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

were being haunted by the memory of a long-ago lost child.
    He tried to imagine the night of the murders and failed every time.
    You’d have to be that innocent, Babe thought, to kill your own parents. How could a girl with a guilty conscience manage it!
    DID YOU LOVE your parents?
    Yes.
Did you love your mother?

Yes, I said so, I just said so.
But particularly your mother?

I loved both my parents the same.
But you killed them
?
Yes.
Why?

[Silence.]
There has to be a reason.

I didn’t mean to.
Constance. Connie. The murder scene—

I was there. You don’t have to tell me.
Do you consider yourself a good person?

I don’t consider myself anything.
Do you consider—
    I don’t consider myself anything. There’s nothing wrong with me.
    SHE WOULD HAVE told him, as best she could, though no one would understand. She didn’t understand, either. If you’d asked her on October 10, 1982, if she ever could have killed anyone, she would have said no, of course not, and she would have believed it. But she was rageful. No one knew that but her parents, and even they didn’t know the depths. She was fifteen and furious. At night she whipped her thoughts around until she felt she could smash through the window and fly through the streets of the town, bursting into bedrooms. People were asleep like storybook children. They never woke up or looked at her while she pummeled them to death. Usually she dreamt of one bedroom visit a night, but sometimes she flew to two or three. She flew wrapped in garbage bags because of blood splatters, in bathing caps to avoid shedding hairs, in wigs so as not to be recognized. She flew concocting alibis. Usually she was righteous, but sometimes she killed people for bullying reasons, the girls who didn’t know how to dress, the boys with bad skin who made her nervous.
    She understood this as fantasy. She’d always gone to sleep with dreams of flight, since she was a little girl. They were the way you calmed yourself.
    What happened with her parents had nothing to do with that.
    BABE WAS CONSULTING a woman who had perioral dermatitis but thought it was globally antisocial to take antibiotics. At the end of aisle six (First Aid, Cough & Cold, Pain Relievers) two teenage boys walked up to Connie.
    “Can I ask you a question?” said one of the boys, the boy Connie had asked about the coolness of his pants. Only fair: of course he could.
    “Sure,” said Connie.
    “My friend says you killed someone.”
    “Shut up!” said the other boy.
    “Shut up!” answered the first. “No, seriously. We heard you killed someone.”
    Connie held still. She bit the side of her thumb. “Yeah,” she said at last. “I did.”
    The first boy shoved both hands deep in his pants pockets: the force of the admission seemed to knock him at an angle. “Get out!” he said. “Really?”
    “Yeah,” she said, casually, but now she wouldn’t look them in the eyes.
    “Like, how?” said the second boy. He grabbed at her elbow to get her attention. “Like, with a gun?” He raised his hand to hold an imaginary gun parallel to the ground and made a consonant-rich gunfire noise, a single shot.
    “Who’d you kill?”
    “Or didja go psycho on them with a knife? Ee-ee-ee-ee!”
    “No seriously, who’d’ja kill?”
    “Or like run them over!”
    “Leave her alone!” said the little old lady, who’d come to the rescue, but from a distance. She was afraid of the boys. She aimed her tiny shopping cart at them as though prepared to use it as a weapon.
    “It’s all right,” said Connie, exhausted.
    “Go away,” the little old lady commanded, and the boys were about to, until Connie said, “My parents.”
    “Your parents?”
    “Fu-
huck
.”
    They took a step back to look at her better.
    “Darling, you don’t have to tell them anything.”
    “She
is
a psycho,” said the second boy.
    “She’s a fucking psycho!”
    “Fuck!”
    Did Connie think they’d like her, if she told them, or did she just want to