by Rowan Massey
I started a To Do list and put in a reminder to read Catch Me If You Can, anything about Aleister Crowley, and a book by a man who pretended to be an amnesiac war veteran. I was especially interested in reading about David Hampton, who fooled a bunch of rich people into thinking he was the son of some rich guy. They let him stay with them and they gave him money, but he was found out and went to prison. It seemed that all these people were telling lies that couldn’t have lasted. I would do the same, but on purpose.
I was having fun. Even if I never acted on any of my plans—I knew I probably wouldn’t follow through on reading any books—it was thrilling to figure out how fool people. I made a list of things I’d found online to do with body language.
Body language to avoid:
● Fidgeting
● Stuttering
● Breaking eye contact too often
● Talking fast, too much, or unnaturally
● Touching neck or face
● Tucking thumbs in
● Tensing your lips unless you are trying to convey that you are having a negative emotion
● Tensing shoulders
● Breathing erratically
● Turning body away from listener
● Crossing legs or arms
For practice, fucking with somebody who didn’t matter seemed like a good starting point. I just needed a victim and a goal. Maybe some random girl at school could be convinced of some small lie, then I’d move on to someone else. Low risk, good practice.
But my mind wandered as the new identity I was forming for myself—one of an impersonator and a schemer—gave me a sense of becoming new. A bright, expanding awareness surrounded me, and I laid back onto my pillow, finally tiring, closing my eyes.
I hadn’t searched for more information on Clay Corden. Why had I been so much more interested in reading about frauds than finding out who he was? Part of me wasn’t ready. Oddly, I was avoiding him through my new obsession, even though my obsession was all about him.
My arm over my eyes, pen still gripped in my hand, I sensed a dim light coming through the cracks of the window blinds. When I stayed up until sunrise, the dawn usually gave me a sense of dread. Morning was bullshit. But right then, I was glad the night was over because its end seemed to signal to my brain to finally collapse into exhaustion. Scrambled dreams were already trying to prod their way in, even though I was still half awake. There was fear in those images. They were nightmares. But I was helpless against sleep. Just as my awareness of the difference between reality and imagination was about to wink out, I gave in to the fact of my helplessness. That way, the nightmares couldn’t hurt me.
Chapter Two
Zander Age 10
THERE WAS A DISTINCT smell to the church. The hard wood of the pews seemed to give off a scent that hadn’t dissipated since they were constructed in the seventies. Decades-old dust stirred in the rafters. I was only about ten years old, but I think I’d already made my way down that thinly-carpeted center aisle and navigated through the rows of pews a couple thousand times. As a toddler, I’d sat backward and gnawed on the wood while staring at familiar faces. I knew the taste of the place. Every song book had been touched by my roaming little hands. The auditorium was as familiar to me as my own home.
After the song service, the children were dismissed to their Sunday school classes. It was always an exciting moment, which we were expected to handle calmly. I liked the attention of standing up among the adults and walking over their feet, jostling their knees, until I reached the wall, where thin windows let light in through avocado green stained glass. I usually ran my hand over the wall as I walked to the front corner of the church and the hall door. The whole place, and all its textures, made me feel grounded. Other kids joined me in my polite retreat. Sunday school teachers who exited alongside us were in charge of hushing anybody who got too hyper over it. It wasn’t as if the class was going to be exciting. Leaving the boring church service and having all eyes on us was the exciting part. Every adult gaze was indulgent and smiling.
My shoulder was bumped by my friend, Eli. I grinned and bumped him back, but harder, so that he bounced into the wall.
“Lysander,” a teacher said in her warning voice. I put my hands behind my back and took on a pose of innocence.
Two vanilla sandwich cookies each and some apple juice were waiting for us in the little room full of kids in our age range. They were my best friends. I’d never made close friends at school, since those kids didn’t understand about God. Other kids said bad words and mouthed off to their teachers. Me and my friends were the good ones.
There were only six of us and the room was small, with folding tables and chairs. The walls were covered in friendly Jesus paintings and baby lambs. The bulletin board had a new verse on it.
James 4:4
Don’t you know that friendship with the world means enmity against God? Therefore, anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God.
While we ate, spreading crumbs within a two foot radius of our mouths, Miss Becca slowly read it out to us. I tilted my head back and let my full mouth fall open, the words bouncing around in my head and making no sense. I wasn’t ever the smartest one in any group, but I looked out for opportunities to get something right and enjoy the praise. This wasn’t one of those opportunities.
“Can anybody tell me what God means by this? Anybody?” She looked at each of our faces, her blue eyes expectant. “I think this is an important message. Let’s see if we can figure it out.” She read the first line again, still slowly. “What does he mean by ‘the world’?”
I knew that one. Easy. But all of us were raising our hands, and she called on Hannah.
“Sinners,” Hannah said. “And bad people, and stealers, and bad people, and bastards-”
Eli and I gasped. We knew what that word meant. Well, we knew it was a cuss word.
“It’s okay,” Miss Becca said, “Hannah just means people who have babies without getting married first. We should be careful with that word, but that’s right, he’s talking about the sinners and unsaved people in this world. People who aren’t part of the church. Those aren’t people we should want to spend a lot of time with, but we should always be friendly.”
“Lysander’s mom is a bastard!” Eli contributed, his hand stretched up in the air, exposing his side, his skin smooth and white.
I snarled at him and punched him in the arm, making him squawk. “Your mom’s a bastard!” I yelled.
“That’s enough! Both of you stand up right now. No, leave the cookies.” Miss Becca put her hands over our cookies and slid them toward herself, out of reach. “Get up and stand in the corner.” She was calm, but firm.
When we reached the wall indicated and leaned our backs against it, heads down and lips pouting, she leaned over us with an outstretched finger. “I’m telling your parents to talk to you about that word when you get home. I want both of you to be quiet while I’m teaching, or I’m sending you back in with the adults, and then you’ll really be in trouble.”
She turned back to the kids still sitting at the table to continue her lesson, and I kicked Eli’s shoe. He hissed at me but didn’t retaliate.
We managed to behave long enough to get to sit down again, and then go out with everyone else for ten minutes playground time before the end of church. Our parents would pick us up there and take us home for lunch. Eli always either came to our apartment on Sunday afternoons or I went to his house.
I ran out into the sun, blinded but only concerned with claiming a swing, which I did, and I was as high in the air as possible in no time. One kid, then another joined me on the other swings, then the swing set went empty. I watched the swings slowly wobble back and forth on their chains for much longer than they would usually go without an occupant. Looking around, I discovered that the girls were all bunched in a group, hands cupping their mouths, backs at an angle to whisper in each other’s faces. The boys were playing with the basketball hoop, b
ut most of them were on the sidelines, kicking leaves around nervously. I hopped off. My stomach flip-flopped just before I made a perfect, satisfying landing. I ran over to Eli.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
He sidestepped away from me and shrugged.
“Do the girls have a secret or something?” I asked.
Another shrug.
An older boy I rarely talked to appeared next to Eli and squinted down at me. “Are you really a bastard?” he asked.
“No…” My mom hadn’t been married to my dad, but that had nothing to do with anything I’d done, so it made sense that my mom deserved a nasty name, not me.
“Yes, you are. You don’t have a dad, right?”
“Well,” I started, but couldn’t form an argument under pressure.
“Does that mean he’s worldly?” Eli asked the boy in a strained little voice, as if he didn’t want me to hear, even though he was right next to me.
“Yup,” the boy said and whirled around, going back to the basketball hoop.
Eli and I faced each other but he didn’t look at me. He shifted his feet awkwardly and picked his nose.
“He’s a jerk,” I said. “Are you coming over to my place?”
He shook his head and looked over to where our moms would come to get us.
“Am I going to your place?” I asked.
Instead of answering, he bolted. He skidded to a stop behind the cluster of girls and said something to them.
Confused and hurt, I turned and went back to the swings, where I pumped my legs and tried to enjoy myself while everyone else gossiped and avoided me. By the time Mom came to get me, I’d accepted that Eli and I had basically had a fight and weren’t going to be friends that day. I told Mom, dejected. She said we could make up when we saw each other for evening services. I nodded. She was probably right. I felt a little better and didn’t worry over it once we got home.
Eli pretended I didn’t exist before the service started that evening, as well as after, when we usually ran off to any place we thought our parents wouldn’t be able to find us and make us go home. Instead, I stood lonely in the foyer where adults crowded and talked every night, sometimes for an hour. I’d tried talking to the other kids, but they each gave me hesitant looks, then made it clear they didn’t want me hanging around them. None of them said anything outright, but their bodies turned away from me, and their answers were short. Some frowned, others gave me a stuck up look or rolled their eyes.
As usual, my mom and I didn’t talk on the car ride home. We’d never been talkers. But I needed to ask her about the bastard business.
“Yeeess,” she said. “Technically you’re a bastard. I didn’t marry your father because…that’s just not how it went, okay? God forgives.”
Her answer hit me like a blow between the eyes. I saw a flash of white light so fast that I wondered if it had been real. Then, I comprehended what she meant. I didn’t ask questions or argue. I was too devastated to speak.
It was true then. I was a worldly bastard and I always had been. God forgave, but there was still something ugly about me that I couldn’t ever change. Something that needed heavy forgiveness. Where I’d thought I had a sparkling clean soul just like my friends, I had a dark and slick puddle of unworthiness.
Week after week, the kids quietly rejected me until it seemed to be a habit for them. They didn’t have to think about it, they just did it. Sometimes I was literally shoved away, as if I had germs. Where I’d had a community so tight knit that my friends felt like family, I found a void. As I got used to being ignored, I started to feel as if I barely existed. The adults hadn’t changed, but they didn’t help me or seem to notice my problem. Only my mom noticed, and she did nothing but give me disappointed looks.
What they did notice was a change in my attitude. I lashed out at anyone who even slightly annoyed me. In case more people might reject me, I rejected them first. The walls and corners used for time out at school and church became my personal spaces, familiar and undaunting.
Home remained the same. My routine with Mom was silent and easy. She often left me to myself. Even dealing with her depression became routine. If she stayed in bed and didn’t go to work, I’d call her best friend from church, who would come over, make me a snack, and talk Mom into taking a shower and eating.
I took care of myself by that age. The house was always quiet with nothing to stimulate me into hyperactive noisiness, so there was no change for Mom to notice when I spent all day in my room reading comics from the library and watching sitcoms and nature shows on my little TV, adjusting the bunny ear antennas every time a commercial came on. I lived in solitude, and the flickering light of the TV was indulged in so consistently that it infiltrated my dreams.
After reading a few teen horror novels, all the while thinking about the way the other kids at school talked about me, I got some imaginative ideas. One day after school, I went to the kitchen and picked out a knife from all the mismatched items in the kitchen. It was a steak knife with a thick, wooden handle. I weighed it in my hand and rubbed my thumbs over the steel blade and worn wood. I scraped it across my palm. It needed a name, but I couldn’t think of anything.
There was a wooded plot of land behind our apartment, a playground of thin tree trunks, thick underbrush, and millions of daddy long legs. I ran outside with the knife, thrilling at the fact I was running with a sharp object; a huge no-no.
When I got to my fort—which was just a rotting piece of plywood propped up on a stump and steadied with some rocks—I slid underneath it and lay in the dry dirt on my stomach. I stabbed and sliced at the earth with my new friend. Grounds of dirt flicked up into my face, making me cough lightly.
But I didn’t want to just play with it, I wanted to be the knife. I wanted to be cold, hard, and precise. Yeah, I would try to become the knife. The idea hit the spot.
Killy. That was what I named it. For a few hours every day after school from then on, I became Killy the Knife.
Chapter Three
Zander Age 18
ONLINE, I DISCOVERED the same pictures Mom had dug up. The professional one was from the About Us page of a website and magazine for book reviews. It had a lot of boring articles about nonfiction and the publishing industry. His bio was pretty generic. Happy career in books, loving daughter, dog, and so on. I needed more than that.
Facebook didn’t show me much except boring pictures, mostly of him smiling next to lots of different people, including his daughter—my half sister. It was hard to think of her that way. I had no emotional concept of what that relationship would have been like if we’d grown up together.
Clay’s smile was always real. No fake-it-for-the-camera smiles, no hidden misery. The fucker was genuinely a happy man.
He was probably an introverted guy; there was no boyfriend or husband mentioned on his profile. Scrolling through his posts, I started to see I wasn’t going to find a whole lot of information, not that I really knew what I was looking for. He didn’t post often, and it was usually something banal; the kind of stuff you want your employer to see when they snoop on you.
My sister’s name was Lottie Anderson-Corden. Her profile had a lot more to offer, including links to her other social media accounts where she posted often—mostly photos of herself and her friends, plus a lot of snapshots of her calico cat. She seemed as sunny and good-natured as our dad but with slightly rebellious vibes to her poses and expressions.
Part of me wanted to meet her, but it was not only risky, I doubted I would like her. In my experience with girls, they wanted me around as if I were part of a set of friends they wanted to show off. They were looking for a gay best friend stereotype and quickly discovered I didn’t fit into their idea of what gayness was. I did have a little experience with girls as girlfriends. I’d had two girlfriends and fucked one of them, despite knowing I was gay at the time. It was something I’d done without understanding why I was doing it. Maybe it was only to see exactly what I was capable of. In any c
ase, I ended my experimenting after dealing with the horrifying awkwardness of my dick sliding flaccidly out of the girl’s pussy, leaving her completely unsatisfied. Not to mention, it had all left me on edge and out of joint.
