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Maybe I was wrong. Maybe Nathan just seems like a pompous asshole. Maybe he’s a good guy.
But I’ve counted my chickens way too fucking early.
Nathan sneers at the front page distastefully. “‘The Murdering Clown of Mexico City’?” he reads off, an impertinent scoff in his voice. “Is this a joke?”
My brows furrow. “The topic I chose to write about follows Professor Morrison’s guidelines perfectly. It’s on par with Criminology 101.”
“The assignment was to assess a serial killer and write a professional report through the lens of a criminologist, highlighting statistics and likelihood of a positive reform back into society.”
“Yeeess,” I drawl out, very nearly avoiding an eye roll. “That’s exactly what I did. I studied the case of Hector Valenzuela, the man in Mexico City who dressed up like a clown and went on a killing spree.”
When classmates were choosing the basic bitches of serial killers like Bundy and Charles Manson, two cases that were beaten to death at this point, I wanted to write about something,someone, different. If serial killers were Pokémon cards, Hector Valenzuela would be a rare collector’s item indeed. The fucking foil edition of collector’s cards.
Sure, there were plenty of murderous clowns throughout history. Way too many. The interesting thing about Valenzuela’s case was the fact that he’d been a failed serial killer. He’d made very few successful killings before he was caught by the population, and the citizens had taken matters into their own hands, beating him to death with his own murder weapon of choice: A bat his father had given him when he was just a child. For the sake of the assignment, I’d had to recreate an alternate narrative. One in which he’d survived and been caught by the police. One where I assessed his life, what little was known of it, and then made my analysis.
It’s a fantastic fucking look into his mind and motives.
But Nathan looks at me like I’m excrement beneath his shoes before a slow smile curls his mouth. It’s the kind that makes a shiver of dread slide down my spine. He shrugs. “Sorry.” He doesn’t even sound apologetic. “I can’t accept this paper.”
Smirks and cocky glances are passed around between his teammates who are in deep leg stretches near us, obviously watchful of us. They begin moving again, shoving each other while passing the puck between themselves while making their way toward the middle of the arena where their game will surely begin soon.
It feels like my window of opportunity is closing. “I came all this way.”
I can only watch in horror as he releases his hold of the report I worked very fucking hard on, and it falls to the ice.
“Hey!” I make a reach for it, but it sticks to the ice too fast.
The clean-up crew across the rink eye the papers, and I know in a matter of minutes, all my hard work will be scraped off the ice and discarded like it never even existed.
“You know, if you’d let go of the tacos and actuallyrunhere, your fat ass might have turned in the report on time. So no, I won’t be accepting it. Good luck failing, amigo.”
Humiliation rises from my neck, over my cheeks, to the tips of my fucking ears. For a second, I can do nothing but stare, the shock of those words resonating in my brain. Everything outside fades for a single moment. The laughter that follows those shitty words, uncomfortable murmurings, and among it all... not a single person says a word for me, despite how many are now whispering behind my back.
And somehow, I can’t even do it for myself either.
Among all the emotions, anger shakes inside my chest, but my eyes burn with dampness I can’t control. I want to jump on his back and beat him with his own hockey stick.
My eyes stay trained on the papers being whirled around and rushed over beneath the blades of hockey skates. I fixate on every tear that’s ripped into the papers I spent hours working on every single night.
It would be less painful if the professor had failed me on the spot.
Seeing my hard work crumble chases away the humiliation and replaces it with a rage. It diffuses through my entire system, and I flick my eyes up quickly to give one final glare to Nathan, but he’s not there anymore. Instead, my eyes catch on someone else’s.
Someone with a scarred face beneath a heavy helmet. His features are shadowed but etched into grooves of a fury that seems to mirror what’s tight in my chest. I blink once, and the expression is gone.
And so is he.
Three
Rowan
Obsession is defined as something–orsomeone–preoccupying the mind, continuously, intrusively, and to a troubling extent. The thing about my obsession is the fact that it isn’t troubling at all.
In fact, it’s freeing.
To care so much and so deeply about another thing, another person, is surely nothing else but a sign of devotion. Who doesn’t want that? I want that.
I would kill for that. But I’ll never have that.
