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I don’t know how to do this: make friends, talk to girls, talk to anyone my age really. In high school, kids only acknowledged my existence if they wanted something, like help studying for their AP English final.
I let my mind wander again to one of my favorite fantasies: tugging the silk so tight around his neck his eyeballs pop like pimples.
I guess all his sucking up is really paying off. Shouldn’t be long now until his interim chairship turns permanent. That position should belong to Drew. He’s more qualified than Kinnear by every conceivable measure, and he has years of seniority. But Drew refuses to engage in the political games and petty sabotages that are Kinnear’s specialty.
The past few years have seen a spate of suicides—not all my doing—and the school’s leadership has always done their best to sweep them under the rug before word got to Gorman’s wealthy alumni network. It’s the same nothing to see here approach they take with student sexual assault reports. Their obsession with protecting the university’s reputation has allowed plenty of misdeeds (my own included) to go unpunished, while the administration keeps waving their hands, pretending everything is fine.
“I figured you’d be locked up in your office, hard at work on that fellowship application. My offer to review your materials still stands, by the way.” “I’ve already submitted it, actually,” I say. “But thank you.” As if I would ever make that mistake again. Two years ago, Kinnear read a paper of mine on Viola Vance’s rumored bisexuality, gave some insulting notes on the structure of my argument, and proceeded to present a trivialized version of the exact same thesis in a talk he gave at the ALSCW conference the next semester.
I’m struck suddenly by the thought that people might see us together and assume we’re a couple. As soon as the path is clear enough, I sidestep so I’m a few inches away from him. It’s stupid; I don’t know why I care.
Kinnear doesn’t really want the fellowship. He just doesn’t want me to have it. The Women’s Academy did finally contact me to set up a phone interview, but I can all too easily imagine Kinnear pouring poison in the ears of the selection committee during his own call, framing his work as superior to mine, undercutting my accomplishments. That’s what he’s been doing since the day I was hired at Gorman.
I worked so hard to get ready for that interview, accounting for every detail down to my outfit: a blazer and pencil skirt I’d had tailored precisely. It made me feel formidable, capable—the kind of woman I’d worked so hard to become during my years of graduate school. But the way Kinnear stared at me as I took my seat in the interview room immediately punctured my confidence. Later I overheard him commenting on my “great legs” to one of his older male colleagues, and I deflated entirely. I took the job, but I never wore that outfit again.
and driving fills me with stomach-churning dread. It’s so much responsibility. So easy to take a life or cut your own short.
I knew it. I knew he was a cheater. The late hours at work, the frequent overnight trips, his insane jealousy if Mom even glanced at someone else herself.
I tell him about my 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. How every time, she believes him and takes him back and tells me I ought to show my father some respect, he’s done so much for us, he loves us, really. She swears.
“You looked like you wanted to burn the whole place to the ground,” Wes says. That’s not pity in his eyes, or judgment. Instead, it’s something like… wonder. Maybe admiration, even. It’s so far from what I expected, I don’t know how to respond. The air in the car feels charged now, and I almost think Wes is going to kiss me. But he doesn’t. And that makes me like him even more.
That’s one of his policies as department chair: My door is always open. His door is always open, and I’m always watching.
“Thank you,” he says. “I didn’t realize you’d read it.” I lean in even closer. “I read all your papers.” This part is true—I have to know my enemy, and in academia that means studying what they study. I’m not sure what’s more nauseating: Kinnear’s pretentious writing style, or the way he shamelessly regurgitates my ideas and those of our colleagues. Drew is too nice to call him on it, but Kinnear’s latest publication lifted, almost verbatim, a lesson from Drew’s survey unit on the Aesthetic Movement. The man is shameless.
Kinnear is using his professorial voice now, the better to mansplain my own academic specialty to me. Mina was right; all he wants is a fan club.
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.
Stright’s time will come too. Unless the sudden death of his mentor scares him into a newfound morality. Unlikely. If men like that could learn the error of their ways, I wouldn’t have to teach so many of them a lesson.
He’s clearly a few beers in, swaying a little on his feet, and he uses it as an excuse to keep angling farther into her personal space. The side of his beer bottle brushes her wrist, and she flinches away from him, tugging her sleeves down. No one else seems to notice how uncomfortable she is—not
“I just mean—she’s very focused on her career. She’ll do whatever it takes to get ahead.” And you won’t? “You should just—watch out, that’s all,” he says. “Mina doesn’t care about relationships unless she can get something out of them. Once someone’s outlived their usefulness…” 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.
The red is still vibrant, my natural color showing slightly at the roots, but I want to be at my best for tomorrow. The more I look like Kinnear’s wet dream, the more satisfying it will be to transform into his worst nightmare.
“See, I told you.” Allison leans in to whisper in my ear. “All the cutest girls are bi.”
My lips are ripe-apple red, and it changes my whole face. I look like a completely different person—someone bold, sexy, confident. I’m not sure who I’m supposed to be, but I definitely don’t look like myself tonight. And isn’t that the whole point of Halloween?
“You could come to London.” He lays his hand on my shoulder, pressing the pad of his thumb into the bone. “Spend some time with me, and I could see about getting you guest access.” Under the table, I dig my fingers into my thighs. How dare he. How fucking dare he. He thinks he’s going to get the fellowship—the fellowship I deserve, the fellowship that should be mine in the first place, that would be mine if he weren’t “Cambridge chums” with the goddamn curator—and he’ll do me the favor of helping me with my work if I fly across the Atlantic to suck his cock. He disgusts me. I’m so tired of
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Kinnear grasps at my thigh, fingertips sliding under the hem of my skirt. This dress is brand-new, picked out especially for tonight—same with the black lace lingerie underneath it. He’ll never get far enough to see it, of course, but it makes me feel powerful. Armored.
Kinnear has never looked at me like this—really looked at me. In all the years I’ve known him, eye contact was always a brief stopover on the way to ogling my tits, my ass. Reducing me to parts. This wild-eyed fear is the closest thing to respect he’s ever paid me. Too little, far too late.
I’m not an object or an obstacle to him anymore. I’m his goddamn ruination.
“Scarlett, come on, it was sixteen fucking years ago.” 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.
“You want a rape kit?” He says this so matter-of-factly, like he’s asking if Allison would like a glass of water. He doesn’t seem the least bit concerned.
She’s been through enough; she shouldn’t have to deal with this. The dean should be helping her, not accusing her of bringing this on herself. “So that’s it?” I’m on the edge of my seat now, muscles poised to lunge. Allison grabs my wrist. “Carly, don’t, it’s not—” “You’re not going to do anything? You’re not going to help her at all?” “This can be a valuable lesson for you,” the dean says, sounding so fucking reasonable I want to punch her teeth in. “There’s no need to ruin anyone’s life over it.” “What the fuck is wrong with you?” Allison gasps, like she can’t believe I said that out loud. I
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It makes me sick, thinking of him in there with her for all the hours of rehearsal, smiling and laughing and dancing like there’s nothing wrong, like he’s not a fucking rapist.
His face darkens with a mixture of embarrassment and anger—perhaps the most dangerous combination of emotions in a man.
“I don’t want to censor your self-expression.” Alex leans forward, elbows on his knees. “But we have to be considerate of the other students. Make sure this is a safe space for everyone.” Fury flares in my chest again, chasing the tears away. Nowhere is safe, not while guys like Bash are out there taking whatever they want from whoever they want, with no one to stand up to them. 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. But Alex can’t understand that. Even if he tries his best to be
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“The whole time we were married,” Mina says, “I knew he was cheating on me, all the signs were there, but he’d deny it, tell me I was imagining things, that I should see a therapist for my ‘pathological jealousy.’ ” Her voice breaks a little, rage seeping through the cracks. “He made me feel insane.”
“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. “Alexander could lie and cheat and turn my own mind against me, and everyone still thought he was so charming. But if I’d showed up to work with a black eye just once, everything would have changed. They would have had to take it seriously.”
It’s exhausting, being in my head. I wish I could stop thinking. I wish I could be like everyone else.
Everyone is laughing, smiling, having fun. Everyone but me. I’m in a house full of people, and I’m all alone.
“Stop,” I say, but his mouth swallows the sound. He’s crushing me, sucking all the oxygen out of my body. I push against him, harder this time, locking my elbows. “Stop it.” He listens. He stops. But when he sits back on his side of the sofa, he has a look on his face I’ve never seen before. Alex is angry. “I don’t—” I curl in on myself, my knees against my chest. “Why would you— What about your wife?” “I thought we understood each other, Carly.” He shakes his head, like I’m a misbehaving child. “I thought you were more mature than this.”
“You’re not…” Alex swallows. I’m the one scaring him now. “You’re not going to tell anyone about this, are you?” He runs his hands through his hair, and he looks so lost. Why didn’t I see it before? He’s pathetic, with his constant grin, his desperate need for everyone to like him. No wonder he pretends to care so much about his students. We’re the only ones still young and foolish enough to fall for his bullshit.
“You’re pathetic, Alex.” The smile fades, and a meanness seeps back into his expression. His face looks so ugly now, I can’t believe I ever considered him handsome. “No one would believe you anyway, if you told them. Troubled girl like you.”
But who’s to say he’d take me any more seriously than the dean of students took Allison? No. I can’t trust any of them. If I’m going to give Alex and Bash and all the other men like them what they deserve, I’ll have to do it myself.
steady herself, messing up the stacks of folders. I look her right in the eyes. “These men are predators, Mina.” She meets my gaze, unyielding. “So are you.” She’s right; I am. I enjoyed every second: their screams, their blood, the life draining from their eyes. She’s still afraid of me, and she should be. I belong in a cage. “I mean, you’re plotting their deaths,” Mina says. “Hunting them. It’s…” She trails off, but I can guess what she’s about to say. Sick, twisted, appalling. Evil. “It’s brilliant.”
“Move,” he says. “Or I’ll fucking kill you.” He levels the blade at me, but his hands are shaking. He’s not capable of this. He never was. He’s nothing but a cornered animal, and even without a weapon, I’m the dangerous one.
Jasper is trembling more by the second. Pathetic. He has no problem intimidating a woman, violating her, but he can’t bring himself to commit actual violence. Like Mikayla said in class, though, it’s all the same crime.
Maybe a boy like Wes could have made me happy. If I were a different girl, a normal girl, not a freak with a head full of revenge fantasies. If I’d never seen behind his nice-guy mask. He’s never given a damn about me, or about Allison. He thought if he was nice to us, eventually we’d fuck him. He thinks we owe him that.
They tell me what a sweetheart Wes was, what a good friend. I smile and thank them, and all the while I’m thinking of that ugly sneer on his face when I told him to stop touching me. I wonder how many other girls got to see that side of him. I wonder if Allison’s ever seen it.
I meet his gaze—steady, unblinking—and I think of the way that girl at the restaurant in Pittsburgh laid her long manicured fingers over his knuckles and laughed. He might be able to fool her and my mother, but he can’t fool me. Not anymore. A smile spreads across my lips, even colder than the snow. You’re next, motherfucker.
