Love in the Time of Serial Killers(20)

I didn’t consider myself a very sentimental or demonstrative person, either. Like that one episode of The Office, where Jim hosted a silly version of the Olympics and made everyone medals out of yogurt lids? At the end, Ryan the Temp throws his away, and gives a talking head about how he could either throw it away then or wait two months, but either way what was he supposed to do with a medal made from trash. Ryan the Temp is clearly the worst, but in that moment, I felt seen.

Back in North Carolina, the small office in the English Department I shared with another graduate student for our teaching assignments looked like a decorator’s version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, one where Jekyll loved Stranger Things, Funko Pops, and artistically desaturated wedding photos, and Hyde loved death row cinder block walls. I’d never bothered to put up anything, because I always thought the job was temporary, anyway, over once I graduated. Except I’d been teaching there for the last four years now, longer than I’d ever held down any other job.

So it wasn’t necessarily a hardship for me to start tossing stuff from the house. Conner, on the other hand, was struggling.

“Dude,” he said, “check this out. My sobresaliente award from eighth grade Spanish. I have to keep this. It’s so sick.”

I hurled another box of old appliance parts, who knew what they belonged to, into the dumpster. We’d only been at it for an hour and already I was drenched with sweat. God, I hated Florida.

“Say sick in Spanish,” I said.

“Uh.” He turned over the trophy in his hand, as if the answer might be engraved somewhere on the bottom. “Well, in this case I mean sick like excellent, so . . . excelente.”

“Put it in your car to take home if you want,” I said. “It just can’t go back in the house.”

He bounced it in the air, letting it spin before catching it again. The corner of the statuette caught him on the palm. “Ow,” he said and, as if mortally offended now by the trophy’s very existence, threw it in the dumpster.

Next door, Sam emerged from his house dressed in his bland business casual again, looking like a stock photo from a credit union’s website. Khakis, white button-up, sunglasses on top of his head. He gave Conner and me the briefest nod, sliding the sunglasses down over his eyes before climbing into his truck.

“Well, that was weird,” Conner said.

I glanced down to see if I looked as sweaty and gross as I felt. My Torrid skinny jeans were black, thank god, so they didn’t show any stains. It was probably one reason I was overheated, but I hadn’t owned a pair of shorts in over a decade. As one concession to the sun beating down on us, my shirt was gray instead of black—DEATH + TEXAS written across my chest in cracked screen-printed letters. I’d gotten it while in Austin at the Pop Culture and Literature conference I attended each year, and it was one of my favorites. My messy bun was messier than usual, tendrils of hair falling out and sticking to my neck and face. I stopped to take my hair down and wind it back up again, looping the elastic around it tightly and hoping it would stay.

“I know, right,” I said. “Don’t try to figure out what he’s up to. Maybe he gets discounts on the Dockers if he puts in an hour appearance at the store every now and then.”

“No,” Conner said, “I mean weird that you didn’t even say hello. We were in that guy’s house a few days ago.”

And I’d forgotten to even try the garage door to see if it was locked. Truly a missed opportunity. “Uh-huh.”

Conner gave me an exasperated look I couldn’t read. He’d been a little taken aback when I’d wanted to leave so abruptly, but then Shani reminded him that they both had to wake up early for work, and he’d shrugged and gone along with it. We hadn’t even said goodbye. Was that rude?

I had a feeling that was rude.

“Josue told me some very interesting things about your neighbor Sam,” Conner said, waggling his eyebrows.

“Did he give you a handwriting sample?” I asked, starting to rifle through a box of old mail before tossing the whole thing in the dumpster. “Does Sam use an excessive amount of pen pressure and leave odd spacing between individual letters?”

“You act so cool,” Conner said, “but I know when you bring up handwriting analysis it’s because you’re dying inside for answers.”

“Only because of the lack of closure around the JonBenét ransom note,” I said irritably. “Just tell me whatever you learned, Conner. You obviously won’t leave it alone until you do.”

“Well,” Conner said. “For one thing. He’s single.”

A treacherous flutter, low in my belly. “So?”

“Apparently he did have a girlfriend,” Conner said. “They were together a long time—Josue told me her name, something with an A? Anyway, she broke up with Sam right before Christmas. He was pretty wrecked by it.”

We should really go back inside to load up more to sort through and toss. We’d run out of the load we’d brought out of the house already and were just standing in the driveway at this point, talking. But for some reason I didn’t feel like breaking this up just yet.

“Why did Josue even tell you all this?”

“Oh,” Conner said. “I asked.”

I tried not to react to that. Knowing Conner, that meant that he’d come out and said something really embarrassing, like how his sister was paranoid or, worse, how his sister was single herself and increasingly thirsty.