Page 125 of What Boys Learn

I sent a text to Robert:Home safe.

It was one in the morning. He didn’t answer.

I kept wondering why I wasn’t bursting to tell Robert what I’d discovered from the tapes—that I hadn’t known about the girl in the back of Grant’s car, and I hadn’t been the one to suggest leaving Grant. Why wasn’t it a revelation worth celebrating? Because those two claims, upsetting as they were, didn’t clear my record entirely. I was a messed-up kid. I did bad things. I wouldn’t have believed Curtis’s made-up stories otherwise.

Still sitting in my car, I watched as a teenage girl stepped out of an idling car three doors down from my apartment, walked up to the front door of her house, and bent down to move a geranium pot.

Bad idea, leaving that key there, I thought automatically.Wouldn’t be hard to get into that house.

The voice wasn’t an adult voice. It wasn’t Abby the neighbor, the counselor, or the mom. It was Abby the teenager, seeing opportunities even when she wasn’t searching for them. Abby, the bad seed. The hypnosis transcript was a hoax, but that didn’t change what I thought of my younger self.

When I was living at my second foster home—age fourteen, fifteen—a group of us kids were sent to a church group run by Pastor Baxter, my foster dad at the time. We were supposed to talk about the bad things we did and promise to be better. The problem wasn’t that we paid no attention during our little group sessions. We paid excellent attention. Others’ confessions were valuable, something we all figured out quickly.

One kid pretended to be sorry about all the cars he’d hotwired, but he also told us how he did it. Great lesson. I went next, saying how bad I felt about the makeup I’d shoplifted but I also explained how easy it was. Another lesson. A third kid explained his best tips for making and selling impressive fake IDs. It took Pastor Baxter a month to realize we were all using the group sessions not to cleanse our souls but to learn how to be more successful petty criminals.

Sitting in my car, I felt the tumblers turn.

Criminals learn from each other. Serial killers learn from each other—or they could. Even Curtis had said it. They’d used group therapy at Menkoka for a while, but it backfired.The problem with housing and treating psychopaths together is that instead of getting better together, they get worse. They study each other. Learn from each other.

I’d thought he was calling me out as a bad influence—and he was trying to. But he was also speaking to a larger truth.

Psychopaths learn from each other. But not only from each other. They could learn even more effectively from a leader. A teacher. A therapist. Amentor.

I was never going to sleep, now.

I was just about to drive to Robert’s duplex four hours later when he showed up at my curb. The sky was lightening to pink in the east. I got to his car before he could come out.

“Yeah, yeah. Text first,” he said, gesturing to a cup of coffee in the passenger side cup holder. “Extra cream, two sugars, right? I know you didn’t sleep.”

I tossed a gym bag into the back seat, then I came around front and pulled the microcassette from my pocket. “You’re right. But I didn’t explain why I took so long getting home.”

I needed to tell him, before we pulled away from the curb, just in case he wanted to distance himself from all of this—the laws I’d already broken, never mind the ones I might be willing to break in the hours ahead. The last four hours had given me a lot of time to think about what I wanted to do to Curtis.

“You stole private property,” he said. “Wonders never cease.”

“It was worth it. This tape proves I didn’t say what Curtis claimed I said, in his so-called transcript. All the most important stuff was made up.”

Robert seemed oddly unsurprised.

“So, there it is. He’s been gaslighting you. You must feel much better now.”

I didn’t feel better. I felt even more confused and conflicted, especially whenever I pictured Curtis the only way I ever wanted to see him again: on his knees, in pain, begging for mercy.

“And here’s part two,” I said. “Curtis’s SUV is still at his house, and it has all the signs of hitting another car, head-on.”

This time, Robert leaned back in his seat, eyes wide.

“You’re kidding.”

“I am not.”

“That cocky little fucker.” Robert frowned. “That makes this more serious, you know. He has a lot more skin in the game.” We were both buckled in, but Robert hadn’t started driving. “Is Benjamin’s phone in the house?”

“I assume he brought it on the trip and handed it over to Curtis.”

“Makes sense, if Curtis was a good guy and he only wanted to make sure Benjamin wasn’t using his phone on the sly. But if Curtis is who you say he is, and if he wanted no possibilities for tracking their location, then he would have told Benjamin to leave it behind.”

We unbuckled simultaneously and hurried into my apartment. Robert took the living room and kitchen. I started in Benjamin’s bedroom, feeling a sense of déjà vu as I opened drawers and dug under the mattress.