The Serial Killer's Ghostwriter

Part 1

I don't remember exactly when I first met Humble Lee. It was in high school, that I do remember, but what little I do remember of high school, It was not the exact moment we first met. We just always kind of knew each other and shared a class or two every year. Even before I knew he was a serial killer, I thought the guy was a bit wacky, but I honestly had no clue who he really was until he took a life right before my eyes. They're still calculating his body count and trying to track down all his possible accomplices, but he has already gone down in history and in the end, that's all he really wanted.

Humble Lee was a short and stout, crazy rich asian kid with a round, boyish face that carried a smile too easy to trust. His hair sat in a neat, cropped line above his brow and he wore a crisp white suit wherever he went that reeked of cologne. He always looked too clean, and knowing what I know now, that was the most unsettling thing about him.

Humble and I were never friends in the way that matters. Humble didn't really have friends. He had an ever-rotating court of "best friends," and I became one of them when he recruited me to shoot and edit a video for him.

Humble was going to ask a Disney Channel actress, Lacy Towers, (I never heard of her before either) to prom, and he wanted to do a big, viral video proposal and needed me for it. I was in the AV club, so at first, that's why I assumed he asked me for help, but looking back, I now know why he specifically chose me...

Humble performed twice at the school talent show under the name 'Humble the Rapper.' The first time, he wore sunglasses and a big gold chain. He rapped over a beat he'd downloaded off YouTube and his verses were about "haters," "loyalty," and "the price of fame," Nobody booed, but also nobody laughed. Everyone just kind of... watched. That was the weird thing about Humble. He had this forcefield around him. Not respect, exactly. Not fear, either. (Not yet at least) More like... nobody wanted to be the one to pop his bubble. He believed so completely in what he was doing that calling him out felt cruel, like mocking a toddler who thought he could grow up to be a superhero.

After the first show, he walked through the hallway like a celebrity. He didn't win, but he acted like he did. He said the boomer judges were too small minded to get what he was doing and that 'his art' took risks that some just weren't ready for.

The next year he performed, he did a free style battle with every teacher in the audience. He hit them with some prepared lines like, "Mr. Oakly, you may teach English, but I'm about to leave you speechless!" and "Principal Rhule, today is the day you're getting taken to school!"

He got cheers from the audience. Other kids were either trying to be nice or cruelly egg him on. I didn't care, as long as he was distracting the teachers while I ghosted hits off my vape. Then Humble came dashing up the bleachers looking for a challenger and he mistook me taking a hit as gesturing for the mic. He shoved it in my face while I had a lung full of the grossest artificial, fruit vapor a minor could illegally buy. I sat there, all eyes on me, trying to hold in my hit. The longer I sat still and did nothing the more my lungs rumbled like a volcano ready to erupt. I shielded my face and coughed the remnants of the hit into my hoodie as best I could, but in doing so, I sent myself into a massive coughing fit.

Humble ran with it and said right into the mic, "My rhymes are so sick they just gave you covid." Lockdown had just ended, so the joke was perfectly topical and landed because of it. It was the biggest cheer he got from the crowd that day.

Humble would win the people's choice award, something they introduced that year that allowed the whole student body to vote for a winner. Not The Winner, but the People's Winner. Humble started calling himself Humble, the People's Rapper, after that.

I think a lot about Humble the People's Rapper these days. Everyone knew he wasn't good, that he'd never make it, but nobody told him. We all just smiled, nodded, and let him talk about "his hustle" like it wasn't complete bullshit. It was easier that way. He was harmless. Just a guy with dreams too big for himself. But now, I wonder if that was the moment it really started for him, the disconnect between who he was and who he thought he could be.