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But she didn’t deserve the truth now.
I still loved her, but dark tendrils of hate snaked through my heart and squeezed it, turning my love poisonous. I didn’t even speak to the police officer, except to tell him I didn’t kill the rats. He took me to the station and sat me down, looking at me like a pile of shit he’d just stepped in.
When my parents arrived a little while later, they were somber and quiet.
Surely they would believe me, I thought. They’ve known me their entire lives. They knew I loved animals. They knewme.
But they didn’t believe me. As we drove home, as I tried to explain I had smelled something bad coming from that cellar, they cut me off. My mother, her voice shaking, said that Camille told the police that she saw me stabbing a rat.
That fucking bitch.
Why? Why would she say that? She saw no such thing. I understood her telling on me, sort of, but lying about what she’d seen? She’d just slammed the lid shut on my coffin and nailed it tight.
I was disgusted, heartbroken, and full of sorrow, hate, and humiliation. I already grew up doubting myself, wondering why I had such sick, dark urges. To have everyone look at me like I was a filthy, evil monster was just confirmation of everything I’d ever suspected about myself.
When we entered the house, the servants and my siblings were nowhere in sight. They must have been sent away to one of the other houses on the property. We sat down in the foyer, my parents looking so grim and miserable you’d think I’d been diagnosed with cancer.
I tried to fight back. I pointed out that the rats had been dead for several days now. Why would I be stabbing it?
I expected that my parents would be delighted I’d presented such a logical argument. Shouldn’t they be looking for reasons to believe me?
But no. My father said that someone who was disturbed enough to torture any living creature would likely be disturbed enough to return to the kill site and mutilate the corpse. When I tried to argue about how ridiculous that was, he rattled off the name of several serial killers who’d revisited the corpses of their victims.
“You think I’m a serial killer now?” I snapped, and I saw my mother’s face go waxy pale. “Mom,” I said furiously. “You know me! Why do you believe her over me?”
“It’s not just what she said,” she says, tears streaming down her cheeks. “It’s the evidence. It’s logic. How could you possibly have stumbled across that cellar and the smell, unless you knew it was there all along?”
“Because I was walking in the area to meet up withHer,” I said. “And you could smell it from the alley! I already told you that!”
But I saw the look in their eyes, hopeless and despairing, and knew I was screwed.
Sure, I could tell them the truth about the man who really was killing the rats, but that would mean confessing to murder. Being thought of as a boy who would kill a rat was horrible, but confessing to murder would mean a lengthy stint in a juvenile treatment facility and a black mark on my record for the rest of my life. And my parents would have been even more horrified and revolted at the thought of me killing a human.
For that matter, if I took them to the body of the man I’d cut up into pieces, that wouldn’t prove I hadn’t killed the rats. I could easily have killed both all of them.
So I pressed my lips together and stared at my father without saying a word.
“There have been other indicators that worried us before this,” my father said, rubbing at his eyes with his hand in a gesture of great weariness. “You’ve always seemed to be interested in violence and killing. We know about some searches you made on your school computers. I know you thought that you were anonymous, but you weren’t. And the books that you chose from our library, and the way you get when you’re doing your martial arts training. You like to inflict pain.”
I went very still. They had been watching me without my realizing it, because they knew something was wrong with me. I hadn’t fooled them after all. They’d always known.
The sorrow and self-hatred that poured through me were almost too much to bear, so I banished them. I wrapped a wall of stone around my heart to protect it. “Camille is a liar,” I said coldly. “And I’m not going to keep arguing my case. Believe me or don’t. I have no plans on begging for forgiveness for something that I didn’t do.”
“Why would she lie about something like this?” My father’s tone was calm and reasonable, but I could see the enormous strain on his face.
“Because I was seeing another girl at school and she found out.” The falsehood slipped easily from my tongue.
My father’s cool gaze never wavered. “Well, that would make you another kind of liar, wouldn’t it?”
I was watching their love for me wither and die. I couldn’t bear to breathe the air in that room, so poisoned with despair and disappointment.
“I would like to go to my room now.”
They made me give them my cell phone and let me go back to my room.
I had another phone hidden behind a loose plank in the floor of my closet, a phone I’d bought with money extorted from students at school. I used that phone to search for Internet sites that would satisfy my perverse urges. If my parents ever saw what I’d searched for on that device, they’d flip their shit. It’s so much more depraved than what they found on the others.
I called up my friend Simon, the leader of my little pack of sycophants, and gave him my version of what happened. I pointed out the ridiculousness of the notion that I’d be in a cellar stabbing the rotting corpse of a rat, and unlike my parents, Simon believed me and was furious at Camille on my behalf.
