Page 64 of Dissection of a Murder
“Does blackmailing me make you feel powerful? Some kind of twisted revenge, hitting back at the system?”
“Do it, now. Today.”
“Screw you, Jack. And this video you claim to have, because I don’t believe you.”
At that, he storms out of the room, closely followed by Jack.
The other guy remained out of view the entire time. I only heard his voice. It was one of those plummy posh-boy accents, from someone raised in a middle-upper-class environment. They have an annoying inflection at the end of sentences that drips with privilege.
But I’ve heard this particular voice before. I recognize its pitch and timbre, the rise and fall of his words. His speech, tinged with the same urgency it had over the phone.
The young man in the video is Quinn Smythe.
31
Witness X
Rule #7
Beware the Talented Student
Once you becomegood at something, you become a threat to others who have the same skill. But beware most of all the person to whom you impart all of your knowledge.
The student.
You want someone whose mind is in alignment with yours, but whose appetite for dominance will never exceed your own. Pick your pupil wisely. The last thing you need is your protégé becoming too powerful. It’s a tricky balance to achieve. If a student becomes more skilled and successful than their mentor, things can turn ugly. It triggers all kinds of inferiority complexes. Things can get out of hand.
I heard her before I saw her.
Even though we were both only sixteen at the time, that husky voice made her sound like she smoked thirty fags a day. She spoke with the confidence that money affords you. Laughing loudly, the girls around her directed their adoring, magnetic attention her way. I had never seen her before, but I could tell she was the dangerous one, the rebel. She wore the same pristine uniform as the rest of us but somehow looked better in hers. The pencil skirt grazed the top of her knees, a good two inches higher than ours. The top button onher white shirt gaped open, as her tie hung loosely around her neck. She wore two sets of studs in each ear; we were allowed one. The uniform code was applied strictly here. You expect that at a boarding school—the sanctions are tough—but this girl was prepared to bend the rules.
After eyeing one another up around school for a few weeks, we found ourselves gravitating toward each other. It was inevitable: we each saw a piece of ourselves in the other.
I spent a year beside her, observing her, before introducing her to the rules. I needed to ensure she would respect and use them wisely. They required emotional intelligence, impeccable timing, and restraint. They were powerful in the right hands, and dangerous in the wrong ones.
She knew how to play people in a way even I had not yet learned. I had become an expert at manipulating boys. I knew the kind of person I needed to be around each of them to secure their placement in my pocket: a nerd, a tease, a vixen, a coquette. It was transactional.
But she knew how to work the girls. Was a natural social climber. A keen sense of justice ran through her blood and people trusted her; she always made the right call, even if it pissed people off. She was skilled at being fake in a way that made it appear that she wasn’t.
We could help each other.
A model student, she was patient and asked questions. She had an insatiable thirst for the dark knowledge that was being fed to her, and she lapped it up.
It wasn’t until we applied to go to the same university that our behavior soared to the next level. Suddenly, we possessed an even bigger world in which to create our chaos.
We reveled in causing as much destruction as we could, playing people against each other, covertly causing rifts within friend groups and fucking our way through hot, influential male students. Guyswith girlfriends always had more value. The ultimate challenge. How long would it take for them to cave in and cheat? But they had to be under the illusion they initiated it. We never actually wanted them, of course—it was all just part of our game. We were attracted to their status, their unavailability.
Could we make them want us? Need us? Love us? Even for just a few weeks before moving on to the next?
It was a playground, a place for us to hone our skills before moving into the real world, where we set our sights on married men. The stakes were higher, and the thrills were, too. We collected broken marriage vows like sweets and became drunk on the power it gave us.
How irresistible. How intoxicating. How powerful.
How fucking pathetic.
But even this got boring after a while, and that’s when it happened. My insatiable desire for self-destruction pushed me to a place where I’d never quite recover.
You can break down defining moments, the ones that become landmarks. The decision I made to start talking to her changed the trajectory of my life. Theoretically, we shouldn’t have worked. She was not like me, but she was also very much like me.
