Distemper by Beth Saulnier Page B

her?”
    “Nah.”
    “Why not?”
    “A boy’s best friend is his mother.”
    “You realize that’s from
Psycho
.” He laughed, a deep chuckle that seemed to clear the dregs of memory. “Pardon me if I don’t go take a shower now.”
    “Your turn.”
    “Do I have to?”
    “Unless you want me to call you a chicken.”
    “You want another beer?”
    “Quit stalling.”
    “This is perverse. But okay, a deal’s a deal. Here goes. When I was working at a paper in western Mass, I met this guy. His
     name was Adam Ellroy. I fell for him like a ton of bricks, but in the end he went back to California to the love of his life.
     I move to Gabriel, she winds up giving him the shaft, and he comes back east to get away from it all. We sort of get back
     together, and the next thing I know he’s dead at the bottom of the gorge. Everybody thought he’d offed himself, but I couldn’t
     let it go. So I didn’t.”
    “And you and your crazy friends tracked down the killer. GPD’s still smarting about that, you know.”
    “Really?”
    “Really. To put it in your parlance, you scooped them.”
    “Goodie for me.”
    “But you’re leaving out the best part.”
    I took a swig of my beer. I knew what he was going to say. “Which is?”
    “That the person who killed him turned out to be…”
    “Stop. Just drop it.”
    “Alex, come on. You should be proud of yourself. I heard you really kicked butt.”
    “Can we talk about something else? I’m willing to share every detail of my miserable love life. Want to hear about how my
     college boyfriend dumped me for a two-hundred-pound lesbian? It wasn’t pretty.”
    “This really gets you.”
    “Are you crazy? Of course it does. It was the worst thing that ever happened to me.”
    “But you did the right thing. You nailed the son of a bitch. You avenged your friend’s death. You got justice for him.”
    “ ‘Avenged’? How melodramatic.”
    He stopped and stared at me. “There’s something I don’t know about this.”
    “There’s plenty. Look, I’m not as tough as you are, okay? Can we just drop it?” He looked disappointed in me. Why the hell
     was he so interested in all this, anyway? And why did I care what he thought? “Listen, last year was a goddamn nightmare,
     okay? I nearly got myself killed. But I was lucky. I only got myself just short of raped.”
    “Fuck.” He said the word under his breath, and I realized I’d never heard him really swear before.
    “And for your information, I’ve barely even talked about it in the whole goddamn year since it happened, not that I don’t
think
about it every five seconds. My parents wanted to pay for a shrink, but I didn’t see the point. What am I supposed to do,
     somehow ‘come to terms’ with the fact that one of the best people I’ve ever met is stone-cold dead, and the guy who did it
     is reading the
New Yorker
up in Dannemora? The only thing I regret is that I didn’t kill the bastard when I had the chance. I could have, you know.
     I hit him, just enough to knock him out. But when he was lying there unconscious and I was waiting for the cops to come, I
     could have killed him, and no one would have been the wiser. They would have called it self-defense. Sometime I picture myself
     hitting him over and over, watching his brains spill out on the carpet…” I was seeing it then, feeling my arm swing down hard.
     I got a jolt of pure hate that fueled what I can only describe as blood lust. Then I snapped out of it. “Christ. Maybe I do
     need a shrink. You must think
I’m
the homicidal maniac.”
    “Actually, I’d only think you were a maniac if you
didn’t
want to kill him.”
    There were tears prickling at my eyes, and I swiped at them, hoping he didn’t notice. “Would you have done it? If someone
     murdered someone you love, would you kill him if you had the chance?”
    “I don’t know. I hope I never have to find out.”
    “Have you ever killed anyone?”
    “Yes.”
    “More than