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“That’s gonna be hard to get used to,” I said after a few seconds.
Drake shrugged and sat back, relaxing as the train pulled away from the station again. “Like I said, he’s become the embodiment of Sam now. If there’s anything left of the Owen I used to know, then it’s all gone now.”
“Are you ever going to fully open up to me?” I asked, surprising myself with the words.
Drake’s eyes widened slightly. “I have, Dahlia. I’ve brought you into my world. I’ve shown you everything you could imagine?—”
“I don’t mean this stuff,” I said, cutting him off. “The…the punishments and revenge is one thing. Learning what I like and enjoy is good but that’s not you. Who the hell are you, Drake? What else are you hiding? Sam’s real name is probably just the tip of the iceberg. If you can’t even tell me that, what else do you have hiding deep down?”
Drake’s face fell slightly, almost like I’d chastised him in some way. Finally, he shook his head and closed his laptop. “It’s not that I don’t trust you, Dahlia. It’s that, umm, I don’t want you to judge me. I feel like, maybe, you’d lose respect for me.”
I gaped at him. I’d watched this man butcher human beings. I’d let him fuck me a dozen different ways. Fuck, I’d let him fuck me in a pool of blood for god’s sake. What could be so bad that I would judge him?
Before I spoke again, I gave a furtive glance around to make sure no one was within earshot. “There’s not much more we could do that I would judge you for. I’ve seen you murder people, Drake.”
He ran a hand over his face, his palms rasping over his unshaven cheeks. “It’s not what I’ve done, it’s how I was raised. I don’t know that you’ll respect me when you hear.”
“Jesus.” I grunted. “What happened? Did you get sold into sex slavery or something? Was your grandfather a meth head who raped you? What? Anything you lived, I’ve probably seen the same or worse.”
He tilted his head up, staring at the ceiling, and let out a humorless chuckle. “That is exactly the problem.” He turned to face me. “I didn’t live a life like yours. I didn’t have to endure a living hell. My life was, for want of a better word, perfect.”
“Excuse me?” I asked. I had no idea how someone from a supposedly perfect life could have ended up doing the things Drake did. “Explain.”
“All right.” He looked dejected. He cleared his throat and began to talk. It was the most he’d said in one sitting since I’d met him.
“I was born into a well-off family. My grandfather came to America as a poor immigrant from Ireland. He arrived in 1947 at seventeen years old. Unlike most immigrants after the world war, he seemed to trip and fall backward into good luck left and right. He took work as an ironworker in New York, but the man who owned the company went bankrupt. Through a twist of fate, my grandfather and another of his coworkers had been talking about starting their own business. When their boss said he was closing up, the two men got a loan and purchased the roofing business from him for pennies on the dollar. Less than four months after the sale went through, the company my grandfather owned received a contract to work on not one, but six apartment buildings as well as two skyscrapers. It was a coup for them, and a financial boon for the fledgling company.”
“Drake?”
“Huh?” he said, snapping out of his story.
“I don’t really know what any of this means. Is this going somewhere?”
He blushed. “Shit. Sorry. It’s an old story. Basically what happened was grandpa and his partner ended up owning one of the three largest construction companies in New York by 1950. By the time my father was born in the early 60s, grandpa had sold his portion of the company to his partner for nearly three million dollars. He proceeded to invest, and again got lucky. He managed to buy shares in stuff that no one had ever heard of, right when they went public. Those investments turned that three million dollar buy out into almost forty million.” Drake shook his head in what appeared to be disgust. “That’s close to a half billion dollars in today’s money. I was born rich, Dahlia.”
“Holy shit,” I muttered. I knew that what Drake did must have cost a lot of money, but I never imagined anything along these lines.
“Not only that,” Drake said, going on. “I had the happiest home life you could imagine. Mom and Dad were in love, like actually in love. They loved me too. Cared for me and brought me up in a respectful and loving home. Christmases were magical, birthdays were special; I did everything people dream of. Vacations in Japan and Australia, safaris in Africa, and beach trips in the Caribbean. We went to church every Sunday, I was in the Boy Scouts, hell, I was even the prom king in high school, and salutatorian of my graduating class. It was perfect.”
“Why do you make that sound so awful? To me, that’s, like, the picture of happiness. Of perfection. I’d have cut off my left tit to live that life.”
“That’s the problem, Dahlia. I didn’t deserve that life. Someone like you should have had all that. I was…” He locked his eyes on me. “I was different. Even when I was a child, I had urges. The world was unfair, and I wanted things to be set right. At seven, I watched a neighborhood bully kick a little kid. She wasn’t even three years old, and this kid kicked her right in the face for no good reason. I punished him later on. Not severely, but let’s say he never kicked any defenseless babies again.
“It got worse the older I got. Small animals, things like that. I had to set things right, I had to hurt things, and I had to get my impulses out. All this while my parents thought I was god’s gift. I sat in Sunday school talking about forgiveness and turning the other cheek all while imagining disemboweling a stray dog I’d seen in an alley killing a kitten the day before.” He glanced at me. “I did find that dog, by the way.”
“So you kept all this hidden? Your parents never knew any of this?” I couldn’t fathom the idea. Even as drugged up and shitty as my parents had been, I felt like even they would have noticed if I were torturing and killing animals.
“I did. That’s part of why I did so much to seem normal. Made sure to get every merit badge, made sure I said all the right things to get baptized, studied extra hard in school. All of it was so they wouldn’t know what was. That, and I was very good at hiding my tendencies. I was never punished in our house, and other than that bully when I was a little kid, I never punished a human. Always animals I’d seen behaving badly.” He shrugged and sighed in an exasperated sort of way. “At least behaving badly in my eyes.”
A question percolated, one that had been stirring since the moment I found out who Drake really was. A question I needed answered before I could go any further with this man.
“When did you kill your first person,” I whispered.
Drake made a wincing smile. “That comes next. It was my senior year of high school.” He cleared his throat, and his eyes looked wet, like he was about to cry. “I wasn’t an only child. I had a sister. She was ten years younger than me, and she was my life. When she was born, it was like I finally found a piece of humanity inside me. A reason to at least try to be normal. It didn’t happen, but it was nice to try. Her name was Sasha, and I loved her. She was everything I wished I could be. Normal, loving, sweet, and happy. All the things I had to pretend at.
“Anyway, a few months before I graduated, our driver was bringing her home from a dance lesson. She did ballet, you see. It was a late class, and they were coming back home at around nine. A drunk driver slammed into the car. It rolled five or six times. Our chauffeur was killed instantly, and Sasha hung on for about twelve hours before dying.”
A sudden jarring memory of my own sister dying flashed through my mind. Aching sadness filled me, along with a deep longing to comfort Drake. To comfort him the way no one had me. I’d spent days sobbing in my apartment when the police told me. The only consolation I’d ever received had been physically destroying her murderer in the playhouse. Something I could never truly repay Drake for.
