Page 3 of Wicked Vile King
It's embarrassing how easy it is to fool people because, I've learned, most people want to be fooled. A charming smile and a well-placed compliment, and they are putty in your hands. An underhanded insult and a lack of appreciation when they expect it, and you can crumble their matchstick egos in the palm of your hand. No one ever sees it coming, not the pretenses, not the building them up and watching them fall, none of it.
And fuck if that's not boring too.
Sure, I'm certain the docs still question my sincerity when I say I want to become aresponsible and productivemember of society, but not too often at least. To do so would be to question their own success, and their egos wouldn't allow for that, the narcissists. Sometimes, when I slip up and take a moment too long to smile or laugh or give whatever reaction they expect, the docs still take it as a win, because at least I'm not out cutting people open to see what makes them tick.
To be fair, it was just the one time, and she was deadbeforeI started cutting. But it turns out that was boring too, and gross when I accidentally nicked her intestines, and everything smelled like shit.
I need a hobby.
A distraction.
A . . . pet.
I look back out at the campus at the road that leads up to our little slice of purgatory and slide a cigarette out of the pocket of my Academy-issued black slacks. I fish a lighter out of the opposite pocket, roll the wheel, and light her up before taking a long drag. It burns on the inhale, and as I exhale, letting wasted nicotine slip between my teeth, I watch as the fog catches the smoke and carries it away. I could be expelled for having cigarettes on campus, not to mention a lighter, but there are worse things that happen here.
In the dark. When they think we don't see.
I take another drag, staying crouched on the rooftop, and watch as headlights start up the path to campus.
Today's the dayshearrives, my newest reason to not tip forward a few inches and meet the great unknown. I always know when they're coming, the fresh meat. It interrupts the routine and acts like a bandage to the languor of my existence. I've read probably a hundred student files, maybe more, from the records I steal from Headmistress's office. I study over them in the dead of night like I can find a solution to my boredom parsed out between the lines.
I haven't found one yet, but I have gathered there are three types of lost souls who find the Asylum home.
The first is the wannabe badasses, the students who got into one too many altercations back home, who got kicked out of more boarding schools than they can remember before being sent here.
The second are the ones fresh out of juvie or rehab, deposited at the Asylum because mommy and daddy are determined to set them straight on the path to righteousness this time.
The third, though, they're the ones I like the most, the unloved, the fucked-up, and the forgotten. They are sent here to rot because the world doesn't know what to do with them, just like me. They wear scarlet letters on their charts. Bipolar, Schizophrenic, Antisocial Personality Disorder, Oppositional Defiant Disorder, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Major Depressive Disorder, and more.
Some were born fucked-up.
Some were traumatized because of how granddaddy liked to touch them in his special way.
Some became what they were to survive.
A new girl is coming today, an enigma in a file that said a lot, but yet nothing at all. No previous boarding schools, institutions, rehabs, or juvie facilities. She has none of the typical fuckups I see.
She's just a girl, eighteen years old like me, from Charleston, South Carolina, born the only child of a businessman and his pageant queen bride. She's not even on the fucking bell curve of this place.
She was a straight-A student with not so much as a speeding ticket, a cheerleader, and a homecoming queen, until it all went to shit junior year, when her entire world crumbled for seemingly no reason. She slit her wrists in her bathtub and cut so deep she ended up in intensive care for two weeks and institutionalized for six after.
Nothing in her file explains what she did.
Why does the golden girl, the cheerleader, try to kill herself?
I am . . . curious.
And I amnevercurious.
But I guess it's better than jumping to my death, so as the headlights draw closer, I round the parapet and start down the wall, my fingers finding the learned indents in the stone before I free-fall the remaining eight feet to the ground. Water splatters with the impact, across my boots and the bottom of my pants, payment demanded from the campus grounds that never quite dry.
Hidden in the shadows and fog that shroud this place, I watch and wait, staying still until the wrought iron gates at the front of the Academy shut behind the black car, caging her in here with me and sealing her fate.
2
WILLOW
The drive is tedious and long, and it drains the last drops of fight from me. The leather plank of the backseat needles my butt as my knees scrape against the driver's seat with each jostle of the car. I am slowly suffocating in a shiny black Cadillac, the miles gnawing away at my resolve to not completely lose it. It's been thirteen hours, over half a day, since I was plucked from my room by my father and ushered downstairs and into the company of two strange men waiting in our foyer.
