by Stephen Kyo Kaczmarek
“Frida, you loser,” Rhiannon Gallagher mumbles, “untie me from this chair right now.”
Blood cakes against her temple where I’d hit her. That’s got to hurt. It’s not like in the movies, where one tap and the girl goes down. Vlump! It took effort not to kill her. More to get her into my old F-150. Then this barn. The logistics are just wild.
Ever try to pick up an unconscious body?
No rigidity. It’s like a Hefty bag filled with dumbbells and sauerkraut, five-foot-seven-inches and a hundred-and-forty pounds. I’m smaller. Guess determination does go a long way. The ant and rubber tree plant and all that.
Anyway, Rhiannon might just pudding her yoga pants, which is good.
“How’s it feel to be afraid?” I say.
Jock, prom queen, hometown hero—that’s her. The golden girl. She’s putting on a good show. She screws her face into anger, but fear still shows in all that nauseating symmetry.
I know fear. It’s looked back at me in the mirror plenty of times, Rhiannon so often the cause of it.
“When I get loose, I’m going to beat your ass. You know that, right?”
She’s lacking in the brains department, thank goodness. Not that it impedes her life one bit, but I guess it’s good to know nobody’s perfect.
I raise the Remington double-barrel shotgun from behind the hay bale between us.
“You don’t threaten someone with one of these,” I explain.
The steel looks black in the hissing Coleman lantern’s light. So does her dried blood against the stock.
Her eyes go wide.
“You really are psycho.”
I have to admit, that’s a good point. Maybe. Could be. I haven’t taken meds for weeks, but they do so little anyway. Antidepressants at best numb me to the bad. I get out of bed. Shower. But feel good? Not until I came up with this ditty of an idea.
“Let me out of here,” she screams.
“Rhiannon,” I say gently. “It’s night and we’re miles from anyone else. Who’s going to hear you?”
She shrieks.
I have to smile. She’s trying to intimidate me, as she has for years, starting in kindergarten. I remember the day I sidled up to the raised sandbox in the corner of that big, awful classroom in Flintridge Elementary. I was that one kid crying from missing her family all morning. So I made little sand castles, like we did with my dad at the beach before his Freightliner went off rain slick I-80 one February night and took him away. My castle was elaborate, with ramparts and turrets and a little moat I filled with water from the drinking fountain.
“Baby,” Rhiannon hissed, knocking it over.
Now, I just watch her scream her voice raw.
“Done?”
She watches me from under loose strands of blond hair, not frizzy brown like mine.
“Look,” she says, some of the fight taken out of her, “let me go, and I won’t tell anybody.”
I lean forward, letting her think I’m considering the notion.
“You mean, not even after I almost cracked your skull open?”
“I’ll heal,” she promises. “I’m fine.”
“Hmm. But how do I know you’re telling me the truth?”
“I’m telling the truth.”
“Like the time you said Tommy Masterson sent me that Valentine, when in fact you did, and when I tried to hug him, he threw me down like I had farted in his face? And everybody in class laughed, you most of all? That kind of truth?”
She grits her flawless teeth.
“I mean it,”
Those eyes certainly are pretty—an emerald shade, bright and sparkly, even now. Mated to a kind person, they might move me.
“I want to believe you,” I say, resting the shotgun on the bale, level with her abdomen, and sit back. “The problem is we’re way beyond that point.”
She sobs.
Of course, she’s cycling through all the predictable strategies. First, intimidation. Next bargaining. Finally tears for sympathy.
Like all pretty people, she’s a master manipulator. No matter what cruelty she did to me – the time she pulled my shorts down in 8th grade gym class when I was on my period or how she spread a rumor our sophomore year I had chlamydia when I’m still a virgin – no consequence ever befell her, not from teachers or anyone. Always the untouchable golden girl.
Tonight, though, her makeup melts from tears and sweat. She looks like a used-up, bully-shaped candle.
“Enough,” I tell her, setting the hammers back on the Remington.
They click like dusty old bones.
“Oh, please, no,” she says, and for the first time, something genuine and pitiable comes out of her mouth.
Of course. It’s directed at herself.
“Look, you’ve had a good run, but from 19 on, it only goes downhill.” I point both barrels at those pretty green eyes. “Better to go out a winner.”
“Frida, wait!”
I let out a breath.
“What?”
“I’m sorry,” she says sobbing. “I’m so, so sorry. For everything.”
I’ve thought about those words many times. Dreamt of such unicorn things.
“You know, I appreciate that,” I say.
My finger tightens on the trigger. It’s warm and silky, and if I just tickle it —
Suddenly, something smells foul, like a stopped up gas station toilet.
“Oh, shit,” I say laughing, “you actually did it.”
Shaking and embarrassed, Rhiannon closes her eyes.
In this moment, I am completely alive. Time converges all at once, I’m at that gritty sandbox, against Tommy Masterson’s rebuffing hands, in the hot and suffocating gymnasium under the cold, cold lights. My father’s long, lonely funeral winnows down to a pinprick of light, and I feel release, as though outside of myself, the pain, the horror, all the suffering in my young life pulled toward some distant event horizon that promises to hurl it somewhere, anywhere, forever away.
I squeeze, the whack echoing off the barn walls and roof like thunder.
When she realizes her head is still in one piece, Rhiannon opens her eyes.
At first, there is only confusion. Then hatred seeps back in.
“You crazy-ass, psycho bitch. You fucking lunatic. Untie me now.”
“It’s April 1, Rhiannon. Get it? Happy April Fool’s Day.”
I’m laughing harder, Robert DeNiro with a cigar.
She turns blazing red.
“Straight to the cops,” she’s sputtering, flecks of spit popping like sparks.. “After I get out of here, I’m going straight to the cops. You’ll spend the rest of your pathetic, pointless life behind bars where you belong.”
She goes on like that for a while. I tell you, it harshes my good mood and takes me right back into reality. I’m no longer laughing. I don’t think even smiling.
“Rhiannon.”
“What, motherfucker?”
I hold up my DuckTales watch.
“It’s now past midnight.”
“So?”
“So, it’s not April Fool’s Day anymore,” I say, pointing the shotgun back at her face, “and I have one more barrel left.”