They Never Learn

by Layne Fargo

He’s a boy, and he’ll never become a man. Because in a few more minutes, he’ll be dead.

I’ve spent the past sixteen years murdering men who deserve it, and I’m not about to get sloppy now.

Five boys raped Megan Foster, but only one of them did it while stone-cold sober.

Who’s smiling now, motherfucker?

Twenty is young. But if Tyler was old enough to gang-rape a girl and try to get away with it, he was old enough to pay the price.

Even in his final moments, I doubt he learned his lesson. But I didn’t kill him to teach him a lesson; I killed him to carve him out of this world like a tumor. And I’d do it again.

There are so many less messy ways to kill a man.

But I see them.

With her looking at me like that, I barely feel the cold anymore.

He knew I was there the whole time.

I didn’t kill all of them, but I could have.

Mina gives Kinnear a look, like she’s waiting for him to intervene; it is his party, after all. But he seems oblivious to the tension, sipping his drink as if nothing’s wrong.

I’m furious with my father, and I’d be perfectly happy never speaking to him again, but at least he’s not a pastor.

But little do they know: killing a man is so much more satisfying than fucking a man could ever be.

I might enjoy fucking him, but I can’t trust anyone with the truth about what I am, not if I want to survive. I have so many more men to kill.

This wild-eyed fear is the closest thing to respect he’s ever paid me. Too little, far too late.

The first semester I worked here, I spent every day sick with dread, waiting for someone to put the pieces together—to recognize me as Carly Schiller, even though I’d changed almost everything about myself since leaving Gorman in the middle of my freshman year.

WHAT

There it is: the anger, the disbelief, the utter indignation that I would dare to judge him, to hold him accountable. To make him pay for what he’s done.

I’m a “good friend”? Allison is “lucky”? Is she joking?

“She wouldn’t have understood. She’s not artistic like us.”

His face darkens with a mixture of embarrassment and anger—perhaps the most dangerous combination of emotions in a man.

“If someone raped me,” she says, “no one would ever find his body.”

He wasn’t afraid of me, I write. That was his first mistake.

My story was fiction, but it was about how the world should be—how it would be, if we could turn men’s actions back on them. Make them fear us instead.

Even if he tries his best to be sensitive and caring, he’s still a man. He’ll never know what it’s like.

Yes. Come closer. Give me a reason.

He can’t hurt me unless I let him.

It takes him a few seconds of focusing on my chest before he finally recognizes me.

He’s right: I don’t need any help. But in a second, he will.

It’s easier than you think, I want to say.

It’s so simple. It’s always simple, no matter how much careful planning and preparation I have to do. Cut them, and they bleed. Choke them, and they stop breathing.

He thought if he was nice to us, eventually we’d fuck him. He thinks we owe him that.