I was handling it as well as I thought. Somewhere around there was when I started thinking about killing him.”
The breath went out of me. Of course I should have known—no, I had known, except I hadn’t been able to believe it. I had known I didn’t have it in me to come up with the idea for that kind of planned, meticulous killing. And I would have known, if only I had been able to think about it clearly for thirty seconds, exactly who did.
“Well, not in a serious way,” Susanna said, misreading the look on my face. “It was just a thing to make myself feel better, like sticking pins in a doll. I was daydreaming about blowing him away with a machine gun and coming up with some smart-aleck line that would be the last thing he heard on earth, that kind of crap.”
“‘Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker,’” Leon said, grinning.
Susanna blew smoke at him. “The point is, I still thought I could cope. I figured all I had to do was grit my teeth for a few more weeks: we were about to leave school, right? Once we’d done our exams, why would I ever have to see that arsehole again?”
“If only,” Leon said.
“Right. After the Leaving, it actually got worse. While I was living at home, Dominic couldn’t exactly call round and demand to be let in; but once we were all here for the summer, he was over like every other day. He waited for me outside work, a few times—I don’t even know how he found out where I was working. I definitely didn’t tell him.”
Side-eye at me. I had no idea; I might have said something, how would I have known that was some terrible crime? A lot of this felt hugely unfair: I was being blamed for stuff that I hadn’t done and had had no way of knowing about. “Anyone could have told him,” I said. “It’s not like it was a state secret.”
“Well, someone did,” Susanna said. “He’d walk me to the bus stop, pinching various bits of me and describing all the details of what he was going to do to me. I kept telling him to leave me alone, but he’d just laugh and tell me I could quit bullshitting, he knew I loved it. I don’t know if he was just saying that to wind me up, or if he genuinely had himself convinced.”
“Who knows what the fuck went on in Dominic’s head,” Leon said. “Frankly, who cares. The whole reason for this was so that Dominic Ganly’s horrible little mind wouldn’t be our problem any more.”
“I think, deep down,” Susanna said, “he thought I was a jinx. He’d always got everything he wanted, without even having to try for it, right? And then there was me. And then straight after that there was the Leaving. He knew he’d crashed and burned, and the only course he was going to get offered was like basket-weaving in Sligo Tech. Whatever life plans he’d had were pretty much fucked—which was my fault, for stopping helping him—and I doubt he had a Plan B; it had never occurred to him that he might need one. And I think he felt like it had all started with me.” She considered that, head cocked to one side against the arm of the sofa. “Maybe not a jinx; more like an albatross. And if he could shoot me down, put me in my place, then everything would go back to the way it should be.”
“Or else it was nothing deep,” Leon said. “He just liked making people scared and miserable, and he liked shagging girls, and you looked like a perfect chance to do both.”
“I don’t know,” Susanna said. “I think he was really seriously crazy, by then. I don’t mean mentally ill, not in any way that would have got him a diagnosis. I just mean wrong; gone off the rails. Basically everything he’d ever been—the big success, the king of the castle, the stud—it was all gone. And it broke him. He must’ve been pretty fragile to start with, if that was all it took.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Leon said. “He wasn’t broken. He’d always been a total shit. Any of us, if we’d crashed and burned in the Leaving, would we have started making rape threats to random people? No, thanks very much, we wouldn’t have.”
Susanna thought about that, tapping ash. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe it was more like he didn’t break;