Put Me Back Together(77)

I cleared my throat and waited until he was really looking at me to begin. This was the kind of conversation that needed everyone’s full attention.

“Have you ever heard of the Kindergarten Killer?” I asked.

Lucas frowned slightly. “Sure, everyone has,” he said. “The kid who murdered Tommy Wesley. The most horrific homicide in recent history, if you believe the papers. It’s been all over the news, because he just got out. Why are you—” I held up my hand to stop the question I knew he would ask. We’d never get anywhere if we did it this way. I just had to tell the story and let him hear it.

“I was thirteen when that happened,” I said. “He lived in my neighbourhood. The media frenzy was unbelievable. Even when they don’t publish your name they find you anyway—nobody ever mentions that. His parents barricaded themselves inside their house. The parents of the dead boy, the Wesleys, were crying in the papers, on the news, on their lawn. They lived on my street.

“Emily didn’t understand why I reacted the way I did. Why I changed into this sullen, silent creature that roamed the house at night because I couldn’t sleep and stopped caring about anything, stopped living. I couldn’t face the Wesleys, even though they wanted to see me, to comfort me. They thought I was on their side, but I knew better. I knew more about Tommy Wesley’s death than anyone.”

“What do you mean?” Lucas said, his face clouded with confusion now instead of anger. “How could you know more than them about their own son’s death?”

I raised my chin. “Because it was my idea,” I said.





20





“I met Brandon at the park,” I went on, looking out the window now. I couldn’t look at Lucas anymore. “That’s important. We didn’t go to the same school. The park near my house was this huge, wild tangle of nature, with a forest and hiking trails. I used to go into the woods to sketch on these huge boulders. That’s where I met him. He liked to smoke there and I thought he was cool because he smoked for real. You know, not like a kid pretending to smoke. He smoked like he knew what he was doing, like a grown up. Remembering it now it seems absurd, but I was so impressed with him at first, even though he was a year younger than me. He never said much, which was so different from all the boys at my school. He had these intense dark eyes. And he was cute. He called me Katie Kat. We met up every day for a week and a half and I called him my boyfriend, in my head anyway. A week and a half. That’s all it took.

“I didn’t tell Emily about him, which I was really glad about later. It was the first thing I’d ever kept from her.” My mind reeled as I said this, because I’d lied to her so constantly every day since. “I didn’t know it until…after, but Brandon never told anyone, either. If what happened next hadn’t happened, Brandon Tomko would probably be erased from my memory by now. There wasn’t much to our relationship, really. We never even kissed. But what happened did happen, so Brandon and those days we spent together in the woods are now and forever a major event in my life that I can’t ever escape.”

My voice quavered and I felt Lucas’s hand cover mine. His thumb smoothed the skin on the back of my hand and I knew that I’d been wrong. Whatever might happen in the next little while, I hadn’t lost him yet. He was still here with me. It gave me the strength to go on.

“Tommy Wesley was five and Ricky Wesley was nine. I was their babysitter. It was my first babysitting job. I’d watch them two or three times a week after school while their mother was taking a class. Copywriting, I think. I wasn’t a very good babysitter. Mostly I’d just let them watch TV for three hours straight, which was completely against the rules. Tommy would sometimes talk me into playing trains with him. He adored trains. If he hooked up all the toy trains he had—which he did once—it made one gigantic train that stretched all the way from the kitchen to his bedroom door. He was a cute kid, very cuddly. He still had that baby sweetness. It was Ricky that was the problem.”

“I don’t remember ever reading about a brother,” Lucas said, frowning, pulling me out of my story for a moment.

“Yes, you do,” I replied, my eyes on the sycamore across the street. “At the funeral he tried to climb into the coffin to be with his brother and an uncle had to drag him away, screaming.”

The papers had printed that detail over and over the week of the funeral. I knew Lucas would remember it. Everyone did. The dead child, the inconsolable brother, the sobbing parents, the nation in mourning.

The tears that I had wrought.

“Oh, right,” Lucas said grimly, remembering. “Keep going.” He squeezed my hand.

“Ricky hated me,” I said. “He didn’t want a babysitter. He thought he was old enough to stay on his own. Remember, I was only four years older than him. He would spend the afternoons doing anything he could to get rid of me. He broke a vase and said I did it. He played too rough with his brother, and when I pulled him off he accused me of abusing him. He poured soup into my backpack. Basically he acted like a total brat. By the time I’d been their sitter for a month, I hated him, too.”

“On the day I regret the most, the day that started it all, I met Brandon in the park when I was done babysitting. It was already getting dark, but I knew he would be there. I was excited to see him, because usually I could never think of what to say to him. I didn’t know how to talk to boys. But on that day I had plenty to say. And I remember word for word how I started. I said, ‘I want to kill Ricky Wesley.’ Then Brandon put out his cigarette and said, ‘Tell me.’”