Some of the time Mr. Floyd Arneson, aka the killer, likes to show up at work on time, and sometimes he shows up early, but he never shows up late, because he does not want to have to be called into the principal’s office. This is Floyd Arneson thinking, I know perfectly well there is a pretty blond woman who is trying to bait me into killing her. I can see the outline of the handgun sitting in her oversized pocket. She is careless, though, and turns her back to the woods too often, where I could come out quickly and be on her in no time. Floyd Arneson likes thinking about this woman rather than having to think about work. He is so often annoyed with the teachers when they want to order supplies and say they need them right away and need him to type up a purchase order for them right away and then, when he orders them right away, even cutting his lunchtime short to get it done, the package arrives and they leave it in their mailboxes for days. So it was no hurry, really, at all. He is tired of the way they come into his office without knocking, while he is working, asking for substitution forms to fill out, asking where the principal is, or asking how to work the new phone system, which they should have learned by now since he has put a copy of the manual in each one of their mailboxes. He is tired of the way they open up his desk drawer while he is out, searching for postage stamps or scissors or tape or pens when, of course, if they weren’t so lazy, they could just go down to the supply room and get most of those items themselves.
Floyd Arneson likes the children. He likes hearing their small hands rap on the sliding glass window when they come up to deliver the attendance list. He likes opening the sliding glass window and peering down to where they are standing up on tiptoes trying to see him and pass him the list. He likes how yellow like corn silk the little girls’ hair can be, and he likes how long the boys’ lashes can be. He doesn’t like how at recess he can always hear the teachers telling the children to stop climbing the trees and to stop playing with sticks and to stop playing by the stream where the poison ivy grows. He wishes the teachers would just let the children have fun.
He knows that if he wanted to, he could easily kill the blond woman he sees at the rest stops, but he doesn’t want to stop seeing her when he goes and parks his car on a dirt logging road on the other side of a rest stop and walks through the woods to get to the rest stop. He likes how she keeps patting the pocket where her handgun is located right before she walks into the restroom. He likes how a few times he has looked through the door and seen how she stands at the mirror and washes her hands, hardly looking up at her reflection, when you would think a woman that attractive would be drawn to looking at herself all of the time.