There was a punk band playing, a shrill screech that distracted everything, sweaty bodies grinding through the heat. When you noticed the top of her bobbing head, retreating through the side door for a cigarette, you followed, asked if you could bum one. The third Girl looked obscurely familiar—she had hair dyed blue, a ring like a bull through the cartilage of her nose. Don’t you remember me? she said. Her eyes were inquisitive, a joke and a dare. You nodded. You lunged.
The music played on in the bar, a deafening squall that drowned out her wheezing. You hoped maybe the danger would heighten it, the possibility of capture, the fact that she gasped only feet from the door. But no. This last one was a bad idea; she fought back, kicking you so hard in the eye you saw stars. A scuffle, a shriek. At one point, she had you pinned against the wall. But in the end, you were bigger—it took so long to tighten the belt around her neck, you dragged her to the car still twitching, afraid someone would see. Pure luck: no one did.
As you shoveled the dirt over her limp and useless form, you felt a wide, furious nothing. She was dead, and you were the same, and nothing mattered at all.
In the sour moonlight, you examined the ring you’d plucked from her finger.
You knew this ring. Miss Gemma’s. You remembered how those girls had laughed through the door, when you gifted those cookies. It seemed impossible that the same Girl splayed limp before you, that the world had served her back to you like this. The recognition felt like a slap from a parent—standing over all three of those Girls, you wished you could take it back.
You shouldn’t have done it. You were sick and wrong. Most devastatingly, you were unchanged.
Your Theory grew then, expanding, a truth proven as the moonlight jumped off purple amethyst. You can do the vilest thing. It’s not so hard, to be bad. Evil isn’t something you can pinpoint or hold, cradle or banish. Evil hides, sly and invisible, in the corners of everything else.
After, you stumbled through the thicket of trees. You got into your car, hands trembling deranged, the ring in your pocket poking jagged against your thigh. Four in the morning, and furious tears flew down your cheeks as you swerved onto the highway. You drove, resigned, to the hospital.
You have never told this part of the story. You don’t know where it came from. Maybe it came from that little girl’s smile, laughing in the glow of Miss Gemma’s television. Or maybe from the fact that it did not even feel good anymore—and if it did not feel good, then you had no idea why you’d killed them.
You left the car running in front of the emergency room. The hospital was lit up bright, all whites and blues, daunting and sterile. You walked, stunned, into the searing light. You knew how you must look, shaking and covered in soil, the welt of your black eye already swollen to a soft oozing purple.
Can I help you? a woman called from the reception desk. The waiting room was empty, and it smelled like latex and disinfectant.
Please, you whispered.
Sir?
Please, you said. I don’t want to be like this.
The woman stood. She was wearing pastel scrubs patterned with smiling teddy bears. She gaped at you with the confused and vaguely alarmed eyes of everyone you’d ever known, all the social workers and foster parents and concerned teachers. You realized it then. If you could be helped, they would have done it long ago. The singular truth of your life seemed to rise from your chest, unignorable, as you backed out through the ER’s sliding doors. You were impossible. Beyond help. You would never be more than your own creature self.
*
The breeze calls you back. A smack to the face, whistling through the window of the transfer van. You surface from the memory to find that you have already passed the lake, that the Sam Houston Monument is rising in the distance, towering over the border of Huntsville. This is Shawna’s cue. As the van speeds closer, the statue reveals itself, gigantic in sculpted marble.
The world seems to slow, sinking into the molasses of the moment. The importance builds into an anxious thrill, and your ears start to ring, blood thudding through your body like a drum.
The future expands before you. It will be scary, to run. It will be exciting and dangerous and hungry and hard. You don’t have a plan, beyond basic survival. You will hide in drainage pipes. You will scale the roofs of train cars. And even if you never see the Blue House again, the fact of that place will push you forward. A reminder, a testament: You are capable of being better. You are capable of living on.
*
It’s time.
The seconds stretch into eternity. The whole of the weeks spent planning and the years spent waiting converge into a span of three crucial seconds. In one graceless motion, you lean as far as your handcuffs will allow—you extend one leg beneath the driver’s seat, your foot brushing metal.