The Bullet Theory

by Sonya Jesus

  “Did you just Post-It my ass?”

  He laughs and hands me the pad. “Seventy-nine to go, and only two more days to do it.”

  If twenty had me in his arms, I’m afraid of what will happen when I have no more sticky notes left. Luckily, Nolan didn’t give me a timeframe.

  4

  First Session

  Dr. Nolan Mills

  “Take. These. Back!” She throws the nearly full pad of numbered sticky notes on the coffee table in front of us.

  “Were you having trouble?” I ask, glancing at the yellow paper with seventy-nine written on it.

  She crosses her arms and leans back, adding as much space between us as possible. “It’s trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “Kace is getting the wrong impression.”

  “What impression is that?”

  She glances up at me, finally staring at something other than the glass of the coffee table. “He kissed me.”

  “Did you not mention wanting to patch things up in the last session?”

  “Yes, but that’s because I wanted to…” She trails off and focuses on the glass again. “It’s going to hurt Kace more if things don’t work out, is all I’m trying to say.”

  “Why wouldn’t they work out?”

  She ignores me completely. I don’t blame her; trust is something most patients need time to build. Talking about grief is one thing, because it can be seen on the surface, talking about anything that lies just underneath is another story altogether.

  In our last session, she briefly spoke about being a human lie detector. Grief clouds her perceptive abilities immensely. I test it out before getting into the nitty-gritty of our session—my scorecard.

  “Last night, I went to Rizzo’s and ordered a pepperoni pizza.” I scratch my nose and lick my lips before elaborating on the absurd lie, “I got the one with fish sticks on it. It was delicious.” My nose scrunches in disgust. “You should try it.”

  “That’s great,” she admits sarcastically, rather than picking up on my bluff. Had she been reading my body language and micro-expressions, she would know my alibi was off and follow up with something else, but she couldn’t see beyond her own problems.

  In truth, I spent my evening in the shed, engraving the bullet for Coralee Mitchell. After Borshin was killed in broad daylight in the middle of the street, in front of his wife, the statewide killer hit national news. Reporters and Feds flocked into the city. If they looked deep enough, the Feds would have reason to get involved.

  I had crossed state lines, and the tri-state area has received some of my bullet messages, but only four people.

  And one of them took her own life with the same poison she gave her dead boyfriend’s best friend. The other three have done nothing, and it’s been years. Most of my test subjects had been previously failed by the police, and they see my bullet as a heroic act—closure the police could not give them.

  After a while of silence, Eleanor sprawls out on the leather couch and stares up at the ceiling, mulling over her thoughts.

  “What are you thinking?” To make Eleanor Devero the next member of the Bullet Club, I need to start filling out her information.

  “What makes someone a psychopath?” she asks the so-called killer everyone is searching for.

  Slightly amused, I smile at the situation and grab my yellow ledger. “What do you mean?”

  She rubs her eyes and rests her hand over the womb she no longer has. I jot down her given mannerisms in my notes. “Touching loss. Constant reminder of her trauma by running her fingers over her stomach.” This, notably, is quite characteristic of someone who loses a child in utero.

  Not many people are aggressors toward pregnant women. Criminals, who I’ve helped through situations, have moral codes on pregnancy. Even they don’t escape the influence of society. We, as a group of people, are womb obsessed, and at a certain age, everything becomes about the baby bump.

  She rotates her neck to glance at me.

  I gauge her reaction as I draw a tree onto the corner of my ledger. Most people usually ask what I’m writing, but she seems utterly unfazed by it.

  “Who kills a baby?”

  Holding my pen in the air, I make eye contact. Her brown eyes focus on me, desperately wanting an answer, so I give her one. “There’s a lot that goes into criminology and victimology, Eleanor.” I bypass genetic talk on MAO-A, size of the amygdala, and prefrontal cortex damage, and simply say, “Not all killers are psychopaths. Some are just murderers… and not all psychopaths commit murder.”

  She furrows her brow and nods her head, processing the information and letting it sink in. “I’m asking you like I don’t already know all of this.”

  “I would assume you’ve learned a few things.”

  She sighs and releases the air from her lungs, slowly. “I’m a behaviorist, but ever since the shooting, I can’t focus.” She waves her hand in my direction. “Can’t be a human lie detector if I can’t detect shit. No wonder they don’t want me back at the precinct.”

  I flip back to the pages with the reason for her leave and broach the subject. “It says here you were running background checks on people without due cause, and you showed symptoms of instability.”

  “Instability?” she echoes back and sits up, resting her elbows on her thighs. “How the hell am I supposed to be stable when my whole life just got turned upside down? It’s been three months. I wasn’t just shot, I was housing a human being who got shot!”

  The elevated tone of her voice reveals her anger. There’s so much, and it’s so good.

  “I threw a fucking mug at the window, and they called it a post-traumatic episode. I was mad because they were putting my son’s case on the back burner.”

  I flip to a new page with my test subject scorecard. “Would you say you’ve had vengeful tendencies in the past?”

  She appears taken back by the question but leans forward. “No, not really.”

  If you had to quantify it? On a scale of one to five, zero being no tendency for revenge and five being a constant tendency for revenge, where would you find yourself?”

  “This is a stupid question. Revenge can be defined in a lot of different ways.”

  “Like?”

  “Like reacting by bettering yourself and showing them you’re not inferior, or even better, becoming superior to them. But if you mean physical violence, then before the shooting, I never had the urge. So, zero.”

  Her answer hints at one of my other questions. “Have you ever been bullied?”

  She pauses for a second and cocks her head to the side. “I want to change my previous answer to one.”

  I nod curtly and wait a beat for her to explain.

  “When I was in grammar school, the girls always used to pick on me. I was a little heavier set, and they enjoyed rubbing the extra pounds in my face.”

  “How did that make you feel?”

  “Like shit. It lasted for years, but it wasn’t physical. Mostly verbal bullying and emotional.”

  “Don’t underestimate verbal abuse. Words hurt. Sometimes, even more than a punch. Words dig into our psyche and create wounds that fester every time we remember them. Sometimes it’s harder to heal from psychological injuries than physical ones.”

  “That’s true.” She smacks her hands together and sighs. “Girls are vicious.”

  “Did you ever confront your bullies?”

  “Like a fight?” She shakes her head. “It never got to that. One time, one of them wanted to start a fight so she could up her new-girl status, and I ran away because I was scared.”

  “Were you scared for yourself, or were you afraid of getting in trouble for fighting?”

  “Both.” She chuckles and points to her smile. She reaches for the journal on the table and jots the occurrence in her smile log. I had suggested it because smiling involves neuropeptides and neurotransmitters, which can help elevate the mood. Mood-boosting can alter the group she’s classified under in my
study if she qualifies, but I care about my subjects.

  I see a lot of myself in them. When my mother died, I entered the system and retreated inwardly. My trauma stifled my mind, and I was so scared. The assailant was in every man who crossed my path, which made foster care challenging. I was petrified of myself and the world, just like she is.

  She’s scared to see what’s right in front of her.

  My ears tune in to her voice, missing some of her confession.

  “I used to be super sensitive. I picked up on people’s moods easily. I guess I hated seeing people upset. But I had wished the girls could feel what it was like to have to listen to their mean words all the time. My mom always told me they were jealous, or they had problems of their own and were lashing out because I was stronger than them.”

  “Did you believe her?”

  She shrugs. “Honestly, every time I came home, I was surrounded with so much love, it didn’t matter. It was hard at school sometimes, though.”

  “Being an outcast can be traumatic.”

  “I had friends.”

  “Did it make you want to treat someone else the same way they treated you?”

  She wrinkles her nose and shakes her head with precise movements. “No, that would have made me just like them, and I didn’t want to be that way. Even then, I knew one day they’d grow up and look back at the bad things they did as kids and feel bad for it.”

  “That’s a unique perspective on bullying. Did you want an apology?”

  “An accepted apology is a burden you take off someone’s shoulders, so if they felt the need to ask, then I guess, that already meant they felt bad for it.”

  “And if they didn’t?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Because they might have won the battle as children, but I won the war as an adult. Ivy League, valedictorian, popular, and until Tyler, extremely happy. And I did all of that without hurting anyone; that’s something they can’t boast about.”

  She’s leaning toward the ‘no revenge’ pile at the moment. Had it not been for the ‘until Tyler’ I would have solidified my assumption in writing. “Have you ever confronted them as an adult?”

  “Yes,” she admits with a wide grin.

  I point toward her notebook, and she rolls her eyes, jotting down the smile and the reason for it. The idea is to give her an actual list of things worth smiling about. “Would you like to tell me about how the confrontation went?”

  “I was a teenager, had lost the weight, and grew into myself. I was in a really good place. Getting away from them and going to high school in a safer environment really helped me become who I am today.”

  “Would you say the bullies inspired you to reach your potential?”

  “No, I never gave them that kind of power. I followed what I wanted and barely thought about them until I ran into a couple of them. I had graduated summa cum laude from a prestigious school, had a plan, and a full life ahead of me. I had strong faith, a great family, and amazing friends. It felt really fucking good to show them they didn’t impact my life negatively, and that after all the negative things they said to bring me down, it didn’t affect me. As kids, they had power, but only because they didn’t know how to earn it.”

  “I’m impressed with how grown-up you are about it. Childhood bullying is something, even as adults, we have a hard time processing.” Though severity and age are also critical, teenage years in high school are particularly scarring for many adolescents. Part of IQ3 assesses bullying at its earliest stages, which later may bring about implementations of stricter no-tolerance policies. No child should have to be afraid to go to school. I speak from personal experience.

  “Eh,” she says and shrugs her shoulders. “It helps that I dated some of the guys whom they used to crush on. Guess that makes me vengeful, right?”

  “That makes you normal.” And a more interesting candidate. I give her a bully score of three and a confrontation score of two.

  “I used to be nice. I believed in justice and upholding the law and treating people with the respect they deserved, but—” she cuts herself off.

  I immediately follow up. “Do you think, given recent events, that’s changed?”

  She holds my gaze and bites on her lower lip.

  “Don’t be afraid to tell me how you feel. If you don’t tell me, I can’t help you. Nothing you say here will be conveyed to anyone else but me, unless you give me the authority to.” Which she already has in her waiver, but I keep this to myself.

  She nods and itches her nose. “I’ve considered murdering someone.”

  Well, now we’re getting somewhere interesting. “Considered and doing are two very distinct things,” I remind her.

  She rebuts with a shake of the head. “No, I’ve pictured it. I’ve dreamt it. I’ve envisioned every minute detail. If I knew who shot me and killed my son, I’d destroy them.”

  Now she’s talking my language.

  “That makes me a horrible person, doesn’t it?” She shuts her eyes for a second as she comes to terms with the idea of saying her deepest, darkest secret aloud.

  “Not necessarily.”

  She scoffs and shakes her head, negating my comment. “No… I don’t want to just kill the person, I want to torture them. To make them feel like my son did. Or tie them to a chair and set them on fire, so I can hear them scream and choke on their own melting tongue.”

  “That’s very detailed.” And very reminiscent of Borshin’s demise. Bitten Senior not only killed him in the middle of the street, but he set him on fire and strapped himself with a fake bomb, threatening to set it off if anyone came near. I watched on the news as Borshin screamed out his agonizing confession before he passed out. Unlike Elijah, Borshin was doused with so much accelerant it didn’t take long for him to die.

  “My pain is very detailed, Doctor. No one knows who shot me, but we were…” She shakes her head and changes the subject, obviously not ready to talk about her own culpability. “Cap said my injuries exceeded a physical diagnosis. Do you think my injuries are psychological?”

  “I think trauma to the body always comes with some form of emotional sequelae. Fear is a very intrinsic emotion. It’s crippling, and when dealing with loss, we have to face many fears over and over again.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Loss is a ripple effect, and when coupled with trauma, it’s like grabbing a bunch of stones and chucking them into the water at the same time.”

  She watches me draw ripples on the paper.

  “Sometimes, depending on where they land, the ripples may be one, or two, or three.” I point to where some touch and cross over each other. “Or they will overlap … For example, you have to face losing your identity and the fear that comes with finding yourself again. In your situation, you have to cope with the loss of family, of bearing children, and what those implications have for you and your fiancé. Often, as a couple, you deal with losing what bound you together, or communication, or sexual desire. There’s fear in each one of those settings, and simultaneous confrontations are overwhelming. Sometimes, you shut down.”

  “That makes sense,” she admits and leans back. “I feel like nothing makes sense anymore. Living, breathing, existing—it all lost value at some point. Even with Kace, it’s like we’re still the same people, who live in the same house, and there’s still something between us, but it’s different.”

  “Are you not attracted to him anymore?”

  “I’m not attracted to life anymore.” She turns her head from side to side, slowly to consider her thoughts. “I mean, what am I still doing here? Going to therapy to get my job back, so I can see the same people who didn’t find who did this to Tyler. It’s like everything is a reason to just stop, except two things.”

  “Which are?”

  “One of them is Kace. We’ve been talking more lately. Being in his presence messes with my head. Or with my body. I don’t know.”

  “Has it been difficult to be intimate with your partner?” I ask, l
ooking down at the intimacy score. “Zero to five. Zero being no intimacy—”

  “Zero,” she says blatantly. “The desire is there, but I can’t.”

  I record the score. “How long has it been?”

  “Since before Tyler was taken from us. The big belly kind of got in the way, and I was always tired, but about four, maybe four and a half months.”

  “Is that normal for you as a couple?” I ask, not because it’s relevant to my study but because she seems flustered over it. I prefer clear-minded subjects.

  “No, we were—um—frequent, in that area.”

  “And now you feel you can’t?”

  “Yes.” She runs the palm of her hands over her jeans, massaging her thighs.

  “Why? Let’s explore this a little bit. What will happen if you do?”

  “He’ll think we’re okay.”

  “And you’re not?”

  “I’m not. He’s apparently ready to move on, adopt, and forget all about Tyler.”

  “It’s normal to forget to communicate with your loved one, but remember you both suffered the loss. It’s as unfair to blame him for coping with it differently, as it is for him to blame you.”

  “But I’m the one who carried Tyler. He was inside me. I should have protected him—that was my job.”

  “Tyler was half his,” I offer, though I sympathize with her. Often times, fetal loss is harder for a mother; it’s a literal loss—an entity which is no longer a part of them. Unfortunately, quantifying emotion is not a therapy objective for her, just a means to an end. “Do you think there’s a winner when you grieve?”

  “What?” she asks with a scrunched brow.

  “Do you try to one-up the one person who knows what you’re going through, by telling him your loss is greater than his? Even if it is subliminally.”

  “He can’t just add a positive spin to the catastrophe of our lives. We shouldn’t be able to just pick up where we left off before Tyler came into our lives.”