The Secret Society of Demolition Writers by Marc Parent Read Free Book Online

was abused by her parish priest. She’d had a head injury and was never the same after that. She did drugs and had a psychotic break. She had seizures. She hallucinated. She snapped.
    She was abused by her mother the doctor under the guise of medicine, in the medical office that was, like the kitchen, an addition off the back of the house: she was abused on an examination table, she was abused with medical equipment, she was made sick with medication so that her mother could get the sympathy of a sickly child, she was a sickly child. She was abused by her father, the head of a small Catholic charity, and when she told her doctor mother about it, her doctor mother refused to believe it, her doctor mother slapped her. She was on drugs. She was covering up for someone else.
    She killed them for no reason.
    She confessed to the murders. That was a fact. She said the same thing to everyone, the lawyer paid for by her grandparents (both sets), the police, the social workers, the psychiatrists: “There’s nothing I can say.”
    HIS FIRST MURDERESS. His first Christian, for that matter, at least his first Born Again. Did that explain the daffy expression on her face? Maybe it was just all the corrections he’d made to his initial impression of her, a cheerful dork in a snowflakepatterned sweater. (Even that sweater seemed tragic to him now, fifteen years out of date. She clung to the knitwear of her youth.) Then an insane woman. Now a murderer, but what kind? She killed people. She believed in God. Babe didn’t know which was more unfathomable. Connie of the bad sweaters, Connie of the flowers.
    Connie, why did you do it?
    The teenagers who hung around the store became human to him, because of Connie. She was fascinated by the boys and disdainful of the girls, like any girl who for whatever reason hadn’t attended her high school prom. “They’re so big and quiet!” she said of those boys. In their raised sweatshirt hoods, they were a race of muffled men, leaning hood to hood to communicate, a branch of the military service in some mumbling country, on leave here on the shores of the strip mall. They examined batteries as though they were foreign trinkets, bags of Fritos like they were the local delicacy: delicious, possibly lethal, worth the risk. They never raised their voices, except, occasionally, to laugh. One had the laugh of a movie genie. The sound could shake you apart.
    Sometimes the European little old lady would ask for pharmaceutical advice when Connie was there. “Excuse me, darling,” she would say, putting her hand on Connie’s elbow. “Excuse me, sweetheart.” She’d wedge herself in at the consult counter, using her breasts as a lever, and Connie would try to step away, but the little old lady wouldn’t let her. She’d hook her arm in Connie’s. “No, darling, sweetheart, a moment, I wouldn’t bodder you but. Excuse me sir! I am wondering perhaps vhere is somessing for ear vax.” Who knew where she was from? Maybe there had been a moment in her life when she wished she had the nerve to swing a candlestick.
    “Listen,” Babe told Connie later, in the hosiery aisle. “You don’t have varicose veins.”
    “I don’t? Cool!”
    “No, listen. You don’t have acne. You don’t have psoriasis. You don’t have athlete’s foot. What do you want?”
    “I’m just worried about you,” she said. “That’s all. I worry.”
    “I’m all right,” he answered, insulted, ecstatic.
    She was so
innocent
. Not technically. She’d killed her parents, no suggestion of accomplice or mitigating circumstances. As a person, though, innocent and pure of motive. She brought flowers to everyone who treated her with kindness, even the guy at the McDonald’s. Imagine the guy at McDonald’s, a skinny Haitian teenager with walleyes and a shy smile, receiving a bouquet of flowers! She thanked people for the smallest favor. She seemed frozen at fifteen, as though she were the one who was killed, as though Babe