Deranged

Long Island, 1982

“I’m going to Super Comics after school. What do you say?”

Henry gave Nancy Bower an apologetic smile. “Can’t,” he said. “I’ve got plans.”

“Don’t tell me you’re having coffee with goth girl again? You don’t even like coffee.”

“I like mocha lattes. That’s where they put chocolate in the coffee.”

Nancy rolled her eyes. “I know what mocha lattes are. So that’s what you’re doing after school, huh? Coffee club with goth girl?”

Henry’s cheeks flushed pink. He said, “Afterwards we’re going to her house. I’m going to show her my Shrieker comic books.”

Henry and Nancy were sitting together in study hall. He dug out his latest completed comic book from his backpack and handed it to Nancy. As she flipped through the pages, she became demonstrably exasperated.

“You’re kidding,” she finally said. “You’re making goth girl a shrieker hunter? Everyone else gets torn apart by them, but goth girl can kill them with a bow and arrow? You realize how stupid that is?”

Henry snatched the comic book away from her. “I liked the way I did it,” he said. He pulled his social studies textbook from his backpack, and for the rest of study hall acted as if Nancy wasn’t there.

* * *

For weeks Henry had been dreaming of this moment, and now that it was happening and he was actually alone with Aisley in her bedroom he could scarcely believe it. He pinched himself, and nope, he wasn’t dreaming. He really was sitting on a beanbag chair and watching Aisley as she lay on her bed and read his full series of Shrieker comic books. He gave a quick look around to admire once more how cool her room was with the pewter skull, the pentagrams, the witch figurines, and the bats and other creatures painted on her walls, and then he was back to watching Aisley.

After that Henry couldn’t take his eyes off of her. Aisley wasn’t a skinny stick like a lot of the popular girls at school. Instead she had this breathtaking hourglass figure. Maybe a little plump, but to him she was perfect, especially her smooth, round, baby-doll face. She’d been reading his Shrieker books for an hour and was now on his last one, so of course he was anxious for her verdict, but simply watching her made him nearly breathless. His heart soared when a tiny smile crept over her lips. At that moment he experienced pure, unadulterated joy for the first time in his young life.

“You made me a shrieker hunter,” she said. “So cool.”

The next minutes were torture as Henry waited for Aisley to finish. When she did, she got off her bed, kneeled next to him, and kissed him on the cheek.

“These Shrieker books are so cool,” she said. “I love them.”

The thought of her lips having been pressed against his cheek and her close proximity made Henry dizzy. A hotness flushed his face as he fumbled awkwardly for her, trying to draw her in for a more passionate kiss.

“Whoa,” Aisley said as she pushed him away and quickly got to her feet. “What do you think you’re doing?”

Tongue-tied, Henry blinked at her several times before stammering out an apology. “I thought you liked me,” he said in his confusion.

“As friends. Not romantically. I thought you were cool.”

A redness glazed Henry’s vision and a loud buzzing filled his head as he stumbled to his feet and gathered up his comic books and his backpack. He mumbled something to Aisley, but what it was he had no idea. He was only barely aware of leaving her room and clumping down the staircase to the front door, and it wasn’t until he was nine blocks from her home that the buzzing in his head subsided. It was only then that he realized that he’d been walking to Nancy’s house, and was in fact only three houses away.

When he rang the doorbell, Nancy’s older sister answered. She didn’t like Henry, always looked at him as if he were some sort of strange insect, and this time it was worse than any of those other times. But she still consented to yell for her sister that her oddball friend was at the door. “You better come down before he starts blubbering!”

When Nancy came to the door and saw Henry, she quickly stepped outside to join him and closed the door behind her.

“I’m so sorry, Henry.”

He bit his bottom lip as he struggled to fight back tears.

“She didn’t like you the way you wanted her to.”

Nancy didn’t say this as a question but as a statement of fact. Still, Henry nodded.

“Let’s walk to Super Comics. It will cheer you up.”

Henry still didn’t trust himself to speak, and they set off on foot together to the comic-book store two miles away. After walking half a mile, Henry told Nancy that it was stupid that he was ever interested in Aisley.

“Those blue lips and black eye shadow make her look like a corpse,” he said. “She’s not anywhere near as pretty as you.”

Nancy didn’t say anything as Henry took her hand. They walked quietly for another block, then Henry said that they should date. “There’s nobody I like better than you.”

Nancy pulled her hand free. “Stop it.”

“No, I mean it. You should be my girlfriend.”

“I said stop it.”

Her voice sounded different from what Henry had ever heard from her. As if she were talking to a stranger that she didn’t particularly like.

“Do you have any idea how insulting this is?” she asked in that same cold, distant voice. “Goth girl rejects you so you come running to me as a consolation prize? We’re friends for three years, and this is the first time you express interest in dating me!”

Henry couldn’t think of what to say. A slow horror filled him as he realized he was on the verge of losing Nancy from his life.

“Why’d you even come to me that day in the cafeteria and ask if you could sit with me?”

He wanted to cut out his tongue as he half heard himself tell her that it was because Mr. Shapiro told him he should. At first Nancy stared at him dumbfounded. When she turned and walked away from him, he knew she would never speak to him again.

At first Henry felt too weak to move, as if his muscles had melted into goo. As if he’d been completely hollowed out and left barely as a husk. It wasn’t until a half hour later that he was able to start trudging off toward his home, and it was then that he passed by the kid he had saved from humiliation weeks earlier, Gary Fleishman. Fleishman was on a bike, and he stopped to say hi to Henry.

“I never got a chance to thank you for saving me like you did. Standing up to those football jocks was amazing,” Fleishman said.

Henry stared at him dumbly, not recognizing him or making sense of what this scrawny kid was saying. All at once hurt and pain and rage flared up inside of him, and he bellowed out a yell and started chasing after Fleishman, who had dropped his bike and was running as fast as he could to get away. As if he were running for his life. Which he was.

Henry never would’ve been able to articulate why at that moment he wanted so badly to beat Fleishman’s face into a bloody pulp, but that’s what he wanted to do, and he blindly chased after Fleishman for two blocks before Fleishman fell to the sidewalk skinning his knee bloody and crying out in fear. Henry, huffing and puffing, rolled Fleishman onto his back, then plopped down on his chest and brought his fist back ready to crush Fleishman’s head as it were a grape. But a force stopped him from following through with his punch.

“What the hell are you doing, kid?”

Bewildered, Henry looked up to see that a man had grabbed his arm and was keeping him from hitting Fleishman. He broke free and ran off. The man who had kept him from killing Gary Fleishman made no effort to stop him, and Henry kept running, his chest aching as if it was going to break apart. It was only later that he realized that somewhere along the way he had lost his Shrieker comic books.

When Henry got home, he locked himself in his room and started a new comic book. This one had an anti-hero who killed his first victim (a scrawny kid who looked a lot like Gary Fleishman) using a sledgehammer to smash the skull into a gory pulp of blood, hair, brain matter and bone fragments. Henry decided to switch things up after that and have his anti-hero instead use a hammer and chisel to break open the skulls of those deserving his wrath, and once the skulls were broken apart, the anti-hero dug out the brains with the claw end of the hammer. His next two victims strongly resembled Aisley Martin and Nancy Bower.