The Kind Worth Saving (Henry Kimball/Lily Kintner, #2)(11)

“About killing my cousin? Yeah, I have.”

She laughed. “Would you really kill him if you could get away with it?”

“Sure,” he said.

Joan looked at him. He was wearing the cargo shorts he always wore and a striped polo shirt that was a little too tight on him. Probably a shirt his mom had bought for him in middle school. His book was still open on his lap, and he was holding a finger at the place where he’d stopped reading. He looked back at her, his expression unchanging. She thought his face was like a blade, with his thin, bony nose. He had some hair on his upper lip, and she wondered if he was hoping to grow a mustache or if he just hadn’t bothered to learn how to shave yet.

“You really would kill him?” Joan said, again. For whatever reason, probably because the expression on his face never changed, she didn’t really know if he was being serious.

“I’d kill a lot of people if I could get away with it. My cousin Duane, for sure. I’d kill Garrett Blake, and my stepfather. I’d kill lots of people if I could go back in time. Hitler. Richard Nixon.”

“What did Garrett Blake ever do to you?”

“What, you like Garrett?”

“No,” Joan said. “Not really. As much as you, probably. I just think of Garrett as someone you don’t even think about, not someone that you want to kill.”

“Garrett was probably my best friend from second grade to fifth grade, and then he stopped hanging around with me when they started calling me Old Spice.”

“Oh,” Joan said. “Just so you know I never called you that.”

“I don’t care,” Richard said. “All the kids called me that, I guess. It’s just that Garrett was pretty spineless about it. He didn’t even want to be seen with me.”

“So what about Tommy Fusco? You wouldn’t want to kill him?” Tommy had been the biggest bully, by far, at Middleham, the type of kid who made the Richards of the world miserable.

“I might kill Tommy if I had the perfect opportunity, like if it just fell in my lap or something. I mean, he’s a pretty repulsive person, but I just don’t give him that much thought. He’s a bully, but he’s actually not that good at it. I mean, he’s not smart enough to know how to really hurt people.”

Joan thought about that. “Yeah, you’re probably right. So who’s a smart bully, then?”

“Your friend Madison.”

“Oh my God, I can’t believe you just said that. She’s my best friend, you know.”

“You asked me who a smart bully was, and I thought of her. Remember what she did to Wendy Cook in eighth grade.”

“Wendy tried to steal Madison’s boyfriend,” Joan said.

“Oh, maybe. I don’t know all the details. I just remember that Madison pretty much destroyed her.”

That was how Joan remembered it too. Madison had decided to ruin Wendy Cook’s life, and then she’d done it by spreading rumors and by convincing other eighth graders to not speak to her. It had been a full-fledged campaign. Joan had done her part, mostly because Madison asked her to, and when Wendy had been pulled from school (the rumor was she tried to kill herself) Joan remembered her parents sitting her down, asking her all about it. She’d lied and told them she felt terrible for Wendy.

“So what you’re saying is that you’d probably kill my best friend, if you had a chance?”

“Yeah, probably,” Richard said, but he smiled, as though he was joking, which would be the first time she’d seen him making any kind of joke. “I mean, to tell the truth, I don’t give her a lot of thought.”

“Well, she doesn’t give you a lot of thought, either.”

“I’m sure.”

The fluorescent light above them flickered suddenly, the room darkening then springing back into light.

“Uncle Murray,” Joan said.

“Yeah. It does that, the lights.”

“Look, aren’t you scared I’m going to tell Madison what you said about her, that I’m going to go back to school and say how you want to kill people?”

“I hadn’t thought about it. I mean, you can do what you want. I can’t stop you.”

“She’d probably try to make your life miserable.”

“Honestly, my life is already miserable, and it’s not like we’ll be in school forever.”

“It’s three more years,” Joan said.

“Exactly. Not forever.”

There was another slight pause, and Joan said, “Well, I should probably go.”

“Okay,” Richard said, and he looked back down at his page. She studied him briefly. He had thick, black hair, and the hairline pointed down in the middle of his forehead. There was a word for that, but she couldn’t remember it. The truth was Richard was far less of a nerd than he was just two years ago, and even though his eyes were a little too close on either side of his nose, they were an intense shade of blue. In the right clothes he’d probably be borderline cute.

“Hey,” she said. “The best way to murder Duane would be to walk out to the end of that jetty on one of the days when the waves are crashing in, then just push him off the edge. He’d never be able to get back up onto the rocks, and you could just say that he slipped.”