5

All the news shows predicted that mine would be the trial of the century. They showed the same pictures of me over and over: one standing at the gates of my college on graduation day, one of me at the front of my kindergarten class, and one of me entering the courthouse. That day I was wearing a red scarf and a skirt with a simple pattern of flowers on it, the one that my neighbors had once laughingly told me was every inch the kindergarten teacher.

For a while, I was the topic of countless human interest pieces, as they were, perhaps debates. Various acquaintances throughout my life wanted to believe that a girl like me, a young girl from a good family with a good education and a nice home, with a steady job, who helped her neighbors unload their groceries and taught five year olds to tie their shoes—nobody wanted to believe a girl like that could be a killer. Only my political science professor from my sophomore year of college pointed out that although he remembered me being very polite, my quietness had a sense of coldness to it, too.

After that, all anyone could see is that they couldn’t find any friends of mine. They couldn’t find anyone who could really say we’d been friends in high school, in college, in my adult life. There were acquaintances and co-workers, classmates and enemies. But nobody really felt confident saying that we’d been friends. The news shows and their changing opinions of me were convoluted enough so as to almost be interesting, but for most of the time, I was bored.

Time spent sitting actually in a jail cell wasn’t all that boring, because they gave me the newspaper, and that was just about as boring as my life had been before I’d been arrested. But the times when I had to sit in the defendant’s box, listening to stupid, boring person after stupid, boring person drone on and on about this thing I’d done and that thing I’d done and this thing that proved it and that thing that proved it was so agonizing that I actually considered killing one of them while I was standing there. But what they didn’t realize was that I had planned a huge joke, something I was planning to dump on the heads of all of them, to watch it drip down into their consciousness.

At that point in my life, I would have done anything to make myself laugh.