CHAPTER 47
Stalker
“I’ll ask you again, did you do it?” My therapist shifts, her knees bowing in together as she leans back into the chair.
She’s not like the other ones. She’s as cheap as the plastic prison chairs we sit on.
Or the polyester shirt she wears. She’s also hiding something.
Not just today, although that has been different too, but as a whole. She reminds me of you.
“I don’t know what you mean?” I reply with the party line.
I like her, Ella. Despite her budget presentation, I think you would too. It’s the thinly veiled secrets that lie beneath the bad makeup and pungent perfume. It’s intoxicating.
We stare at each other, a standoff of unwavering eyes. I lower mine just enough to make her move.
“Not this again. It’s quite the facade,” she says, her tone making me look up. Usually, her face is an almost vapid display of impartiality. Today, a small frown forms on her lips and her brows dip together, bushy and untamed as they are.
“Oh, do tell me how your degree allows you to see into my soul? Oh, sorry, traineeship. These hours of mindless cosplaying Carl Rogers really have got to your head.” My body tenses to see the frustration flick across hers.
It never comes.
She lets the silence stretch as she watches me, pen still and eyes flat.
“Finished?”
I turn my gaze to the corner of the room where the sunlight dances across the floating speckles of dust.
“I don’t buy it, you know,” Valerie says after a while, head tilted.
“I’m sorry?”
“Quite,” she says again, folding her arms.
“What are you getting at?” These court-mandated therapy sessions are held in the same small room where our medical checks happen. It’s echoey and dark with meaningless posters staggered haphazardly across the walls.
“We’ve met for nearly three months now, and not once have you been honest with me, Imogen.”
The use of my name irks me.
“Well, I am sorry that you think that, Valerie.” My smile hasn’t quite convinced her, but the laugh she produces catches me off guard.
“Indeed. Do you want to know what I think?” There’s a pad of paper on her lap, and occasionally she writes something down. It’s never about me. It’s often something random, a word that appears from thin air.
She continues when I offer her nothing. “I think you did it because, despite what you tell yourself, you loved to see them suffer. Jealousy is too easy of a motive, especially with the length of time between that poor boy’s death and what you did to Ella.
No. Boredom fits better. You ran out of chess pieces to play with and so you moved to checkers, as it were. ”
A muscle in my neck twitches.
“You probably don’t even remember if you killed Ella’s brother.”
Oh, I remember.
If I hadn’t picked up Nate when I came out looking for Robbie that night.
If I hadn’t locked the car in the garage.
If Nate had told me where Robbie was. If Father listened when I knocked to tell him that Nate was bleeding out in his car.
If the police hadn’t called a few hours later, distracting us all.
If those ifs never lined up, I’d never have to carry the rancid smell of decaying flesh and the anger in my father’s eyes.
“But you enjoyed finding another player to take down, no?” The satisfied look on Valerie’s face makes me want to punch her. My nails dig into my forearm. They are short and chipped. I worry at my nails now, Ella. You make me worried.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I say and sit up straighter.
“There it is again,” Valerie murmurs. “The performance. You get theatrical when you’re frightened.”
They say these sessions are for my own good. Yet whenever I am here, I find myself playing a game. Fitting the role.
“You wanted to be the bad guy, and when there wasn’t a reason to be, you made one,” Valerie continues after a pause.
“I’m not a bad person,” I say.
She speaks over me, barely listening.
“Now, the thing that irks me… is why Nate. Why did you kill him? Hurting Ella is understandable, the tying of a bow on a horrific present. But Nate,” she pauses, hands gesticulating wildly, “that makes no sense.”
“I didn’t kill–”
“Because you’re not scared of being guilty. You’re afraid of being alone. So why risk losing everything you barely had?” A finger points at me.
“I–”
“And even if I get an answer, I doubt that it’s going to be satisfactory, is it?” The finger moves away, placed on her top lip, which curls into a disgusting smile. “Because there was never a grand plan. There was never a big reason. You were just a bored teenager who made a mistake.”
“Of cour–”
She leans forward, engaged. “Because murder is a well thought-out act. It takes a great deal to kill.” Her head tilts, searching. “And I don’t think, if you really planned for someone to die that night, that it would have been Nate.”
Her words are so factual, so cold that my jaw tightens. I bite back the scream.
“It was all just one big mistake–”
“They wanted a villain.” My words are loud. They bounce off the walls and slam her mouth shut. At least Valerie has the decency to look shocked.
“Who?” she says, her face a picture of scared confusion. I smile.
“All of them. They wanted me to play the villain. The sick, poor, bad, little girl. And when I did, when I gave them what they wanted, they clutched their pearls at the wickedness of it.”
Valerie shifts in her seat, using her forefinger to push up her pink, sparkling glasses. Cheap.
“Are you saying Nate wanted to die?” she asks.
The idiocy of the question alone.
“No, of course not. No one wants to die. But Robbie and his family needed me to be the bad one. And I did as I was told.” The words rush out with an excited flare. God, I needed to say that.
She frowns. Valerie has the audacity, Ella, to frown at me. As though it’s me that doesn’t make sense.
“How is that hard to understand?” I squint across at her. “They took me in and they mocked me until I became someone I barely recognised. And when they needed the monster they made, they used me.”
“And so you killed that poor boy.”
Ugh, that “poor boy”. The one who let Robbie die. The one that left you alone in that house. The one that ran away.
“Did I?”
Valerie lets out an exasperated sigh and, I kid you not, Ella, rolls her eyes. If it weren’t for the security guard, I’d have made a run for it. Jumping on her so her chair topples back, and I’d have smashed her head into the concrete until her eyes touched the floor.
Bitch.
“So, we’re back here, are we? Pretending you didn’t murder someone.”
I smile at her.
“I simply don’t know what you mean, doctor. You tell me. Did I kill Nate?”
She looks down at the notepad. There’s nothing written but the word wood: A single word that has nothing to do with anything. Nothing.
It’s the only part of her I can’t untangle.
“This is our last session, Imogen,” Valerie says.
For a second, I think I misheard. But she looks back at me, and time slows. Our last session? My nails sink in again, picking at an invisible mark on my skin. I open my mouth to speak, but nothing comes out.
“After this, you won’t be required to see me,” she continues, inexpressive. The air in the room drops, the temperature rising so that my mouth and lips feel dry. I run my tongue desperately over them.
“And I won’t be required to help you.” Is there a gentleness to her voice?
My mind scrambles for somewhere to land.
Eyes bouncing around the empty, emotionless room, from the posters to the guard, to the growing dust on the surfaces.
Nowhere catches until they find her. The only constant has been her.
The room that I have visited for over twelve weeks.
The only other space that I’m allowed in beyond my cell and the canteen.
The only person who still speaks to me.
“Oh.”
Something blooms behind my ribs, the kind of pain you can’t breathe around. Tears prickle. I blink them away. They keep coming.
It’s not always been about you, Ella. Sometimes it’s been about others. And before Nate, Robbie and Henry, it was about me. My hands fall into my lap.
Once she goes, there will be no one left.
No Robbie.
No Henry.
No you.
No me.
The walls close in, the sun falling behind a cloud so the room darkens. My cheeks are wet.
“Is there anything you’d like to say, before we end our last session, Imogen?”
I want to put the mask back on. God, I need the mask back on. The air itches at the raw skin. I need to go back to when there was more to think about than the emptiness. A sniff fills the silence of the room. I realise it’s mine.
The whisper, barely audible, cracks out of me.
“I’m sorry.”
And I wish I didn’t mean it.