by Kevin Wilson
They took a break and smoked some pot and watched videos of cheerleader accidents on YouTube. Wolfgang went back to his room to check his e-mail and probably do something unsavory. It was now three in the morning and the girls were finding it hard to reclaim the initial rush of making something so stupid and violent. They were out of Adderall and the pot, as always, made inactivity seductive. Mary Beth held Jess’s mask up so that Jess could take another hit from the pipe, pulling calmness down into her lungs. On the computer, a cheerleader did a backflip right into the face of another cheerleader. “I’m so fucking hungry,” Wallis said. Only Lanie, her own desires burning the pot right out of her system on impact, kept her focus on the movie.
“It’s the ending that needs to be perfect,” she said. “We’re gonna kill Wallis and then . . . what?”
Jess, almost asleep, said, “And then the killer just disappears into the night, off to who knows where.”
Lanie nodded, but wasn’t satisfied. “Of course that’s the easy ending. I want something better than that.”
“I’m thinking maybe I don’t want to be killed anymore,” Wallis said.
“Okay, fuck,” Lanie said, closing the Internet window on the computer and clapping her hands together furiously. “Everybody just hold on for another hour and we’ll be done.”
“Let’s just eat some popcorn and go to bed,” Mary Beth said.
Lanie grunted and then disappeared from the room. She came back with a prescription bottle and dumped the pills onto her math textbook. She put her civics textbook on top and jumped up and down on the books until the pills were reduced to a fine powder. “These are my mom’s weird fucking diet pills that some shady doctor gives her. They are pretty much speed, I think. We’re going to snort this and then finish the movie and then we’re going to collapse in bed together like a big litter of newborn kittens.”
“Ugh,” Wallis said. “Fine.” The other girls gave their grudging consent and bent over the lines that Lanie was cutting up.
The girls were not used to so many drugs, though they tried to pretend it was no big deal, like they were teenagers in a bad movie and all they ever thought about was getting high and having sex. Truth be told, they smoked small amounts of pot on a weekly basis, to make the world tolerable, and then they took Adderall when they really needed to not fail an exam. Real drugs were too much trouble to keep circulating through their bodies. Now, however, the drugs stacking in their systems, their bodies confused by the irregular gorging on junk food, they were wired and glossy in a way that felt very dangerous, even in the safety of this empty house. Wolfgang, who demanded he get some of the diet pills, was starting to become a tangible threat, the way he no longer cared about their personal space, forcing himself into their circle as if he were one of them. He started filming them in random moments, which he said was for “behind the scenes” footage. He was so lanky and petulant and doofy, however, that her increased caution around him was perhaps more paranoia than good instincts on Jess’s part. Or perhaps the threat lay not entirely with Wolfgang, but within herself, the things she might allow herself to do. Her body had built up an excess of static electricity that had seemingly nowhere to go.
“He shouldn’t be doing drugs, right?” Jess asked Lanie as they watched the twins take the brunt of Wolfgang’s non sequiturs and vague come-ons. “With the rehab and everything?”
“That was a while ago,” Lanie said. “I don’t think it matters much now. He does what he wants.”
Wallis was to die on the stairs. Lanie filled a plastic shopping bag with fake blood, tied the handles shut as best she could, and, after they had filmed Jess stabbing Wallis, shoved the bag under Wallis’s shirt. Lanie poked a hole in the bag and Wolfgang filmed Wallis as she crawled up the staircase, a river of blood trailing her movements. Halfway up, Wallis slumped on the stairs and slid down to the bottom before crawling up again. When she reached the top, she shuddered and died.
The other girls clapped in appreciation of her fantastic death. For the first time in a while, Jess felt unambiguously happy as she watched Wallis smile, blood smeared across her face and neck. Then Jess realized that Wallis wasn’t so much smiling as she was grinding her teeth. Still, she hugged Wallis and they sat on the stairs and watched the blood pool and collect, a huge mess that they would not even consider cleaning up. Wallis had been a track star in junior high but quit before high school for reasons no more mysterious than boredom. Still, she had that straightforward dullness in her eyes that Jess recognized in athletes and was pretty in a boyish way that suggested she could leave them behind if she wanted to.
“Are you having a good time?” Jess asked her.
“Every time I think I might not be friends with you guys anymore,” Wallis confessed, “I remember that I love shit like this and no one else would do it with me.”
It made Jess happy to hear this admission, as if their friendship had been secretly tested and found to be strong enough to withstand it. It was their weirdness, she realized, that kept them together, and though she imagined this would burn out over time, she was grateful for it now.
Lanie had given up on an ending, settling for the killer slipping away in the night, leaving carnage behind. From a storytelling standpoint, Wolfgang said, this made the most sense. Jess was amazed that, even with his truncated experience in film school, Wolfgang had a very limited vocabulary when it came to making movies. Or maybe he was just really high, she realized.
“I have an idea,” Jess said.
“Let’s hear it,” Lanie replied.
“I just stay in the house,” Jess offered. “I don’t leave.”
“Maybe,” Heather said, getting excited, “it was her house all along.”
“Ooh, I like that,” Mary Beth said.
“Maybe,” Wallis added, “she killed all her sisters and now it’s just her.”
“I like that,” Wolfgang said. “It’s a nice twist ending.”
Jess felt certain of herself, a rare occasion, but she still waited for Lanie to weigh in.
“It’s perfect,” Lanie finally said. “You’re not some killer. You’re just some girl.”
“Or,” Jess said, “I’m just some girl who’s also a killer.”
They set up the shot quickly. Wolfgang following Jess as she climbed the stairs, walked into Lanie’s bedroom, and pulled off her mask. She shook out her hair. Going on instinct, she walked over to the nightstand and rubbed some moisturizer on her face. Then, without thinking too much about it, not caring that Wolfgang and the other girls were watching her, she stripped off her sweatpants and T-shirt. In just her bra and panties, she slipped into Lanie’s bed and turned off the bedside lamp.
“Cut,” Lanie said, her voice ragged and chewed up.
It was dark enough that Jess could not discern where Wolfgang and the girls stood in the room. It was silent now, no one moving or speaking, and Jess lingered in the bed, holding on to the moment, the movie finished, before she would have to pull back the covers and join her friends again.
She had made this moment happen, surprised by the power of her own desires. She had killed everyone around her and created a place just for herself. She lay in the bed, breathing softly, and she heard Lanie say, “Jess,” her voice pitched slightly higher than normal, worry having crept in. But Jess didn’t respond. She stretched her body and felt her muscles, which had been so tense throughout the night, relax just enough that it felt like a new drug in her system. “Jess?” Lanie said again, and finally Jess replied, “I’m okay.” The lights came on and everyone was staring at her, half smiles on their faces. She threw off the covers and smiled back at them, even Wolfgang, and stepped out of the bed. It was six in the morning, the sun just beginning to rise, every single disaster in the house softer in the daylight.
Now that it was all over, every fake knife broken into uselessness, Wolfgang uploaded the footage to his laptop and they watched it with the detachment of a fever dream. Wolfgang promised that he would edit it into something pe
rfect and they could upload it on Vimeo and the entire world could see it. “This feels like something viral,” Lanie said. Jess, who had wanted to be invisible, suddenly realized that a lot of people would watch her in her bra and panties, but it seemed silly to mention this worry now. Perhaps this was how bad decisions worked, she considered. They happened so quickly and felt so unreal that you didn’t really care about the repercussions until it was too late. But a thing probably happened whether you wanted it to or not, good and bad, and you either allowed it to happen, or you fought it off long enough that you felt absolved of the eventual outcome.
Framed like the ending to an entirely different horror movie, their bodies were scattered around the room. Wolfgang had fallen asleep on the floor, wedged between Mary Beth and Heather, who hadn’t bothered to change out of their bloodstained clothes. Wallis was curled up on a beanbag chair and snoring so loudly that it seemed fake. Only Lanie and Jess remained awake, still giddy, though their excitement was tinged with the sadness that the night was over, that they would never be able to conjure those exact feelings again.
They did not bother to clean up the blood that covered the floors and walls of the house. They left that horror to the parents’ return the next day. In order to escape the morning sun, now filling the house with unwanted light, Lanie and Jess hid under the covers of Lanie’s bed. Half afraid that if they let go they would fade, ghostlike, into this atmosphere, they wrapped their arms around each other tightly until every last bit of the drugs wore off, but not the thrill of making a truly wonderful disaster.
The Lost Baby
1.
The baby was so beautiful, so perfect, that Meggy constantly allowed herself the fantasy of eating her baby, of consuming him until the baby was housed entirely inside of her own body. “You are so beautiful,” she whispered to the baby.
After the baby was gone, she thought of how often she imagined the pleasure of devouring him, knowing that she would never actually do it. How would she, in reality? And what struck her now, in the baby’s absence, was that the baby, without a care in the world, swallowed Meggy whole.
The baby was so beautiful, so perfect, that Paul could not imagine the baby’s future. To imagine an adult with his son’s name, to imagine a future where the boy did not entirely need Paul, it was impossible.
After the baby was gone, he thought of how simpleminded he had been, the way he perpetually placed the baby’s future self in a kind of stylized fog. And what struck him now, in the baby’s absence, was that he could not conjure, no matter how hard he tried, an image of the child as it must now be, out in the world, separate from Paul.
2.
Meggy and Paul passed a crudely made coupon offering one night of free babysitting between the two of them, each one examining the simple piece of paper as if there was hidden fine print. The baby was eight and a half months old, gurgling and happy, lying on his back. In those eight and a half months, Meggy and Paul had not spent a single moment alone outside of the house. They were, though they told no one, not even their best friends, on the verge of a breakup. They loved the baby more than anything they’d ever loved before, more than, they were surprised to learn, each other. They could not yet determine if this was natural, or if it spoke to previously unexplored problems between them. Or maybe they were simply exhausted and prone to overthinking things. They still loved each other, felt the intensity of their longing when the other was away. They simply loved the baby more. Or, maybe, they suspected, the other person didn’t love the baby with the same intensity as they did and held it against them. Or perhaps they didn’t love the baby as much as the other person and were being judged for this. They were so tired, did not realize that love and exhaustion could cause such mania.
Paul taught fiction at a tiny liberal arts college in the middle of nowhere. Up until eight months ago, Meggy taught poetry workshops at the same college. But Meggy was now on maternity leave. And she would be taking a leave of absence for at least a year after her maternity leave ended. Paul would keep teaching, it was decided jointly, to keep a steady paycheck, for him to continue to move toward tenure. Meggy’s job was always more tenuous, simply a visiting professor gig, tied to Paul’s own position. Paul told Meggy that this would work out, that she could “focus on her poetry” during the leave of absence, and she wanted to take her fingernail and drag it deeply down the side of his face. When would she write poetry, when she was changing diapers full of shit? When she was rocking the baby at three in the morning, reminding herself with great effort not to rock the baby so hard that it died? When the baby was napping? If he said, when the baby is napping, she would drag that fingernail down the other side of his face. He shrugged. He knew about the imbalance of gender roles when it came to parenting. He was a college professor. But he was never a great student; he didn’t pay enough attention when he should have, so he made most of it up as he went along. Like when he suggested that, if she didn’t get a lot of writing done, perhaps she would get a lot of reading done, which could also be really instructive and helpful.
And Paul thought about how, when he would return from a day of teaching, he would sometimes, often, find Meggy sitting alone in the living room while the baby wailed in its crib. “Sometimes I want to stab myself in the stomach with a knife,” she once told him, seconds after he walked into the house, and he said that she was a great mother, that it was going to be okay, and she replied, “That’s not why I want to do it.” He would hold the baby while he did his best to make dinner, nothing more than a protein and a vegetable, sometimes both roasted in the same pan. He would bathe the baby while Meggy watched a TV show or napped, and then he would wait until everything was quiet, his son and his wife asleep, and he would go into their shared study to grade and plan his lessons. And when he fell asleep, he slept so deeply that he had no idea what went on during the rest of the night, and he was always shocked to hear how many times Meggy had to tend to the baby, how little sleep she had gotten. “I had no idea,” he told her as he made breakfast. “Didn’t you?” she asked him.
Both knew that the other was doing their best. They just weren’t sure that this was enough to stay together.
What they now held in their hands was a coupon. Their next-door neighbors, the Shibayamas, gave them the coupon at the baby shower, a time so far in the past that they could not quite remember it. They had invited the Shibayamas, Jameson and Mindy, because it seemed awkward not to, because they lived in the adjacent house and they were aware of the impending baby. Paul and Meggy barely knew them, simple small talk when they were caught outside with them. And then they had invited the couple and it was clear from the Shibayamas’ reaction that it was a kind of intimacy that they were unprepared for.
Mindy was a lawyer, her specific area of expertise unknown to them, though she was beloved by the people of the town for her community work. Jameson wrote science fiction novels and developed tabletop RPGs. He had given his most well-known novel, The Silver Corsair, to Paul and Meggy, signed, “With gratitude for your interest in this world I’ve created.” Paul read the first one hundred and fifty pages but gave up, unable to understand the vagaries of galactic treaties, the particulars of the underlying tensions between alien races, the oftentimes blatant misogyny of the titular Corsair. When he next saw Jameson, Paul commented on how much he had enjoyed the novel. “What specifically?” Jameson asked him, and Paul, dumbfounded, worked his way toward an answer, smiling the entire time. “Well, I loved the way you pulled everything together by the end,” he finally said, and Jameson nodded, pleased. “But I also left quite a bit up in the air,” he said. “That, too,” Paul admitted. “There’s a sequel,” Jameson said, “but you’ll have to buy that one. Only one free book per family.” That night, Paul ordered the sequel from a website that specialized in out-of-print books, and he left the book out in case Jameson ever happened to come inside their house.
At the party, the Shibayamas spoke only to Meggy’s brother-in-law, would not leave him alone for re
asons that Paul and Meggy could not decipher, and then they said that they had to leave early and gave Paul and Meggy an envelope. “Open it later,” Mindy told them, and it wasn’t until two days later that Meggy remembered the envelope, which had been bundled together with all the greeting cards that they had accumulated. When they opened the envelope, they found a single index card with this written in black marker: “This coupon entitles the bearer to one free night of babysitting.”
“What the hell is this?” Paul asked, holding it up for Meggy to read.
“I guess they’ll watch the baby one night,” Meggy said, shrugging.
“Why?” Paul asked. “We don’t even know them.”
“I wonder if they just assumed that we’d never ask them.”
“That is kind of shrewd,” Paul admitted.
And they had forgotten the card, hidden in a drawer in the kitchen, until this very night, five minutes after their babysitter had canceled, the dinner reservations already made.
“Are we going to do this?” Meggy asked her husband. The baby continued to gurgle, as if delighted by their anxiety.
“Why not?” Paul asked.
“They don’t have any kids,” Meggy said. “Do they even know what to do?”
“The baby will be asleep the entire time,” Paul said. “They just have to sit in the living room and wait until we get home.”
“Is this okay?” Meggy asked again, almost crying.
“Goddammit,” Paul said. “I want to have a night alone with you.”
“Well,” Meggy said, her voice rising, “I want to have a night alone with you.”
“Well,” Paul replied. “Then what’s the problem?”
They both looked at the baby, who had stopped gurgling and was now watching them in that curious way that made both of them intensely feel different things. For Meggy, the baby’s calm, searching gaze made her flush, made her want to straddle someone and slowly grind on them. Not the baby, God, but Paul or someone like Paul. For Paul, it made him feel like he had not been a good person in his early life, that he was not capable of taking care of a child, but it made him, each time the baby looked at him in this way, resolve to be worthy of the baby.
