Every story has a murder

It was February, my girlfriend was six months pregnant and I hated her for it.

I haven’t always dated other women. There had been trysts, but Courtney was the first girl I ever had real feelings for. I met her at a metal show in Detroit three years ago. She was tiny, but she kept crashing into me in the mosh pit anyway. Most people like pits because the violence is just an excuse for affection, but for me I think it’s the other way around.

“Hey Charlotte,” My friend Josh said. “Do you see that girl? She’s into you.”

“Yeah right,” I said, but then I looked over, and sure enough, there she was, giving me that look.   

“You should bring her back to my place,” Josh said, and of course that’s what happened. I made her cum twice that night in the guest bedroom of Josh’s swanky midtown apartment. We could hear my friends in the living room talking, laughing and more than likely listening in.

I figured that night would be the end of it, but it turned out that Courtney was kind of cool. She was interesting but not funny, and the paradox got under my skin. We kept hanging out and fucking, and I kept waiting for it to end, but it never did. After about two months, she gave me one of those, “What is this, where is this going?” ultimatums, and I responded with equal platitudes like, “I don’t like women like that” and “This has been fun, but c’mon.” I really thought I was telling the truth, but when I heard a week later that she was hanging out with another girl, I saw my weak heart for what it really was: an engine that couldn’t run without Courtney, and I’ve been trapped ever since.

We moved to Seattle a little over a year ago, for her grown up job at a museum near the space Needle, the inevitable trajectory of a polished girl from a nice home with a Masters of Fine Arts. I dropped out of college my junior year and didn’t want to leave Detroit, but there weren’t enough compelling reasons to stay. I was the assistant manager of a pizza place, who could care. In Seattle I got a job walking dogs, which is as easy as it sounds, and anyway, Courtney always gets what she wants.  

We flew back to Michigan for Courtney’s cousin’s wedding on Saturday, and I agreed to go so long as we got to stop by and see my friends first. Josh didn’t live in midtown anymore; he and his wife Claire had bought a house in Ferndale, just north of 8 mile. Andrew and Jason were supposed to show up too, and I couldn’t wait to see them. They were the friends I’d made delivering pizzas right after high school. Most groups like these tend to fall apart over time, but for whatever reason, we had carried on. They were mostly men and that’s the way I liked it. Are 31-year-olds still allowed to be tomboys? You tell me.

Josh answered the door with a beer in his hand, wearing a storm trooper helmet. We hugged in the doorway and he pretended to try to kiss me through the mask while Claire came running after to manhandle Courtney.

“Oh my god, you are SO pregnant!” Claire squealed, and the two of them retreated hand in hand to the kitchen. It’s true, Courtney was enormous and more beautiful than ever. People were always saying she looked like the girl in Juno, and she ate that shit up. It made her blush and giggle, and that in turn drove everyone an extra dose of crazy. Even at the height of my resentment, I was always proud to call such a pretty thing my girlfriend.

“Let’s go say hi to the fellas!” Josh said, and there they all were on the couch in the living room, passing a bong around, watching Jaws. To look at them, you’d think they hadn’t moved in ten years, but I knew better. This sloppy hanging out was a pageant play they seemed to put on for my benefit whenever I rolled back through town, and never was I more appreciative of the gesture than that weekend.

I squeezed onto the couch between Andrew and Jason—not where the bong currently was, but where it was going to be. I’d come in right at the part of the movie where the wife says, “Want to get drunk and fool around?” and Brody replies, “Oh yeah.”

“Charlotte!” Jason screamed, and put his arm around me. “How the hell have you been?” I’d prepared myself for questions about Courtney, because that’s all anyone ever seemed to want to talk about with me, and I was relieved when they didn’t seem to care. I took a long hit on the bong and exhaled a huge cloud of smoke without coughing. “I’m great now!” I said, and the boys laughed. I still smoked every day and Courtney hated it, but what was she going to do, leave me? I looked at a bottle of Crown Royal in its purple felt sack on the coffee table, longingly. “Who do you have to kill to get a drink around here, anyway?”

It was nearly midnight and Courtney had already gone to sleep in Claire and Josh’s bed. The homeowners would sleep on the air mattress in the office, Claire insisted. Everybody treated Courtney like she was so special, like having a baby is some miracle instead of what it actually is, the most common, and let’s face it, disgusting thing in the world. At this point, I was a little more than drunk. Courtney had done a poorer job than usual of pretending she wasn’t mad at me for drinking too much. I think she was hurt that I hadn’t offered to stay sober with her, the way her pregnant friends Jill and Britt had. I felt guilty, but not enough to change. I know it would have hurt my feelings if things were the other way around.

Andrew and I were out on the back porch, huddled against the cold, smoking cigarettes.

“So who’s the daddy?” Andrew asked. Smoke and steam billowed from our mouths in equal parts.

“Look at us,” I said. “We look like drunk dragons.”

Andrew waited patiently.

“It’s her friend Paul,” I said. “Artificial insemination from a kit they ordered online.” And it really was that easy. It makes me panic in the night to think of it, as if a rogue sperm might one day scurry up my pant leg to ruin my life twice. I picked up Andrew’s Miller High Life from the banister and found it mostly full. “Can I finish this?”

He put his arm on my shoulder and looked at me, pitiably. “It’s going to be okay,” he said. “You’ll learn to love it.”

I was touched that he noticed my anguish, but it made me a little mad too, as though I were the monster here. But of course, I was.

“Any new gossip?” I asked. I wanted to change the subject, immediately.

“Oh!” Andrew said, putting out his cigarette. “Holy shit, this is crazy. Did you ever hang out with Mark Fox?”

“Not sure,” I said. “Why?”

“He murdered his parents last winter.”

“No shit,” I said. “With a gun?”

Andrew shook his head. “I think it was a knife. I feel like you probably knew him.”

“What was he like, who did he hang out with?”

“I dunno, he was sort of a loner…” Andrew said.

“You don’t say.”

“He had longer hair. He was in my Spanish class but he rarely came.”

I was pretty curious now. “Do you have your phone?”

Andrew pulled up his mug shot and handed it over, and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The murderer stared back at me with a painful, frightening indifference. His face was grizzled and puffy. He had unkempt hair, a gross beard and red welts on his face, like the addicts on Intervention. “Oh my god,” I said. And then I said it again. “Oh my god.”

“Right?” Andrew said. “Do you remember him?”

“Once in high school I ran into him and this other girl in the woods behind the Rite Aid warehouse and they shared their pot with me. He didn’t talk much. And then another time… ”

I trailed off. I was trying to figure out how to link to the larger news story from Andrew’s phone. I wanted to know why, and how, and where. The killer looked so much worse than the last time I saw him. I thought I might throw up over the banister.

“Let me look again.” He took the phone back from me before I got anywhere. “Seriously,” Andrew said. “What a Nutbar.” And then, “Look at his eyes… He’s got lifeless eyes. Like a doll’s eye…” He was repurposing Quint’s line from the evening’s movie, and even then, I had to laugh a little.

“What else does it say about the murders?” I said. “Is he in prison?”

Andrew paraphrased from the article: He’d gotten two life sentences. He tried to plead insanity but they found a notebook in his house with a murder to-do list that included the words “collect inheritance.” The state said it was premeditated, and when his parent’s family begged for an explanation in court he refused to tell. The article spoke frequently of the killer’s flat affect and his chilling lack of remorse.

I don’t know why I didn’t tell Andrew the whole truth. I hadn’t told anyone before what had happened, and it seemed like bad luck to start then.

The second time I saw Mark was on a pizza delivery, more than five years ago. He’d answered the door in nothing but a towel and I felt instantly afraid of him. I couldn’t tell if he recognized me from high school or not. I started to take his pizza out of the bag and nearly dropped it. He bent down to help me with his one free hand and almost dropped the towel. “What’s the matter?” he said. “Are you nervous?”

“Why would I be nervous?” I said. I demanded eighteen dollars for the pizza. He handed me a twenty-dollar bill and stared at me until I gestured to make change; then he waved me off.

“You busy?” he said. “Do you still smoke pot?”

In fact, we were very busy. It was Thursday night; I had another delivery in the car and more waiting when I got back. But for some reason I said, “Nah, not too bad. Why, you got any?”

I followed him inside and he led me down a narrow stairwell into his basement bedroom. He didn’t have to duck to clear the doorway, but I did. I was taller than him, but he was stockier. Not fat, but sturdy. He set the pizza on a table and gestured for me to sit down next to it. “Hold on,” he said, ducked into the bathroom and came out wearing a pair of cut off army fatigues and still no shirt. He had a full sized bed in the corner with an ugly plaid bedspread. The air felt thick and stale and dark. I realized just when it was too late that I’d been staring at his body—his bellybutton, specifically, and the swirl of hair where the skin met his shorts. He looked at me hard and I looked away.

“Help yourself,” he said, gesturing to a metal tray on the table covered in dry, dirty weed, a couple of roaches and some papers.

“Do you want me to roll a joint?” I asked.

“If you don’t mind,” he said. He sat down in front of his desktop computer and played some bleak, grinding industrial; I just assumed it was Skinny Puppy.

He handed me a lighter and we passed the joint back and forth. I’d done a pretty shitty job and it kept canoeing. I thought about the delivery waiting for me in my car, but I couldn’t bring myself to hurry. He sat across from me in silence, taking long sips from a can of Fosters on the table in between drags. “So,” I said, lamely. “What have you been up to?”

He coughed and laughed at the same time. “Who gives a fuck?”
I struggled to respond with something that hid how embarrassed I was. “Right,” I said.

“You’re pretty,” he said. He said it as though someone else in the room had just said that I wasn’t. My whole life, people have been complimenting me this way, as if to say, “Everybody else thinks you’re trash, but not me. Isn’t that nice?”

“Whatever,” I said. I reached across the table and took a sip from his Fosters without asking. It was disgustingly warm.

“Do you want me to fuck you?” he said.

It was the way he said it, like my answer didn’t matter. I felt seized with fear, and at the same time, I think all along that I had hoped it would come to that. I didn’t know what to do next. I got up to leave and instead I just stood there.

“Come on, Charlotte,” he said. He reached out, grabbed my hand and pulled me closer. “Real quick. I’ll use a condom. It’ll be fun.”

I guess I sort of nodded, I don’t know. He stood up and kissed me and then reached down and pinched me hard between my legs. I moaned way louder than I’d meant to. It hurt and I was embarrassed. He pulled the maroon polo shirt over my head and I stepped out of my pants. I was wearing men’s boxer briefs, I remember. Everything embarrassed me. I felt nauseous, but excited, too. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before. He stepped out of his shorts and held his dick out in front of me. It was the first uncircumcised cock I’d ever seen in real life, and the biggest, and now—I think it’s safe to say—the most evil. I dropped to my knees and put the thing in my mouth. He grabbed a clump of my hair and held it in his fist until it hurt.

“Get over on the bed,” he said. “On your back.” He got a condom out of the desk drawer and hovered over me as he rolled it on. ‘Bring your pussy closer.” I did everything he told me, dutifully. I wrapped my legs around his waist and he slipped his cock inside of me while standing at the edge of the bed. I couldn’t believe it. For once, it felt like something was actually happening. He put his hands around my neck and slapped me in the face. “Hit me again,” I said. I can’t believe I said that, but I did. The second time he hit me on the side of the temple with his fist so hard that I saw stars. I tried to get up and he held me back down. He put his hand over my mouth and stared down on me with lifeless eyes. Like a doll’s eyes… He came quietly and suddenly, just a little gasp and then it was over. He pulled out, threw the condom in the trash next to his bed and put his shorts back on like it was nothing, like this was a thing he’d done to a thousand other pizza delivery girls before. He sat back down at the table and lit a cigarette.

I was close to cumming when he pulled out, and my legs were still shaking as I put my uniform back on. I started fretting again about my other delivery. I tried to think of something normal to say.

“You’re a slut,” Mark said.

“Don’t do that,” I said.

He’d started eating the pizza and he spoke to me with his mouth full. “What the fuck is wrong with you? I swear to God. You barely know me.”

Things had taken a turn. I had to get out of there. My hands were trembling when I put my keys in the ignition and drove away. The whole thing had been awful, but a little funny and weird, too, right? I told myself to try not to take it so personally. I felt crazy and plump with feeling. I reached between my legs and got myself off at a long stoplight on my way back to the store. I checked the rearview mirror and saw a crescent-shape bruise beginning to form along the temple where he’d hit me.

“What took you so long?” My manager said. “And what happened to your face?”

Saturday night, Courtney and I were back in our hotel in Grand Rapids after the cousin’s wedding, and it hadn’t gone so well. She was mad at me again. That night I dreamt of being stabbed over and over, but if stabbing were a lucky thing that felt good and people wanted. I had woken up that morning with a fresh resolve to act and feel normal, I really had—but something about the wedding must have put me in a dark place. Maybe it was all the pastels, or everyone’s happiness, or my hangover from the night before, but I guess I was rude to Courtney’s aunt or something, and I’d gotten drunk again after promising that I wouldn’t. Courtney was angry that she had to drive us the whole ten minutes from the reception to the hotel. She didn’t seem to think that pregnant women should have to drive a car, or endure drunken people or feel pain.

“Aunt Betty was so nice to you,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “Everybody’s so nice to me when I’m with you. A girl dating a girl. They think it’s so fucking cute. They’re falling over themselves to show how supportive they are. I was a person before I met you, you know.”

“Are you kidding me?” Courtney said. “Do you think it’s easy to be gay?”

“I think it’s easy to be you,” I said.

We didn’t talk for the rest of the way. That wasn’t what I’d meant to say at all. I’d picked the wrong fight. Plus, I was wrong, and we both knew it. From the concierge’s trite, knowing looks at the front desk, all the way up to our room on the tenth floor, I tried to concentrate on how to make it right with her—but I couldn’t stop thinking about Mark. I pictured his parents in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor I’d walked through to get down to the basement. I remembered how for days after, I had to explain to people what happened to my face, I worried that I would run into him again, or that someone would find out somehow, but it never happened. I had tried to push the whole thing out of my mind, and eventually it just became one of a dozen other burning memories floating around inside of me—until now.

Courtney’s family wasn’t just kind; they had money, too. They’d gotten us a suite, with a king-sized bed and a whirlpool bath right there in the room next to it. Courtney took off her shoes at the door and sat down on the bed. She had on a pale green dress made of silk or something; it felt like a slip in my hands. “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s all my fault. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’m sorry. I’ll try to do better.” She turned and kissed me on the lips. I thought she might not, but she let me slip the dress over her head. I took off her bra like an expert and sucked on her nipples, one at a time. She made a cute sound and tilted her head back. I remembered what was mine, and it made me feel powerful.

We got under the covers and started making love, the long, romantic, lesbian way, the way that she liked and I endured. I got up and went to the suitcase and pulled out our strap-on.

“Oh, honey,” she said. “I don’t want to do that tonight.”

I handed it to her and she looked confused.

“Do it to me,” I said.

“What?”

“Fuck me,” I said. “Just this once. Please.”

“Charlotte,” she said. She looked scared, and God help me, that only made me want it more.

“Come on, Courtney” I said. “Real quick. It’ll be fun.”

I tried to put it on under her oval belly and she turned away.

“I’m pregnant, you monster,” she said. “What’s wrong with you?”

I felt it all churning around inside of me, this sick, dreadful feeling like I didn’t belong anywhere near this nice girl, in between these nice sheets, with this nice life and all these nice friends who were so nice and patient and tolerant of me, because they didn’t know who I really was. What I was like on the inside. Tiny pellets of snow swirled around in the black night outside and disappeared into the frozen ground, and I was going to be a mother.

“I already told you,” I said. I held her down and tried again. “I don’t know.”