resin of the marijuana kids were growing in their parents’ basements. Along with things that were much worse. Things that make people crazy. People like her. The girl with the painted nails’ mother. Things that made her do terrible things to her daughter.
I should have saved her.
The sheriff shoved his freezing hands in his pockets and moved through the woods. The cold bit at his ears. Worming into his brain. If the neighbor had smelled the apartment one day earlier, he could have saved her. Why didn’t God let him know one day earlier? He could think of a hundred people who deserved to die more than the girl with the painted nails. A thousand. A million. Seven billion. Why did God kill her instead of other people? And then, the answer came to him. Cold and quiet. God didn’t kill her instead of other people. In the end, He kills everyone.
Because God is a murderer, Daddy.
Chapter 53
Brady Collins woke up in his bed. His mother had finally let him out of the doghouse when he woke up with a bad fever and couldn’t go to school. She asked him if he was ready to act like a human being, and he said yes. They all ate breakfast at the table. His father complained about “that fucking sheriff” delaying the Mission Street Woods project and how the loans were coming due. If the project died, the family was bankrupt. “So, why do you spend so much God damn money, Kathleen?!” As his father railed against the small pond he mistook for the world, Brady finished his breakfast, then spent the rest of the day in bed. He slept the whole time, stopping only to take one long pee that smelled sweet like baby aspirin. Then, he went back to bed and slept all the way through lunch and dinner. When he woke up, he was covered in sweat. His fever had broken, but the itch on his arm was worse than ever. Brady looked at the alarm clock to see what time it was. The date looked right. December 18. But the time was all wrong.
An hour can’t have more than sixty minutes.
Maybe he was still asleep. Maybe he was still having that nightmare. The one with his mother luring him off the street and killing him while Special Ed laughed. Brady walked down the hall into his parents’ bedroom. His parents were asleep. They were so much nicer when they were asleep. His father’s nightstand was covered with business papers. His mother’s nightstand was covered with invitations and thank-you cards. And her letter opener. It was sterling silver. It cost a lot of money. She fired their old housekeeper for stealing it. But it turned out his mother just lost it. And when she found it a week later, she didn’t give their old housekeeper her job back because the new one was from the Middle East and worked harder for less money. Desperate people do that, she told a friend on the phone. Brady picked up the letter opener. He looked at the reflection of the moon in the silver. It looked like a row of smiling teeth. Brady tucked it into the string of his bathrobe. Then, he knelt down and held his mother’s hand. The itch on his arm began to heat up. It became warm and soft like his mother’s smile the times she loved him. He put her hand on his head and pretended that she was patting it and telling him he was good. Good boy, Brady. It felt so much better than the nightmares where she killed him, saying the same thing over and over, while Special Ed laughed.
“You’re such a bad little dog, Brady. Somebody should put you down.”
2:17
Special Ed pulled the gun out from under his pillow. That’s how scary that nightmare was. He and his friends were out on the street playing baseball with fresh baseball gloves. But the cars kept coming faster and faster as the deer kept chasing them. His mother reached her arm out to get them off the street, but just as Special Ed took his mother’s hand, Brady Collins and Jenny Hertzog jumped out of nowhere and stabbed her. Her blood ran into the street, and Brady took his little serpent’s tongue and lapped it up like a dog in a toilet. That’s when Special Ed woke up. He was covered in sweat. His fever had broken. All day, it didn’t matter how many