Forget, Vi. Forget all you’ve learned. Let’s go back to the way things were. Wouldn’t it be easier? Isn’t that the way things are meant to be?
Part of her longed to go back.
“I think,” Gran began, her words slow and calm, “that you’re very shaken up right now, Violet.”
“I read the files. I know what you did. And you can’t do it anymore.”
Gran twirled the object in her fingers.
The lighter. The gold lighter with the engraved butterfly and her initials.
Vi thought of the butterfly, of metamorphosis. Of how once she was a lowly caterpillar, an ugly thing. But now she’d been transformed. She’d crawled out of the chrysalis and unfurled her black, wicked wings.
“If you read the notes, then you know I did you a favor, Violet. I rescued you. I took you away from a doomed life, a dreadful situation. I gave you a second chance.”
Vi shook her head. “You turned me into a monster!”
Gran held up the lighter, flicked it once, twice, three times.
Vi felt her head swimming.
Gran reached for her, wrapped her hand around Vi’s wrist, feeling her pulse. A loving gesture she’d done a thousand times.
“No!” Vi cried, pulling away, scuttling backward. She got behind the bed and held tight to its metal frame, keeping it between them.
Gran flicked the lighter again, began counting down, her voice drawn-out, slow and drippy like molasses. “Ten, nine…” She paused.
“Shut up!” Vi ordered.
“I gave you everything, Violet. You’re the best thing I’ve ever done, my masterpiece. The thing I’m proudest of in all the world.” Gran frowned, then resumed the countdown and flicked the lighter again. “Eight, seven, six, five—”
Vi’s eyelids fluttered.
I am all the gods rolled into one, she told herself. Hypnosis might have worked on the lost girl, Vi, but she was not Vi anymore.
“I. Am. The. Monster,” she said, firmly but not loudly. Her own kind of hypnosis.
And it worked.
She shoved the bed as hard as she could, and it slid, hitting Gran just above the knees. The lighter went skittering across the floor, the butterfly spinning drunkenly. Gran went down with an oof and a clatter, her feet flying up, heels off the ground.
Vi ran to the metal med cart, rummaged through what was left in the medicine drawer.
She snatched a brown glass bottle of chloroform. Moving to the bed, she pulled the clean, starched white case off the plastic pillow and crumpled it up, then dumped some of the bottle’s contents into the center of the folded pillowcase.
Gran was starting to sit up. Vi pushed the bed again, slamming it against her until she went back down.
Vi tracked back through the broken glass, the bits of circuit and wire and metal, and crouched behind Gran’s head. She slapped the pillowcase over Gran’s mouth and held it in place with both hands. Gran stiffened, struggled, so like the rodents she had euthanized over the years. She was screaming, saying something over and over, but the words were muffled. What Vi heard （or thought she heard） was please.
“You did this,” Vi told her. “You made me.”
At last, Gran went limp.
Vi released her, dropped the pillowcase.
Then she dragged her toward the bed.
Gran was small, but Vi was surprised at how easy she was to move. She didn’t even stir when Vi lifted her onto the bed like a sleepy child to be tucked in for the night. Her breathing was slow and soft. She smelled like gin and cigarettes, like clean laundry and Aqua Net hair spray. Like the Jean Naté cologne she always put on after her bath.