Boring Girls(2)

Fern and I could not forgive. And the reason we murdered these people was very simple.

It was for revenge.





ONE


I have always lived in the same house in Keeleford. My family never moved, I never had to start all over again in a new school. I had that sort of idyllic childhood, growing up on a street with neighbours we knew. A nice community, you know. A normal youth. A good family.

My parents didn’t have a ton of money. We have a small bungalow, with three bedrooms, on Shade Street. Next door was Mrs. Collins, who lived alone after her husband died. Across the street was an elderly couple. On the corner lived a family with a few kids younger than me and a dog that always chased us along its side of the backyard fence when we’d walk by. When I was five, my sister, Melissa, was born. There was a little store where Dad would take us to buy candies: red jelly feet, cinnamon-flavoured lips, black licorice sticks. There was a park nearby. Our schools were in walking distance.

My father was a high school teacher, but he worked at a school in a neighbouring town, so luckily Melissa and I would never have to face the social awkwardness of having our dad in our high school. We did, however, have to face the awkwardness of having a father who taught English and always liked to hit us up with word games.

He would sit at the dining room table, marking his papers, and I believe he liked to compare the intellect of his students with the intellect of his daughters, always raging to Mom about our superiority, of course.

“Rachel,” he once said to me, “can you think of a word that rhymes with orange?”

I thought for a minute, because when I was younger, I liked these games. I liked that my dad, a teacher, would come to me for my ideas. I liked thinking that I was smarter than the older kids in his classes.

To this particular question, I answered “porridge.”

“Okay,” Dad said. “Now make a ‘roses are red’ poem with orange and porridge.”

I thought for a few more minutes and then announced,

Roses are red,

Violets are orange.

Goldilocks ate

The three bears’ porridge.

“I love it!” my father said, beaming at me. “Creative. I’ve got fifteen-year-old kids in this class who couldn’t think of that. Marilyn,” he said to my mother, “your ten-year-old daughter is writing better poetry than my class is.”

Melissa got into it as well:

Roses are red,

Violets are orange.

When it rained,

It was a storm.

“Brilliant!” My father applauded. I knew that mine was better. Of course, Melissa was only five, I could concede that. But I believed that my father thought me to be a genius, and it inspired me to start writing poems and stories. I kept many journals, which I never showed my parents despite my desire for their praise. I believed my diaries to be full of secrets that were mine alone, regardless of the irrelevance of the events they recorded.

But I always wrote them with the idea that someone would read them. I remember being in fifth grade and receiving my first diary as a birthday gift. It had a little lock on the outside that you could easily pick. I wanted to make a good impression on my phantom audience. I wanted my future readers to be intrigued by me, to marvel at how exciting a life I was leading, to be impressed by my intellect. If my family ever snooped, I wanted them to be surprised.

So I started making things up. Spicing up my existence. I would casually mention how a police officer had asked for my help to solve a crime and how he had admired my detective skills. I would write about how I had fought off a kidnapper who was attempting to abduct a little kid and how the kid’s parents offered me a reward that I graciously declined. My diary became filled with so much fantasy, which was more interesting to me than the dull normality I actually existed in.

My mother worked as a receptionist in a dental clinic, and she also loved art. When me and Melissa were babies, she created paintings for our rooms: watercolour scenes, flowers, portraits of us. Her stuff was all around the house, really. And her shelves were packed with books on art history. Big heavy books with thick glossy pages filled with paintings. Those books were really something special to me, almost magical.

I remember looking through the books with her, always focusing on the art with children. She’d talk to me about the paintings and the artists, pointing out the colours they used and why they worked well together, complementary colours — you could make blue look brighter by putting orange next to it, things like that. I didn’t really absorb much colour theory, but it was fun that Mom would do crayon drawings with us and let us use her fancy grown-up paints too. I didn’t know any other kids with moms who would do that.