I’ve never seen a dead body before, I thought to myself as I poured over the books I lay out on my floor. Was it good or bad that it hardly bothered me when I watched that therapist die like that? The way his eyes stared at the ground, his pupils like specks of soot on white golf balls, dead and never coming alive again? I guessed no, looking at the evidence that I’m about to create more death anyway. I had a dozen dishes in a row between where I sat cross-legged and the collection of books about pharmaceutical biohazards.
The familiar melody floated to me without warning and soon found myself humming along to it, occasionally speaking the words: “Poison in a drink, bleeding in a sink, choking with a link, killing with a stink, trust your mother’s ho …” I lost track of the lyrics after that line, the song was pretty difficult to follow anyway. Smith’s big mug came into my mind’s eye, I saw him drinking my work and going pale and dying. I added nine concentrated ounces of pure lye into another dish with orange juice, I told myself: “Brains over brawn, Smith, brains over brawn.” I knew that doing any “choking with a link” would be pretty damn impossible for a guy that size, so I might as well try serving him arsenic for his break time energy drink.
The Buick was out of the driveway, I worked up enough courage to take up sky-diving lessons by the time I pushed my finger into the doorbell. I observed the house, I never saw it from this angle before, the angle of not hiding in a bush, and the house didn’t look quite as large. My hands flattened to my sides, palms sweating, legs turning to water but I managed to stay standing somehow. Clementine came to the door and I could see the sun behind my dark façade was painful as she shielded her eyes with a People magazine, I stepped more to the side so she didn’t go blind.
“Hey, can we talk?”
“Okay but he’ll be back in a few hours, you better disappear after this.”
“Yeah, about that…”
“What? You’re not backing out are you?”
“No. I’m definitely doing what you asked me to, but, I wanted to ask you a favor.”
“What?” She leaned against the wide-open door. I saw her without makeup apparently, there were black bruised on her arms and neck, ones I hadn’t noticed this morning.
“I,” my brain screamed at me not to say it but I did, “want us to be together once this is all over.”
Her long lashes blinked, reopening and I discovered their surprise. I ached to touch her hand, plead on my knees for her to accept me, but the little high school reject inside me was a coward and couldn’t do anything so impressive. “I love you. I want to be with you when you start over, no one has to know. It’ll be like old times.”
“Like old times.” She said quietly, like she couldn’t understand what I meant. Her eyes looked down, she nodded. Was that a yes? Oh my god, she means yes! Her hand went to the doorknob, she pulled it closed half a foot before stopping, lunging last-second to me and pressing her lips against my cheek. It closed with her on the other side. I left after a minute feeling less like a desperate boy and more like a man.
*
I pushed my way upstream through a massive wave of students flooding out of the college, many of them weary-eyed from a long day’s work. Normally I’d ruminate on how that would never be me and how much I’d like to be among the other artists, but my head was too full of the weight of my impending plan to care. A thousand ways to pull off what I was about to commit surged in my mind, inventing harsh scenarios I wish wouldn’t occur, for example, the tables turning and I was strangled instead.
The incandescent lights flickered off as I passed under them with great haste, the soapy trails janitors recently left sticking to my shoes. I don’t know much about forensic science, but I knew before I left this evening it’d be wise to wipe away my shoe impressions. I neared Mr. Grazer’s classroom, as I did, the strange thought occurred to me that if five years ago I actually had a descent home life and got support for going to school this man could be a former teacher of mine. The door was locked, strange, my paranoia almost saying that he was expecting me. The lights were off in the classroom but I saw that where his (apparently) desk was, there was some human activity. I readied my makeshift garrote, and using my special knowledge of busting locks, jumped inside the dark classroom.
