Page 43 of Matchmaking for Psychopaths

Something funny about my parents was that, regardless of our financial situation, we always had a cable subscription, because, in addition to movies, my mother loved television.

This was before streaming networks were around, and I filed through the channels until I found something that interested me.

One channel was playing a multiday marathon of a crime show about investigating brutal murders.

I started watching because I enjoyed the mystery element of it.

Who is the killer? It was a nice distraction from my rumbling stomach and my growing concern that my parents had abandoned me forever.

In addition to being lonely, I was dangerously close to running out of toilet paper.

In the third season of the show, the police realized that they weren’t dealing with a run-of-the-mill murderer; they were looking at a serial killer .

It took me a few episodes, but eventually I understood that my parents bore a remarkable number of similarities to the top suspect.

The only difference was that, on the show, a single, isolated person had built beneath his house an unsanctioned bunker in which he committed his crimes.

My parents didn’t own a house or a bunker, nor were they isolated.

They were the stars of every party they’d ever attended. However, they had killed several women.

I liked television because TV villains were irredeemable.

Yes, go to prison forever, you scum! Things were a little different when the villains were my own parents.

Aside from the screams of the women, which interfered with my sleep, their nighttime activities hadn’t impacted me directly.

But their continued absence caused me undue pain.

There were days when I wondered if they’d simply moved and forgotten to take me, or if I’d done something wrong, causing my sudden abandonment.

I became sure that I’d somehow caused my own suffering and deserved everything that I got.

I was watching the show when they finally returned.

“Oh, there you are, Lexie,” my mother said. She was tan, wearing a bikini. My father said nothing to me at all.

“We were at the beach. We only planned to stay a night, but we were having such a good time that we decided to extend things.”

By that time, they’d been gone for three weeks.

The show helped me realize that my parents were bad people, but their absence had done something greater—it helped me understand that they were bad parents and, like the villains on the show, they needed to be punished for what they’d done.

I didn’t start with murder. Killing wasn’t a natural impulse for me. I was gentle toward animals, and I didn’t hurt my peers any more than an ordinary child. The first thing I did was tell my fifth-grade teacher.

“My parents are killing people,” I told her.

School had been in session for only a couple of weeks, but somehow the social hierarchy in the classroom was already well established.

I’d once again been marked as “the weird girl,” a label I was used to.

One of the worst things about being socially outcast was that it wasn’t limited to being outcast by people my own age.

Teachers wanted to be accepted by their students, and thus they distanced themselves from the stranger people in the class.

Somehow, they knew that I didn’t belong, and they treated me as such.

When I told her what my parents were doing, my teacher, a tired woman who lacked all the softness I wanted her to have, looked at me and said, “Come on, Lexie. You know it’s wrong to lie.

There are better ways to get attention.”

I knew then that no one would believe me, not without proof. I needed to make my parents’ crimes impossible to ignore. I needed to create a situation that my father couldn’t talk his way out of and my mother couldn’t seduce herself free of. I needed a body.

After making this realization, I began to study the crime show, committing to memory all the dumb screwups that killers made.

The mistakes seemed so obvious on television.

In real life, particularly for a ten-year-old, orchestrating the perfect murder was more difficult.

The victim had to be small enough that I could overpower them, but they couldn’t be someone my own age.

There were people in my class whose disappearance I wouldn’t have minded, but killing someone I knew felt too risky.

Something I’d learned was that people tended to murder people who were like them, and that serial killers’ victims tended to be similar to one another.

The other difficulty was that the murder had to be done in the house.

Bodies were heavy! Detectives on TV mentioned that all the time.

As strong and capable as I felt, there was no way I had the kind of power needed to lift a corpse.

Also, I didn’t want to kill just anyone.

I needed my victim to be bad , because there was something redeemable about killing someone who was bad.

I considered waiting until my parents had completed another murder themselves.

However, that would leave too many factors out of my control.

I didn’t want them just to be punished; I wanted their downfall to be a spectacle.

Look at this show that I put on for you!

I probably spent too much time envisioning the set design and not enough time considering what would happen if my plan worked, but I was ten—what did I know about consequences?

Every person I saw became a potential victim.

Nearly all of them proved themselves to be unworthy.

After several weeks of looking, I began to consider a woman who routinely walked by our house.

Occasionally, she had with her a small dog that wagged its tail whenever it saw me.

How precious it was to feel loved, even if it was only by a stranger’s dog on the sidewalk.

One day, I witnessed her kicking the dog.

The action filled me with rage. It was the one thing in the whole world that loved me, and she’d caused it harm.

After that, I noticed more slights. She tugged on its leash rather than letting it enjoy sniffing the grass.

She grew irritated when I asked to pet the dog’s fur.

I understood her to be someone like my parents, the type of person who didn’t deserve to have another living creature in their care.

I would be doing the world a favor by getting rid of her.

It was actually a good thing I was doing.

I imagined a future in which the dog and I ran away together and lived a happy life.

One night, when my parents were out, I waited by the window until she came by; I hoped that it wasn’t one of the occasional evenings when she skipped her stroll.

As I waited, I realized that I was excited.

I didn’t get to look forward to birthday parties or Disney vacations like other kids did.

Sure, my parents and I occasionally did nice things, but there was always something unsettling about them, largely because my father swindled his way into everything we had.

Most of the time, I was lucky if there was food in the fridge.

Finally, I had something to anticipate. I mentally ran through the scene again and again, like I might practice a speech for a presentation at school.

When she arrived, it felt like I’d summoned her. She was without her dog, and there was no one else on the street. We were actors. This was her role. Lights, camera, action.

I ran outside.

“Help! Help!” I cried. “My mom fell down and I don’t know what to do.”

The woman looked around. She wanted there to be someone else. There wasn’t.

“Please come inside and help me!”

It took some convincing. After all, she was a bad person.

I acted my little heart out until, finally, she relented and followed me inside, where I killed her.

I had no gory details about her death to share with Aidan, largely because I didn’t remember most of them.

When I tried to think back, I could recall only the scene that I’d imagined in my head, rather than the reality of the blood.

After I finished, I called the police and told them I’d just arrived home to find a body in the living room.

I’d sprinkled the corpse with evidence of my parents, rubbed their clothes against the mess, grabbed strands of hair out of hairbrushes.

I gave the police incontrovertible proof.

If anyone suspected me, I never heard about it.

Still, as the police dragged my parents away, paranoia crept in, along with the sinking realization that, unlike the things I watched on television, all of this was real.

A woman was dead, and my parents were going away, maybe forever.

“You think I’m disgusting. You want to get away from me,” I told Aidan that night in the hotel room.

He shook his head.

“No, you were a child. You didn’t know what you were doing.”

“I did though. I planned the whole thing out.”

“Then you were doing what you needed to in order to survive. No one can blame you for that. Or at least I would never blame you for that.”

“I’ve been trying to avoid men like you for my entire life,” I told him.

“What kind of man is that?” he asked.

“The kind of man I could love,” I replied.

If it hadn’t been Aidan standing there, if it had been Noah or Molly, I would’ve considered calling the police. But it was Aidan, and I knew that he wouldn’t judge, because he understood what I needed to do. You can justify almost any action as a matter of self-preservation if you try hard enough.

As long as Nicole was alive, I would never be able to relax.

She’d labeled me as the enemy, and I knew from my years of watching reality television that feuds between women didn’t come to an end until one person left the show.

Besides, she was a bad person. The police would never see that.

They would look at her and see an innocent baby-woman. That was her power and her weakness.

As soon as I spotted the gun, I recognized what I was going to do. Before Nicole realized what was happening, I grabbed it off the floor and pointed it in her direction.

“You would’ve been a terrible director,” I said, and then pulled the trigger.