least be tense or jittery or something. “I don’t know what I would have done.”
“I was pretty crazy myself, at that point,” Susanna said. “It was like being in a nightmare, that feeling where you have to get out but you can’t move fast enough and you can’t scream. I was cutting myself a lot. The only thing that made me feel any better was daydreaming about killing Dominic. I still wasn’t even considering actually doing it, but I had got a lot more realistic. Riddling him with machine-gun bullets felt stupid; like dropping a cartoon anvil on his head. I needed something that could be real.”
“I didn’t know,” Leon said, to one of us or both, I couldn’t tell. “I mean, I knew, but I had no idea it had got that bad.”
“It took me a while to find a way that would work,” Susanna said. “Dominic was twice my size, and I didn’t want anything where he would bleed because the cleanup would be too complicated, so that ruled out most stuff. I thought about poison, but it’s too dicey. Even if I managed to get something into him, most poisons take ages; he would’ve had time to go to the hospital, get treated, tell someone about me . . . I don’t even know how much time I spent reading true-crime websites, checking out methods. I know how to poison someone so it won’t come up on a tox screen—if I could have got my hands on succinylcholine—I know the best ways to drown someone, which would have been great if we’d had a lake in the garden . . . Finally I found out about garrotes. At first I couldn’t believe it was that easy, but I kept reading about it, and bit by bit it dawned on me: Holy shit. This could actually work.”
And again, I should have known; I had known. It would never have occurred to me to go researching garrotes. It was, on the other hand, exactly Susanna’s style. My mind felt like it was turning inside out. I could have trusted myself, all along.
“It was a good feeling,” Susanna said. “Not that it made any actual difference, but I’d been so totally fucking powerless . . . After that, when he’d grab my boob or whatever, and give me that big shitbird grin like What are you going to do about it, I’d be thinking Motherfucker I could garrote you any time I want.”
“Oh my God, your face,” Leon said, to me. “Don’t look so shocked. I’d been daydreaming about feeding him into a wood chipper for years. And so would you have been.”
My apartment, step and drag, unstoppable fantasy loop where I tracked down the burglars and karate-kicked them off tall buildings a thousand times a night. “I’m not looking shocked,” I said.
“You’ve got nothing to be self-righteous about.”
“I know that. OK?”
“And then,” Susanna said, ignoring this, “it got to August, and the Leaving Cert results came out. I only skimmed mine, you know that? I should’ve been over the moon with myself, but the only results I cared about were Dominic fucking Ganly’s, because if he’d done OK then he might pull himself together, but if he’d bombed then I was in deep shit. And of course he’d bombed.”
“I got to tell her,” Leon said, on a stream of smoke. “When we went down to the school and got our results, I headed straight off, remember— What am I saying, of course you don’t, you were too busy jumping around making orangutan noises with Sean and Dec. But Dominic was just off in a corner, staring. He looked like he was about to pull out an AK-47. I barely even looked at my own results. All I could think was that now I had to tell Susanna.”
“I figured my only option was to lock myself in my room for the rest of my life,” Susanna said. “Except even that wouldn’t work, because Leon’s birthday party was coming up like a week later, and of course Dominic was going to be there. I was petrified. I thought about saying I was too sick to go, but what was I going to do instead? Stay up in my room, where he could get me on my own any time he wanted? Hugo always put in earplugs for the parties, he wouldn’t have heard anything, and I could hardly stay in his room all night—I mean, I guess I could have, if