9. Drake
CHAPTER NINE
I hated making mistakes.
Mistakes argued against the god-complex in my head that sounded suspiciously like my dad’s voice whispering that I sat above everything and that everyone was beneath me.
Mistakes proved I existed in the same space as every other flawed human on the planet.
Mistakes proved I wasn’t perfect, wasn’t the best, wasn’t already the polished tool my parents expected.
A mistake meant that I’d failed, and I wasn’t permitted the security to fail and try again.
The summer I turned sixteen I made a grievous mistake, and I made it in front of my dad. William Graham gave me the same test his father gave him. A loaded weapon. One of our enemies tied to a chair. A single bullet. Make the shot. Take out our enemy. Only then would he allow me to return home.
I had the training to handle firearms. I knew, on a foundational level, what our world, what our lives entailed. Having a live gun in hand and a man across from you pleading for his life tilts that understanding to a dizzying, nauseating degree.
My first mistake that year: missing the shot because my hand trembled. The first link in a chain of events that spiraled out of control.
One gun. One bullet. One failed kill.
I couldn’t go home until the man was dead, Dad reminded me.
The scowl on his face penetrated the vulnerable childhood clinging to my shoulders, cutting it away from my soul bit by bit.
Without Dad, without the family, without his acceptance, I had nothing and no one.
If I didn’t perform, I might as well be dead myself.
At the end of the night, the screaming, the crying, the begging, it overwhelmed me. It was all too much.
I had to use my hands.
The voice in my head sounded like Dad’s, repeating over and over by any means necessary.
But finally, finally, when dawn crested over the horizon and streaks of pale, golden light streamed through the grime coated windows of the abandoned building, the world went silent again.
No more begging because the man—some enemy I didn’t even know the name of—went limp and lifeless.
Was he even one of our enemies? Or had Dad snatched some poor man off the street to test me?
Either way, he was dead. It no longer mattered who he was.
“It gets easier,” Dad said when I found my way home. He noted the blood on my hands, regarding me with something like mild satisfaction despite the failure he witnessed earlier in the night. Then he smacked my shoulder. “Best not to dwell on it.”
The flicker of satisfaction bolstered me. That was pride, wasn’t it? Was my father proud of me? If I followed orders, protected my family, if I did as he told me to, he would continue looking at me favorably. He’d be proud.
Mom wouldn’t look me in the eye. She sank deeper into the couch, sitting in the dark with a nearly empty glass of red wine gripped in her hands.
She had that glaze in her void stare, telling me she was on those painkillers again that she popped like candy.
The flickering firelight on her skin reflected a haunted, shallow creature.
I turned away from her and trudged to my room.
After all, I had to prepare for my fifth year at St. Henry’s.
Weeks later, when I joined up with Julian and Dougie at school, things fell into a false semblance of normality with rugby classes, girls vying for my attention, and dull classes.
No matter what, I needed to maintain the status quo, trudging along as if I didn’t see red under my fingernails and hear screams in my nightmares.
Preserving normalcy meant acting the same as I always had.
It meant continuing to play rugby, pushing myself past my limits from the year before, flirting with the dimwitted girls who batted their lashes and exchanging meaningless kisses at parties, and it meant sustaining my marks in classes as second best. Second best to a girl I’d bullied for the past four years, and for the sake of normalcy, I had to continue that too, didn’t I?
My second mistake of the year: noticing Monty at the party, building up a torrent of vitriol against her in my mind… and then just not saying anything to her. Nothing at all, not that night.
Her family and mine were enemies. We were enemies.
That meant we had to hate one another, didn’t it?
It had to, because one day we would graduate and leave the safe walls of our school and then we’d be opponents on a battlefield.
Opposite sides on a chess board moved like pawns to gain ground in a game with no end.
But I should have approached her that night. I should have jumped at the chance to antagonize her, maybe even say something nasty enough to make her cry. That would have kept us in our prospective roles, maintained the rules of the game we played.
Instead, I watched her more intently than ever before. Observing Monty had always been a straightforward task, tracking her movements like a wolf tracked a wounded animal.
The mistake of not harassing her, of simply watching in my tortured state of mind, came from secret thoughts under the deluge of my hate sneaking up through the surf and cresting the waves of my hatred.
And those thoughts didn’t seem like hatred at all.
They crested the frothy waves of my inner turmoil bearing the head of a snake, hissing forbidden things.
Things about the random flashes of her skin, wondering what her thighs looked like under her too-long skirt that went past school regulation.
Thoughts about her eyes, bluer than absolution and the deep water that cooled the guilt-laden fire in my chest. And thoughts about her mouth when her little pink tongue darted out to lick a drop of her drink from her bottom lip.
Maybe it was the lack of self-gratification I’d indulged in since the summer.
Hard to jack off when all I saw was blood on my hands, and the shame of what I’d done doused any heat in my loins.
Maybe it was because I’d gone through most of the girls I could get my hands on since the year before and she was one I hadn’t had—like a challenge.
Maybe it was the several drinks already in my system reminding me I’d spent years impulsively watching her.
So, it only made sense that those thoughts about Monty would pop into a teenager’s head.
They meant nothing. She was just a girl—a girl I’d hurt time and time again.
I convinced myself I was simply too exhausted to torment her.
I continued avoiding Monty. Each missed opportunity became another link in my chain of mistakes, steadily growing longer. Not plaguing her every step, but continuing to watch her, to read her, to learn every outside factor that made her who she was.
If she entered a room, my eyes cut to her, magnetized and pulled without my consent.
My body disobeyed me, seeking her out in every environment we coexisted.
Classes, meals, school events, the library—fuck—I never went to the library if I could help it.
But if I saw her in the hall heading that way, my traitorous feet tugged me along, following her into the dusty, dimly lit shelves of books.
Julian noticed, but he had the wits not to say anything aside from the mild teasing.
Dougie struggled to keep up with assignments, and he was a few coins short of a full dollar, so he didn’t see a damn thing if I didn’t want him to.
My closest friends kept their mouths shut when they noticed my gaze trained on the frumpy know-it-all and her rat’s nest of hair across a room or the times I slipped away from the group.
Each time I told myself I’d corner her, bully her, tease her. I didn’t—couldn’t.
Monty never seemed to notice me. If I wasn’t immediately harassing her, the girl spent most of her time either reading or talking with her friend, Brooke.
The few times her eyes clocked me, she scowled as if her pinched little nose might scare me away, and returned to whatever held her attention.
Because anything and everything else was more important to her than I was—and that only spurred me deeper into a growing, spiraling need for her to notice me.
My third mistake: realizing on some level I’d always wanted her to notice me.
It was a driving force that sustained most of my actions.
I wanted, needed, everyone to always pay attention to me.
Naturally, she fell under that umbrella.
But with Monty, it started when we were nine and her book was more important than me.
That aggravation morphed into bullying, because her feelings didn’t matter as long as her attention remained solely on me.
After the holiday breaks when we returned to school, I realized I’d spent half of our fifth year at St. Henry’s avoiding her and missing her attention. That’s what ignited my drive to watch her—I just needed to maintain normalcy.
Yet for some unknown reason, the year ended, and we’d hardly interacted once.
Aside from that piercing glare at the party, we hadn’t exchanged words.
Through the summer I felt the lack of her, like a Monty shaped hole in my mind.
I needed Helen Montgomery’s focus back on me where it belonged by any means necessary.
So much so that thoughts of her were a driving force in my mind through the summer and a blessed distraction from the gruesome things Dad asked me to do.
12 YEARS AGO
Sixth year at St. Henry’s started much the same as the last. Rugby practice, games, flirting, classes, and my closest friends being the only two people aware of the things I’d done over the summer.
Julian had been with me for my third solo mission, his own task set by his uncle. He’d thrown up on his shoes by the end of the torture session, but we’d retrieved the intel we needed. I patted him on the back and repeated my dad’s words. It gets easier. Don’t dwell on it.