If you want to blame the music, it wouldn’t be hard. Fern and I like death metal. Dark, heavy, disgusting death metal. Filled with lyrics that a lot of people don’t like. Most of the people in these bands are guys. Angry-looking guys. And I mean, these bands have names that seem tailor-made to be blamed for a massacre: Deathbloat? Bloodvomit? Torn Bowel? And, of course, Die Every Death. I can’t leave them off the list. Lest we forget.
So how easy is it to point at me and Fern and then slide that pointing finger to our CD collections? Really easy. I mean, let’s be real. Torn Bowel? I totally get why somebody’s mother wouldn’t like the sound of that. Too bad. They’re some of the nicest guys I know, and I’m sure they’ve been hounded by the press about me and Fern, and I feel bad about it. They didn’t kill anybody. As much as they might have written songs about murder, they never did it. I’m sure they’re facing a lot of questions now, simply because they’re our friends. They’ll have to explain the music to outraged activists and families and journalists and church folks and talk-show hosts. A lot of bands will. Ones we were friends with, ones we weren’t. I’m sad for that. It wasn’t their fault.
I’m sure there are murderers in the world who listen to nice acoustic folk music or play the harp or something. Killing people isn’t exclusive to those of us who listen to Torn Bowel. People were murderers before there was recorded music. Before radios. Before running water. The whole thing is silly.
You can’t blame music. You can blame me.
And you can damn well blame the people who gave me the reason to do it.
I tell them over and over again why we did it. It’s very simple. Maybe we should have dealt with it differently. Maybe we should have exercised forgiveness. But in my opinion, some things cannot be forgiven. Some people cannot be looked at with compassion. It’s kind of ironic, because the people judging me believe that I should have been compassionate, but they aren’t looking at me with any. Everyone is a hypo-crite. Everyone, deep within themselves, whether they want to acknowledge it or not, knows that there are things that they would not be able to forgive.
Fern and I could not forgive. And the reason we murdered these people was very simple.
It was for revenge.
ONE
I have always lived in the same house in Keeleford. My family never moved, I never had to start all over again in a new school. I had that sort of idyllic childhood, growing up on a street with neighbours we knew. A nice community, you know. A normal youth. A good family.
My parents didn’t have a ton of money. We have a small bungalow, with three bedrooms, on Shade Street. Next door was Mrs. Collins, who lived alone after her husband died. Across the street was an elderly couple. On the corner lived a family with a few kids younger than me and a dog that always chased us along its side of the backyard fence when we’d walk by. When I was five, my sister, Melissa, was born. There was a little store where Dad would take us to buy candies: red jelly feet, cinnamon-flavoured lips, black licorice sticks. There was a park nearby. Our schools were in walking distance.
My father was a high school teacher, but he worked at a school in a neighbouring town, so luckily Melissa and I would never have to face the social awkwardness of having our dad in our high school. We did, however, have to face the awkwardness of having a father who taught English and always liked to hit us up with word games.
He would sit at the dining room table, marking his papers, and I believe he liked to compare the intellect of his students with the intellect of his daughters, always raging to Mom about our superiority, of course.
“Rachel,” he once said to me, “can you think of a word that rhymes with orange?”
I thought for a minute, because when I was younger, I liked these games. I liked that my dad, a teacher, would come to me for my ideas. I liked thinking that I was smarter than the older kids in his classes.
To this particular question, I answered “porridge.”
“Okay,” Dad said. “Now make a ‘roses are red’ poem with orange and porridge.”
I thought for a few more minutes and then announced,
Roses are red,
Violets are orange.
Goldilocks ate