by A. R. Torre
“Detached? Explain.”
“She was always hugging me, wanting to talk about my day, coming up to my room to spend time with me. With Summer and Trent, there wasn’t that show of affection, she didn’t seem eager or interested in spending time with them. It was almost like she was afraid of getting close to them.”
“Think back, Deanna. Was there any hint of what was to come?”
I close my eyes, concentrating on the question, flipping back through the past. But I already know the answer; it was a question I had asked myself for four years. “There were times she was moody or quiet, and times when we knew to give her space, but that’s ordinary behavior for any person, right? And sometimes she would fly off the handle for no reason—just go ballistic on us over some little thing.”
I roll over, playing with a seam on my comforter. “Something happened in the past, when I was young. I overheard Mom and Dad talking about it one day, something that caused Mom to be sent away for a bit. I asked Dad about it one day, and he just said she was sick, and I dismissed it as nothing. Honestly, even if she did fly off the handle at times, what happened seemed to come completely out of left field. The only clue I can think of, looking back on it, was that she had sent me away that day.”
I climbed the steps of our big white Colonial-style home, an impressive structure that screamed upper middle class, and threw open the red front door. Dropping my book bag at the base of the stairs with a heavy thud of educational oppression, I hollered, “Mom!” trying to find her in the big house.
“I’m up here, sweetie.”
Her voice had come from upstairs, and I bounded up the steps two at a time, out of breath by the time I reached the second-floor landing. I trotted down the hall, glancing in bedrooms till I saw her in mine. I blew in the open door. “You would not believe what happened today.” I stopped in my tracks, looking at my bed. “What are you doing?”
She had my suitcase open on the bed—a purple suitcase I hadn’t seen since last summer when I had made the horrid decision to go to volleyball camp. She must have pulled it from the attic. She had stacks of folded clothes on the bed and was in the midst of packing a pair of jeans when I asked the question.
She glanced at me, smiling. “You’re going to your grandparents’ for the weekend.”
“What? Why? Jennifer has a party at her parents’ lake house this weekend—you already said I could go!”
“I know, sweetie, and I’m sorry. But you haven’t seen them in ages, and when they called and asked, I couldn’t say no.”
I frowned at her. This was so completely out of character. “Are Trent and Summer going?”
She hesitated, folding a gray cardigan. “No. I don’t want to burden your grandparents with all three of you. Plus, it will be good for you to get one-on-one time with Papa and Nana. Once you go off to college, you won’t be seeing them as often.”
I walked over, looking at the clothes she had picked out. It was way too many clothes for two days at my grandparents’. But Mom had packed the right stuff. She knew what went with what and what was currently stylish. Missing Jennifer’s party sucked, but I had a feeling that Mom had something up her sleeve. I was a month from graduation and wouldn’t be surprised if she had something special planned. Mom was always big on surprises.
“Why do you think she sent you away?”
“Mom and I were very similar. I was a younger clone of her; at least that’s what she and Dad always called me.”
He cut off my next sentence. “Deanna, if you always considered yourself to be a clone of your mother, isn’t it possible that you are projecting this fantasy of violence onto yourself because you think that is what she was struggling with?”
“Anything’s possible, but I don’t think that paranoia would manifest itself in urges like the ones that I have.” Derek doesn’t know that I have killed before. He doesn’t know that I have sunk a knife into someone’s stomach and watched them die. That I left that experience and wanted more. More bloodshed, more death. I don’t trust the bonds of patient-doctor confidentiality that much. I move on before he can latch on to this theory and analyze it to death. “Anyway, I don’t know that she planned what happened, but I think she might have known something was coming. Killing me would have been like killing herself.”
“But she did kill herself.”
I pause. “Yeah, but maybe that was unexpected. Maybe after she did what she did, she couldn’t live with herself anymore.”
“Is that really what you believe?”
I stiffen on the soft bed. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, don’t spout off bullshit to make my questions go away.”
“It’s not bullshit; it’s the truth. And if I wanted your questions to go away, I’d just hang up the phone.”
“Maybe.”
That does it. I hang up out of spite, and then, giving in to my sophomoric tendencies, I stick my tongue out at my cell.
Derek doesn’t think that I am a killer. He says that my urges are strictly fantasies, that I don’t manifest other traits of a killer. He thinks I’m bipolar, that the dark side of me is just one facet of my personality, not the real me. He thinks we can compartmentalize it, kill it off altogether with “proper medication.”
What he doesn’t realize is that just because I call it “an urge” or “the other side of me” doesn’t mean it is a separate personality of mine. I used to call it Demon, because it was a lot easier for me to refer to it by name than call it cruorimania. Plus, when I was pissed at it, it was a lot easier to trash talk it if it had a moniker. But Demon was just a name, not a separate entity. I am Demon. There’s never nice Deanna, then evil Demon. I’m always evil. Demon is Deanna. So I finally just dropped the nickname and accepted anthropophobia, cruorimania, psychosis…all of it is who I am.
My many diagnoses would help in a murder trial. And technically, since I am a murderess, I should be in prison. But you have to realize that while prison would be a good thing for me, it’d be a very bad thing for my obsession. See, there are a lot of people in prison. And they wouldn’t be able to run far.
CHAPTER 13
JEREMY
HIS BROWN UNIFORM pressed, his name tag straightened, Jeremy Bryant rides the old metal elevator up to the sixth floor. The delivery isn’t scheduled until tomorrow, but seeing the address, he added it to his truck for today, wanting the excuse to get on this damn elevator, ride up to the sixth floor, and go through the same routine he had for the last three years. Ring, wait, sign, and leave. Not exciting enough to waste fifteen minutes on a day already jam-packed with deliveries. Yet here he is.
The package is a small manila envelope with “Jessica Reilly” written on the front. Most deliveries to this address are for Deanna Madden, but occasionally the names on the packages changed; Jessica Reilly being a frequent recipient. He’d originally assumed she had roommates, but after sharing an elevator with the apartment complex superintendent, he had discovered she lived alone, paid for her rent a year at a time, and—according to the overweight, unwashed man—was “smokin’ hot.”
“Really,” Jeremy said. “Hot?” It had crossed his mind. The mystery of not being able to see her had sent his imagination into overdrive—one day convinced she was gorgeous, the next day envisioning one of those gargantuan women who have to be forklifted from the couch.
“Smokin’ hot. Beautiful face with a body that I jacked off to for days.” Hmmm. Not a forklift woman.
“How often do you see her?”
The man laughed. “She’s the mystery of this building, man. She’s hiding from someone. She hasn’t left that apartment since the day she moved in. I mean that literally. The door closed, and that was it. One guy pulled the fire alarm a couple of years ago, just to see if she’d come out. We all stood outside in the freezing-ass cold at two in the morning, but she didn’t budge.” The elevator came to a shuddering stop and the man nodded at Jeremy, moving laboriously ahead of him through the filthy opening. “See you late
r.”
Her delivery habits corroborated the super’s statements. The volume of packages she received was staggering, at least for a normal person who didn’t run a retail operation out of her house. They were frequent enough that he made almost daily deliveries to this ancient apartment complex and had become accustomed to and unaffected by the dark elevator that barely made the climb to her floor. And she had consistently, for three years, refused to open her door; his first delivery had been a disastrous standoff that ended in her favor.
He hadn’t given a second thought to the box, other than the fact that it was incredibly heavy, more than seventy pounds—a large box from an electronics superstore. He almost missed her door, starting to pass it and then stopping short, checking the address before knocking.
There was movement in the apartment, steps, a small commotion, and then a breathless voice.
“Yes?”
“UPS. I have a package for a Deanna Madden.”
“Just leave it at the door, please.”
He glanced down at the box. “It’s insured, ma’am. Needs a signature.”
“So scribble my name.”
“I’m sorry, I can’t do that. If you need some time to dress, I can wait or come back later.”
“I’m dressed, but I’m not opening the door. Leave the package and handle the signature however you want to.”
Her voice was strong but had a sweet tone and enough sass that his mind begged for a look at the woman connected to it. He ground his teeth and looked at the door. “Ma’am, it’s insured for eleven hundred dollars. I can’t leave it without a signature. Would you prefer for me to deliver it tomorrow?”
“I’m not going to open the door tomorrow either.”
He fought the urge to groan in frustration. He looked down at the heavy box. “I’m not sure of your size, but the box is pretty heavy. You will probably need help carrying it inside.”
“I appreciate your concern, but I will be fine. Thank you.”
Thank you. An assumptive statement that indicated her decision that he was going to leave the box. Decided before he had made up his mind. He sighed, torn between leaving a $1,000 package in this mildewed hallway and taking it with him to try this whole song and dance tomorrow.
He left the package, doing his best imitation of a girlish script on his scan pad and sending a long look into the dark peephole, trying to communicate his displeasure with the whole situation. Shaking his head, he headed toward the elevator, hoping that he never had to deal with her again.
That was three years ago. Three years in which he has heard her voice through that door—lugged, toted, and swung countless packages with annoying regularity down that dim hallway. The woman seems to have toilet paper delivered via two-day mail. He looks down at the manila package, for Jessica Reilly. The sender is a mail-forwarding company in Des Moines, Iowa. That is another mystery. About 10 percent of her packages are mail-forwarded, most from senders with no return address. Maybe she is a terrorist. A terrorist who has a penchant for household goods and who receives packages with hearts drawn on them.
The elevator doors open with the squeal of metal on metal and he steps onto the dark brown carpet that is the sixth floor. Stopping before her door, he leans forward and listens.
The sounds coming from her apartment often vary. Sometimes music, sometimes voices, once a cry that sounded sexual in nature. Today it is quiet. He straightens and raps on the door three times.
“Leave it. Thank you.” The voice comes immediately, from below, as if she is crouched or seated on the other side of the door.
Leave it. Thank you. He grins despite himself, signing her name to the pad and gently leaning the package against the door. He raises a hand, waving to the silent door, unsure if she will see the gesture given the height her voice is coming from. “Have a nice day,” he calls out, starting the walk back to the elevator. She won’t open the door; she never does. He stood two doors down once and waited for fifteen minutes, but her door remained closed, the package sitting before it like a piece of delicious cheese in a rattrap. He presses the elevator button, the doors opening immediately, and steps in, his view of the sixth floor disappearing as the doors close.
CHAPTER 14
ON THE CAMMING sites, it costs clients an extra dollar per minute if they want to turn on their own webcam and let me watch them via the cam-to-cam feature. This feature, as well as allowing me to see them, a feature that voyeurists love, allows sound—the ability for a client to speak instead of type. Every groan, every gasp, comes through loud and clear via the speakers that I have scattered throughout my cam room. Some clients don’t like to type their responses, but they’re too cheap to pay the extra dollar per minute just so they can talk. Those clients ask me to call them, the camsite economics circumvented with the simple dial of a number.
When I signed up for the site, I had to agree to a list of rules. One of those was that I can’t establish contact directly with the clients. Phone calls break that rule. Initially I was the perfect cammer, following the rules to a T—biting the hand that fed me was scary, especially at the beginning, when my bank account was in the three digits and I wasn’t sure how this whole webcamming thing would pan out financially. Now, I break rules with blatant disregard. I advertise my personal site, I give out my mailing address, I perform “forbidden acts” like flashing my tits in free chat, and I allow clients to get emotionally attached to me.
Part of the reason I break the rules is my virtual way of giving them the middle finger. As my bank account balance and number of fans have risen, I have grown more and more irritated with the cam sites. Yes, they have made me rich, but I have paid them back tenfold. Literally. Last month, my cut from Cams.com was $57,000. My total revenue generated? $203,581.42. They pocketed a cool $150K that month for doing nothing but broadcasting my video feed. So I break their damn rules, and they don’t say a damn thing about it.
That wasn’t always the case. Once, I got a call from a nasally voiced man who sounded like one step up the food chain from the mailroom. He started in with a scripted lecture on how my account would be suspended if I continued to break the rules that I agreed to at sign-up. I let him finish his script before informing him that last year his website made more than $1 million off of my chat sessions. I told him to have his boss call me and hung up. That month I got a card in the mail with a personal apology and a check for ten grand. I’m not gonna lie, I had some warm and fuzzies for a week or so over that.
I do understand the rules, why they are in place. The majority of the rules are truly for our protection. The rest are for profiteering reasons. But the rules about contact—those are to protect us against the sickos. Which in my case is fucking hilarious.
I protect myself as best I can. Any packages clients want to send me get sent to a campus address in Delaware, which forwards my mail here. I also have a Delaware cell phone number, which rings to a phone I have dedicated to camming, my cheery voice mail message proclaiming that you have reached Jessica Reilly and sorry! I can’t take your call right now because I am busy having fun! It is nauseatingly cheerful. The men love it. On a given day, I receive anywhere from twenty to forty voice mails. I don’t return them and respond to text messages only if they concern appointment times.
I used to have a texting plan—clients could pay thirty bucks a month to text with me—but it got to be a full-time job and not one that paid $6.99 a minute. So that entrepreneurial venture lasted only three weeks. I’ve tried a few other harebrained ideas to generate income but have found that my time is best served in front of the camera. The lights, the clients. They pay the bills and help keep the crazy away.
CHAPTER 15
ANNIE
ANNIE PUSHES HER hair back and admires the plain wrapping, a single pink ribbon hanging loosely off the tape her uncle has worked loose.
“Well, go ahead,” Frank prods, bumping her small body gently with his elbow. She looks over at him, her mouth spread wide in an expectant gri
n. Her small fingers grip and rip the paper, revealing a pink princess costume set, complete with a feather boa, plastic crown, and silk gloves. The sun glints off the crown’s large pink jewels, and she throws away the wrapping and waves the set excitedly, the wind blowing the boa around. He stands, chasing the yellow paper, which jumps and skips across the grass yard, finally snagging it and crumpling it into a tight ball. Gripping the ball tightly, he walks back to her. She tugs on the cheap crown, trying to free it from the cardboard display board. The plastic curves, close to breaking with each pull of her fingers, and he reaches out as he sits back down beside her, taking the item gently from her. He turns it over, untwisting the plastic ties, and she leans closer, her breath blowing warm on his neck. Finally the crown is free, and he holds it up, setting it gently on her head and pushing the plastic teeth into her blond hair.
“How do I look, Uncle Frank?” she asks, grabbing the boa and wrapping it around her slim neck.
“Perfect, honey. You look absolutely beautiful.” His gruff voice is quiet, but she hears the words and throws her arms around his neck, kissing him on the cheek.
“Thanks, Uncle Frank,” she whispers.
“Annie!” Annie looks up into the strained eyes of her mother. “Annie, come inside. Uncle Michael and Aunt Becky are here.”
She stands, brushing off the fabric of her dress, and grabs her uncle’s hand, tugging it as she climbs a concrete step. “Come on! Come inside!”
“You go on. I’m gonna stay right here for a bit, Annie,” her uncle says, a small frown on his face. Then he smiles at her. “I just need a minute, sweetie. Go inside, like your momma says.”
