Life Is Short and Then You Die

by Kelley Armstrong

  We learned our lesson. And worked to get that taste out of our mouths.

  * * *

  After Our Mother’s suicide, Regina and I became intimately aware of just how mediocre a mental health professional you have to be to work for the Department of Family Services. Our parade through their cluttered offices taught me the words borderline personality disorder and that bursting into tears was a fine way to avoid talking about borderline personality disorder and how you fail on a regular basis to see other people as real, as having agency and interiority.

  We also became intimately aware of just how mediocre a relation Uncle Jimmy was, or at least I did when he asked me for advice dealing with Regina. He didn’t have any experience with teenage girls. I had no answers for him. Any story I might have told about Regina in recent years would no doubt terrify him. For example: When she was fifteen, Regina drove Malík Kysely to attempt suicide.

  This was the first sign of The Change. To be fair, I was in accelerated courses at the time, so I was naturally enamored of myself, and not entirely aware of Regina’s status or The Change. The Change was an unmarked cardboard box that sweet wobbly Regina crawled into at the age of fourteen and emerged some unknown time later as the Destroyer of Worlds, beautiful and emotionless, glistening from her recent metamorphosis. Of course, the version of Regina that was mostly human had existed when our parents were still alive; before my father was poisoned by Our Mother, before our little brother Raymond was poisoned by Our Mother, before everyone in the universe was poisoned by that old bat Our Mother, who poisoned us regularly when we disappointed her or embarrassed her. I can still taste the bitter flavor of it, that aftertaste that meant you were going to spend the next three days home sick from school, barfing.

  Raymond didn’t break her, but Dad did. She punted and killed herself with her own brew.

  I knew Regina had started a relationship of sorts with Kysely, and it was one of those sweet, innocent things. He was never going to be a match for Regina; all soft and slump-shouldered, with an artist’s soul, and you could tell by the way he stole glances at my sister that he regarded her as far too beautiful to be real. For her part, Regina at fifteen hadn’t yet realized she was beautiful, a nearly ideal combination of our parents’ DNA.

  How do I know this? Regina kept an old-school diary, and mistakes were made.

  So their relationship was kind of tentative and innocent, all secret texts and secret posts and secret phone calls after Aunt Sheila and Uncle Jimmy had gone to bed, whispering into the glow of her phone. The key word here, in case you’re not paying attention, being secret.

  And then The Change, and Regina, Destroyer of Worlds, emerged from her cocoon and forgot to tell Kysely that she’d crossed over into something not precisely human, something greater and lesser at the same time, a demigoddess ruling over a shadowy underworld. So the poor bastard thought he still had a girlfriend, and he was eager to let the world know.

  Regina began a gaslighting campaign that should be recorded and analyzed and written down in some sort of dark grimoire. I mean, even I felt bad for Kysely, and I rarely feel bad for anyone aside from myself.

  In public, Regina acted like Malík smelled bad. She walked by him without acknowledging his existence, she smirked when he talked to her, she made comments about him to her increasingly mean-spirited acolytes—she treated him like shit.

  At night, at home, she whispered that she loved him and told him she was messed up, she was confused, she just needed him to be strong for her. She sent auto-delete texts that told him she loved him. That she needed him to wait for her. That he was the only reason she was still alive.

  The kid took it for six months, and then he ran a hot bath, sliced open his wrists in the messiest, most incompetent way possible, and didn’t even come close to dying because he missed the arteries, though he lost the ability to use chopsticks due to some ligament damage. His parents tried to blame Regina, but she’d very publicly treated him like shit, and there was no evidence they’d ever had a relationship, so nothing ever came of it, and the Kyselys moved away, and I deleted Malík from my memory banks.

  And started to seriously fear my sister.

  3.

  Over the course of a few weeks, Doug made up with Sam. She refused to see him at first, and a haze of gloom hung over our room. But you couldn’t underestimate Doug. He crawled. He groveled. He swore he was okay with just being friends, and that he understood, and that it had not been nearly as passionate and deeply felt and permanent as he might have made it seem. Listening to his half of the conversations, it appeared that Doug had experienced a bout of temporary insanity, and that some second personality, a trickster, had temporarily forced his body to say things he now found hilarious. Things like I love you, Sam. Or We should be together, Sam. Or If you walk away now I won’t be alive tomorrow morning, Sam.

  The groveling worked: Thirty days after Doug had humiliated himself, Sam reappeared in the room—sporting a new boyfriend, which shouldn’t have been surprising at all. Or that the universe hated girls like Sam, and so it cruelly paired them up with men like Jake Wismau.

  Jake: Tall, lanky, had dreamed of playing pro baseball all through high school; discovered to his horror that his flat, reliable 90 mph fastball had curdled into an 83 mph lob by his eighteenth birthday. He worked frantically to correct the problem, then went underground. Emerged a freshly baked business major, where everyone who has recently abandoned a dream ends up.

  How do I know this? The Boy Genius has superpowers, and also knows how to Google people.

  Jake: The first time you met him, you didn’t like him. No one did. He seemed cocky, overly assured, fake. He smiled a lot, a wide shit-eater’s grin that implied both cruel sarcasm and complete innocence. He was a man convinced that nothing he did could ever possibly be considered bad. If you walked in on him throttling a small child, he would be amazed to discover you thought it was in poor form.

  The second time you met him, you liked him. He seemed suddenly cheerful, easygoing, sincere. He had a way of softly mocking everyone around him, but there was a sphere of neutrality around him. If you were within his physical proximity—inside the Sphere—you were safe. If you were outside it, you were mercilessly mocked. It took everyone a little while to realize the Sphere was localized—Jake didn’t care who you were, only that you weren’t within earshot.

  Unsurprisingly, the third time you met Jake, you wanted to punch him in the nose.

  Any sane person could see that Jake and Sam weren’t going to last long. The reason was simple: They were both mean drunks. The main difference was that Samantha went through a soft, purring, warm-fuzzy period of inebriation that was followed by a squint-eyed, irritated hellcat phase where she was as likely to scream in your ear until you were deaf as she was to throw her arms around you and tell you that you were her favorite. Jake went straight to mean, a Reverse Popeye Syndrome, wherein one beer and he turned into a braying jackass who got angry at just about anything you said. Or did.

  The two of them, out crawling the bars and frat parties and in-room bacchanalia? It started ugly and went downhill from there.

  * * *

  If I were offering a threat assessment of Doug, I would have classified him somewhere between a shrubbery and a small toy truck left in the middle of the floor. But when he suspected that Jake had hurt Samantha—physically, of course, as everyone within a half mile of the happy couple already assumed Jake was going to crush her emotionally—he suddenly developed an outsize opinion of his ass-kicking skills.

  It started with a visit from Regina, Destroyer of Worlds, which already had me on edge. Sprawled on my bed, she was writing in her journal, like always since The Change. She stared, she studied, she made silent mental notes, and she rarely told you what she was thinking.

  “Hey, Reg,” she said, pronouncing it reg.

  “Hey, Reg,” I said, pronouncing it reeg. “Want to come to a party?”

  She brightened. “Will there be beer?”


  I sniffed. “Will there be beer,” I sneered. “Amateur.”

  * * *

  In college, of course, anything is an excuse for a party. Happy? Let’s get drunk. Sad? Drunk. Uncertain? Manipulate yourself into emotional certainty with alcohol.

  Wismau was in an unofficial fraternity, which said so many negative things about him that it was difficult to choose just one. Imagining a house filled with Jake Wismaus was bad enough, but a house filled with Jake Wismaus who imagined they were in some sort of socially functioning brotherhood was horrifying. I pictured dozens of them, all in variations of the Wismau uniform (slouchy jeans, T-shirt that exposed his Adonis Arrow, checkered Vans, and hair that took sixteen hours to look like he just woke up), working in uncanny synchronicity, like an army of ants.

  The house was all yellow light and bass drum, swelling and pulsing with drunken energy. In the swampy, moldy kitchen I found Jake Wismau, who smiled at me with a dead-eyed expression that indicated either he liked me or wished to eat my flesh, possibly raw, possibly while I was still screamingly alive.

  “Dude,” he said, stretching out the word, his typically huge and psychopathic grin in place. “Rough day.”

  He put a hand on my shoulder. He met my gaze, and I wondered if Jake Wismau thought we were friends. I felt a surprising and unwelcome jolt of sexual energy. I asked myself, how much alcohol would it take for me to hook up with Jake Wismau? And the dismaying answer: not much.

  “Rough days,” he said, turning and opening a kitchen cabinet, “require rough libations.”

  Jesus. Only college assholes use words like libations, which they recently learned and enjoy rolling around in their mouths like verbal worry beads. But then Jake Wismau produced a bottle of Mellow Corn, the small-town mayor of cheap whiskies, and the chances of the evening ending with me trying to turn Jake Wismau bisexual had gone up significantly.

  “Libations,” I said. “Yes, please.”

  * * *

  Jake escaped me, melting into the sweaty scrum, and I lost Regina. A familiar sense of frustrated weariness settled over me; if Regina died or fell off the roof and became paralyzed or was abducted into a human trafficking ring and sold to a foreign prince, I would be blamed—unjustly, but rather comprehensively. So I went in search of my sister.

  The invariable law of parties is that the moment you desire to find someone, they disappear into an alternate dimension, so I expected my search for Regina to be a lengthy process of deductive feats, kicking in doors, and fighting enraged seducers. Instead, as I turned to go look for her, she was crashing down the stairs, pushing people aside and cursing a blue streak so vile and forcefully delivered that by the time she arrived at the landing, people were scrambling out of her way.

  She ran into me, head down, and reached up and delivered a forceful push that made me stagger backward.

  “Out of my fucking way!” she hissed. Then she looked up and took a step back. She was flushed and unsteady. Her face firmed up, going blank. “I want to go home.”

  I reconsidered my acerbic zinger, because she didn’t seem to be in the mood. I did some math, and decided it was better to have an angry sister moving under her own power than to wind up carrying Reg, as I had so often during our childhood.

  I finished my whiskey and handed the glass to a startled kid standing next to me. “Let’s go.”

  For a moment Reg hesitated and seemed on the verge of saying something, of telling me some terrible secret. And for a split second I could almost see it. Her hair was a mess, teased this way and that. A button was missing from her sweater. For the first time since adolescence, she didn’t look at me, but anywhere but me.

  For a moment, the words were there, in my throat. Then she shoved past me.

  “I said I want to go,” she hissed.

  Irritation swamped me, burning the rest away. Whatever had just happened, I did not wish to be burdened with it. I wanted to go home, go to sleep, and start my new life tomorrow by installing Regina on a train back to my uncle’s, where she could spoil and rot on her own time.

  4.

  If there is a word in existence to describe a group of men prowling a city in various states of inebriation with the express purpose of locating and beating up another man, it is probably Germanic in origin.

  It was Doug’s idea, of course. For a week, things were back to the normal abnormal of our intricate, beautiful dysfunction machine. Then one evening he was prowling through the suite, pacing and making fists and occasionally talking to himself. Samantha, mascara all over her face, was sleeping in his bed, and if the symbolism of him not being in there with her was obvious to Doug, he didn’t show it. He just paced around outside in his bare feet, and for some reason, despite his anger and fuming, he looked younger than ever. Like an embryo with legs. I was reminded of my complete lack of sexual attraction toward him.

  The precise nature of Jake’s offense was left unexplained. Samantha didn’t look bruised, or bloodied, but she certainly had the shaken look of someone who’d recently realized the delicate nature of the unspoken social contract that prevents us all from murdering each other on whims.

  I sat on the stiff, unhappy couch in the shared living room, watching a show about aspiring models and drinking from a paper cup filled with grain alcohol whenever one of them cried or seemed about to cry or got choked up or mentioned personal struggles. It was a loose set of guidelines more than rules. I was buzzed, my stomach was upset, and I had the sense that there was nothing in the universe powerful enough to lever me up off the sofa.

  Regina had invited herself down again, which had, I suspected, everything to do with Jake Wismau and his admittedly compelling abdominal muscles. That Jake was precisely the sort of man that overheated high school girls and boys with self-loathing issues (read: all of them) might find darkly attractive had not actually occurred to me until Regina’s phone calls, typically robotic and disinterested, suddenly grew animated when she oh-so-casually asked how Sam’s boyfriend was doing, had I seen him, what was he wearing and how did he smell?

  The worst part was, I knew exactly how Jake Wismau smelled: really, really good.

  Regina had arrived in a terse, blank-faced mood, with her usual green backpack, a green backpack that was actually a Bag of Holding. Need a brush? A book? A pen? A sandwich? An MP3 player? A comfy sweater? Warm socks? Makeup? Gum? Regina could produce it from her bag. It’s also where she kept her journal, and this time a brown bottle she’d brought from home, likely siphoned from Uncle Jimmy’s top-shelf booze collection.

  She was in my room, napping and making my bed smell like peppermint, and suddenly I had the curious feeling of wanting action, of desiring movement and purpose. The stillness of the place bothered me, itched me. I felt like there was energy and action right outside the door, and I was stuck inside drinking booze that tasted like burn and once again saddled with the silent, grimacing creature I’d been informed was my sister, although she didn’t resemble the girl I’d known very much.

  Until Doug appeared, pulling on a blazer, holding his phone and a soft cap in his hand.

  “C’mon,” he said, his voice pitched to perfect seriousness. “We’re gonna find that asshole and kick his ass.”

  I was up on my feet before he’d finished speaking, a fuzzy excitement animating me. We were going to find this asshole and kick his ass. Or at least I was going to be in the general vicinity when it happened, probably filming it on my phone.

  The room spun. I almost fell over. I’d been sitting and drinking for three hours. We were out the door and halfway down the hall when I realized that Regina had joined us, her face blank, her eyes blazing.

  * * *

  I led us to Jake’s soggy rental house, where an infinity party had been going on for weeks. When we got there, I bent down and picked up a good-sized pebble from the ground. Straightened up and tossed it in the air once, twice. Then I went into an approximation of a pitching windup, almost lost my balance, and sent a two-seamer at the house, smashing th
e big bay window.

  “What?!” Doug managed, spinning to face me.

  “Jake WISMAU!” I shouted. “Come on out and get your ass kicked!”

  I turned and took hold of Doug’s shoulder before he could spook. I judged the chances of me getting popped in the nose as part of this at fifty percent, and I was prepared to take those chances, honestly. It would be worth it. Besides, I was so full of grain alcohol I wouldn’t feel it until next Tuesday.

  The house had gone silent. Music off. Voices muted. Then the front door opened and guys started filing out. They were all Jake, tall and skinny and slithery, hair a little too long. Easy guys. But seven of them, a faceless crowd gathered behind them in the doorway, the windows. I gave Doug a little push and stepped back.

  “Jesus,” Jake said in a stoned drawl. “Jesus. Doug.”

  Doug didn’t say anything. To say that his expectations for the day had never included the possibility of successfully finding Jake would grossly understate his sense of injustice in that moment.

  “All right, Doug,” Jake said, stepping forward in a disappointingly quiet, restrained way. “You want to say something to me, Doug?”

  Doug’s every syllable of body language screamed no, but he appeared unable to speak. Behind Jake, the group of bros tittered, nudging each other. Jake was advancing, slowly, just walking closer. The recently erected statue of Doug just stood there. To an un-bright young man like Jake, Doug’s immobility might have been misinterpreted as truculence, but only if you squinted.

  But Doug surprised me. Like a lot of people who had never been in an actual fight, Doug sought to overwhelm his opponent, to simply swarm Jake with the righteous fury of his anger, which Doug imagined would make him burst into flame like the Human Torch, destroying a large portion of the town and killing dozens. The Dougs of the world always thought their hurt feelings were secretly a superpower, and they waited all their lives for that moment.