6

I bent an ear toward associated cliques during the final few days of school and discovered that no one suspected me of poisoning the punch bowl, because no one knew I was there. A few people had seen me, but it seemed none of them had been paying attention. I noted a few embarrassed faces, a few friends that could seemingly not look each other in the eye, which suggested that the night had gone as I hoped it would and that those friends saw a lot more of each other than they ever wanted to.

When the school year and my educational life ended, I was delighted. My classmates were hiding their fears for ambiguous futures behind smiles of bravado and plans for a life spent drinking, smoking, and fucking, but the smile on my face was genuine. I had no aspirations of further education, no college, nothing that would prolong my harrowing stay in a flawed system.

My father had left me some money in his will, a will that had named my degenerate uncle as my sole guardian. It wasn’t a spectacular amount. He was a man of great secrets, but none of those secrets involved a wealth of ill-gotten gains. With the mortgage and the bills burning a small but expanding hole in those savings, and the house not officially mine until I turned eighteen, I would need to find a job eventually, but until then, I was free to devote my time to my new vocation.

In the subsequent summer months, I spent more time than I would have liked at home. My uncle, whether suffering from a brain tumor or the mental ejaculations of an alcohol-based epiphany, had changed his tune.

“I’m going to be the man your dad would have wanted me to be,” he told me one afternoon. I had stumbled in from a spying excursion, expecting to find him typically comatose on the bathroom floor, drenched in vomit and despair with a stench of inevitable death emanating from his soured body. Instead he was waiting for me in the kitchen, a cup of coffee in his hand, a look of sobriety on his haggard face.

“I’m sorry if I haven’t been much like an uncle to you,” he continued, straining his wretched face into a smile. “But things will change, I swear.”

He hugged me and I stood rigid and uncomfortable in his musky embrace.

When he pulled away, he was grinning. I felt violated.

“What’s gotten into you?” I asked him suspiciously.

“Nothing. I’m just—”

“No, seriously,” I interjected. “What is it? Are you high? Is that it?”

He looked offended, but I hadn’t finished. “Did you finally drink away all of your pathetic misery?”

His face twitched. “I’m just trying to be nice. I’m cleaning up my act.”

“You still stink, though,” I told him. “Clean up yourself first. Take a fucking shower.”

My baiting didn’t work. He sneered at me, did a double-take as if to say something, and then decided against it.

I found the source of his newfound sobriety the following day. A woman, short, skinny. Her eyes were sunken like the hollow crevices of death. Her clothes, although trimmed to supermodel proportions, hung loosely from her skeletal body. She was constantly grasping the edge of her sleeve with her palm and pulling it taut, hiding the needle marks that lingered on the pale flesh of her arms.

“I’m Joanne,” she told me timidly, looking around me instead of at me. “Dave’s friend.”

“Dave?”

“Your uncle?”

“Oh.” I gave her a succinct, uncommitted nod. “Him.”

She edged around the house with the timidity of an injured rodent. She refused to make eye contact, barely uttered more than a word, and seemed constantly ill at ease inside her own flesh, yet my uncle was infatuated by her. He never took his eyes off her, didn’t seem to mind when his endless chatter constantly faced a weakened smile and a timid mumble.

Curiosity got the better of me and, for a few hours, I remained downstairs with the couple, watching television and trying not to sicken myself while studying my uncle’s infatuation. After a while, I grew bored and decided to take my leave, but my uncle stopped me.

“It’s late,” he said, looking at his wrist, even though we both knew he was too cheap to own a watch. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“I …” I paused and stammered, a little taken aback. “I don’t know.”

“Well, sit down then,” he said with an assured nod, turning away from me.

“But I need …” I didn’t finish that sentence. I wasn’t sure how to. I didn’t want to tell him my intentions, but for some reason I also didn’t want to disobey him without knowing his intentions. I had images of him following me, or taking his newfound responsibilities to the extreme and reporting my disappearance to the police. The last thing I needed was the dense blue line following me around.

I returned to my seat with a scowl on my face. I saw my uncle exchange a dignified look of self-importance with his new mate and she grinned back, proud of his parenting efforts.

The malnourished girl stayed over that night. I retired to my room in the evening, stewing over my foiled plans, but I heard them—or rather him—talking downstairs throughout the night. They withdrew to bed early and he came to wish me goodnight, with her beaming a proud smile over his shoulder. I ignored him.

For an hour after that, I listened to their audible fucking. The bed squeaked angrily under their efforts, the mattress rebounding with a repetitive, springy rhythm. I prayed that his sweaty, desperate body would snap her fragile frame, forcing her out of my life before she became too comfortable and forcing him to hit the bottle again. Instead she seemed enlivened by the experience. The following day, skipping downstairs in one of his shirts—stained with years of sweat marks that no amount of washing could ever remove—she looked like a different girl. She was still the pale, pathetic female I had encountered the previous day, but she looked different. Lively. Fresh. She greeted me with a smile and a friendly “good morning.”

I took my thoughts for a walk that evening, trying to collect myself with a brisk stride in the sunshine. When I returned I found my uncle, watched over by his ghostly mate, waiting impatiently for me.

“And what time do you call this?” Again he was looking at his wrist.

“Ten,” I told him abruptly. “If you actually bought a fucking watch maybe you’d know that.”

His eyes flared. He crossed his arms aggressively over his chest. “Get upstairs to your room!” He threw his hand toward the stairs in a wayward Nazi salute.

I smiled a stifled laugh. “You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me.”

“Now!”

I met his annoyed stare. With the door behind me and his weakened frame just in front, it would have been easy to force his head in the jamb and use the door to split open his skull and end his—

“Now!” he ordered again, louder this time.

I looked from him to Joanne in the living room—she had been watching me but she turned away with shy uncertainty when our eyes met.

“For fuck’s sake,” I muttered softly.

He jolted his thrusting arm, as if to repeat the expression.

“Fine,” I spat, mournfully slumping up the stairs and into my room. I heard him receiving praise and imagined the wide, simple grin on his moronic face as he soaked it up. I needed him out of the way, but as much as I wanted to, I couldn’t attack or kill him. Not with a witness present. My career as a killer would be over before it started.

I decided that if I was to resume my plans of killing Darren Henderson that summer, I needed to make sure my uncle returned to being a terminal drunk.

——

Darren had started a summer romance, a new girl to force his unwanted sexual urges and sweaty desires onto. She hadn’t gone to our school and looked a few years younger than him, maybe no more than fourteen. She was short and petite, with an Irish smile and bright red hair. She was fully developed for her age, but her soft features gave her away.

Wearing an inconspicuous disguise, I tracked him to the corner of a small, middle-class suburb. He waited there, checking his watch intermittently, while I pretended to examine the schedules at a nearby bus shelter. When he saw her—sauntering around the corner, her hair shining in the sunlight, her glittered face sparkling under its rays—his gaunt face lit up. He greeted her with a sloppy kiss and a casual grasp of her buttocks and then they set off together. When they brushed past me, my back to them, my eyes away, I heard him bragging to her about his exploits the night before, the bravado of stealing something inane and then running from the police. She didn’t sound impressed, but she giggled along regardless.

They went to the park, sat briefly on a bench, and then took off sharply toward an enclosed, wooded area, the same section of park where Darren and his thuggish friends had jumped me months earlier. I had nothing to gain from following them and watching him awkwardly fondle her, but I had grown fond of the voyeuristic lifestyle. I felt a superior godlike rush when following him. It gave me a sense of power to know that I was watching and studying his movements without his knowledge.

I tracked them into the woods, keeping my distance and ducking behind trees for cover. I heard them ahead, their feet crunching twigs and kicking stones as they advanced deeper into the shrouded land. I heard their whispered conversation; him eager, her anxious. I stopped my tracking when I could no longer hear them. No crunching leaves, no conversation. I could hear only my own softened breathing as I waited for a sound to break through.

When I didn’t hear anything, instinct got the better of me and I popped my head around the corner of the tree. Up ahead, the redhead was leaning casually against a tree, her eyes lazily wandering, a nonchalant patience on her face. Then I saw Darren, and he was looking right at me.

His face twisted into a darkened mix of anger and delight and he bolted straight for me. Shock and surprise held me momentarily rooted. I tried to turn and run when my body allowed but by then it was already too late. Darren pounced like a wild animal, grasping me tightly.

“Well, well, well!” he exclaimed, grabbing the back of my head with his thick, clubbish hands. “If it isn’t my good friend Herman.”

I mumbled something in reply, but even I wasn’t sure what. I could feel the sweat of desire and anticipation soak from his palms onto my hair.

“You trying to catch a look at me and my girl?” he demanded to know.

At that point, the redheaded girl was moving cautiously toward us, her face twisting with a flinching moment of distaste at being called his girl. I watched her trepidatious steps with a hint of curiosity, but when Darren slammed my head into the trunk of the tree, I lost sight of her and pretty much everything else.

A sea of stars danced around my eyes like a glittering rave. A rush of pain shot from the front of my skull to the back before radiating an intense agony that covered every inch of my head. I dropped to my knees and threw my hands to my face, but Darren held me up.

“Sick little cunt!” I felt the cold sting of saliva on the back of my neck. “You make me sick!”

He threw me to my knees; I clattered to the ground with a joint-jarring thud. I felt the thud of a heavy-toed shoe as he swung his foot into the middle of my spine. I vaulted forward into the tree and felt my nose crunch painfully under the initial impact before my chin absorbed the rest of the grating grind of the caustic bark.

My ears were ringing with the sound of my own blood and through the noise I heard Darren laughing with glee. He yelled something at me, a giggling tirade of hilarity that I couldn’t hear and only he could find amusing.

Wallow in your delight you pathetic little boy because soon I will tear every inch of existence from your unworthy soul.

I heard the girl shout something, a cross between a scream and a yell. It cut through to my ringing ears like a distant birdsong.

“Leave him!”

Darren grumbled something in reply, the bass of his discontented voice rumbling through without coherence.

I pushed my face away from the tree and flopped forward, flipping myself over so I was staring at a hazy, tree-blocked sky and the bemused expression of Darren Henderson standing underneath it. The girl came into view and put a restraining hand on his shoulder.

“Leave him!” she said. “What are you doing?”

“He fucking deserves it,” he spat venomously. He threw her hand away and moved toward me, bending to pick me up by the collar. She stopped him again, more sternly this time. He snapped at her sudden touch, throwing her away a little more aggressively than he would have liked.

She toppled backward, losing her footing on the leafy ground and hitting the ground with a thud. He turned toward her, a look of regret and diminishing hope building on his face. She looked up at him with a sense of fear and newfound hatred.

“I didn’t mean to—” he began, moving toward her, intending to help her up.

She kicked out at him, her heels digging in the dirt and flicking up specks of it. She shimmied backward, her eyes wide and alert. After staggering to her feet, she threw him an evil stare that said more than words ever could, then she turned and, with a final whimper, hurried away.

“No, please!” he shouted after her. “Sandy! I love you!”

He watched her go with solemn eyes, then he heard me laughing behind him, my laugher cutting through a bust lip and crackling through the viscous blood that spewed from my nose.

“What’s so fucking funny!” he demanded to know.

I broke my laughter long enough to answer him. “You,” I told him with a broken voice. “You’re fucking pathetic.”

A mixture of anger, self-loathing, and despair built a torrid and turbulent picture on his face. He moved with a frothing mouth to grab me, spraying spittle at my bloody face, then he decided against it, his despair taking over. He swung one last kick, heavy against my ribs, and then walked away, leaving me a bloody, agonized, and hysterical wreck on the forest floor.

——

I stumbled home, cutting a disturbed figure as I staggered along with my back hunched lamely, my face covered in dried blood, my arms holding my chest as if to prevent my lungs from falling out. A permanent smile on my face. Many people looked, but no one spoke and no one offered any help.

My uncle was asleep on the sofa when I staggered through the front door. I stood over him, breathing heavily. A drop of fresh coppery blood gathered in my mouth and popped out with my breath like crimson bubblegum.

He gently stirred to the sedate pulses of some unknown dream. A whimper on his lips, a twitch in his neck. The sight of him made me sick—so much waste of human life. He served no purpose to me or to anyone else, yet he still managed to get in my way.

An empty glass rested before him on the chair. Since he had taken to sobriety, he had been drinking a lot of water, whether in an attempt to flush out his system or to substitute his preferred tipple with something a little more innocuous. I hated him more for his sobriety, not just because he was a nuisance to me, but because he did it out of selfish greed, an act committed purely to get into the pants and the mind of a unwitting woman who didn’t know any better than to inject her veins with filth and fuck the first dickhead who offered.

I flinched at the sound of the phone, a shrill siren that sparked the silence of my body into one terrified jolt. My uncle also flinched. He twitched violently, mumbled, moaned, and then turned over, his swollen body arching toward the other side of the chair.

I answered on the second ring.

“Is your uncle there?”

I recognized the timid tone of Joanne the addict.

“He’s asleep,” I told her with great difficulty, my voice grating in my throat.

She paused, hearing my voice and sensing the need to ask me if I was okay. “Oh,” she said, deciding against it, her addiction and recovery having zapped any sense of social obligation out of her system. “I was supposed to come around later,” she continued, half to herself. “It’s just I’m back earlier than I thought and I was going to come around now.”

I didn’t reply. I enjoyed toying with her sense of uncertainty.

“Do you think I should?” She pushed through the silence.

Again I refused to comment.

“I’ll come around soon,” she said eventually.

“Okay.”

“Okay, well, bye. I mean, I’ll see you soon.”

I hung up.

She was at the house within the hour. A timorous knock, a pitiful rat-a-tat of an approaching visitor almost apologetically alerting the occupants. My uncle didn’t stir at the sound. Even I barely heard it.

When I opened the door and exposed my face, the blood now cleaned, the bruises and swelling more evident, she recoiled in surprise. She glared at me, a look of disgust on her face. No lack of social obligation would ease her away from the question now.

“What happened to you?” she asked.

I sighed heavily. “It’s a long story.”

I moved away from the door, standing sideways to allow her inside. She didn’t move. She remained at the threshold, as though scared to bypass me and enter the house.

“Are you okay?” One of her initial recoiled steps had now been retaken, but she was still standing a few feet away from me.

I stared at her, absorbing the horror in her eyes, eyes that refused to leave my disfigured face. There was something behind her fear, a personal attachment to my wounds.

I replied slowly, following her face as I spoke. “I suppose I’ll live.”

She looked beyond me, her eyes apprehensive as they darted into the house, then to the street beyond, everywhere but at my face as her mind conjured up images that her eyes refused to acknowledge.

Then it occurred to me: she thought my uncle had beaten me. Her mind was weighing the possibilities of inquiring and finding out. Did she really want to have it confirmed that her new boyfriend was a thuggish brute? And if so, did that mean he had broken their pact and had started drinking again?

A smile tried to creep onto my face, but I managed to exchange it for a pained expression. “Wouldn’t be the first time, after all,” I said, throwing in a meek look and then staring off into the middle distance to establish a melancholic moment of reflection.

I heard her stutter. Her feet twitched uncertainly as they prepared a path of retreat; the primal fight-or-flight response in her body screamed for flight at every sense of discomfort.

“Di-di …”

I lifted my eyes to hers. She looked like she was ready to cry.

“Di-Did Dave do this?” she spoke in a whisper, almost silencing herself at the mention of his name.

I nodded solemnly and lowered my head to my chest. “He’s drinking again,” I said softly. “As soon as you leave.” I tried my best to sniffle, emulating a suppression of tears when internally I felt like laughing. “He hides the bottles when you’re here, he says that what you don’t know won’t hurt you.”

I paused to let my words sink in. When I raised a surreptitious eye to gauge her reaction, I saw streams of tears rolling down her bony cheeks. She looked less agitated now; a feeling of desolation had taken over. She wiped the rivulets away with the back of a hand that seemed entirely composed of knuckle. She made a move to say something, one final word before running away in a fit of tears. I jumped in before she could.

“Please don’t say anything,” I told her. “He’ll only beat me more.”

I looked at her and she returned a look that shone with sympathy. Then she turned and left, walking to begin with, then running. I watched her all the way, grinning broadly as she departed from my and my uncle’s life.

“Who was that?” my uncle asked as I entered the living room and discovered him rubbing his sleepy eyes with his palms.

“Nothing.”

“I thought I heard a noise.”

That noise was the sound of your last chance of sobriety and decency departing in a torrent of tears and regret. Now you have fuck all else to do but drink yourself into a putrid grave and give the earth back the carbon that you so recklessly borrowed.

“It was nothing.”

That night, Joanne left a message on the answering machine. She told him it was over, that she didn’t want to see him again, and that she would appreciate it if he never called or visited ever again. She sounded heartbroken, her voice cracking and breaking even more than usual. She sounded like she would burst into tears at any moment during the extended message of goodbye. She didn’t leave him with a definite reason but did offer him plenty of excuses so he could pick his own.

“I don’t think we fit together…. It’s just not working out…. I have a few problems to work through …”

I was with him at the time. When the message started, he was smiling, happy to hear the voice of a newfound flame and pondering on what delights she would bestow upon him. As it wore on, his face grew gradually darker. By the end, when her weakened voice fuzzed its final excuse and faded into the electronic beep, he was distraught and looked like death incarnate. He left the house without saying a word, without even looking at me. He returned a few hours later, drunk, crying, and mumbling to himself. He had begun the day as a sober man on a gratifying journey to self-worth; he ended it as a drunk, passed out in a pool of his own piss and misery.