The Best American Mystery Stories 2002

Not gin out of a silver flask, but a heavy dose of barbiturate from my mother’s crammed medicine cabinet. It was an old prescription; I took the chance that my distracted, nervous mother would never notice.

It was not my intention to hurt my high school sweetheart. For I so adored her, I could not imagine even touching her! In my sickly, fevered dreams I “saw” her vividly, or a female figure that resembled her; beneath layers of bedclothes, as if hoping to hide myself from my father’s suspicious eyes that seemed to penetrate my bedroom walls, I groaned in anguish, and in shame, in thrall to her female beauty. I was the victim, not the girl. I wished to free myself from my morbid obsession, and I became desperate. For had not my father (reading my thoughts? identifying certain symptoms in my person, my behavior?) warned me with much embarrassment of the danger of “unclean practices,” “compulsive self-abuse”? Had not my father turned aside from me in disgust, seeing in my frightened eyes and inflamed pimply skin an admission of guilt? And yet I could not beg him for mercy claiming I am the victim!

In high school life, Babs Hendrick existed in a rarefied dimension, inaccessible to someone like me; I might brush against her in a corridor, or descending a flight of stairs, might sit on the floor of the greenroom backstage, six inches from her feet, yet this distance was an abyss. The girl was invulnerable, immune to anything Roland or Rollie might say or do. At such times I knew myself invisible, and though lowly, in a way blessed. Unlike other, older and more attractive boys, I had not a chance to compel this girl to love me, even to notice me, thus I risked little, like a craven but faithful mongrel. Even when someone called out “Rollie!” and sent me on an errand, I felt myself invisible and blessed. During rehearsals on the open, bare stage, which was often drafty, I liked it that Babs might send me for her sweater, or her boyfriend’s jacket; I loved it that, in this place devoid of glamour, Babs yet exuded her innocent golden-girl beauty, which (I came to think) no one really appreciated but me. At such times I could crouch on the floor and gaze openly at Babs Hendrick’s flawless heart-shaped face, her perky, shapely little body, for she was an “actress”; in fact, and this was a delicious irony not lost on Roland, Babs and the other Indian River stars were dependent on people like Roland, an admiring audience for their self-display, or what was called “talent.” And so I made myself more and more available to the Drama Club, and to the rather vain, pompous Mr. Seales, as a way of making myself liked and trusted. How quiet Roland was, and utterly dependable! No one else in the Drama Club was either, and this included Mr. Seales himself. I was always available if, for instance, Babs needed someone patient to help her with her lines, in the greenroom, or in an empty classroom. (“Gosh, Rollie, what would I do without you! You’re so much sweeter and a darn sight smarter than my kid brother.”) Mr. Seales had cast, or miscast, Babs as the wan, crippled, poetic Laura in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie; this was a plum of a role for an aspiring actress, but one for which Babs’s healthy, wholesome golden-girl looks and childlike extroversion hardly suited her. Her superficial facility for rote memory wasn’t helping her much with the poetic language of the Williams play, and she was continually baffled by its emotional subtext. Even Mr. Seales was beginning to be impatient with her tearful outbursts and temper tantrums, and several times spoke cuttingly to her in front of others. These others were to be shortly designated as “witnesses,” even I, who had no choice but to tell police officers all that I’d truly heard.