Neutral Mask

Part 2

Connie read everything she could. She read for hours.

Her mother came by at one point, leaning in the door that way she did, as if not wanting to place a foot in her daughter’s space without permission, and asked if Connie wanted lunch. With one hand scrolling the laptop’s track pad, Connie waved her off with the other, far more dismissive and disrespectful than she normally would have been.

But Mom was part of some other world, and Connie was currently orbiting a whole different planet.

The planet of Billy Dent.

It had only been a few years since Billy Dent’s arrest, but those years to a sixteen year old might as well have been decades. There are eons between thirteen and sixteen. Millennia. The Halls had been living in Charlotte. Billy Dent’s arrest in Lobo’s Nod—a town that might as well announce “The Middle of Nowhere’s bedroom community” on its welcome sign—had not made enough of an impression at that age for her to remember the town, the state. She’d been latched onto her budding interests in yoga and acting. She’d been discovering boys, and they’d been discovering her.

A madman in the middle of the country held no interest to her.

And now she was dating his son.

“Is he black?” her father had asked, and Connie began giggling, snickering as if it could ward off disease or death or even—let’s say— a crazy serial killer.

Not only is he white, Dad, she could picture herself saying, but you know that guy they call “Butcher Billy” on TV? Guess what?

On YouTube, there was a clip of Billy Dent coming down the steps of a courthouse with his lawyer. He wore a gray pin-striped suit with a black-and-pale-blue rep tie. And holy God above, it was Jazz. Only older. The hair lighter, sun-kissed, and she instantly chided herself for adjoining such a bucolic adjective to Billy Dent.

She played the video. Billy spoke only once, as a reporter shoved a mic at him and said something unintelligible that sounded like “What are your regrets?”

Billy grinned, and Connie had seen that grin, had kissed the lips that made it. “Once this is all done and I’m a free man,” Billy drawled, “we can talk about that.”

His voice. God. His voice was just like—

She slammed the laptop shut, too hard, not caring.

Oh, Jazz. Oh, what the hell have I gotten into?

That night, she dreamed that Jazz came in through her window, handcuffing her to the bedpost before she was even entirely awake. She screamed for her parents, but Jazz just shrugged, and then there was somehow Billy, too, and Billy dumped a trash bag’s contents on the floor—her parents’ heads. Her brother’s.

“Two is better’n one,” Billy said offhandedly. Jazz nodded and, with a large, wicked knife, cut Connie’s oversized T-shirt—the one she’d snaked from her Dad’s dresser years ago, with his college crest over the left breast—from her body and leaned in, and she woke up, and everything was fine, of course. Everything was normal.

It was his father, she reminded herself, yoga breathing to bring her heartbeat—which had decided to Sousa march—back into line. You don’t inherit crazy.

That thought, plus the yoga, guided her back to sleep.

Monday at school, she rushed through her normal locker routine—bio, English, trig books into the backpack, lip gloss check in the mirror—and made it to homeroom with plenty of time to spare. Van—Vanessa McCurdy, one of her new friends here in the Nod—was lazily sketching what looked like an astronaut in her notebook when Connie sidled up to her and said, “I need to talk.”

Van shrugged and popped her gum. “Now?”

“Before first period.”

“Def.”

Right after the first bell, they ducked into the girls’ bathroom and jammed into a stall at the far end. “What’s so urge?” Van asked. She was incapable of using more syllables than strictly necessary.

Connie hesitated. She hadn’t told any of her new friends that she had gone on a few dates with Jazz. First of all, it hadn’t seemed like anyone’s business. Second of all, she knew how territorial girls could be—lions on the Serengeti seemed more likely to share a patch of veld sometimes—and she had no desire to be “the new black girl” and “the girl who stole the guy someone else was secretly into.” Lastly, she was “the new girl,” and she didn’t know the prestige (or lack thereof) of Jazz’s particular block on the flowchart of the Lobo’s Nod High School social scene. She thought he was cute. She didn’t want to prejudge him based on high school gossip before she got to know him.

Well, she knew him now. Never in her life had she felt such an immediate connection to someone. And never before in her life had she felt such an equally immediate need to know more about someone.

“Do you know Jasper Dent?” she asked.

Van’s eyes went so wide that Connie could see the curve of the orbs sinking back into the sockets.

“What about him?”

“I—” Connie paused. Had someone just come into the bathroom? She and Van held their breath and stared at each other through the silence until convinced they were still alone.

“Remember how I told you I went on a couple of dates with a—”

“Jasper Dent?” said Van, sounding like a woman who’d just gagged down a bowl of toddler stew. “Are you kidding me?”

“No.”

“He’s the one—”

“I know. That’s his father, though.”

“You don’t get it, Connie. You’re new to town. We grew up with him.”

“So what?”

“He was normal. He seemed normal. But the whole time, his dad was killing people and stuff, and he was teaching Jasper all about it.”

“We don’t know that,” Connie said with a confidence she neither deserved nor trusted.

“He taught him,” Van shot back just as confidently, though Connie suspected Van’s confidence—deserved or not—was backed up by something more than Connie’s own. “But here’s the thing. Here it is. Look, the whole time his dad was murdering peeps, Jasper seemed normal.”

“You already said—”

“He acted normal. Like nothing was weird at home. Like everything was cool. Get it? His dad was a psycho freakazoid, and Jasper just came to school every day and acted like everything was normal. No one ever knew.” She shook her head. “Acting normal when that kinda shizz is going down at home? When your dad killed your mom? That’s not normal, Connie.”

The bell rang. Van swore briefly and stumbled out of the stall.

Connie sank onto the commode. She would be written up for being late to her first class, but right now she didn’t care. She had to think.