8

At the trial, they tried to paint me as an innocent, sweet child. I was twenty five then. I wore my hair short and rounded on the ends, used headbands to keep it out of my face. I had a ring made out of a spoon that I had made during the one art class I’d needed to graduate college. It was the only piece of jewelry I wore, excepting a pair of cubic zirconium earrings my mother had given me for my thirteenth birthday and that I hadn’t taken out since. I hadn’t moved them when I’d gotten my ears pierced and the skin had healed around them. It was the last mistake I ever made.

My lawyer told me to look scared, to look young. I was young. I wasn’t scared, but she was scared of me, scared in a way that she wasn’t afraid to admit, because I wouldn’t tell her anything and she didn’t think she was going to win the case.

Normally she wouldn’t be particularly concerned, she said, flirting and confiding in another lawyer, but this was all over the news. She didn’t want to be all over the news as on the losing side. Besides, she confessed, I was a little creepy. I never spoke to her (and maybe I shouldn’t be telling you this), but she’s the bat-shit crazy quiet type, the kind you tease and then shoots up the school. I could have done it.

But even she didn’t seem completely convinced. She always regarded me with a patient smile, a strained patient smile, while she tried to explain to me again and again that I needed to tell her where I had been that night, explain a way that I could be connected to the scene that didn’t include my killing him. I sat silently and stared. I had long since learned that the average human was unsettled greatly by a long, lasting stare.

She put off putting me on the stand for the longest time. They talked to my mother, to the family of the dead man, to neighbors and co-workers, trying to paint a picture of me, of that night, of him. They speculated and hemmed over what connection we could possibly have.

That right there was the point they never could understand: what possibly would lead me to kill him? It couldn’t have been a robbery—I didn’t need money and nothing had been taken from his corpse. Though he lived only down the block, we hadn’t ever really spoken before. It didn’t strike like a crime of passion or of cool, calculated anger. They speculated at its randomness, which of course had been my intent.

There came the point, however, where my testimony couldn’t be put off any longer. My lawyer grabbed her chair when the prosecution called me to the stand, and held on with white-knuckled fists. She didn’t know what I was going to say—that’s what she was afraid of. She didn’t know what I was going to say and that was no good position for a lawyer to occupy.

None of them ever knew that I had been planning this from the start, from the moment I had purposefully planted the evidence that would lead to me. They may have suspected when I submitted meekly to the police, but I knew that was giving them more credit than they rightly deserved. Humanity was no match for me. I would win again and again and again.

For all the fancy defense that was created, for all the months of speculation, none of them would have ever suspected that as soon as they put me on the stand, I’d confess.