This Is How You Die Read online

  I remained in the kitchen in silent contemplation. I entertained the notion of feigning to fall for Elizabeth’s ploy, slipping upstairs with her and then giving her a few surprises of my own, but I quickly dismissed it. Instead I decided to slip out before they found me.

  On my way to the front door, beyond the entrance to the living room, I brushed past a boy from my class. He was attached to the chubby girl who had chimed in during Elizabeth’s plotting and was trying to slide a sly hand into her pants while she attached her mouth to his and they traded slurping sounds. It sounded like a cheap horror film. It looked like it, as well.

  I stopped behind him, watching her face as it squirmed against his. Her closed eyes were facing me and I scowled into the sealed orbs. She didn’t even know me and I couldn’t recall ever meeting her or seeing her. She had no right to revel in my misfortune. I turned away, disgusted. Darren, my reason for going to the party, was nowhere to be seen. Therefore Elizabeth’s words had not harmed me, as my attendance had been rendered redundant anyway.

  The little Labrador puppy was still in the hallway, curled up into a small ball at the foot of the stairs. The initial interest from the teenage girls had waned once the drink had flowed and they had spotted the teenage boys. Now the puppy was on its own, murmuring to itself in its sleep.

  They say dogs dream about chasing rabbits. Bull shit. Dreams are segments of life played on repeat, therefore only greyhounds should dream about chasing rabbits—everything else should dream about chasing anuses and licking their own shit. I bent down, planted a soothing finger on the little puppy. He looked up at me quizzically, his eyes snapping open as they left the dream world of jogging anuses. I picked him up, cradled him in my arms. He was warm, cozy. I could feel his beating heart against my own. He looked up at me with black and sorrowful eyes and then settled into the crook of my arm, content with the efforts of sleep.

  I gave him a sorrowful smile of my own and carried him past the kissing couple and into the kitchen. I flicked a switch on the wall and then sat down with him at the dining table. In the living room, the sound of playful screams and shouts intersected the numbing beats.

  After a few minutes, the dog was comfortable and had fallen asleep, a further ten minutes and he was fast asleep, twitching slightly under the influence of his dreams. Two people came into the kitchen in that time, but neither of them acknowledged me. I took the dog to the other side of the kitchen where the dwindling supply of bottles sat in haphazard formation, a scattering of bottle caps strewn around them. With the beer dwindling fast, attentions would no doubt turn to the punch bowl, the ratio of alcohol to fruit juice gradually increasing as the night wore on and taste buds were forgotten.

  The puppy was asleep, stirring in my arms. I held him tightly and caressed him with one hand while I took the bleach out of the sink with the other. It occurred to me how easy it would be to poison the dog, to make all those girls cry and to create pure chaos, but I had no intention of doing that. I may hate dogs, but I still prefer animals to humans. Dogs, and other animals for that matter, act on primal instincts, devoid of all the emotions and characteristics that make humans human, and make them so deplorable at the same time. They are not as evil, simply because nothing they do can be construed as being evil. I’m not an animal lover, but when it comes to hurting an animal or a human, the human always gets my vote.

  I left the puppy on the kitchen counter, curled up out of sight and out of reach of drunken idiots and giddy teenage girls. I then poured some of the bleach into the punch bowl before topping it up with vodka. It wasn’t going to kill anyone, but it would make them sick, which would make me happy.

  I left the party with a smile on my face. I wasn’t humiliated like Elizabeth and her friends had hoped, and although I was sure they would still be looking for me, I knew that in an hour or so, when the contents of their stomachs were leaving via every available orifice, and her plush new house was covered with the biological detritus of a dozen teenagers, I would be the last thing on their minds.

  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 stoppe
d 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.”