Things became worse when I began to crave it, sometimes even when he didn’t lock me in the shack. That was when I knew I had become lost. And he lorded this newfound victory over my tiny warped mind. I’d plead to be taken back to the shack so it could satisfy my needs, but he’d refuse with a devilish grin. So I stole a knife from the kitchen drawer and gutted the farm animals late at night. He’d retreat into his drug-fueled ether and never noticed me coming home with a heart in my hands. I kept this side of me concealed at school. I knew I needed to strive to appear normal, but the mask I wore hid a world of flames. Obsessions begin early in young boys, and I’d been trained to be a demon by the best of them. One time when I was in high school, when I became strong enough to retaliate, I stabbed him in the palm with a fork. He bashed my head in with a Campbell’s soup can and I lost some of the hearing in my right ear. I wound up in the shack for days but never received my prize of a heart, lost the ability to move my muscles due to dehydration and hunger. I had a vision of my death and learned that there was no afterlife, just a shallow grave for my bones.
Three days later, when the door to the shack finally unlocked and he entered with some water, I summoned the only shred of energy I had and stabbed him in the heart with the slat I’d broken off from the wall. I left him writhing on the floor. I locked the door behind me, knowing no one would find him for a long time, since we lost the farm and had to sell off the animals, and all that remained was an overgrown plot of land in the middle of fucking nowhere. Then I took off and never returned to see if he’d lived. I like to think it probably took days for him to finally die.
Kyle took a break to refill his glass. It was approaching midnight, but it didn’t matter since he wasn’t going into the office all week and could wake up anytime he wanted. If Devil’s Hopyard wasn’t fiction, then the passage he’d just read had been a glimpse into William’s past, an abusive father who forced little William to eat an animal’s heart so many times that he began to crave it. While it was tough for Kyle to believe as truth, it was good backstory for the character of the professor and supported his becoming obsessed with eating the heart of the girl in his class. Kyle didn’t want to admit it, but he needed to know what happened next. He’d get this feeling when he was into a manuscript he thought had potential, a desire to put everything else aside. He skimmed ahead until he reached a part about the girl again. She still hadn’t been mentioned by name, but now William began to describe her. Instead of being a two-dimensional character, this time she lifted off the page for Kyle, as if he was a part of the story too.
I watch her during my Camus lecture. Teaching the same lesson for a few years has allowed me to be on autopilot. I scribble notes on the board, but she is my focus. We’ve met outside my classroom many times before. She has awakened me. I am asleep at home with my wife and children, but with her I am alive. One time we did it in her dorm room with a green scarf over the doorknob so her roommate wouldn’t enter. The thrill of being caught made it feel electric, dangerous, a beautiful secret. But we couldn’t chance it again since I could be fired if someone found out and she refused to have that on her conscience. She had a boyfriend, a skinny, forlorn guy in the back of the class, a kid I was mentoring. He would write notes to her, but she seemed disinterested. I knew she played around with other guys and girls, even men older than me. I once saw her at a bar in Mystic, her legs wrapped around a burly man in his fifties as he pecked her with kisses, her eyes high and spinning. I couldn’t have her over at my house, and hotels were too expensive, but one time on a run through Devil’s Hopyard I spied a shack in the distance, far enough away from civilization for anyone to notice. I set up a cot, candles, even brought a record player and some classical music LPs. She loved it the first time I took her there, said it was our secret hideaway. For months, we were drunk on each other, but I wanted more. I’d find myself listening to her heart in her sleep, its thumps like a dance party in my ear, as I wondered how it would taste. It had been years and I’d tempered my indulgence, but she made it palpable again.
And then she fizzled away.
The boyfriend became more needy. She got busier. Our days at the shack happened less and less until I could barely remember the last time they occurred. I’d see her and the boyfriend in class, their fingers entwined, a note passed between them, and then I’d see her sucking face with some drug-dealing townie on the outskirts of campus. It was as if her goal was to torture both of us, me and the boyfriend, until one of us snapped. I had desperate dreams about her heart. It was all I could think of. I could no longer have her—she made that perfectly clear with her wicked, tempting, pitying smile. But I could take that heart from her. So one day after class I pounced.
We wound up in my car on the way to Devil’s Hopyard, the chloroform keeping her silent. In the shack, I tied her up tight—my Boy Scout training coming in handy—and waited with a butcher knife for her to stir. I traced an outline around her heart ready to slice. But I couldn’t go through with it. One slice and she’d be gone, her heart eaten, but then what? So I envisioned going for the second best thing, a heart-shaped tattoo imprinted on her left butt cheek. Her screams would be music to my ears as I’d cut it out and observe my work in the palm of my hand. She’d inevitably pass out again, but I’d sew up the incisions and put some Hello Kitty Band-Aids I’d have taken from my daughter over the wound. Night would fall and I’d be starving, not having eaten all day. It would be similar to when I was a child, locked in the same kind of shack, waiting to be satiated. So I’d start a fire. With a frying pan I kept in the shack for a late-night snack, I’d fry up that heart-shaped tattoo and devour every last morsel, a piece of my Mia, a piece just for now …
Kyle slammed the book shut. The room slanted and righted itself again. He got to his feet only to spill over and plummet to the floor. The manuscript had opened to the page he just read, the name Mia in bold, loud like a crashing cymbal in his ear.
“Mia,” he mumbled, a heave of vomit flowing from his lips, not having said the name of the girl he once loved and lost in many, many years.
22
KYLE WAS WITH Mia Evans when he found out his dad died. He’d known her for only a week when the call came, but it had felt like a lifetime. He hadn’t fit in yet with anyone else at Bentley, most of them country club kids who summered in the Cape and had bottomless wallets. He talked to her for the first time at the Crystal Mall. He’d been eating an Arby’s Beef ‘n Cheddar alone when she sat down with two guys in tow who didn’t look like they went to Bentley. Their pants hung below their asses without any belts. They wore doo rags and one had a blunt between his lips. Their eyes were smoked out and they talked in their own slang language.
But he recognized Mia. She sat in the front of Professor Lansing’s English class. He usually knew most of the questions the professor asked, but he was too shy to answer.
“How come you never speak in class?” she asked.
He swallowed an oversize bite of Beef ‘n Cheddar. “I dunno.”
“Not a smart way to go through life,” she said, taking out a sour apple Blow Pop and placing it between her lips. “How about the next time you want to say something in class, I’ll make sure to back it up? Even if I don’t agree.”
She spoke with an untraceable accent that seemed to morph into a different ethnicity with each word. It started out Spanish then traversed into Eastern European terrain.
“I’m Mia. Evans.”
“Kyle.” Cough. “Broder.”
“Wanna get high, Kyle Broder?” she asked, and removed a blunt tucked in the fold of her tank top.
He smoked with Mia in the parking lot, passing around a blunt with her two dudes, Rocco and Stoolie. She was a philosophy major and talked passionately about Nietzsche. Rocco and Stoolie seemed to be far from her level, both of them dropping out of high school to sell schwaggy weed. Kyle figured that was why Mia kept them around. She had doe eyes, big red lips, and multicolored hair—black on the top of her head and blondish-brown do
wn to her shoulders. She’d finished her Blow Pop and blew a massive bubble with the leftover gum. It popped against his face, and they all laughed. An hour later he found himself on the townies’ smelly couch, making out with Mia and loving the taste of her sour apple tongue.
This was what Kyle dreamed college could be. Spending a week straight with Mia, barely leaving her dorm room since her roommate dated this guy who lived off campus and was never home. He wasn’t a virgin, but pretty close. She taught him things he’d only fantasized about before. By the end of the week, he told her he was in love. The next day he got a call from his mom. His father had fallen into a coma due to liver failure. His will stipulated he didn’t want to be resuscitated. The funeral would be over the weekend.
Mia hadn’t even heard what Kyle’s mom said on the phone, but she was immediately upon him with a comforting hug. She held him for hours as he cried into her shoulder. She helped him book plane tickets. When he returned from the worst weekend of his life, she picked him up with Rocco and Stoolie at the airport. She had a sour apple Blow Pop for him. That day he got high with them and remained in that fugue state for the next few months.
The first time he caught her cheating on him, he pretended not to care. He’d entered her dorm room to find Rocco and Stoolie having a sword fight in her mouth. She didn’t apologize, just told him to either join or close the door. He found out from other students how much she liked to get around. She’d even been with girls and older men too. A rumor circulated that she was dating a professor, although no one knew which one. All of this made him want her even more. To prove himself worthy, he began selling drugs that Rocco and Stoolie procured. There was a drought for harder stuff on campus, and with his innocent blue eyes, no one would suspect him as a pusher. He kept his stash in a locked box under his bed. He had to quit his two campus jobs, since his phone was constantly ringing from students looking to score. Even his English professor caught wind of his secret life. Professor Lansing wasn’t upset—in fact, he requested some sleeping aids in exchange for his silence.
Kyle liked Professor Lansing. Thanks to Mia, he began to speak more in his class, and Professor Lansing definitely took notice. He didn’t get high for that class, a much-needed break from his drug-fueled reality. He confided in Professor Lansing too. It all started one night when he drank too much and was too fucked-up to figure out how to get home. Professor Lansing had given him his personal cell number and Kyle called him around midnight. Instead of being mad, Professor Lansing drove over to a bar on the outskirts of town and picked him up. He took Kyle out for coffee at a Bickford’s. He asked him why he did this to himself.
“I love her,” Kyle said, slurring.
“Who, Kyle?”
“Mia. Evans. She’s in your spirit … spirituality of literature class. She sits in the front.”
“I know Mia very well.”
Professor Lansing was biting his cheek hard, but Kyle was too far gone to notice.
“She tells me she loves me too,” Kyle whimpered, “but she sleeps with so many people. Sometimes I think she does it to be cruel.”
“She does,” Professor Lansing said definitively. “I know she does.”
“But the thought of being without her—”
“It’s too much to bear.” Professor Lansing finished Kyle’s thought.
“Yes. Professor, you’re so cool. Like you really understand.”
“I do. And you can talk to me anytime, Kyle. I’m here for you.”
Selling drugs and hanging only with Mia and her townie hoodlums didn’t leave Kyle much time to make other friends, so he really valued Professor Lansing’s mentorship. Especially after the police raided Rocco and Stoolie’s place and they narced on him. He was floored to find out that Professor Lansing not only bailed him out of jail but also got rid of any evidence in the locked box under his bed.
“Mia was involved with this too, wasn’t she?” Professor Lansing asked at a Bickford’s a few days after the charges were dropped.
“There’s no point getting her in trouble too,” Kyle said, shrugging. He wanted to put it all behind him. Now that Rocco and Stoolie were locked up, he figured that meant fewer people vying for Mia’s attention. And the fact that he hadn’t ratted on her should prove how much he cared.
“Girls like her use and abuse,” Professor Lansing said. “She never loved you.”
“She did,” Kyle mumbled. “She just likes attention.”
“She has no heart,” Professor Lansing said, slamming his fist on the table. His coffee spilled over. A waitress came over to mop it up, but Professor Lansing shooed her away.
“She deserves someone to teach her a lesson,” Professor Lansing said. He was licking the coffee residue from his lips. “Don’t you agree? Otherwise she’ll treat everyone like this for the rest of her life.”
That night, Kyle had a fight with Mia in the Commons. He got wasted and expressed exactly what Professor Lansing had said. Told her she was a user and abuser. She attacked in response, pushed him into the wall. She never liked being told what to do. He fought back, but only to protect himself. Dozens of students saw them going at each other before campus safety finally broke them up.
Later, he found himself in Professor Lansing’s front yard, throwing pebbles at the bedroom window. He was hysterical when the professor came down. Professor Lansing kept asking him if he still wanted to kill her for what she had done. Kyle never remembered saying that out loud, but he guessed he had in the heat of the moment. So he took off back to the campus, wishing her dead, spending all night looking in every one of her hangout spots. But he never found her. Days passed without a word. Students began to whisper about her absence. Then the police became involved. They questioned him over and over, knowing he dated her and the two had a fight in public the night she went missing. The police were suspicious because of his record, even though his charges had been dropped.
He started to grow paranoid, since the police threatened prison unless she was found. He even wondered if he’d done something to her, having no recollection of anything that occurred that hazy night. He sometimes pumped himself with so many drugs that he believed he might be capable of the worst things imaginable. To quell his paranoia, he took a fistful of whatever he had left and wound up passing out until a family discovered him in Devil’s Hopyard, naked and howling at the moon. Professor Lansing helped check him into a psychiatric ward just to monitor his behavior for a few days. He watched cartoons and slurped soup until they marked him sane and let him go. When he got out, the cops had picked up Rocco and Stoolie. Both had gotten out on bail when Mia went missing and became prime suspects. All of Bentley began searching for Mia now that more than a week had passed without a sign. News crews arrived and students were questioned. Everyone said what a sweet and beautiful girl she was. Her mother, Karen, lived nearby in Killingworth, a pill popper with a revolving round of men in her life. It was clear Mia didn’t come from a happy home.
After a month without any leads, everyone figured that Mia had run away to start a new life. She no longer made the front page of the Killingworth Gazette. Kyle cleaned himself up, attempted to trade drugs for schoolwork, and managed to make some normal friends. He thought about Mia from time to time, even tried to talk about her with Professor Lansing, but his professor didn’t want to talk about her anymore. Everyone at Bentley College had also become exhausted from hunting for a girl who didn’t want to be found, and soon she was spoken about less and less. He’d see a girl on campus sucking a lollipop and he’d remember the giant bubbles that Mia used to blow; he’d hear a trace of her strange accent coming from someone else’s lips and turn around thinking it was Mia, only to be disappointed.
When spring arrived, he met a girl named Cathy while sitting on the grassy quad reading East of Eden. She was reading it too. She was a dance major and an English minor. She made a joke that she was nothing like Cathy from East of Eden, the wicked temptress with the razor teeth. He watched her perform a bebop jazz dance to Mi
les Davis in the auditorium that night, and for the first time in a long time, he didn’t think about Mia at all. They shared a malted afterward at some 1950s-inspired ice cream joint in town. She didn’t drink, since dance was her drug. For the next six months with her, he didn’t touch a drink, or a puff, or a snort at all.
Even after school ended, he’d let himself float back to Mia only in his dreams. He’d get a whiff of sour apple gum and start salivating. But she was always too far away for him to grasp, no longer a part of this world.
* * *
”MIA,” HE SAID, stirring from sleep as a loud knock pounded against the door. Blinking the crust from his eyes, he half expected it to be her, brought back to life because he’d willed her to return.
It hurt Kyle to think that she might not have chosen to disappear—that William might have taken her away. Especially if he was somehow responsible for planting the bug in the sociopath’s ear.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, still trapped between his dream and reality, shaking like mad as he swung open the door and imagined her ghost in the hallway, awaiting retribution.
23
“I’M SO SORRY,” Kyle said, swinging open the door to find Jamie there instead of Mia.
Jamie stepped inside, shocked by his appearance. Crusted vomit had formed on his T-shirt in a shape that resembled Europe. His hair was messed up and he wasn’t wearing any pants. She checked her watch.
“Shouldn’t you be getting ready for work?” she asked. She wore a professional skirt and blouse and high heels. She hung up a heavy overcoat dusted with snow.
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