Before She Knew Him(45)
I got on my phone, went to my fake account on Instagram, and punched in #latteda, not really expecting to get a hit, but not entirely surprised when the most recent post, a close-up of some latte foam swirled into a heart, was by a haleyfpetersen. Her pictures, mostly selfies, confirmed it was the blonde I’d just followed back to her apartment. She called herself an activist, writer, and yoga instructor. The hashtags on the picture she’d just posted half a minute ago included #shoplocal, #girlboss, #yogalife, #thefutureisfemale, and #thehappynow.
The parking spots at the complex were numbered, and I walked over to where her car was parked. Spot 17.
And like that, I owned her. Her name. Her personal photos. Where she lived and what she drove. I knew that, without a doubt, I could murder her in the next twenty-four hours and never get caught. She’d go from a living girl, pretty enough to have two thousand followers on Instagram, to a dead girl, pretty enough to make the national news.
I drove home, thinking about the specifics of how I would do it. The thoughts were enough for now. I felt better than I’d felt that morning. But somehow it had been too easy, way too easy, and I thought, as I often did, about upping the game, about actually going through with it.
Wherever my brother goes, death follows. Has anyone else noticed this? That kid from his class in college, Jay something, some piece of shit with a dark fuzzy mustache who brought a BMW with him freshman year and killed himself in it the following year. It was the first time I suspected. When I asked Matthew about it, he said that Jay deserved to die, but that he had nothing to do with it.
Likely story.
On hot summer days Mom would take us to a pond two towns over. We’d paddle around in the roped-off area, the bottom rocky and weedy, while she sat in the lawn chair she’d brought with her, reading magazines and smoking mentholated cigarettes, the minty smell of them floating out over the water.
Sometimes a man with a hairy chest would come and sit near her. They never talked, but when Mom would go to the restroom—“Stay where you are, Mommy’ll be right back”—he’d followed her there.
“Is that man your friend?” Matthew once asked from the backseat of the station wagon when we were heading home.
“What man?”
“I saw you in the woods together.”
She was quiet for what seemed like a long time. I took a bite from my Fudgsicle and my teeth went numb. “If you tell your father about him he’ll kill me. Do you understand that?”
Matthew said that he did.
In the other dream I have I am driving alone at night, down a dark road, my headlights carving out a cone of white light. Up ahead a man runs. It is the same man from the house with all the rooms. I’m pretty sure of it. And no matter how fast I go, he keeps running away from me, just out of reach of my headlights.
I told my brother that I’d seen Henrietta Mazur on her front porch. It’s true, but it’s not the only time I’ve seen her. Sometimes I come to Matthew’s house when I’m not invited. I park a few blocks away and walk over. I know that Mira—uppity bitch that she is—doesn’t want to see me, but I like to see her sometimes, or see my brother with her, the way he helps her cook dinner and rubs her feet at the end of the day.
He’s pretending, I think.
And now I get to see Henrietta Mazur as well.
I’ve seen her through the sliding glass doors at the back of her house. Henrietta in the kitchen, bopping along to some music I can’t hear. Once I saw her there in just a short oxford button-up and a pair of black panties. She had to stand on her toes to reach anything, and the shirt would ride up, showing off two perfect ass cheeks, just barely contained by some shiny fabric.
She’s small, with dark hair that’s cut a little short for my taste, and moves like a dancer. I imagine she’s flexible, that if you got hold of her ankles you could push her legs all the way back to either side of her head. I’ve been to her website and seen her etchings—sick, twisted stuff—and I can only imagine what goes on in her head. Sometimes I picture her with thick black pubic hair like the women on the playing cards, and sometimes I imagine she’s completely shaved. That’s what the girls these days do, right? Keep themselves shaved down there all the time, because they never know when some man will come along and pull those little panties off.
There was a murder up in New Essex outside of some bar. The singer from the band got his skull caved in. I didn’t think much of it until I saw the name of the band. The C-Beams.
Wasn’t Matthew telling me about some band he checked out at the bar near his house, said he knew the girlfriend of the lead singer and how he was cheating on her and she had no idea? It rings a bell. I don’t get over to Matthew’s house very often these days even though Mira is always away (I sometimes wonder what she gets up to on all those business trips), and sometimes I drink too much and forget what we talk about. I always think that maybe Matthew will insist I sleep on the couch some night, after I’ve had too much, but he never does. Just sends me on my way.
Brotherly love.
Haley Petersen advertises a yoga class on her Instagram. She’s teaching it in her own apartment on a Saturday morning, and I almost think I’ll go. The thought of talking with her face-to-face when I already know so much about her gets me very excited. I’ve studied all her Instagram photos (she loves to show off her body any way she can, especially doing yoga poses in lacy underpants) and read all her Twitter posts (she was depressed over the winter; she went to Lisbon in the spring) and reviewed her website (she writes terrible poetry that makes me think she’s been abused).