They Never Learn

by Layne Fargo

a screamy white-boy wannabe punk rocker whining about some girl who broke his heart. That bitch, how dare she.

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

But it’s not long before the panic creeps in again. My throat tightening, my heart throbbing with the suspicion that happiness must be a trick, a trap, a rug about to be pulled out from under me, and any second now I’m going to fall.

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.

I’ve never been alone with a guy before. All my father’s warnings flash through my head—boys only want one thing—but I can’t imagine Wes being any kind of threat. He’s barely over my height, way skinnier than I am. It’s guys like Bash my father meant to warn me about, not guys like Wes.

“You know, we’ve been divorced four times as long as we were married, and the dean’s wife still calls me ‘Mrs. Kinnear’—which was never my name, by the way.”

“Men like him don’t want a relationship, they want a fan club. The more members the better.”

father’s mind games, his weaponized silences, the way he controls how my mother wears her hair, how she dresses, what she makes for dinner. How whenever she pushes back, no matter how small her rebellion, he tells her she’d be nothing without him, helpless, destitute, alone.

Typical, that he chooses to call her “Lady Vance”—replacing her name with her title by marriage.

I linger in the doorway and lock eyes with him, finally letting some of the hatred I feel toward him seep into my gaze. But he won’t see it. They never see the murder in my eyes.

If men like that could learn the error of their ways, I wouldn’t have to teach so many of them a lesson.

“You okay? I’m so sorry about that arsehole. Well, about both of them.” She throws a glower back in the general direction of her ex-husband. It adds fuel to the fire of my rage, hearing her apologize for them.

How bold of him to assume he was ever “useful” to Mina. He’s saying much more about himself right now than about his ex-wife. If anything, his warning increases my respect for her.

So tonight I prepare: picking out the perfect outfit, shaving my legs, shaping my nails. All the things most women do to prepare for a date. 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.

He really is good-looking. Definitely the best-looking guy who’s ever given me a single moment of attention in my whole life. It’s just because I’m one of his students, and he’s worried about me.

“They left her alive to hurt her more.” Mikayla doesn’t even try to conceal her exasperation. “It’s all the same crime anyway. It’s about power, not sex.”

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

Of course Bash feels entitled to touch her however and whenever he likes. He got away with it. He drugged her and assaulted her and hasn’t faced a single consequence.

The details rush into my mind so fast I feel dizzy: the bone sticking out of Bash’s skin, the angry red of his blood, the way his screams would vibrate through me.

I slide into a seat in the corner and pull a notebook out of my backpack, my heart pounding as I turn to a fresh page. He wasn’t afraid of me, I write. That was his first mistake.

The scent of Kinnear’s cologne hangs in the recycled air; I don’t know how I didn’t notice it before. It’s like he’s still here, breathing down my neck. The smug bastard.

The implication is clear: I am very much still a potential suspect.

I can’t stand it, the sad, sullen expression on Carly Schiller’s face, the overwhelming fear in her eyes. I’m not that person anymore. That girl is dead.

She still doesn’t know what I did, how I swapped out his heart meds, slowly, methodically, over the several months I spent living at home between dropping out of Gorman and transferring to Swarthmore. But she saw the satisfied expression on my face when he was lying on the kitchen floor, clutching at his chest, gasping for his last few breaths, and that was enough.

“Yeah?” My fist closes around the pages. “Well, only someone with massive daddy issues could write the shit you do, Mallory.”

She’s being so mean tonight. No, not only tonight—there’s been a nastiness festering under every conversation we’ve had since that morning on the roof.

She’s the repressed one—repressing all her feelings about what Bash did to her, pretending everything is fine when it’s not. I’m the only person who’s treating what happened to her with the gravity it deserves.

“You know what’s really fucked-up?” she says. “I used to wish he would hit me.” I’d had this same thought about my father. His abuse was all emotional and psychological; the only marks it left were internal. Impossible to see, easy to deny.

want to tell her everything, about Kinnear and Dylan Hughes and all the other men I’ve killed, about the timid girl I used to be and the way she turned herself into a weapon. I want to look her in the eyes and say: It’s me, I’m the one, and I did it all to protect women like us. I did it, and I’d do it again.

It’s exhausting, being in my head. I wish I could stop thinking. I wish I could be like everyone else.

Incredible that such a small blade could draw so much blood. She must have hit a vein. Beginner’s luck.