Mean girl_A dark, disturbing psychological thriller

by Natasha A. Salnikova

  Maybe it was the prospect of having to try his wife’s culinary experiments or something else, but Dad looked the complete opposite of Mother. He rarely smiled and Corby caught him deep in thought throughout the evening. He went to his inner world frequently before, but now it had increased. Corby noticed the changes, but her mother didn’t. She used to be focused on Dad and now her priorities had shifted to her daughter, the trip, and sometimes work.

  On Friday night, Mother came home and said it would be nice to go somewhere for dinner. Dad used to reply that he couldn’t find a normal restaurant with a decent selection of vegetarian dishes anywhere, but this time he agreed. They climbed into Dad’s car and Mother made a reservation for a table on the way.

  The restaurant served a lot of salads and Dad made his choice easily. While they waited for their orders, they watched one of the five televisions that hung on the walls. Mom made comments about the anchors’ appearance. She made a lot of comments until the anchor said that today a young woman’s body was found on the banks of the river Charlie. The woman’s hair had been cut off.

  Corby wasn’t really listening and was drinking her cola at the moment the last news was delivered. When she heard about the hair, the glass of Coke fell out of her hand and her heart seemed to stop. The voices in her head were screaming with happiness.

  Her parents didn’t pay attention to her, but the waitress picked up the glass and asked her not to worry about anything, she also promised to clean the mess. Corby didn’t care.

  “The young woman’s hair was cut just like in the book about a serial killer called, The Hairdresser.”

  Corby heard the signal on her phone through the haze. She pulled it out of the new bag her mother bought for her during their last shopping spree, so Corby would feel better, and slowly opened the message.

  “You have to watch the news. Love you.”

  Corby slowly turned off the phone and slowly put it back in the bag.

  “Mom.”

  “Can you imagine,” her mother told her father, “just like in the book! They read and then kill. The power of reading?”

  “Mom.”

  “What’s going on? Two girls disappeared and now this! Who knows what happened to them? Maybe they ... Corby doesn’t leave the house alone often. To understand ... What’s the matter? Corby, what’s wrong?”

  CHAPTER 40

  When Corby opened her eyes, she was lying on the floor and her mother, father and a dozen strangers hung over her. All with worried faces.

  “You scared me!” Mom exclaimed, grabbing Corby’s shoulders and trying to help her up. “What happened? How are you, baby?”

  Her voice was muffled at first and then grew louder as the images became brighter. Corby realized she had lost consciousness, but didn’t know why. She knew only that the cause was serious and she had to find an answer fast. Mom probably believed that her daughter should know why she collapsed.

  “I ... I didn’t eat anything this morning.” Corby cleared her throat. Her voice was hoarse, as if she hadn’t talked for a week.

  “What? Why?”

  “Can you get up, Corby?” Dad stretched out his hand and Corby grabbed it. Suddenly she didn’t want to let him go. She wanted to cuddle up to him and ask for his advice, for his help. Because ...

  “Because you’re screwed!” the voice shouted. “Because of you, fat idiot, a good guy became a murderer!”

  Corby stood up and then sat down on a chair. Food was already on the table.

  “You have to eat right now!” Mom said, and that was the last thing Corby wanted to do.

  “Let’s go home,” she said.

  “If you promise to eat your salad in the car,” her mother said.

  “I promise,” Corby said, remembering the last message she received. She felt sick, but didn’t feel like barfing in the restaurant, so she jumped from the chair and ran into the street.

  “Corby!”

  High heels clicked behind her. Corby stopped at the edge of the road, greedily swallowing the chilly air. Dad began to pull on her jacket and Corby didn’t have strength to push him away, even though she was hot.

  “She didn’t eat! I can’t believe it! I’m not letting you become an anorexic!”

  “You don’t need to lose weight,” Dad added his two cents.

  Corby winced. “What?”

  “You should eat!” Mother said almost tearfully.

  “I don’t understand what you are talking about,” Corby said softly. “And this is not the right place for a fight, regardless.”

  “I agree.” Her father took a ticket for valet parking out of his pocket. “I’ll get the car. Wait here,” he said.

  “You can’t do that.” Mom hugged Corby’s shoulders, helped her to zip her jacket, but Corby started to shake, though she still wasn’t cold.

  “Oh you’re freezing, baby,” her mother said, hugging her daughter tighter. Her daughter didn’t mind, even though she didn’t know what her mother was talking about and didn’t want to understand. The last message from Jacob was circling in her head, mixing with the voice and comments from Vera and Sylvia. They were all talking at once, and they blamed her.

  CHAPTER 41

  Corby ate salad under her mother’s supervision though she felt sick. She didn’t understand why her mother concluded that her daughter had stopped eating altogether in order to lose weight and it was a disease called anorexia. Corby tried to convince her mother that this disease didn’t threaten her because she loved food too much, but her mother didn’t look convinced.

  “I even did an episode about anorexics on my show. It was so awful. Poor girls killed themselves for the sake of some illusionary beauty. Don’t even think like that Corby! Of course, I talked to you about losing weight, but it’s all superficial, it doesn’t matter. The main thing I want for you is to be healthy and happy. I’m proud of you regardless of your weight, baby. Please eat, and don’t scare us like that.”

  “Eat whatever you want,” Dad added, putting a piece of cheese in his mouth.

  Corby walked into her room thinking that she wasn’t guilty in the absence of spontaneous creativity. She said the first thing that came to her mind. She never imagined that it would stir another rush of caring from her mother. What happened—happened. At first she wanted her mother to pay more attention to her and now she didn’t want that at all.

  Entering her room, she sat on the bed and then pulled out the box of jewelry from her bedside stand. She shook out the earrings and the pendant, laid them on the bed, pulled her knees up to her chin (she couldn’t do that before because of her stomach), and gazed at them as they sparkled in the lamplight. It was the jewelry of the girls she had killed. Her souvenirs. What did Jacob do? Did he keep her hair as a souvenir? The girl that was shown on television was the same age as Corby and very cute. They didn’t say how she was killed or at least Corby didn’t hear it. Now she wanted to know how he did it and what he felt.

  “Nothing,” the inner voice said. “He didn’t feel anything, because he’s crazy. He’s as crazy as you are.”

  “He’s not crazy,” Corby said stubbornly, hardly believing her own words. If she wouldn’t believe them, it meant only that she was indeed crazy too and that wasn’t true. She knew what she was doing and why she had done it. “He did it for the same reason. We are not crazy. I believe in him because ... Because he’s good. He stood up for me when no one else did.”

  “Who are you telling this to?” the inner voice said. “Who do you want to convince? I know exactly what happened. You just enjoy murdering, you enjoy the sense of superiority it gives you.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Not true? What is the truth?”

  “I wanted to stop the bullying. She threatened to kill me!”

  “Do you think she would really have killed you?”

  Corby sniffed. It was hard to argue with her own inner voice. But, as her father said many times, you have to fight with yourself. You have to grow and improve. Wh
at was it that she wanted to improve? Her own mistakes?

  If she recognized the fact that she made a mistake, she would have to admit that she had committed an unjustifiable crime. It meant she would have to admit that Jacob committed an unjustifiable crime.

  “That girl didn’t do anything to him,” she whispered. “She didn’t do anything bad to him. And he cut her hair.”

  Corby checked her phone. She didn’t have any new messages and she didn’t want to re-read the old ones. Why was he silent? Was he waiting for a response from her? Was he waiting for her reaction?

  Opening the field for a new message, Corby thought for a moment. What should she write? What should she ask? What should she say? She loved him. Should she forgive him and accept everything he did? Mom and Dad fought all the time, but they still loved each other. They accepted their differences and continued to live together. They matured and grew together.

  “Who was she?” Corby wrote.

  The answer came almost immediately. He was waiting for it.

  Jacob: We have to meet. I’ll tell you everything.

  Corby: I’ll tell you when. My parents won’t let me out any time soon, because the girl was killed and her hair was cut off.

  Jacob: That’s terrible. Let me know.

  Corby turned off the phone. They shouldn’t say anything that would give them away.

  On the weekend, Mother drove Corby to a restaurant, where Abigail celebrated her sixteenth birthday. There weren’t too many people: Abigail’s little family and several girls from school. Molly and Jane were not there. Abigail seemed really happy to see Corby, introduced her to her friends and sisters, and didn’t leave her the whole evening. They didn’t talk about school and Corby was happy about that. She didn’t remember the last time she’d had so much fun. Jacob was on her mind and it saddened her day a bit, but she managed not to think about the murders. She managed not to think about the girl with cropped hair. She had to remember about her when the girls discussed the murder and suggested that it was done by the same person who made Vera and Sylvia disappear, but no one, of course, knew anything for sure. The knowledge of the secret didn’t make Corby as happy as before, and she cleared everything from her mind when they decided to move on to a more cheerful conversation.

  On Monday, her teacher didn’t come due to a cold and Corby contacted Jacob. She had to do it, whether she wanted to or not. She wanted to hear how he did it; she felt she needed that. She knew what she felt for him, he was the love of her life, and all the rest didn’t mean anything.

  “We are all going to die someday, Corby,” Jacob said after they settled at the corner table in the cafeteria, away from people. There was rain outside, Jacob’s mother was at home, the shop was still open, and this was the best place to meet. He just kissed her on the cheek when he saw her and whispered in her ear that he had missed her.

  “We are all meat,” Corby said softly, sipping her hot coffee.

  Jacob didn’t say anything, perhaps he didn’t hear. He drank his coffee, and set the cup on the table, gazing into it.

  “You didn’t change,” Corby added.

  “How was I supposed to change?” Jacob grinned. “Should I have grown horns? You didn’t change after what you did. I mean, you changed a lot, but not in the way you mean.”

  “Yes, I lost weight, but that’s not it.”

  “The main changes are going on here.” Jacob tapped his head. “For me it started after you showed me ... your fridge. That was the biggest change. Everything else is nothing, just minor details.”

  “It wasn’t nothing for me.”

  “It was. You just didn’t think about it like this. When you’re ready for it, everything is already prepared in your head to make a major step and taking the actual step is not the most difficult part.”

  “It wasn’t difficult for you?”

  Jacob lowered his eyes. “It was. I’m not going to lie.”

  “Why did you do it then?”

  “Did you really ask that question?”

  Corby didn’t answer and Jacob continued.

  “I didn’t tell you everything. I told you that my mother was overweight and kids made fun of her at school, but I didn’t tell you that I was really fat myself in first and second grade.”

  “Really?” Corby couldn’t believe it.

  “I had something wrong with my hormones. I didn’t grow tall, only fat. Then I started taking shots every day and I began to grow and I lost my excess weight. I’m still on injections. But that’s not important. No one bullied me except my mother’s boyfriend.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “He hated me. When my mother wasn’t there, he called me a wild boar. I didn’t tell her and she was upset that I hated him. One day she asked him to watch me while she was away and he,” Jacob stopped, “he made me strip naked, put me in front of the mirror, and demanded that I look at myself and call myself a boar. Then he made me touch myself, and when I did it because I was scared, he was a big guy and I was only seven, he ... I don’t know how to tell you.”

  Corby wasn’t sure if she wanted to hear.

  “He jerked off. But he didn’t touch me. Of course he told me that I shouldn’t tell my mother, otherwise he would kill her and all that. I believed him. The problem for him was that my mother had a hidden camera and neither I nor her boyfriend knew about it. It was for thieves. The sound wasn’t there, only the video. Mom didn’t check it because there was no reason. She reconsidered after I stopped eating and constantly cried. I just couldn’t control my emotions. In short, he was sent to prison and then released because he didn’t do anything, but I have a childhood trauma.” Jacob laughed, but it was a sad laugh.

  “That’s horrible.” Corby bit her lip and didn’t know what else to say.

  “Yeah. I’m over it now. Do you know who was,” Jacob leaned over the table and whispered to Corby, “that girl?”

  She shook her head.

  “His daughter.” Jacob straightened up. “Fuck her.”

  Corby swallowed a lump in her throat. “Did she know you?”

  “Yes. How else would I have found her? We met them once in a store, by chance. I recognized him immediately, even though I was little when it happened. My mother took me away from there, I didn’t talk to him, but I found him on Facebook.”

  “Did you contact her? They could figure it out and come find you.”

  “I chatted with her and a bunch of other people. And I invited her in a personal meeting ... But it doesn’t matter.”

  “You are not afraid of being caught?”

  “They won’t find me and they can’t prove anything.”

  “Did she do something to you personally?”

  “What’s the difference, Corby? She had bad genes, okay? It’s not revenge. She was just the most suitable candidate, that’s all.”

  “How did you feel when ... you did it?”

  Jacob looked at Corby for a long moment. She wanted to cast her eyes down or run away. Jacob had never looked at her like this.

  “How did I feel when I did it?” he asked. “How did you feel?”

  “Awful,” Corby answered honestly.

  “How did you feel afterwards? Did you have remorse?”

  “Not right away,” Corby confessed again.

  “Because we are teenagers, we haven’t developed empathy. You know what they say about us. Difficult age and all that.”

  “We’re not talking about teenagers in general,” Corby said.

  “I’m sure everything plays a role. If I were twenty-five right now, maybe I wouldn’t have done it.”

  “Jacob, you talked about,” Corby looked around, “Jane.”

  “So what?”

  “Do you still think about her?”

  Jacob paused before speaking again.

  “Corby, we are in this together,” he said. “We are one now. Don’t you agree with me?”

  Of course she agreed. She had to agree with everything he said.

  “I lov
e you,” Jacob continued. “I trust you completely. We’re different, you know? We are different from everyone else, because we are able to do what others can’t. We have the same chemical composition and we have the same enemies.”

  “I don’t go to school anymore and don’t consider Jane as my enemy.”

  “She does. And she will never leave you alone. You think she will? Am I wrong?”

  Corby thought for a second.

  “I think you’re right,” she said.

  “You know I’m right, you don’t think. People like her don’t stop. And you can’t really go to the police and complain about Jane. Do you know why? Because they will start paying attention to you and start to dig. You don’t know what they will find. Maybe everything. Corby,” Jacob took her hands in his, “we are closer to each other than anyone else in the world. We’ll become even closer if we do it together.”

  Corby looked into Jacob’s burning gray eyes, trying to imagine what they would do. Trying to imagine Jane and how they would kill her together. They would laugh at her while she cried and begged for mercy. She thought about it and then gently freed her hands.

  Jacob’s eyes changed.

  “I have to think,” Corby said.

  “You have already! I thought you made a decision. How long did it take for you to decide the first time?”

  “You’re raising your voice.” Corby turned around.

  “They have no idea what we’re talking about. Did you think for a long time? Did you have ideas about River? Why do you have doubts now? Do you want to do it alone?”

  “No,” Corby shook her head.

  “She decided to become a saint,” the inner voice laughed.

  “You can’t bring us back anyway,” Sylvia and Vera said together.

  “What then? Corby, you surprised me the first time. I didn’t understand you. Now I don’t understand you again. Maybe you feel bad for River? She’s a hundred times worse than her friends.”