Page 9

NINE

Liam

Twenty-two years ago—age sixteen

“Why don’t you look impressed at all?” Abby asks as she stands there with her shirt up, breasts on display.

I’m currently sitting on her bed in the foster home I’ve been in for a short while. She really hasn’t been here all that long, about a month at this point, and the bed previously belonged to a kid who asked me every question under the sun, all of which I ignored. I clapped when he left, which my temporary foster parents didn’t seem to approve of. I secretly think they wanted to clap as well and were merely jealous it’d be inappropriate for them to do so.

“Don’t you want to touch them?” she asks.

“If I touch them, will you write my report for me?” I ask. “You can even pick the topic if you want.”

“Why do you act like you’re the one rewarding me by touching them!” she snaps as she yanks her shirt down.

“Fuck if I know. I assumed you wanted me to poke at them a bit or something. Is that why you called me in here?”

She weirdly looks exasperated when I should be the one who’s exasperated. Like what did she expect?

“You want something out of me, don’t you?” I realize. “I’m going to be real honest, I don’t feel like doing anything for you.”

“Fuck you,” Abby says, and I shrug, deciding that’s permission to leave. So I get up and head toward the door as she looks at me in shock. “Where are you going?”

“I assumed you didn’t want me anymore, and I have things to do,” I say as I check my watch. I need to be at the bus stop soon… I can’t be late.

“Liam, come back here!” she snaps, but I’m already out the door. My mind is filled with thoughts of him . Every waking second has me running scenario after scenario through my head about how I would deal with him. How I would make him regret what he did to my mother. But most of all, how I would do it. How I would kill him. How I would dispose of the body.

I need a car, and thankfully, Lisa, my foster mother, is going out of town and Dale, my foster father, is much more lax. If I asked him if I could use the car, he’d toss me the keys. If I asked her, she’d insist on going with me as well as knowing every detail of the plan. Sometimes, I wonder if she thinks there’s something wrong with me and that’s why she constantly keeps an eye on me.

I wait until Lisa’s gone before heading down the stairs and over to where Dale is watching a game with his buddies. They’re always loud and obnoxious, and I notice that whenever they get like that, Abby refuses to come out of her room, so I know she won’t follow me and keep pestering me. Of course he doesn’t notice that… he’s not observant enough… or maybe he just doesn’t care enough. I’ve often wondered if they foster to look good and not because it makes them feel good, let alone whatever they think we feel about it.

“Can I take the car? My friends are all going to the mall, and I thought it’d be fun to get to go… if that’s okay?” I ask.

Dale doesn’t even look away from the TV as he nods. “Don’t tell Lisa. She made me promise we were spending quality time together, but why the hell would you want to spend quality time with us when you could go out with friends?” he asks. “God, when I was your age…”

His buddies laugh, telling me that they likely grew up together and are thinking about something they’d done back then. Not that I care.

“Thanks,” I say as I take the keys and head to the door. I manage to slip out without another word as euphoria ignites inside me over the thoughts of what’s to come.

Waiting in the monster’s house feels almost surreal. I’ve followed the man who killed my mother for so long that I started to question if I’d ever see the end of it. I planned for this day for so long that now that it’s here, I feel convinced I’ve fucked up somehow. When I’d met Jonah at his bus stop—when I’d looked the man who killed my mother in the eyes—a part of me had hesitated. Because this is it. This is the end of my obsession… one way or another, he will kill me or I will kill him. There is no other outcome.

He has absolutely no idea how long I’ve watched him for. How much I know about his life, his schedule, his home.

After he’d gotten onto the bus, I snuck into his home to make my preparations. I laid down a thick blue tarp that I plan to kill him on. I have gloves on so that I won’t leave a single fingerprint anywhere in the house. I’m wearing a tight hat that will keep me from losing a single hair. And right before I got here, I changed into brand-new clothes right from the store so not a single part of me could be left at the crime scene. I parked down the street so my car wouldn’t be near the house until I was ready.

After breaking into the house, I rushed out to put my car in the garage and disabled the latch on the automatic garage door opener so his remote won’t work when he pulls up to the house. I knew this could lead to him parking in the driveway, and if he does, I’ll have to move his car before leaving, but it will keep me from having to drag a body out to my vehicle when there are neighbors all around us. If I’m lucky, he’ll leave the driveway open for his girlfriend who works nights and won’t be here until the morning, meaning that the two of us have plenty of time. I didn’t touch a single thing in his house, but as I sit on Jonah’s kitchen floor waiting for him, my eyes roam.

This is what a monster’s house looks like… not so different from any of the other homes I’ve been in, but a part of me expected it to be different. I expected it to be so awful that he was pushed to the brink, which caused him to do what he did… but the house isn’t that bad, is it? What gave him the right to destroy my life like he had? What possessed him to rip it all apart? What was so awful that I deserved to suffer like this? He seems to love his girlfriend, he doesn’t seem to hate his life… so what was it?

I start to get antsy as the hours stretch on. Is he not even coming home tonight? Did I fuck up? Did he have some other place to go? Did he go to his girlfriend’s house instead to wait?

The doorknob turns and my heart leaps up into my chest. Something squeezes my stomach that feels a bit like anxiety, but there’s something else… something darker blooming inside of me.

He’s finally home… and this will be the last time he ever walks through that door.

The last time he sets his keys down.

Because it’s so dark, he’s walked past me to reach for the lights. He has no idea I’m waiting in this room with him. I don’t want to kill him in the kitchen. The front door is made of glass, there are windows people can see through, so I have to get him to the garage.

Before Jonah even hits the lights, I rise up behind him and simply drop a rope over his neck. I know I have a brief element of surprise as I jerk him off balance with the plan to drag him into the garage. His weight hits the rope, and I realize the dead weight of a person is much different than I was expecting. I nearly drop the rope from the impact, but I can’t. I haul him back, but my momentary blunder costs me precious time… time where he’s figured out what’s happening.

He twists hard, trying to pull free while his right hand grabs for the rope and his left snakes between the rope and his throat so I can’t pull it tight. The door to the garage is merely feet away, so I get him through the door but am snapped to a stop when his feet hook on the doorframe.

“What the fuck are you doing?” he yells, and I can smell the alcohol on his breath. “You fucking?—”

He lunges up, slamming into me, and I’m rammed into the side of a metal cabinet. Pain flares into my arm as I drop my hold on the rope and pull out my knife. He smashes into me, driving me to the ground as the tarp crinkles under me and the knife is flung from my hand. I can hear the way it slides across the floor, catching on the edge of the tarp too far away for me to reach.

“Did you lay this down for me to get rid of you? That’s awful kind of you,” he says as his hands wrap around my throat and start to squeeze. Darkness washes through my vision as my lungs are deprived of even a breath of air. I drive my knee up, but it’s not enough to get him to stop.

Jonah laughs and the sound slices through me. I can see my dead mother lying there, unseeing eyes pointed my way. I can see this man trampling over every bit of my life. I can see him tearing it apart, ripping it to pieces and destroying it.

“You actually thought you could kill me? You really did waste your fucking life. You can’t kill me. You don’t have what it takes.”

My finger catches something that must have fallen off the rack; I can feel just the tip of it as darkness closes in. I can’t help but question how I could have thought this over again and again and still fucked up this badly.

He loosens his grip just enough that I can see his smug face a moment before I drive the screwdriver I’ve managed to grab into his throat. He reels back, but I don’t let him get far. I send him to his knees as I stab him again.

Jonah clutches his throat as blood leaks from between his fingers, a look of shock on his face.

“Are you sure I don’t have what it takes?” I whisper before the next hit makes it so he can never smirk again.

I stare at his unmoving body sprawled out on my tarp.

He’s finally dead. The man who invaded my waking hours and every nightmare.

Dead.

I gasp for breath, pleased that I can finally breathe again. How long has it been since I’ve been able to breathe? Since my mother died, for sure. Since the death of my father wrapped another noose around my throat.

I can breathe. I really can breathe.

I’m afraid if my mother saw me now, she’d think that I’m a monster. But I’ll be a monster so people like him can’t freely walk around feeling smug about what they’ve done.

A part of me just wants to sit here, unsure how to even keep moving. It’s like my entire purpose is now gone. Of course I feel euphoria over it, but this obsession had masked everything else I was feeling. It allowed me to be numb as I moved through this world. But now that he’s dead… is there really any use in moving forward?

I shake those thoughts out of my mind. I have to clean this mess up. I have to move his body before his girlfriend comes and finds the house empty.

It’s the push I need to get to my feet and start cleaning up the mess I’ve made.

I’m meticulous—making sure everything is back in place, making sure there’s not a single drop of blood that someone could find, and it’s what I need to move forward. It gives me something to do, knowing that I have to dispose of the body, and once that’s over with, I’ll be done. Then I’ll really be done.

I get him in the trunk of the car and then head back into the house to look through the window at the driveway to make sure the dark is adequate for hiding me. He even graciously parked his car on the road to give his girlfriend a place to park and space for me to back out.

Did she know he was a monster? Or was he kind to her? Was he caring? Or did he hit her? Hurt her?

I hurry back into the garage and fix the garage door opener before hitting the button, but what I see standing outside of it is the very last thing I ever imagined I’d see.

Abby.

“What the fuck are you doing?” she demands.

It’s like my brain and body don’t even know how to react to this new information. What the fuck am I doing is a very good question, but how the hell do I answer it?

She looks beyond me, like she’s expecting to get to see something behind me that will give her the answers she’s seeking for. The only way she’s going to find answers is if she looks in the trunk of the car.

“What are you doing here?” I ask.

She’s watching me closely, like judging my face will help her see what’s happening here. “I followed you. And then you just… went in there and never came out. What are you doing with that guy? At first, I thought you were up to something with him. Like drugs or… sex, but I saw you pick the lock. Where is he?”

What’s a good lie? What could I possibly say to draw her attention off this?

“I buy weed from him on occasion. Not my fault I’m better at hiding it than you are,” I say since Lisa caught her smelling of it just last week.

“Why’d you change your clothes? Why’d the garage door not work for him but worked for you?”

Fuck, fuck, fuck. “Because I didn’t want to smell like weed. Abby, come on. I have to get home.”

“Good, you can drive me home.”

My plan is quickly being shredded the longer she stands here. “You found your way here, you find your way home.”

“So let’s get this straight. You meet your… drug dealer at a bus stop where you harass him. Then you go to his house, park your car in his garage after breaking in, and then wait with all the lights off for hours for him to get home. Still don’t turn any lights on… and leave. You know… I want some weed too; think he’d sell to me?” she asks as she pushes past me into the garage. “Drug dealer, are you in here? Hey, drug dealer… you in here or are you in the trunk?—”

I slam her against the wall and press the knife I’d planned to use on the man in my trunk against her neck. “Get the fuck out of here.”

“Trunk it is, then,” Abby says, not at all concerned about the blade at her neck. “Our new mama and papa aren’t going to be overly happy to hear about that.” She sounds so fucking smug for someone who is currently at my mercy.

“They’re not going to hear about shit if you’re not around to tell them,” I threaten.

“That’s your plan? You’re going to kill me and stuff me in the trunk? Or… I’ll make you a deal. I promise I won’t say a single word… if you kill my father.”

The idea of killing her isn’t as tantalizing as killing the man who murdered my mother. And the only reason I killed him is because he got away with it. If the police had managed to arrest him like they were supposed to, I wouldn’t even be here.

“I’m not a killer. That man is the person who killed my mother,” I explain. “He was going to get away with it.”

“If you weren’t a killer, you’d have handed over the information you had to the police,” she says. “There was something that made you confident he was the killer… so why didn’t you notify the police?”

Why didn’t I? It really was that simple, wasn’t it? I told myself it was because they wouldn’t believe me or it wasn’t enough evidence… but it would have been enough.

“Because you wanted to kill him,” she states. “And I want you to kill my father. He deserves to die. He needs to die.”

“Then kill him yourself,” I say as I push her away from me.

“I’ll tell everyone. My dad’s a cop. I’ll tell him what you did. You will rot in prison. I’ll tell them you threatened to kill me as well. They won’t even be surprised. They’re already suspicious of you. I see the way Lisa watches you.”

I know they are… I know they think I’m strange. I need to blend in more. I need to keep people from questioning what I’m doing. I’d assumed that as soon as Jonah was gone, I could do that. I could go back to being a straight-A student with my perfect GPA who teachers loved and my classmates thought was funny. Ever since I came to this school, I don’t even know if I’ve paid attention to a single person. I don’t even know if I’ve turned a single assignment in on time.

All I know is that Jonah had to die. And now that he’s dead…

The rush was magnificent… but now it’s over. Will I ever feel a rush like that again? Will I ever…

Abby grabs tightly onto my wrist. “Kill him. Please… kill him. And I will never speak a word of what happened here tonight.”

“Why?” I ask.

“Because he’s a monster and they’re going to send me back to him. I can’t live with a monster. That man…” she chokes out as she points at the trunk. “Imagine hating someone as much as you hated that man… but being forced to live with him. Being forced to watch every move he makes because you know if you make the wrong move, he will beat the shit out of you. But he’ll make sure to only leave marks where no one will see them.”

“What keeps you from telling someone after he’s dead?”

“Why the hell would I ever turn on the person who fixed my entire life?” she asks.

I put my knife away and make sure there isn’t a single thing out of place—that her shoes didn’t smudge anything, that she didn’t leave a hair behind—and then I get into the car.

When she doesn’t move, I roll the window down.

“Get in the car.”

Abby quickly gets in and I back out before hitting the garage door opener and closing the door to a huge part of my life. I make sure to get rid of it before driving off.

“Tonight,” she says.

“Not tonight.”

“They said I could be placed back with him this week.”

“Do you know how long it took me to perfect this?” I ask. “Abby, I’m not rushing it. I need time to think. Time to plan it out. Do you understand? Now I’m going to drop you off at home.”

“You don’t need to. I’ll help you bury the body.”

“I don’t need your help.”

“No… but I need yours,” she says. “Please.”