Page 33 of Matchmaking for Psychopaths

“Do you ever feel like your parents are like a wound that won’t close?

” I asked at COMP the following day. “And you’re just walking around bleeding and everyone is staring at you and you’re like, ‘Why are you staring?’ because you’re so used to it that you’ve forgotten about the blood, but everyone else thinks you’re a freak. ”

I expected the other members to look at me like I was crazy.

I wasn’t ordinarily so frank with my speech, but yet again, I’d gotten little sleep, which made me prone to verbosity.

I showed up at the Better Love office with bags beneath my eyes, so tired that I might’ve fallen asleep at my desk if I hadn’t been filled with adrenaline. My brain spun in circles.

Noah was dead.

I’d hidden his body parts in the woods.

Someone I knew had killed him. But why?

Should I confront Aidan? If he was the killer, that might be a dangerous action. And if it wasn’t him, confronting him would give him even more leverage to use against me. I couldn’t figure out another solution. It was annoying how he and I were pushed together again and again.

The only relief was in the prospect of seeing Rebecca again.

Having plans, in and of itself, was a balm amid the chaos of my thoughts.

COMP helped people by giving them an outlet to discuss their feelings, but more than that, it helped by giving them a place to go.

Sometimes that was all a person needed to survive another day.

Rather than looking at me like I had two heads, the other members of the support group were nodding as I finished my rant.

“Yeah. I joked to my husband that I should just get a ‘my mom was murdered’ tattoo, because that might make things less awkward,” one woman said.

“I did get a tattoo for my mom,” one of the two men said, gesturing toward his bicep.

One thing that I’d noticed was that most of the murdered parents in the group were women. Rebecca and I were alone in having fathers who were killed. Even in a group of people marked by tragedy, my tragedy was exceptional.

“I want to go back to what you said about feeling wounded,” the facilitator said. “Is there any kind of bandage that we can put on the wound to make things easier?”

I shook my head.

“I don’t know. Every time that I think I’m better, or wearing a perfect disguise, something happens to remind me that I’ll never be like other people.”

“Grief isn’t linear.” Maureen nodded sagely, and then launched into her own speech about how she’d had a panic attack in a grocery store because a brand of flour made her think of her murdered mom.

Maureen, I knew, would never survive the things that I had survived. She thought that she understood other people’s pain because of how she hurt, but her attempts to relate served only to reveal how fundamentally she misunderstood what I was saying.

“Are you okay?” Rebecca asked when we met up in the library parking lot after the meeting.

She’d been quiet, listening to others’ stories rather than sharing her own.

I enjoyed being ingrained in a group, but more than that, I liked sitting next to her.

In my puffy coat, I looked like a marshmallow compared with Rebecca’s tight black pants and leather jacket.

She could’ve played an assassin in an action film.

“Yeah. Yeah.” I repeated the word like doing so might make it true. “I had a weird week, and I guess it rattled me.”

“Rattled” wasn’t exactly right. I was feeling something that I hadn’t felt in a long time, not since I’d become a fully functional adult. Suddenly I was a child in her room, listening to people die.

“You poor thing.” Rebecca threw her arms around me. The touch made me flinch. She didn’t seem to notice. She pulled back.

“I know we’re supposed to go to dinner, but I think we should go for a drive. That always helps me when I’m feeling a certain way,” she said.

I recognized the proposition, as it was a frequent trope in movies.

Fuck it. Let’s drive. Such a proposition was less common in real life, because people had jobs, families, gas tanks that needed filling, and bodies that needed sleep.

I hadn’t slept well in two weeks. I’d gone from being brokenhearted, to worrying about body parts delivered to my door, to discovering that said body parts belonged to my ex-fiancé.

Every action served as a reminder of Noah’s death.

I walked into the town house and remembered that he’d never come home again.

I brushed my teeth and wondered who was keeping his as a grotesque kind of trophy.

I got into the bed that had transformed into a vast gulf without Noah’s form taking up half of it.

I got dressed and wondered who I was trying to look good for.

I pondered who was trying to frame me, and then wondered if prison was really all that bad, which was how I knew that things had gotten dire.

For my whole life, staying out of prison had been one of my top priorities, the way that other people aspired to get into good colleges.

“Fuck it. Let’s go,” I said.

I knew which car belonged to Rebecca before she unlocked its doors, because it looked like her, sleek and sexy.

“This is my baby,” she said as she unlocked the doors.

I sank into the passenger seat. It was my preferred place in the car. Noah had viewed driving as a man’s responsibility, and I’d been happy to let him take the wheel. Now that he was gone, I was responsible for getting myself wherever I wanted to go.

Rebecca started to drive without putting an address into the GPS, which contrasted with my own habit of putting in my destination even when it was somewhere I’d been a million times.

“You like to drive, don’t you?” I asked.

“I love to drive,” she said, as she shifted the manual transmission.

Rebecca put on a playlist titled Be Here , and an angsty female voice came on over the speakers.

She turned the volume up to a level at which I could feel the bass through the seats.

In another car, with another person, silence might’ve felt uncomfortable, but in that moment it was necessary for processing.

I looked out the window as the city gave way to suburbs and the suburbs gave way to fields, interspersed with woods.

Thoughts spun in my head— Noah is dead; I hid his body parts in the woods; someone is out to get me —but as I sat next to Rebecca, things felt more manageable.

No one was supposed to go through the death of a fiancé— ex-fiancé —alone.

That I’d survived the imprisonment of both my parents when I was a child seemed miraculous in retrospect.

I glanced behind us like someone might be tagging along.

No one was there. In truth, some part of me was always paranoid, feeling that I was being trailed by the police or one of my father’s followers, and the events of the past week had only increased said paranoia.

A theory of my father’s was that everything we had the capacity for was already inside us, and no one could make anyone else do or feel something that they wouldn’t do or feel on their own.

I didn’t buy into that. How could I? I was constantly being forced to do things I didn’t want to do.

As we left the city, shedding the lights and the noise, I wished that I could rid myself of my emotional baggage with the same ease. Instead, I carried Noah with me, his body parts a weight even though I’d deposited them in the woods.

Why didn’t you save me? he asked.

Why didn’t you stay? I questioned in return.

We were in the country. In the summer, the fields were tall with corn. Now they were barren. Life and death existed in the same spaces.

“Can I ask what happened?” Rebecca asked. She glanced at me. She continued to look beautiful in the dark.

I wanted so badly to tell her. Gossip was considered malicious, but I understood that people told one another things because holding on to information alone was lonely. I’m alone, I’m alone, I’m alone was a constant refrain.

There was also the possibility that if I told her the truth she’d immediately call the police and have me arrested. I’m really, truly heartbroken about his death wasn’t a good defense.

“I…” I tried to force the words out but couldn’t.

“I know that it’s difficult,” Rebecca said.

She did something with the manual gearshift as we sped up.

“You’re like me in that respect—you think that it’s better to keep everything bottled up inside.

That’s a mistake. People who think that they’re immune to exploding are the most prone to it.

Vulnerability makes us strong, Lexie. The Children of Murdered Parents support group has taught me that. ”

“I was vulnerable,” I said defensively. “I shared a lot tonight.”

“You were vague. I understand why you might not want to share everything with them , but I would hope that you could share with me .”

She put her foot on the gas. I watched the speedometer on the dashboard climb up and up and up.

“Aren’t we going a little fast?” I said.

I wasn’t usually wary of things like that.

I didn’t clap when planes landed successfully, or shudder when I was on a high ledge.

But the roads were icy, and there was something about the look on Rebecca’s face that told me she had no intention of slowing down anytime soon.

“Tell me what’s going on, Lexie,” she insisted.

“I can’t. You wouldn’t understand.”

The car started to skid. I tried to press down on a brake that didn’t exist on the passenger’s side.

I wanted to believe that I was in control of everything, but recent events had proved how false that was.

I hadn’t been able to save my relationship with Noah or keep him from dying.

I hadn’t figured out who’d killed him, and I couldn’t stop the ache of grief in my chest. Most of all, there was nothing that I could do to lower the velocity of the car as it spun, out of control, into the opposing lane.

I screamed, a recognizable thing, the sound of a woman about to die.

Even though the sound came from my own mouth, it felt like I was observing the events from a distance.

Two friends went for a drive. They never came back.

And then: At least I won’t have to feel heartbroken anymore, or worry about the police.

The speed took us off the road and into a field, my body jerking with the movement. My seat belt pressed against my collarbone as it did its best to restrain me. There was a punch to my gut as the airbags inflated. Then, finally, we came to a stop.

The car was filled with the sound of breathing.

I put my hand to my chest and felt for my beating heart, the same way that I had when the first organ was delivered to my house.

It thumped wildly, too much of a good thing.

I wiggled my toes, my fingers, and turned to look at Rebecca, who appeared to be doing the same sort of self-assessment.

When our eyes met—one blink, two blinks, I’m okay, I’m okay —a giggle inexplicably rose up in my throat.

I worried that Rebecca might think I was crazy, until she began to giggle too, the two of us laughing like we’d heard the world’s best joke.

I laughed so hard that it sucked the air out of my lungs, a release like tearing the skin on a blister that was desperate to pop.

As we quieted, I opened my mouth.

“My fiancé left me for my best friend,” I told her. “And I think he might be dead.”