Page 42 of Matchmaking for Psychopaths

There was a crashing sound that I assumed was from a bullet being expelled from the gun, before I realized it was from a window smashing. The alarm started to shriek. Nicole jumped at the noise, the gun flying out of her hand.

Rather than a single foot on the floor, there was an entire body. I didn’t know whose it was until Nicole yelled, “Ethan! Ethan!” and I processed that it was her husband’s.

A figure, dimly lit by streetlights, stepped through the broken window.

“Hello, Lexie.”

Our eyes met through the dark. Even in pitch blackness I would’ve known who he was, because we knew each other in a way that didn’t require sight.

Glass crunched beneath his feet. He seemed especially large, a hulking beast, but he wasn’t a monster—or he was, and I’d misinterpreted what the monster had wanted all along.

As a child I’d assumed that the monster was there to kill and eat my family, but what if its real purpose had been to rescue me?

“I found this guy skulking around outside with a canister of gasoline,” Aidan said, still gazing at me.

Nicole was next to her husband on the floor, trying to figure out if he was still alive.

I’d met Ethan a few times, at various Better Love holiday gatherings.

I’d once asked him what he did for work, and he was so boring that I’d tuned out before I got a real answer.

The main thing I knew about him was that he was obsessed with sports and Nicole.

Based off my knowledge, helping his wife set her workplace on fire was the most interesting thing he’d done in his entire life.

“Ah, I see. So you decided to throw him through the window?” I replied, still trying to process what was happening.

Aidan shrugged.

“It would be more accurate to say that he fell. Unfortunately, he lit a match before I could stop him. We probably shouldn’t stay in here too long.”

That explained why Aidan was growing increasingly visible. I thought it was an emotional effect, like I was really seeing him then, but it was the fire.

“You need to help me get Ethan out of here,” Nicole cried from the floor. “He needs medical attention.”

I pulled my eyes off of Aidan. I looked at Nicole, and then to the floor, in search of the gun.

“You just tried to kill me,” I told her. “Why should I help you?”

“I can’t get him out of here on my own. He’s too heavy,” she pleaded.

I thought about striking some kind of deal, one in which Nicole relinquished the director position to me and I made her kiss my feet each and every day she continued to work at Better Love. But how would I explain the fire to Serena?

Aidan watched me curiously, making no move to help Ethan.

“What do you want to do, Lexie?” he asked.

He knew. It was clear from the calmness of his tone. That was the last thing that I’d told him the night that we met: he wasn’t the only killer in the room.

Ultimately, Nicole was right. She and I couldn’t stay at Better Love together. Like having too many cooks in a kitchen, it was never good to have too many psychopaths in a single office.

“I don’t advise trying to hurt me,” I’d told Aidan, in between bouts of vomiting that night in the hotel room.

It was the final piece of the puzzle. The last part I’d forgotten, or had blocked out.

The thing that I tried my best never to think about.

That was a problem with pretending my life was a television show—it allowed me to separate myself from my actions.

I watched myself performing scenes, like an actor on the opening night of a film.

“I’m more dangerous than I look,” I said as I wiped my mouth. I wished I had a toothbrush. Despite everything, I was embarrassed by my bad breath.

He held back my hair.

“I’m sure you are, sweetie.”

“Don’t call me ‘sweetie.’?” I tried to stand up, but the room was spinning too quickly, the world’s worst carousel.

“What would you like me to call you?”

“Nothing. Call me nothing. I don’t associate with people who are obsessed with my parents. They’re all fucked-up. I know because I’ve spent more time with my parents than anyone else, and I’m fucked-up.”

“You’re not fucked-up.”

“Says the psychopath who killed someone.”

“Fine. What have you done that’s so bad? It’s your turn, Lexie. Tell me all your secrets.”

I started the story at the beginning. I had to. It was the same way I recounted the events to myself, because otherwise I’d sound too much like a cold-blooded killer. Worse, I’d sound like my parents’ child.

Once I’d figured out that there was not, in fact, a monster in my house, and instead, it was my parents who were slaughtering women, I struggled with what to do.

It seemed possible that all adults were secret killers and no one talked about it.

From my perspective when I was a child, there were a lot of things like that.

Adults were constantly trying to hide the truth from children.

I’d known about sex from a young age, but when I tried telling my peers about it, they looked at me like I was crazy.

Surely that wasn’t what our parents were doing.

Surely that wasn’t the thing that brought about our births.

I’d learned my lesson from that experience, and I told no one about my parents’ murderous exploits.

Even before the screams started, I understood that my parents were quirky.

Other parents all had the same haircut, wore the same unflattering clothing.

They owned houses, had stable jobs, made dinner at night.

“You don’t want parents like that,” my mother assured me. “They’re boring, and being boring is the worst thing.”

I never knew how to reconcile the things that my mother told me and what my classmates said. That dissonance did help me learn at a very early age the importance of keeping secrets, of separating the private realm from the public.

Are my parents bad people? The question haunted me.

My simplified understanding of the issue was that the world was separated into two groups, the good and the bad, with no gray space in between.

Because I was myself and my parents were my parents, I naturally assumed that we were good. How could we be anything else?

Murder made things more complicated, but not in a way that was totally clear.

There were, for instance, examples of when killing was allowed, or even encouraged.

War was one of those examples. Superheroes in action movies frequently maimed or murdered, and no one seemed to mind as long as they were doing it for the right reasons.

My parents weren’t soldiers or superheroes, but I figured they must have had a reason for doing what they did, because if they didn’t, then they were bad people, and, by extension, I was bad too—and I didn’t feel bad.

Later, after my parents’ arrest, I would learn that the sex part of things was more distasteful than the murder for a lot of people.

Of course those women deserved to die! They were engaging in group sex!

Some of them were cheating on husbands or boyfriends!

Why had they been in bars, looking beautiful, to begin with?

There were even those who believed that my father was some kind of prophet trying to morally cleanse the streets.

My father encouraged such people, though he didn’t have faith in any kind of higher being.

How could he, when the only things he truly cherished were my mother and himself?

In the end, it was a TV marathon, not some cosmic sense of right and wrong, that pushed me to do what I did.

It was the summer after fourth grade, and since my parents had neglected to enroll me in any of the camps that the other kids in my class attended, I spent my days watching television or wandering the city, hoping to come across enough quarters that I could afford to buy a bag of chips.

My parents paid little attention to my whereabouts.

They took it for granted that I would come home at the end of the day, though they might not have noticed if I didn’t.

Sometimes I went back and they weren’t there.

They never told me where they were going or when they would return, and cell phones were only just becoming common, which meant that there was no way for me to reach them.

Most of the time, though not always, they returned before I awoke the following day.

During a scorching week in August, when I went scrounging in the cupboards for something to eat and found them empty, I realized that they’d been gone for multiple days in a row.

I tried to think of the last time I’d seen them, and I vaguely remembered the sound of a door opening and closing late in the night several days prior.

At that point, I figured that they would come back.

They always, eventually, came back. My immediate needs, primarily my need to eat, overrode my concern about their disappearance.

By then, I’d been stealing for years. I didn’t like to do it, because I was a good person , and good people didn’t steal.

I did it because I needed to. Summer made things difficult, because it meant there were fewer places to hide things.

I raided my mother’s closet for oversized clothing that could help me conceal items. I was careful to avoid the stores closest to my house, because stealing from places where I might be familiar to the employees was a recipe for getting caught.

My youth was an advantage. I wasn’t yet old enough for people to consider me a suspect.

When I had enough food to sustain me—mostly candy bars, single-serving granola bars, and other items that I could easily obscure—I returned home with my loot and settled in front of the television to wait for my parents to come home.

I didn’t quite understand the phrase “absence makes the heart grow fonder,” but I noticed that the desire to see my parents was never stronger than when they were gone.