom, Dr. Marcell stood, went to the classroom door, and closed it. All of us watched her as she walked to the middle of the front of the classroom and stopped. She looked over us, studying our expressions. After a while, she spoke.

“Something terrible has happened.” Daggers. The words felt like daggers.

Terrible? How was it terrible? Sure, he was dead, and death was traumatizing, but it wasn’t terrible. Michael was a bastard. He was more than a bastard—he was legitimately insane. He was dangerous. Everyone was better off now that he was gone.

“I know all of you know what I’m talking about. Here, in this classroom, with one empty desk, we can see it clearly. Now, I know all of you are required to go to therapy at least once, so I’m not going to spend any time talking about the event itself, but I want to talk a bit about something I think pertains to the situation.”

No one said a word.

“Today,” Dr. Marcell said, “we’re going to talk about what evil is.”

She looked at me. I looked down.

“I’m going to ask you a question, and I want to know what you think,” she said, pacing back and forth across the front of the room. “Tell me this—is evil universal?”

For a moment, there was silence; then someone whispered, “No.”

“Interesting. Why do you say no?” Dr. Marcell prompted.

The same person did not care to elaborate, so Dr. Marcell looked over the room for a volunteer. There were none, so she chose someone.

“Marie,” she said, gesturing to the blond girl sitting in the first row. Marie, poor girl, didn’t know what to say for a moment, but after a few seconds she came up with something.

“It’s the same argument as . . . moral nihilism. Like, there’s no true evil, since evil is a social construct.”

“All right.” Dr. Marcell paced back and forth once more, then stopped. “So, then, would you say that Hitler, for example, was not truly evil?”

“No, that’s not what I meant,” Marie breathed.

Damien, the boy next to me, added helpfully, “I think that all the stuff in the middle, like little stuff, like stealing a bag of chips or forging a signature on a minor piece of paperwork, isn’t evil. And for some bad stuff, like, murder, it depends on what kind of society you live in. ’Cause in some places that can be evil, and in others it’s normal. Some stuff is never really evil—unless there are crazy circumstances, like you steal food from a starving person or something. Some stuff depends on where and when you are, like, your society. But stuff . . . like mass genocide . . . that’s evil, no matter what society you live in.”

Dr. Marcell smiled. “Basically, Damien says that evil, except for extreme evil, is based on the circumstances. Can we all agree on that for the sake of argument?”

The students murmured passively in agreement.

“So,” Dr. Marcell said softly and carefully, “was Michael’s murder evil?”

All the air suddenly seemed to disappear from the room. Everything was quiet. Rigid. Immovable. No one could believe she had just asked that question. It was so obvious—everyone would say that it was evil, of course. Even asking it seemed almost blasphemous. Even to me. His mother had cried so passionately for him. Asking the question seemed almost to negate her suffering.

Though, as I thought about it, I probably shouldn’t feel that way.

Dr. Marcell chose her next words carefully. She had to. They were dangerous words. Honestly, if anyone heard her talking, she would probably get fired for insensitivity or something. I knew she was aiming this at me. Every half second her eyes would flicker over to me and stare. I knew she suspected me. But there were more elegant ways to go about victimizing me. I didn’t react.

“Michael . . . was a troubled soul,” she said quietly, her words floating over us and settling restlessly. “Many people, including the police and some parents and teachers who shall remain unnamed, upon reviewing his actions and history, have expressed concern that he may have suffered from antisocial personality disorder,” she said, and continued, even though we already knew what that meant. “Antisocial personality disorder is a disorder that makes a person tend to disregard the rights of others. A violation of the rights of another person, if extreme enough, could be considered evil. He had the potential to become evil. So I will repeat the question: was his
murder
evil?”