"I already wrote it."
"That's great," she said, not really meaning it. She paused a moment longer, then dropped her pretense. "Do I have to guess, or are you going to tell me which of your psychopaths you wrote it on?"
"They're not 'my' psychopaths."
"John . . ."
"Dennis Rader," I said, looking out at the street. "They just caught him a few years ago, so I thought it had a nice 'current events' angle."
"John, Dennis Rader is the BTK killer. He's a murderer.
They asked for a great figure, not a—"
"The teacher asked for a major figure, not a great one, so bad guys count," I said. "He even suggested John Wilkes Booth as one of the options."
"There's a big difference between a political assassin and a serial killer."
"I know," I said, looking back at her. "That's why I wrote it."
"You're a really smart kid," said Margaret, "and I mean that. You're probably the only student that's already finished with the essay. But you can't. . . it's not normal, John. I was really hoping you'd grow out of this obsession with murderers."
"Not murderers," I said, "serial killers."
"That's the difference between you and the rest of the world, John. We don't see a difference." She went back inside to start work on the body cavity—sucking out all the bile and poison until the body was purified and clean. Staying outside in the dark, I stared up at the sky and waited.
I don't know what I was waiting for.
2
We didn't get Jeb Jolley's body that night, or even soon after, and I spent the next week in breathless anticipation, running home from school every afternoon to see if it had arrived yet. It felt like Christmas. The coroner was keeping the body much longer than usual in order to perform a full autopsy. The Clayton Daily had articles on the death every day, finally confirming on Tuesday that the police suspected murder. Their first impression had been that Jeb was killed by a wild animal, but there were apparently several clues that pointed to something more deliberate. The nature of those clues was not, of course, revealed. It was the most sensational thing to happen in Clayton County in my whole life.
On Thursday we got our history essays back. I got full points, and "Interesting choice!" written in the margin. The kid I hung out with, Maxwell, missed two points for length and two more for spelling; he'd written half a page about Albert Einstein, and spelled Einstein a different way every time.
"It's not like there's a whole lot to say about Einstein," said Max, as we sat at a corner table of the school cafeteria. "He discovered e=mc2, and nuclear bombs, and that's it. I'm lucky I got a half page at all."
I didn't really like Max, which was one of the most socially normal things about me—nobody really liked Max. He was short, and kind of fat, with glasses and an inhaler and a closet full of secondhand clothes. More than that, he had a brash, grating attitude, and he would speak too loudly and too audioritatively on subjects that he really knew very little about.
In other words, he acted like the bullies, but without any of the strength or charisma to back it up. This all suited me fine, because he had the one quality I most desired in a school acquaintance—he liked to talk, and didn't much care if I paid attention to him or not. It was part of my plan to remain inconspicuous: Alone we were just one weird kid who talked to himself and one weird kid who never talked to anyone; together we were two weird kids having a semblance of a conversation.
It wasn't much, but it made us look a little more normal. Two wrongs made a right.
Clayton High School was old and falling apart, like everything else in town. Kids bused here from all over the county, and I guessed a good third of the students came from farms and townships outside the city limits. There were a couple of kids I didn't know—some of the outlying families homeschooled their kids up until high school—but for the most part the kids here were the same old crowd I'd grown up with since kindergarten. Nobody new ever came to Clayton, they just drove through on the interstate and barely glanced as they passed by. The city lay on the side of the highway and decayed, like a dead animal.
"Who did you write about?" said Max.
"What?" I hadn't been paying attention.
"I asked who you wrote about for your essay," said Max.
"I'm guessing John Wayne."
"Why would I do John Wayne?"
"Because you're named after him."
He was right; my name is John Wayne Cleaver. My sister's name is Lauren Bacall Cleaver. My dad was a big fan of old movies.
"Being named after someone doesn't mean they're interesting,"
I said, still watching the crowd. "Why didn't you write about Maxwell House?"
"Is that a guy?" asked Max. "I thought it was a coffee company."
"I wrote about Dennis Rader," I told him. "He was BTK."
"What's BTK?"