"Who?"
"Ted Bundy," I said. "He killed thirty or so people around the country in the seventies—he's the one they invented the term 'serial killer' for."
"You know some weird crap, John."
"Anyway," I said, "in an interview before he was executed he said that after you killed someone, if you had enough time, they could be whoever you wanted them to be."
Max was silent for a moment.
"I don't know if I like talking about this anymore," he said.
"What do you mean? It didn't bother you a minute ago."
"A minute ago we were talking about guts falling out," said Max, "and that's just gross, not scary. This stuff is kind of messed up, though."
"But we just started," I said. "We're just getting into it. It's, a serial-killer profile, of course it's going to be messed up." 1":
"It's just kind of freaking me out, okay?" said Max. "I don't know. I gotta go to the bathroom." He got up and left, but left his food behind. At least he wasn't leaving for good. Not that I cared if he did.
Why couldn't I just have a normal conversation with someone? About something I wanted to talk about? Was I really that screwed up?
Yeah, I was.
5
There is a lake outside of town, just a few miles past our house. Its real name is Clayton Lake, predictably, since everything in the whole county is named Clayton, but I liked to call it Freak Lake. It was about a mile or so across, and a few miles long, but there wasn't a marina or anything; the beaches .were marshy and full of reeds, and the water filled up with algae every summer, so nobody really went swimming there, either. In another month or two, it would freeze over, and people would go skating and ice fishing, but that was pretty much it—every other season of the year, there was no reason to go there at all, and nobody ever used it for anything.
At least that's what I thought before I found the freaks.
I honestly don't know if they're freaks or not, but I have to assume there's something wrong with them. I found them the year before, when I couldn't stand being home alone with Mom for another minute, and I hopped on my bike and pedaled down the road to nowhere. I wasn't going to the lake, I was just going, and the lake happened to be in the same direction. I passed a car with a guy in it, just sitting there, parked on the side of the road, watching the lake. Then I passed another. A half mile later I passed an empty truck—I don't know where the driver was. A hundred yards down there was a woman outside of her car leaning on the hood—not looking at anything, not talking to anyone, just leaning there.
Why were they all here? The lake wasn't much to look at. There wasn't anything to do. My thoughts turned immediately to illicit activities—drug handoffs, secret love affairs, people dumping bodies—but I don't think that was it. I think they were out there for,the same reason I was out there: they needed to get away from everything else. They were freaks.
After that I went to Freak Lake whenever I wanted to be alone, which was more and more often. The freaks were there, sometimes different ones, sometimes the same, arrayed along the lakeside road like a string of rejected pearls. We never talked—we didn't fit anywhere else, so it was foolish to assume that we'd fit any better with each other. We just came, and stayed, and thought, and left.
After Max's outburst at lunchtime, he steered clear of me the rest of the day, and after school, I rode out to Freak Lake to think. The leaves had long passed the bright orange phase and faded into brown, and the grass on the side of the road was stiff arid dead.
"What did the killer do that he didn't have to do?" I said out loud, dropping my bike in the dirt and standing in a warm patch of sun. I could see cars, but none were near enough for people in them to hear me. Freaks respected each other's privacy. "He stole a kidney from the first one, but what did he take from the second?" The police weren't talking, but we'd get the body at the mortuary soon. I picked up a rock and threw it In the lake.
I looked down the road a few hundred yards to the nearest car; it was white and old, and the driver was staring out at the water.
"Are you the killer?" I asked softly. There were five or six people here today, at various points on the road. How long before Mom's prediction came true, and people in town started blaming each other? People feared what was different, and whoever was the most different would win the witch-hunt lottery. Would it be one of the freaks who escaped to the lake?
What would they do to him?
Everyone knew I was a freak. Would they blame me?