by Rick Wood
She’s psychotic.
“Destiny, what are you doing?”
She still doesn’t reply.
I walk toward her.
41
Harper
I hear Dad shouting.
I also hear the storm outside and the silence in my room.
I stand in front of the mirror. Staring at myself with my bushy hair and frumpy skirt and blotchy skin and the thought that Dad created me makes me hate him even more.
I pick up my phone.
Danny?
I’m here.
What do I do?
What do you mean?
How do I do it?
I don’t know how.
I’m scared.
You mean your dad?
He’s a paedophile, Danny.
He’s abused a girl at school.
I heard him talking on the phone.
I can’t believe it.
What did I say?
He deserves to die.
You’re right.
I have to stop him from hurting anyone else.
I have to do what’s right.
I’ll be with you the whole time.
What do I do?
Have you got sharp knives in the kitchen?
Yes.
Get one.
Do it now.
With my phone trembling in my hand, I leave the comfort of my room and begin the long journey down the stairs, the tufts of an ageing carpet sticking between my toes.
I reach the bottom step. The front door is open. The rain is belting down and it’s wide open. Why has he left it open?
Then I realise — he’s outside. Walking slowly across the drive.
I walk through the living room, past the open drinks cabinet, and into the kitchen.
The knife block is next to the oven. Below the cupboard where the fancy plates are. The ones we use when we have guests.
The ones we haven’t used in years.
There are four knives. Various sizes. Various degrees of sharpness.
I find the biggest one and take it out.
I turn it over, twisting it, staring at it. I’m transfixed by its lack of beauty. It cuts vegetables and it kills fathers. Its only purpose is to slice things apart.
You there?
My phone vibrates.
Danny’s with me.
Through all of this, he’s with me.
And I know he won’t leave my side.
Yes.
You have it?
It’s in my hand.
Look at it.
Admire it.
Feel it like it’s part of your body.
Your weapon should be an extension of your arm.
I don’t know what he’s talking about, but I try.
I don’t know how to admire a knife. I don’t know how to make it part of my body.
I place the side of the cool blade against my neck.
It’s hard. Rigid. Definite.
It’s sharp.
Now go to him.
I return to the front door.
Dad’s lost in the rain, but I can make out the outline of his body, somewhere amongst the downpour.
What if I can’t do it?
You have to.
But what if I can’t?
Be strong, Harper.
But what if it’s too difficult?
What if I’m not strong enough?
There’s another thing you can do.
Something that will cause your dad more pain than death.
What?
You can kill yourself.
This stumps me.
Why would he want me to do that?
How would we meet?
How would we be in love?
I don’t understand.
The only other way to hurt him is to take yourself away from him.
He’ll live with regret for the rest of his life.
It’ll be a fate worse than death.
It’s him or you, Harper.
I believe in you.
And I love you.
If you love me, why would you want to lose me?
I want what’s best for you.
But I don’t want to die.
But you don’t want to live.
I look from my phone, to the knife, to Dad, to the phone to the knife to Dad, to the phone to the knife to the phone to the knife to the phone to the knife and I drop it.
The phone. The knife.
I drop it.
It’s clatter on the floor is louder than the storm.
I stare at my father in the rain.
And I step out of the house, walking toward him.
42
Will
“What are you doing here, Destiny?” I shout. The rain is coming down even harder, if that’s possible. It’s difficult to hear my own voice.
I’m sure she’s crying, but I can’t tell. The rain has dragged her makeup across her face and you can’t even tell if she’s pretty or not anymore.
“I told them I lied,” she eventually replies.
“You what?”
“After the Headmaster saw you, I went back. I told him I lied.”
“Why would you do that, Destiny?”
She shrugs. Looks around for the answer.
There’s something new in her voice. Whininess mixed with resolve. Sadness, but not at the notion of losing me, but perhaps at what she’s done.
“I just wanted you to know how it feels,” she tells me.
“How what feels?”
“For someone to not believe you. To call you deluded. To call you a liar.”
“So it’s payback, is that it?”
“But now you know how it feels, we can finally be—”
“But you are deluded, Destiny.”
“No!”
I step toward her.
“What you told the Headmaster was lies. What I told you was the truth.”
“Truth is only what you believe it to be.”
She tries to cup my face and I whack her arms away. It hurts her, but I don’t care.
“I do not love you. You are a child. A psychotic. A deranged lunatic who belongs in an asylum, not a school.”
“Why are you saying these things?”
I step forward again, until my body towers over hers. She is pressed against me, but there is nothing romantic about it, and I can see from the look on her face that she is scared.
Good. She should be intimidated.
“I cannot stand you. You wear skirts too short and pretend not to realise. You unbutton your shirt to show off your bra. You walk around like everyone should desire you, but they don’t, Destiny.”
“Will, please…”
“Boys will use you. They will. But not because they love you — because they can.”
“Will, stop!”
She goes to turn away, but this time it’s me who isn’t letting her go; this time it’s me who grabs her arm and pulls her back.
“Let me tell you what’s going to happen. You are going to stop bothering me, and you are going to stop texting my daughter. You come near her again, you so much as send her another message — I will kill you. Do you understand? I will—”
“Dad?”
A faint voice from behind me.
I turn around and there she is. Harper. Drenched just like me. Standing a few steps behind, looking so vulnerable.
I want to put my arms around her and protect her from everything. Instead, I expose her to the true evil of the world.
I step back, hold my arm out to indicate Destiny, and say to her, “This is him, Harper.”
“What?” she says.
“This is the boy who’s been texting you,” I tell her. “This is Danny.”
43
Harper
I stare at this girl, a little older than me, but looking just as scared.
“What?”
“This girl,” Dad says, “has been masquerading as Danny. She has told lies about me, that I have been inappropriate
with her, but none of it is true.”
“She can’t be Danny, though. She can’t be…”
“She is. Why don’t you ask her?”
I look at this girl. Shivering. Holding her arms around herself. Wearing a dress that clings to the perfect curves of her body.
“Is this true?” I ask her.
She doesn’t reply.
“Answer me!” I’m shouting. I’ve never heard myself shout like this, and it hurts my voice, but I don’t care.
The girl doesn’t reply.
“Tell me!” I demand.
The girl looks down.
I turn to Dad. He looks so smug. So pleased with himself. I expect to see sympathy for my predicament, but I only see pleasure that he’s exposed the truth.
“And you knew?” I say.
“Yes,” he says, his voice small.
“And you didn’t tell me?”
“Would you have listened if I did?”
I turn back to the girl. I’ve had enough of Dad. I know he’s a lousy parent, but I didn’t think Danny would be…
This.
“How could you?” I ask.
She shakes her head.
“Answer me!”
“Please,” Destiny says. “Just… This wasn’t meant to hurt you…”
“And you told me to… do that to him? That was you?”
She shakes her head.
“Don’t lie!”
She looks down.
I look back at Dad.
And I rush inside, pick up my phone and run upstairs, shut my door, shut out the world, shut out everything.
I don’t want to see them. I don’t want to see anyone ever again. I’m so sick of this world, this life, the constant pain of living. No one I rely on is truly ever there.
My phone lights up. I have a text message. It’s from Danny.
I tell myself not to read it. What good could come?
But I can’t help it.
Fine.
You won’t do it?
I will.
I’ll kill both of you.
You had your chance, Harper.
Remember that.
YOU HAD YOUR CHANCE.
The phone drops from my hands.
I rush to the window. They are both still there.
I run back downstairs.
44
Will
“It’s over,” I tell her. “I’m going inside.”
“Wait!” she says, and she takes something from inside the back of her dress. It’s an envelope. She hands it to me.
“I don’t want it.”
“Take it.”
“No.”
“Take it and I’ll never bother you again!”
Reluctantly, I take it. “Now get off my property.”
I turn and walk toward the house. My back toward her. Refusing to look behind me. Refusing to dignify her with another moment of my time.
I feel something rush toward me, toward my back, and I glance over my shoulder — but it’s just the wind.
I return inside the house, shut the door, and almost slip on something. A knife. On the floor. I pick it up and wonder why it’s there.
My eyes turn to the stairs where Harper is staring at me, not quite at the bottom but not at the top either. It’s funny, isn’t it, how we always know when someone is looking at us?
Even though we don’t speak, I feel like we understand each other in this moment better than we ever have before.
“Who was she?” Harper asks.
I look at the knife I’m holding in one hand, and the envelope in the other. I want to explain everything, but I feel strange that I’m holding these things, like it makes this conversation more sinister than it should be.
“One minute,” I say, and I take the knife to the kitchen, where I place it in wooden block, then put the envelope on the side. I pause, wondering what I’m going to say to my daughter.
When I turn around, she’s waiting behind me.
“Her name is Destiny,” I tell her.
“Is she the one you had an affair with? Is that why she did that?”
“I didn’t have an affair, Harper.”
“But I heard you on the phone—”
“Then you heard wrong.”
I regret snapping as soon as I say it.
“She was obsessed with me. She has something called erotomania — it’s when you’re convinced that someone is in a relationship with you when they aren’t. She really believed I loved her, and she tried to kiss me, Harper, that is all. I told her no.”
“Did you report it?”
“I… didn’t.”
“Why not?”
“I was scared.”
She scoffs.
“It’s not as simple as it sounds,” I insist.
“Sure.”
“It isn’t. For starters, she threatened to hurt herself with a knife. Secondly, do you know what an accusation can do?”
“But if you’re innocent…”
“I am innocent, and she accused me, and already you don’t believe me. How would I convince you if it went one step further and the police arrested me?”
Harper nods. Faintly. A small movement of understanding that means so much to me.
“So why did she pick on me?”
I shrug. “I don’t know, Harper. Honestly. Perhaps to mess with me, or to get her own back for me rejecting her, or as part of her sick game. Maybe she actually thought she was this Danny boy.”
She looks down at the phone in her hand. It’s silver. I thought her phone is black.
Oh god… It isn’t her phone…
“What is that?” I demand.
“Don’t get mad.”
“Mad about what?”
“I said don’t get mad.”
“Mad about what?”
“If you get cross with me, I’ll go up to my room and this conversation will end. I’m only talking to you if you’re going to be understanding.”
Understanding?
The idea seems preposterous.
But still, she’s right. This is the most we’ve spoken in months, possibly even years. I like it, even if it’s under the wrong circumstance. If I want to keep it going, I need to be patient.
“Fine,” I say. “Tell me.”
“It’s another phone I got, and I only gave Danny the number. It was so I could still speak to him… You know, in private…”
“Even after Officer Felix told you—”
“Danny didn’t seem like a bad person. I didn’t believe Felix.”
I fold my arms and lean against the table.
“What changed?”
She looks down at the phone, and back to me again. She looks like a child in trouble. Like she did when she was six and she’d done something naughty but was too afraid to tell us.
“He sent me a message.”
“A message?”
“Yes. I need to show it to you.”
She unlocks her phone and presents the screen to me.
45
Harper
I don’t let Dad see any of the other messages. None of the ones about killing him; I’m not ready to go there yet. I just show him the last one.
The one where Danny says he’s going to kill Dad.
The one where Danny says he’s going to kill me.
Dad doesn’t say anything, at first. Initially, he seems angry, then he seems despondent, then he seems… I don’t know. I don’t know his expressions anymore.
I did once, but not now.
“Why don’t you begin from the start,” he says. “Why don’t you tell me everything?”
So I do.
Aside from the part about killing him, I tell him every detail of our conversations, about what he — or she — said to me, how they loved me, how I’m special.
How he gave me what Dad never did.
When I say that, I stop, and let it linger. There is a sadness in his face, and it makes me happy, in a way; that he cares enough to be hurt by it.
>
“I’m sorry,” he says, and he wipes his eyes even though there’s no tears, but I can see them glistening, I can see him trying. “I’m sorry you felt you couldn’t talk to me. I’m really sorry, Harper. I am. I’ll be better. I mean it. I know I’ve said it before, but I’ll be better. I’ll be the dad you need. I promise.”
I hug him. He smells like rain. His hair drips onto my top, but I don’t care.
I didn’t realise just how much I wanted this.
It doesn’t last long, though, as he pulls away and wipes his face.
“What should we do now?” I ask.
“I’ll phone Officer Felix. See if he can bring some police presence, or someone to watch us, or… I don’t know. Let us know what to do.”
“Okay.”
“Then I think we should both stay downstairs. Together. Yeah?”
I nod. He hugs me again.
Then, just as he’s about to step out of the room to find his phone, something occurs to me.
“Dad?”
“Yeah?”
“How did Destiny send those messages?”
