spitting in his lunch. He spent his nights locked in his room, ignoring his mom shouting for him to come down to dinner. He filled whole notebooks with poems for girls who would never love him, and torturous diary entries in which he described every excruciating detail of his rejections.
He used to spend hours staring at his reflection in the mirror, trying to figure out what it was that made him so repulsive. Okay, so he was skinny. When he took his shirt off, which he did only when he showered, he could count his ribs like piano keys. His mother used to give him weight gainer when he was a kid, thick, gloopy shakes that tasted like sweetened sidewalk chalk, but he stayed resolutely thin. His face was thin, too, and long, and his eyes looked like they were too big for his skull. Once, one of the jocks called him Auschwitz because he looked like a victim of a concentration camp, and the nickname stuck.
It got a little easier in college. People seemed to hate him less. He even made a couple of friends. But no matter what he tried, he couldn’t get a date. All he wanted was to hold a girl’s hand at the movies, kiss her good night, take care of her. He was a nice guy. Why wouldn’t they give him a chance?
One night a couple of years ago, a girl at a bar laughed in his face when he asked if he could buy her a drink. He’d thought about killing himself that night—had even gotten so far as running a bath and finding a razor—but he’d pussied out in the end.
Instead, he typed “why won’t girls sleep with me?” into a search engine and ended up in a subthread called braincels. At first he was kind of weirded out by the stuff they were saying about women, but the more he read, the more he found himself agreeing. How many times had a girl rejected him and gone home with some ’roided-up asshole? He stayed on the thread for hours, and when the sun was coming up, he finally worked up the courage to write something himself. He described what had happened that night and how it had been the same night he’d been having over and over since high school.
“Might as well swallow the black pill,” one of the commenters wrote underneath his post. “Come on in, the water’s fucking freezing.”
He looked up the definition on Urban Dictionary: “A concept derived from the notion that romantic success is more determined by genetic signs of good health, prosperity and intelligence (physical attraction, strength, symmetry) than by any esoteric personal quality like kindness or strength of character.”
He felt like he’d been struck by a lightning bolt. Suddenly, it all made sense: the rejection, the loneliness, the helplessness. They had been born this way, every one of them. They would never get a girl to like them, because genetics had determined that they were physically inferior and therefore repulsive. The only guys who got to have sex were muscled-up Chads who would treat them like shit, or beta guys for whom girls were willing to settle as long as they had money.
Here was a community of people who understood that unfairness and shared in it. He finally felt like he belonged.
And when he found out that he was living next door to that stupid feminazi bitch, he finally felt like he had a purpose.
He would be the one who killed her.
Clines Corners, New Mexico—58 Miles to Albuquerque
Cait closed her eyes and pretended to be asleep. She needed time to think. Time to plan.
What did he want from her?
Rebecca, lying in the dirt, covered in blood. Oh God oh God she was dead. And it was all her fault.
She never should have let her set foot inside the Jeep. She should have turned back as soon as the truck ran into them that first time, she should have insisted on calling the police. She should have taken better care of her. Now she was dead.
And soon she would be, too.
Calm. Just stay calm.
The desert swept past, endless empty road. No cars to flag down, though how she’d manage even if there were, she wasn’t sure. A billboard for a junkyard: you trash, we smash. A deserted rest stop.
She couldn’t tell if they were heading east or west. Had she passed through here before? She tried to remember landmarks, but of course there weren’t any. There