Chapter 31 Witness X
Witness X
Beware the Talented Student
Once you become good at something, you become a threat to others who have the same skill. But beware most of all the person to whom you impart all of your knowledge.
The student.
You want someone whose mind is in alignment with yours, but whose appetite for dominance will never exceed your own.
Pick your pupil wisely. The last thing you need is your protégé becoming too powerful.
It’s a tricky balance to achieve. If a student becomes more skilled and successful than their mentor, things can turn ugly.
It triggers all kinds of inferiority complexes. Things can get out of hand.
I heard her before I saw her.
Even though we were both only sixteen at the time, that husky voice made her sound like she smoked thirty fags a day.
She spoke with the confidence that money affords you.
Laughing loudly, the girls around her directed their adoring, magnetic attention her way.
I had never seen her before, but I could tell she was the dangerous one, the rebel.
She wore the same pristine uniform as the rest of us but somehow looked better in hers.
The pencil skirt grazed the top of her knees, a good two inches higher than ours.
The top button on her white shirt gaped open, as her tie hung loosely around her neck.
She wore two sets of studs in each ear; we were allowed one.
The uniform code was applied strictly here.
You expect that at a boarding school—the sanctions are tough—but this girl was prepared to bend the rules.
After eyeing one another up around school for a few weeks, we found ourselves gravitating toward each other. It was inevitable: we each saw a piece of ourselves in the other.
I spent a year beside her, observing her, before introducing her to the rules. I needed to ensure she would respect and use them wisely. They required emotional intelligence, impeccable timing, and restraint. They were powerful in the right hands, and dangerous in the wrong ones.
She knew how to play people in a way even I had not yet learned. I had become an expert at manipulating boys. I knew the kind of person I needed to be around each of them to secure their placement in my pocket: a nerd, a tease, a vixen, a coquette. It was transactional.
But she knew how to work the girls. Was a natural social climber. A keen sense of justice ran through her blood and people trusted her; she always made the right call, even if it pissed people off. She was skilled at being fake in a way that made it appear that she wasn’t.
We could help each other.
A model student, she was patient and asked questions. She had an insatiable thirst for the dark knowledge that was being fed to her, and she lapped it up.
It wasn’t until we applied to go to the same university that our behavior soared to the next level. Suddenly, we possessed an even bigger world in which to create our chaos.
We reveled in causing as much destruction as we could, playing people against each other, covertly causing rifts within friend groups and fucking our way through hot, influential male students.
Guys with girlfriends always had more value.
The ultimate challenge. How long would it take for them to cave in and cheat?
But they had to be under the illusion they initiated it.
We never actually wanted them, of course—it was all just part of our game.
We were attracted to their status, their unavailability.
Could we make them want us? Need us? Love us? Even for just a few weeks before moving on to the next?
It was a playground, a place for us to hone our skills before moving into the real world, where we set our sights on married men. The stakes were higher, and the thrills were, too. We collected broken marriage vows like sweets and became drunk on the power it gave us.
How irresistible. How intoxicating. How powerful.
How fucking pathetic.
But even this got boring after a while, and that’s when it happened. My insatiable desire for self-destruction pushed me to a place where I’d never quite recover.
You can break down defining moments, the ones that become landmarks. The decision I made to start talking to her changed the trajectory of my life. Theoretically, we shouldn’t have worked. She was not like me, but she was also very much like me.
We met at a time when I wore a veil of shame, and I observed the world through it.
I hated him, but I hated myself more. I’d internalized the neglect and abuse I had suffered as a child for so long, I believed I had no value.
That I was defective, worthless, dirty, and certainly not deserving of love.
I felt I should be punished for being so damaged—so broken—so I constantly put myself in situations where I could be.
I would binge drink until I blacked out, all the sex I had was unprotected, I’d study so hard I’d only get four hours’ sleep a night, I didn’t eat well.
I cheated on good people who loved me because what better way is there to prove to yourself that everything you believe is true?
I was a disgusting, terrible, vile person, and I enjoyed collecting proof of this. Dad knew it. Declan knew it, Declan’s dad knew it. I knew it.
Self-destruction was the only way to distract myself from what he did to me, from the shame I couldn’t help but feel.
It was all I knew. The irony was that the only thing that made me feel better was attaining the thing my father had conditioned me to crave: power.
Finding these little pockets of control, over people and situations, was the one way to anchor the rage I felt for myself.
Meeting someone who felt the same was blissful, because it made me less alone, less… singular.
But I took it too far.
I once heard someone say that you meet people for a reason, and when that reason is fulfilled, the friendship will naturally end.
That may be true in most cases, but I can categorically say we should never have met.
Some partnerships are too dangerous to exist. I told her all of my nasty little secrets, and she told me hers.
It was the first time either of us had felt safe enough to share those parts of ourselves with anyone else.
We never imagined it would end as horribly as it did.
On paper, she had it all: the perfect family, the incredible house, rich, successful parents. But things are never quite as they seem, are they? School was her escape. She hated going home to her narcissistic bully of a father and emotionally distant mother.
Perhaps that’s what drew us together. Trauma finds trauma. She had a complex, toxic relationship with her own father. Of course she did. That’s what makes it so much worse, what I did.
I know she’ll come for me one day, because I taught her the rules, and she isn’t going to let me forget them.
I created a monster in her, just as my dad did with me.
Look how that turned out.