Diary of a Teenage Serial Killer

by Jem Fox

  None of that added up to “deserved to die” as far as I could see.

  On my worst nights, I wonder if my father was putting me to some kind of test — waiting for me to say, This isn’t right. Seeing if I would stop him.

  I’m not sure whether he trained me a little too well or not well enough.

  You could say my father never tried to kill me, but the way I see it, he was killing me sure enough, just one little piece at a time. In another few years, there would have been nothing left of me worth saving.

  I didn’t know James yet, but I already didn’t like the way my story was playing out. I didn’t need anyone to explain it to me. I knew I was just acting out a part that had been written for me, and with less and less enthusiasm.

  I told you what my rule was, the rule I wrote to replace my father’s rules. I wouldn’t kill anyone unless I thought they were aiming to kill me.

  That day, I knew that my father was going to kill me. He wasn’t going to use a gun or a knife or slip his hands around my throat while I slept. But he was going to destroy my life. He was going to destroy my soul.

  For the first time, I felt the full weight of culpability come down on me. Since I was old enough to keep track, my father had killed 17 men. This was the very first time I had the opportunity to change the story.

  And I took it.

  James said that was the day my real story started. The story of my own life — the one I was writing for myself.

  When James died, I didn’t find out until almost a week later. They don’t call your institutional patients to say your car slid off the road in a storm, killing both you and your fiancé instantly. They don’t invite your institutional patients to the funeral. They just wait for them to show up for their regular appointment and tell them then.

  I came back at night and broke into his office. I didn’t take the blue pottery rabbit. James frowned on stealing. He believed I should be setting high standards for myself. I only took my file and our session tapes. I figured those belonged partly to me.

  I read my file before I destroyed it. Some of it was in some kind of shorthand. I couldn’t make heads nor tails of that. But other parts were just regular writing. I read what James wrote, and I could feel my face get hot. I read right through it and toward the end I was thinking that maybe I had read the situation wrong. Transference. When a patient starts to feel things for their psychiatrist, but the psychiatrist doesn’t feel anything in return. They just see you as a broken thing — a bug under their microscope.

  But way at the back I found two things. One was a drawing I did one day when he was making me explain the difference between a groundhog and a gopher. I picked up a pencil and drew a quick sketch for him. He said it was good and I was embarrassed. I didn’t know he kept it, but he did.

  Then at the very back of the file, stuck to the inside of the folder, was a picture. It was taken at a picnic they had at the institution. It was a place generally barren of merriment, so when they made even the least effort, it was a big deal. The kids would get very excited. Me, not so much, but James had handed his camera to someone and had them take a picture of us. In it, his fiancé Melissa is standing next to me smiling, with her arm around my waist. And James is on the other side, with his arm across my shoulder. He’s smiling, too. And I’m in the middle. And I look happy, for me.

  There was nothing written on the back of the picture. After I looked at it for a long time, I burned it twice. Once in my memory, then in the metal barrel behind my apartment building.

  I didn’t want to be a serial killer. I didn’t want to kill anyone at all. Like my father, I just wanted to set a path and walk it, and I wanted to be left alone. Unlike my father, I was willing to take a few steps to the side to avoid someone who got in my way.

  I used to argue with James that my father was not a serial killer, but he eventually won that argument. The definition is pretty simple. It’s someone who kills at least three people, spread out over time, with periods of rest in between.

  When I killed my father, I knew I was a killer, but I could rationalize to myself that it was self-defense. If my father wasn’t on his way to putting a bullet in my brain, he was at least on his way to destroying my life and my soul. I could feel utter destruction breathing on the back of my neck.

  When I killed Flunky, it was an accident. You could even argue that Glenn killed him.

  But when I went to the industrial park, there was malice aforethought. I knew what I was doing. I went there to kill. I went there to rewrite history. Future history. They were taking over the stories of those girls, those boys, those children. They were ruining their stories. They were planning to keep on doing it. So I rewrote the ending.

  I knew the geek would come for me. I knew it, and I planned for it dispassionately. My father’s training came back to me like the ability to swim when you plunge into deep water. I simply did what I knew how to do.

  I knew the geek would come for me, and I knew I would kill him. I would seal my fate. I was a serial killer like my father. I had killed multiple times, over a period of time, with time in between to consider my crimes and fail to repent.

  So much time. That’s what separates the serial killer from the others. So much time to think about what’s happening and see it coming, passing by, disappearing in the rearview, then coming again.

  For me, James was the better side of life. He was the better side of everything. He represented the future I could just barely glimpse for myself, a future that had nothing to do with weapons and killing, a future where I could be a good person.

  James never forgave me for killing my father. I never asked him to, but I wanted him to. I wanted him to say that it was okay. He died before he had the chance.

  Now I’ve done more bad things he never even lived to know about. My sins are piling up high and there’s no one left to absolve me. No one I care about.

  James said I was the only one whose forgiveness was important. He thought I needed to forgive myself.

  I guess I just don’t have a forgiving nature.

  There are those who aren’t willing to take human life and there are those who are. Without any say on my part, I was raised to be one of the latter. Before I could form my own opinions about things, I was being prepared to take vengeance.

  I said I haven’t learned anything much yet in college, but that’s unfair. In the beginning, they make you take 101 this and 101 that. It’s all the very basic, beginning parts of whatever it is they want you to know — the parts you could probably learn in five minutes on Wikipedia, but stretched out over a whole semester. And there is a thread that runs through all those very basic, beginning rules about things.

  When you fight a man, you watch how his body moves corresponding to what he does. You see how he signals his intent. He feints left and punches right. He shifts his weight to one particular foot that points in one particular direction and that tells you how he will kick or punch. The intent is buried at the beginning.

  In Literature 101 they tell you that the writer lays in a little signal near the front that foretells the whole story. If someone is going to die, there is a tiny signaling death — of a plant, maybe. Or a dog. If someone is going to use a gun in the last act, you see it lying on the table in Act I. The intent is always there, buried in the first few paragraphs, quietly signaling where the punch will land.

  I look back at my own life and see that I was raised from my first days of memory by a serial killer. What did God intend with my story?

  As the twig is bent, so grows the tree.

  Am I rationalizing?

  I broke my own rule, but I give myself partial credit for trying. My rule changed to fit the action. My father killed those who needed killing. And he was the one who decided who deserved to die. Perhaps I have done the same. I played God and I decided who would die according to their sins. But I could feel the vengeance of the women who’d been victimized (the once-innocent girls, the mothers, the sisters) and the men also (the once-inn
ocent boys, the fathers, the brothers) when I took the lives of those Bad Men. I did for the innocents what they could not do for themselves.

  Besides, just because I killed these men doesn’t mean I have to kill any others.

  Tomorrow is a new day.

  The newspapers call him the Blue Valley Killer. I call him my own personal nightmare.

  He takes his victims right under our noses, blinking them out of existence as they’re walking down the sidewalk or getting the mail. Then they’re found dead a couple weeks later. He doesn’t kill them right away. Sick bastard. He’s killed four girls in the last 18 months: two college co-eds and two high-school students. He just keeps coming back for more.

  At 17 and living in the center of the Valley, I’m smack dab in the middle of this psycho’s demographic.

  At this point, it’s hard to believe he can snag another victim. Every girl I know between the ages of 12 and 20 goes nowhere without at least three friends and a six-pack of mace. Every parent in four counties has their daughters on 24/7 lockdown.

  Even the college campuses — of which there are two in the dead zone — are like ghost towns after dusk. Free rides by crisis counselors, escorts from frat guys doing community service — no girl has to walk alone after dark in the Valley.

  How much does it suck to have a serial killer named after your pretty little slice of New England countryside? Evidently a lot, since they’re thinking about changing our name after they catch the guy. No one wants to buy Blue Valley t-shirts or Blue Valley keychains when they conjure up CSI morgue footage instead of fall foliage. Well, nobody you’d want to babysit your kids.

  I’m not the sort of girl who jumps every time a door squeaks. I don’t think the boogeyman lives under my bed, and the monsters in my closet don’t scare me. I think of teen slasher flicks as comedies.

  So you tell me: Why is it that every time this creep gets down to his dirty business, my brain starts broadcasting 24/7 murdervision?

  Murder Vision by Jem Fox

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  Table of Contents

  Frontmatter

  Epigraph

  Diary

  Samples and Other Titles from this Publisher