Page 1 of Succubus

PART I

CHAPTER 1

Benjamin Fickler was the first boy I ever killed.

No one called him Benjamin. I’m being formal, out of respect. It was Benny. We were fourteen and I kissed him first. He wasn’t sure he was ready. I could tell. I liked that about him.

My two best friends at the time—their names don’t matter—preferred boys who were the tallest, the loudest, the usual. Benny was on the short side, often smiling like he was open to the possibility that everything might turn out to be a joke.

It was early summer. I asked him to go for a walk with me. My plan was that we would kiss on the blue bridge over the lightly polluted stream in the preserve two blocks down from my house. When we got to the bridge, I stopped, and he had to stop, too, and then I said something subtle like, “Do you want to kiss me?” and he looked slightly terrified, which was more appropriate than I realized at the time.

“I guess,” he said, looking down. “Sure.”

I remember the toothpaste-white of his sneakers. He wasn’t wearing a cool first-kiss outfit, but I didn’t mind.

“Do you want to go first?” I said chivalrously. When he didn’t move, I leaned forward, too nervous to wait, and pressed my tight, uncertain lips to his soft, looser ones. It was shocking to be against his skin, his nose. His breath was on my mouth, the smell of his mom’s favorite laundry detergent rising from his shirt, a pink, overextended scent.

Why am I reliving this?

Because it’s the least I can do.

I’m not in therapy. I tried that at nineteen, when my suspicions were horrifyingly confirmed. I spoke in code of course, because the truth wasn’t anywhere in the vicinity of believable. Thank God I have Grub now. And Dee, even though she doesn’t believe me, either.

It wasn’t the kiss on the bridge that killed Benny. That was just the first drop of poison. The next time, we kept going, pecking wetly, perched like virgin birds on his musty basement couch. Then Benny got sick—his dad couldn’t wake him up one morning. That’s what I heard. They rushed him to the hospital, but it was as though his lungs had simply given up. They said it was maybe a virus. We did a memorial service: the whole school, candles lit, kids crying with our arms around each other; we couldn’t believe Benny was gone. No one had known until then that death—as distant as war, as outer space—could swoop down at any random moment and grab someone our age and carry them off, never to be seen again.

I had no idea that it was my fault. It’s funny—I was worried that maybe I’d gotten the virus from him. Maybe my lungs would quit, too.

Not funny, obviously. Nothing about it is funny.

I didn’t know until college. Until Sam.

By then, I’d also killed a boy named Arlo Wu, who was the captain of the debate team junior year of high school. He was long-haired, sarcastic, and sensitive. A little goofy, like Benny. We got mozzarella sticks at the diner. I invited him over when my mom was at work late, and Dee, my little sister, was at twirling practice. We made out on my bed and put our hands down each other’s pants, and that was the first time I touched a penis.

His heart gave out two days later. A Thursday. Maybe he’d had an undiagnosed heart defect, they said. I went to his funeral, and I’ll never forget his little sister’s face as she watched her parents holding each other and crying in heaving gasps as though Arlo had taken the air with him into that casket.

My hair, always frustratingly thin and limp, seemed thicker in the weeks afterward. It was easier to wake up in the morning, even if I hadn’t gotten much sleep. I felt lit up, buoyant through my sadness. As though every microscopic thing inside me was suddenly going right, even as everything outside me went wrong. You could say I was full of life. As though I’d eaten an extra helping of it.

I am so unlucky, I wrote in my diary.

“You are so unlucky,” Carly (okay, that was the name of one of the best friends) told me. “It’s like every boy you like dies.”

“Don’t say that!” I yelped.

But I didn’t date anyone else in high school. I felt like maybe I’d been in love with Arlo. I learned guitar and wrote some songs about him. Then I went to college, became more of a hippie, and killed Sam (the first boy I had sex with), and I began to wonder.

When I turned nineteen and killed Omar, I knew. I fell apart and dropped out and moved to Sedona where I waited tables at a gimmicky restaurant called The Vortex and tried to find myself in all the ways you’d think, minus sex. I probably took all the same hallucinogenics as my mother, and look where it got her. Years slipped through my fingers.

And then Dee got married and pregnant right away, and he cheated on her, and they got divorced, and he vanished just like her father and also my father. She had Ella (a C-section performed by a brusque, irritated OB), and I came back to visit and slept on the couch in her crappy upper upper Upper East Side apartment. Dee got her tech job and worked her butt off, and Ella hated preschool, and Mom moved in full time to do childcare, which she was unsurprisingly bad at. So when Dee and Mom moved to New Jersey to a creaky house in an upscale town with a fancy university and Ella started kindergarten, I moved in with them.

I met Adam at an outdoor concert in town, where I was sitting on a bench only half listening, trying to study for my first exam in the doula training program I’d signed up for. I had sworn off men long before then, of course. I’m not a monster.

I am a monster.

But I have never wanted to be one.

I promised myself that I wouldn’t continue the conversation after he sat down next to me. But something about him felt different, felt inexplicably unbreakable. And it had been so long. So long that maybe it wasn’t true anymore— this terrible thing that had never been possible to begin with. Maybe it had never been true. Just an incredibly strange run of the worst luck.

After I went home with him, terrified and shaking, to his nearly empty faculty apartment, Adam didn’t get sick. I held my breath all week, frantic with guilt, tripping on hope. It was finals; he was grading and the new text-to-speech software he was trying out kept glitching. He didn’t get sick when we reunited, and I was flattered that he—obvious genius that he was—wanted to be with me. Once, I’d been academically promising, had been called smart, but that felt like a different lifetime.