Born Evil

by Julia Derek

  “Um, okay.” I honestly didn’t think I’d be able to do that. My mind was hyperactive. I was grateful if I could finish one thought before starting on the next. “What’s the phrase?”

  “‘I can never hurt another being in any way. Love is always the answer.’”

  Okay, I would never be able to repeat cheesy crap like that for twenty minutes. But I would give it a try. It wasn’t like Mom would know anyway.

  “Got it?” Mom asked.

  “Yes.” I repeated the words the way I knew she wanted me to do.

  “Good boy. I’m going to play some music. As soon as I turn on the music, close your eyes and start repeating the phrases in your mind over and over. Don’t stop until the music has finished playing. I know it sounds really boring, but it will do wonders for you. I promise. Ready?”

  I nodded and she started the music.

  29

  Shane… Shane!” Someone was grabbing my leg and shaking me. I opened my eyes and saw a crazy-looking woman with short, black hair hovering over me. I was confused at first. I had to blink a couple of times before I realized the woman was Mom. What had just happened? Did I fall asleep? We were in our squalid room, the sun filtering in through the window above the nightstand, highlighting a myriad of dust particles floating around in the air.

  “Were you able to do it?” she wanted to know, her face eager. “Did you feel like you went into the zone?” She straightened and sat back on her bed.

  I pushed myself up into a seated position on my bed, not fully awake yet. At some point during the meditation, I must have fallen asleep. I do remember repeating the two phrases for a while, longer than I had thought possible only to pass out at some point. I guess meditation was not for people like me, who could fall asleep easily.

  “I think so,” I answered, rubbing my eyes to get the rest of the sleep out of them. “It definitely made me very relaxed.” I grinned at her, and she chuckled.

  “That’s good. Next time, try to stay awake the entire time. You’re not supposed to pass out but to reach a higher state. Or zone.”

  “Did you get into the zone?”

  She pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes that were no longer covered by those thick-framed, black glasses; she always removed them when we got to our place. “Maybe a little. It’s hard staying so focused. Harder than what one would think. But we’ll try again later. Practice makes perfect. Are you hungry?”

  “Yeah, starving!”

  “Let’s go have lunch then.”

  We pulled ourselves together and left the house. There was a small Cuban restaurant that we had gone to before that we liked, so we went there. Mom told me it would have to be the last time, though, since we needed to save our money. We would need to eat fast food or at home from now on.

  We spent the rest of the day walking around the city, sightseeing.

  The next few days were spent at the library, at different branches in the Miami-Dade area, where Mom logged onto one of the computers. In the mornings Mom forced me to meditate before breakfast. I can’t say I’m getting better at it, but at least I managed to not pass out again. I still had no idea what was so great about it. In addition to staying on top of the news and the investigation, Mom wanted to do some more research in the field of psychology. She was obsessed with psychology, lately more so than ever. I kept asking her why it mattered so much to her, but she refused to give me a straight answer. She told me to play games on my burner phone instead of worrying about what she was up to. Or, better, read a book or two. After all, the library was full of them, so I might as well take advantage of it.

  I was bored with the games on my phone already and I was in no mood to read a book, so I found an empty computer and went over there to surf the web myself. If Mom didn’t want to look for the killer, I’d do it on my own. At least I was going to try. The problem was, I had no idea where to start. I didn’t even know who would want to kill Dr. Wilkins.

  Well, I can start by checking out all the news stories that have been written on the subject, I thought. Make sure I had read every single one of them. I had only read the ones Mom had shown me so far, but maybe she had missed some.

  An hour later, I was done and none the wiser. In order to have a chance of finding the real killer, we would have to get back to New York City. I highly doubted we’d find him or her down here in Miami. As I waited for Mom to finish her research, I went to the bathroom where I took my time. When I returned to the reading room, I went up to Mom. She appeared as hypnotized by the computer screen as when I’d left ten minutes earlier.

  I went up behind her.

  “Finding anything interesting?” I asked her.

  She gasped and swiveled her head in my direction.

  I chuckled. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you!”

  She tsk-tsked and shook her head at me. “Well, you did. How are you?”

  “I’m good. Just a little bored. We’ve been here forever.” I remained standing next to her chair.

  She pushed it out and got to her feet. “Okay, we can leave. I just need to visit the bathroom. Why don’t you have a seat and wait for me?” She indicated her chair. “I won’t be long.”

  “Okay,” I said and plopped down on the chair. She ruffled my hair and left. I faced the computer and glanced at what she had been looking at. I had expected it to be some article about psychology, but it was a bank statement. I took a closer look at it and saw that it was from her own checking account. A statement of the previous billing cycle, which had just closed.

  Why was she checking out her own bank statement? To see how much money we had left? I scrolled down the statement. How much money did we have left? It could be good to know.

  I soon found the total and, according to it, we had close to 12,000 bucks. That seemed to be enough for a while. Not that we could access it or anything, or the cops would be able to trace us. She had explained that to me carefully and kept reminding me each time I wanted to buy something we didn’t need.

  Casually, I went through the stuff she had bought using her card attached to the account. Most of it was food and some stuff from H&M and the drugstore. A few things from Amazon. My mom loved Amazon, the convenience of home delivery. She had used the card to pay a couple of bills, one for our cell phones and another for the electricity.

  I was about to pull up another site to check the weather for tomorrow when something in the statement caught my eye. She had paid a cab twice on the same day. Mom never took cabs, claiming they were an unnecessary expense. Why had she taken cabs that day? One ride came to almost twenty-three bucks and the other to twenty-five. That was a lot of money. I had to ask her about it. I looked closer at the charge, clicking the first one open. It said the taxi ride had taken place the day before the charge had gone through. I clicked on the second cab charge. It said the same thing there.

  I changed my mind about asking her about the cab rides when I realized they had occurred the same day that Dr. Wilkins was murdered.

  30

  Is everything okay?” Mom asked, standing behind me suddenly. Mere seconds had passed since I had discovered the weird cab charges. Quickly, I moved the screen up to the same place where it had been when she had gone to the restroom, hoping she wouldn’t notice what I had been staring at. “You look worried.”

  I gave a casual shrug. “I’m not worried. Why would I be worried?”

  “I don’t know.” She peered at me for a moment, as though sizing me up, then smiled and adjusted her thick-framed glasses. “Are you ready to leave?”

  “Yeah,” I said and pushed out the chair. “Want me to log out?” I indicated the computer screen with her bank information displayed.

  “Yes, please.”

  I closed the browser and then we walked out of the library. The sun had disappeared behind a few large, dark clouds and it felt chillier outside, matching my new mood. It didn’t take long before I could feel sticks of rain on my skin. Mom was talking about something she had read in an article about the ben
efits of meditation. I was barely listening, my mind going a mile a minute, trying to figure out why she had taken such expensive cab rides the day Dr. Wilkins was murdered. Where had Dr. Wilkins lived? That tidbit of information had been mentioned several times in the news articles about his murder. I searched my mind and soon remembered what it had said. Dr. Wilkins had lived in the seventies between Third and Lexington Avenue on Manhattan, a neighborhood known as the Upper East Side. We lived smack in the middle of Queens, so a cab to the Upper East Side would cost somewhere between twenty and twenty-five bucks, tips included. I knew this because I had recently ridden a cab back home with a friend after we had gone to see a play in the Upper East Side area. My friend’s mother had insisted we take a cab home, so we had. She had given my friend money to pay with and I remember how we had discussed how much tip one should leave on a twenty-one-dollar fare.

  I scowled lightly. What did it matter where Dr. Wilkins lived? Did I actually think Mom had used her card to pay for cabs so she could travel comfortably to Dr. Wilkins’s house and kill him? That was ridiculous! Why would she do such a thing?

  But then why had she used cabs twice that day? She never ever took cabs.

  I could always ask her, but for some reason I didn’t want to do that.

  “Are you listening to me, honey?” she asked as we walked down a street with queer storefronts on one side. It had stopped raining, thank God.

  “Yeah, sorry. I was just thinking about something I saw online.” I made myself smile at her.

  She grabbed my arm hard and stopped in her tracks. “What did you see online?”

  Her face had gone dark and she was staring at me. What was wrong with her? Why was she squeezing my arm like that? I instantly stopped smiling.

  “Ouch, that hurts,” I whimpered and tried to shake myself loose. Mom only grabbed onto me harder. She had hurt me before when I misbehaved, but I couldn’t remember the last time. It had been a while. I couldn’t see what I had done wrong now, either.

  “What did you see online?” she repeated, narrowing her eyes.

  “I’ll tell you if you let go of my arm,” I muttered, annoyed.

  Thankfully, she did and said in a much kinder tone, “Sorry about that. I have PMS today. Please forgive me, honey. I didn’t mean to hurt you. What did you see?”

  “Just that the person who killed Dr. Wilkins used a large knife from Crate & Barrel. The same kind we have. The kind with the weird, bubbly blade.” I regretted saying those words as soon as they had leaped off my tongue. Where had they come from? I didn’t know what kind of knife had been used to kill Dr. Wilkins, did I? There hadn’t been any mentions on what kind of knife had been used, only that it had been a kind of knife sold at that store.

  Mom gazed at me with a funny expression for which I couldn’t say I blamed her.

  “You’re saying you saw the murder weapon mentioned in one of the articles you read about his murder?” she asked after several seconds passed.

  “Um, yeah,” I lied. It was in that moment that I realized why those words had come to me in the first place. We had been missing our own Crate & Barrel knife for a while. It was my favorite knife to cut stuff with because it was so sharp and, lately, I couldn’t find it anywhere. I used it for everything. When I asked Mom a while ago if she had seen it, she’d said no.

  “Oh,” was all she said to that, much to my relief. I really wasn’t in the mood to go into detail about the knife.

  She kept talking about the benefits of meditation all the way to the grocery store and this time I made sure I paid attention. We bought more sparkling water, crackers and cheese, and fruit for our house. A jumbo bag of sour patches. When we were back to our studio, Mom stopped and turned to face me just as we were about to enter the place.

  “I think your suggestion is a good one,” she said to me.

  “What suggestion?” I had suggested a whole bunch of things in the store, one of them being that we should have burgers and fries for dinner at the local McDonalds. Mom said she would think about it. I hoped she was referring to eating burgers tonight.

  “That we should go back to New York and track down the killer on our own. It really does seem like the cops have no idea what they’re doing or they would have come up with some suspects by now. It’s been more than three weeks since Dr. Wilkins was killed.”

  “Really?” I could hardly believe my ears. So we were going back then? Great! I was beginning to get sick of Miami, and especially the studio apartment we were sharing. And all we did was hang at the different libraries. It was good use of our time, according to her, since we needed to be frugal. It was too cold to swim in the ocean, another cheap pastime, so unfortunately that was out. Mom didn’t want me to get too friendly with other kids here anyway, so she was happy I was mostly with her. My burner phone had the worst camera, so I couldn’t even go out on excursions and take pics to pass the time. I missed my friends back in New York a lot more than I had thought. I even missed going to school. I hated my ugly black hair, so I did my best to avoid mirrors.

  Thank God Mom had come to her senses. I suddenly couldn’t stop smiling.

  “When are we going?” I asked her as she opened the door to our mini-apartment with the key we shared.

  “Hang on,” she said and pushed the door open. “Let’s talk more about it when we’re inside.”

  I followed her into our little home, never before having been so eager to do so. She took a seat on one of the chairs next to the rickety kitchen table and faced me again.

  “I was thinking we’d leave tomorrow,” she said. “How does that sound?”

  I grinned big at her. “Awesome!”

  She returned my grin and ruffled my hair. “Then that’s what we’ll do.”

  31

  Getting back to New York was even more painful and tedious than it had been going to Florida, primarily because the ticket salesperson in Miami refused to sell Mom tickets without her showing her photo ID. So we had to take local buses, stopping in various cities throughout the Sunshine State until we found a ticket person who didn’t care about ID’s. Unlike me, Mom was in no rush to get back, so I didn’t complain. I was worried that she’d change her mind if I did. Or get mad and stare at me with those freaky eyes. She could act so weird at times, snap for no reason or stare at me like she wanted to kill me. For as long as I could remember, she had been doing that, some years more than others. She claims it has to do with her monthly cycles when I mention it. Don’t they have meds for that? I heard somewhere they did. Mom should take them because she’s freaking me out. Not that I would ever tell her that.

  She was really freaking me out in the months after I had shot Dad. She cried nonstop every day, sometimes downright wailing, like she was hurting so bad she couldn’t control herself. I was crying too, but more because she was so upset, not because I was. I had hated Dad for what he did to me and didn’t regret having shot him, even if it had actually been an accident. I had just pretended to kill him, because, deep inside, I had wanted to, but I could never do such a thing on purpose. I had had no idea the gun I was holding in my small hands had been a real one. I swear.

  That wasn’t what Mom thought—I know she thought I did it on purpose no matter what she claims. She has always thought so, from the day it happened even though she told the cops it was all just a terrible accident. Over the years, she sometimes opened the door to my bedroom and peered at me with a mixture of hate and anger in her eyes, the same kind that she had when she had yelled at me after I shot Dad. Like she had wanted to kill me. That look remains etched in my brain. She thought I was sleeping those nights, but I had always awoken, the burning feel of her hot gaze on me rousing me. I had squinted at her through my long eyelashes, barely opening my eyes. When she’d left a minute or so later, I had fallen back asleep and, in the mornings, I hadn’t been sure if it had all been a dream or not. If I hadn’t caught her doing it the other night, I would still have thought those occasions had only been dreams. This latest night, w
hich took place the last night we slept in that squalid place I loathed so much, she had been lying in her bed on the side, facing me, and so had I.

  Like those other times, I had suddenly awoken from the distinct feeling that someone was glaring at me. She had been glaring at me that night, just like she had glared at me over the years. The difference here had been that I had looked straight into her eyes for several seconds, and there was no question she had noticed me. Her hands tucked under her cheek, she had stared at me with hate and anger, just like I remember her having done so many times before. It had freaked me out to the point that I had opened my mouth to ask her why she was looking at me like that, but before I got a chance to do that, she had closed her eyes and flipped her body over, so she had ended up facing the wall instead.

  I had remained in the same position until I eventually fell asleep again, stiff with anxiety. Had she just been sleeping and opened her eyes? I was pretty sure sleepwalkers kept their eyes open, which was why people thought they were really awake when they weren’t. I thought about it some more and decided that this must be what had happened—she had opened her eyes while still asleep. I conveniently forgot about the times she had looked at me with the exact same expression a couple of times when I had returned home from a friend’s house and she had been on the couch in the living room, watching TV. Not saying a word, she had just glared at me when I’d been about to walk up to the couch. Glared at me like she wanted to do me harm. She hadn’t even returned my greeting hello.

  Those times I had asked her if she was okay and that look on her face had instantly disappeared and been replaced with a soft smile. She had run a hand over her face and apologized, either blaming PMS or claiming to have been in her own world.