“I have,” I whisper.
“You want the real story? An exclusive? We both know you’re a fan of those. Fine. You know something? After all this time, you deserve it. Here’s the thing: this is for you.” She jabs the air in front of my chest with her finger. “Not your fancy doctor. Not your mother. And absolutely not Paula Papademetriou.”
I nod slowly.
“He did it fast, like I expected he would. It felt like a paper cut across my cheek. Far worse was watching him fall apart afterward, coke-addled and freaking out over the blood. I didn’t scream. He screamed, high-pitched, like a girl. I had to taunt him for over an hour; it was exhausting. First I had to make sure he smoked enough pot to make him impotent, then snort enough coke to get his frenzy going. Throw in some insults about his real mother, then his fake mother, then his manhood, all the while straddling him until my hips ached. A few moans of ‘Ryan’ instead of ‘Shane.’ After all my coaching, who would have ever thought it would have taken him that long?”
My bag slips to the floor. I leave it.
“I researched what it would feel like, to be prepared,” Liv continues. “The cutters of the world love to blog and tweet. They won’t shut up about it. The touchy-feely cutters use words like release and orgasmic. The more common minds say ‘it burns’ or ‘it stings.’ Duh. There’s a subset that waxes on about best tools, with a majority in the razor blade camp. I sort of wish I’d done more research before I spent $10.49 on the Grim Reaper, because it sounds like a razor blade would have been the way to go from a precision standpoint. But no one grabs a razor blade in the heat of the moment. It’s too awkward. And from the gift standpoint, it wouldn’t have worked. Might as well give him a kitchen knife.
“After a few seconds, it felt exposed, like when part of your body gets cold unexpectedly. Imagine dropping trou on a freezing winter day. It was almost refreshing, the moment the air hit that thin line of muscle and blood. I guess that’s why corpses are cold, because living blood is warm.
“On the subject of blood and surprises: in case you were wondering, there was very little. All the gauze I bought sat untouched in my bag. I hadn’t worked through how I was going to explain carrying what amounted to a first aid kit anyway. Evidence of premeditation, that’s what the courtroom dramas would call it. I clasped my hand to my flayed cheek, surprised, which required no acting whatsoever, because even when you’re expecting something to happen and are fully prepared for it, getting hurt is always a surprise. No need to fake wide eyes, your eyes just fling open. I made a noise too, but mostly, I kept thinking, my cheek is so cold, and I should get that antiseptic out right now.
“It seems a shame that Shane didn’t get to enjoy his Christmas gift a little more. As all future criminals do, Shane has it in his DNA to hide the weapon, so before he even attended to me, he threw open his bedroom window and hurled the knife into the yard. I should have given him a harder time about that. It’s funny that his first instinct was to cover his butt, when he admitted his guilt to his mother and the police right away anyway. It just meant some fat cop had to fish it out of the rhododendron next to the Cuthberts’ driveway.
“His mother. Oh, God, his mother. She heard his shrieks as she walked in from bunco. How horrid that must be, coming in from Eighties Night. Running upstairs, coat flung open, pink scrunchie hanging halfway down her teased ponytail. Shane pointing to me, her screaming, ‘What did you do? What did you do?’ like I’d been the one holding the knife. Running to the window and leaning into the darkness, her butt one big tweedy hump, as though an intruder had assaulted me and scaled down the face of her house and was now running down Evergreen Lane. She kept yelling, ‘Where is he? Where is he?’ and Shane kept moaning ‘There was no one,’ but pausing for a minute, wondering if she might be onto a good fabrication.