“Don’t give me that shit. I used to be normal, and I liked it just fine.”
“Did your mother seem normal?”
I sigh, blowing out a huge whoosh of air and close my eyes. I had been wandering around the loft, my cell to my ear, so I plop down on my real bed, staring up at the ceiling. “Yeah, Mom seemed normal. It’s not like I had a second mother to compare her to, but she was great. She had fresh homemade cookies every Wednesday when we’d get home from school. And she loved coupons. Dad made more than enough money, but Mom was obsessed with couponing; she did it every night after the dishes were washed, while we did homework. She seemed happy, maybe a little detached from Summer and Trent, but as normal as anyone else.”
“Detached? Explain.”
“She was always hugging me, wanting to talk about my day, coming up to my room to spend time with me. With Summer and Trent, there wasn’t that show of affection, she didn’t seem eager or interested in spending time with them. It was almost like she was afraid of getting close to them.”
“Think back, Deanna. Was there any hint of what was to come?”
I close my eyes, concentrating on the question, flipping back through the past. But I already know the answer; it was a question I had asked myself for four years. “There were times she was moody or quiet, and times when we knew to give her space, but that’s ordinary behavior for any person, right? And sometimes she would fly off the handle for no reason—just go ballistic on us over some little thing.”
I rolled over, playing with a seam on my comforter. “Something happened in the past, when I was young. I overheard Mom and Dad talking about it one day, something that caused Mom to be sent away for a bit. I asked Dad about it one day, and he just said she was sick, and I dismissed it as nothing. Honestly, even if she did fly off the handle at times, what happened seemed to come completely out of left field. The only clue I can think of, looking back on it, was that she had sent me away that day.”
I climbed the steps of our big white Colonial-style home, an impressive structure that screamed upper-middle class. Throwing open the red front door, I dropped my book bag at the base of the stairs, a heavy thud of educational oppression. “MOM!” I hollered, trying to find her in the big house.
“I’m up here, sweetie.”
Her voice had come from upstairs, and I bounded up the steps, two at a time, out of breath by the time I reached the second floor landing. I trotted down the hall, glancing in bedrooms ‘til I saw her in mine. I blew in the open door. “You would not BELIEVE what happened today.” I stopped in my tracks, looking at my bed. “What are you doing?”
She had my suitcase open on the bed—a purple suitcase I hadn’t seen since last summer when I had made the horrid decision to go to volleyball camp. She must have pulled it from the attic. She had stacks of folded clothes on the bed and was in the midst of packing a pair of jeans when I asked the question.
She glanced at me, smiling. “You’re going to your grandparent’s for the weekend.”
“What? Why? Jennifer has a party at her parents’ lake house this weekend—you already said I could go!”
“I know sweetie, and I’m sorry. But you haven’t seen them in ages, and when they called and asked, I couldn’t say no.”
I frowned at her. This was so completely out of character. “Are Trent and Summer going?”
She hesitated, folding a grey cardigan. “No. I don’t want to burden your grandparents with all three of you. Plus, it will be good for you to get one-on-one time with Papa and Nana. Once you go off to college, you won’t be seeing them as often.”
I walked over, looking at the clothes she had picked out. It was way too many clothes for two days at my grandparents’. But Mom had packed the right stuff. She knew what went with what and what was currently stylish. Missing Jennifer’s party sucked, but I had a feeling that Mom had something up her sleeve. I was a month from graduation, and wouldn’t be surprised if she had something special planned. Mom was always big on surprises.
“Why do you think she sent you away?”
“Mom and I were very similar. I was a younger clone of her; at least that’s what she and Dad always said. I don’t know that she planned what happened, but I think she might have known something was coming. Killing me would have been like killing herself.”
“But she did kill herself.”
I pause. “Yeah, but maybe that was unexpected. Maybe after she did what she did, she couldn’t live with herself anymore.”
“Is that really what you believe?”
I stiffen on the soft bed. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, don’t spout off bullshit to make my questions go away.”
“It’s not bullshit; it’s the truth. And if I wanted your questions to go away, I’d just hang up the phone.”
“Maybe.”
That does it. I hang up out of spite, then, giving in to my sophomoric tendencies, stick my tongue out at my cell.
Derek doesn’t think that I am a killer. He says that my ‘urges’ are strictly fantasies, that I don’t manifest other traits of a killer. He thinks I’m bipolar, that the dark side of me is just one facet of my personality, not the real me. He thinks we can compartmentalize it; kill it off all together with ‘proper medication.’
What he doesn’t realize is that just because I call it ‘an urge,’ or ‘the other side of me,’ doesn’t mean it is a separate personality of mine. I used to call it Demon, because it was a lot easier for me to refer to it by name, than call it cruorimania. Plus, when I was pissed at it, it was a lot easier to trash talk it if it had a moniker. But Demon was just a name, not a separate entity. I am Demon. There’s never nice Deanna, then evil Demon. I’m always evil. Demon is Deanna. So I finally just dropped the nickname and accepted anthropophobia, cruorimania, psychosis … all of it is who I am.
My many diagnoses would help in a murder trial. And technically, since I am a murderess, I should be in prison. But you have to realize that while prison would be a good thing for me, it’d be a very bad thing for my obsession. See, there are a lot of people in prison. And they wouldn’t be able to run far.
CHAPTER 9: Jeremy Bryant
His brown uniform pressed, his nametag straightened, Jeremy Bryant rode the old metal elevator up to the sixth floor. The delivery wasn’t scheduled until tomorrow, but seeing the address, he added it to his truck for today, wanting the excuse to get on this damn elevator, ride up to the sixth floor, and go through the same routine he had for the last three years. Ring, wait, sign, and leave. Not exciting enough to waste fifteen minutes on a day already jammed packed with deliveries. Yet, here he was.