4

11/3/08
3/6/09
Red

I sat in a room full of people who knew I'd done it, and who all wanted to convince each other that I hadn't. Nobody wanted to believe that a nice girl from a good family with a good education and a good job could kill twenty-seven people in cold blood. Even those people who wanted to see the killer fry didn't want to believe it had been me to kill their brothers, their mothers, their friends. They wanted to believe the stereotype: a brilliant but misguided man, antisocial with greasy hair, gaunt and haunted with a disturbing past. They didn't want a little girl in a knee-length skirt looking cute as pie and sweet as sucrose.

My lawyer was tapping his fingers against the table; I took this to mean he felt nervous. I wasn't nervous. I didn't feel much of anything anymore. I was bored utterly by all of these proceedings. I just wanted it all to be finished.



Everyone had agreed on my behalf that I was to plead innocent. The forensic evidence was shaky at best, they told me. The little clues pointed to me with a tremulous, uncertain finger. The prosecution only had one leg to stand on to begin with, and we were going to shoot it out from under them.

Guns never were my style.

Besides, they didn't understand: if I hadn't wanted to be caught, I wouldn't have been. I wouldn't have wanted to get caught if I had known that these procedures were going to be so boring, but then again, killing was getting boring, too. The ennui was destroying me.

So they told me to plead innocent and I didn't say anything. I said nothing through all of the rigmarole, just stared at them, eyes as wide as I could make them. Even my own lawyers were slowly becoming terrified of me, even when I was chained to tables by wrists and ankles. I hear the whispers. They though I was some sort of diabolical evil genius. They were stupid and that's why they thought me genius. They were stupid and didn't even being to understand.

On the seventh day, the day of rest, the prosecution called me to the stand. For half a moment, I half thought I might laugh. I knew this was a joke, a fantastic practical joke that I was pulling off, but I couldn't quite find the humor in the punch line.

"Miss Boyle," the lawyer addressed me. One of the men I had killed had looked just like this lawyer. They both wore gray suits and both had graying brown hair. They both had shiny black shoes. He placed twenty-seven pictures on a corkboard, so that both the jury and I could see them. "Do you know what happened to these people?"

I gazed at him levelly. "I killed them." There, punch line delivered. I thought I should laugh, but I felt no amusement. For half a moment, the prosecutor stared at me. My own lawyer stopped drumming his fingers mid-tap. The audience erupted into trilling whispers. This audience was utterly unnecessary. Their presence irked me.

Mine was supposed to be the trial of the century. The media had covered my case from end to end. I was the topic of news specials and current events, and everyone was gearing up ready to watch me win or lose. I had ripped their fun out from under them.

The judge called everyone to order and I began my stint in the old jails.