 
3

by Moxie Mezcal

Smashwords Edition

March 2010

San Jose, California

This volume collects three stories originally appearing on MoxieMezcal.com

1999

Home Movie

Fake

Copyright 2010 Moxie Mezcal

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

### Contents

Home Movie

Fake

About the Author

### Home Movie

I was holding a thirteen-inch penis in my hand when it all started.

The digitized bell rang to tell me a customer had entered the store. I set the giant rubber cock on the shelf, then glanced over my shoulder to see Kathy and Kevin Wertham walking in. They were a middle-aged couple who were among our best regulars – nice people, maybe a little white trashy, but always friendly.

"Hi guys," I called out. "Just let me finish unpacking this stuff and I'll be right with you." I reached down to scoop another armful of sex toys out of the cardboard box sitting on the floor.

"Hi Marie," Kevin said as they both walked over to the aisle I was in. I glanced up just in time to catch him checking me out while I was bent over. It always amazed me that, despite all the nudity plastered everywhere in the store, guys could still get excited over a little cleavage.

It didn't really bother me, though. As a reasonably attractive nineteen year-old woman working in a smut shop, you can't get bent out of shape every time a guy lets his eyes wander. To be honest, I enjoyed it in a playful, exhibitionist sort of way, just as long as they guys weren't too scuzzy about their leering.

"You need to have a talk with that guy who works here at night," Kathy said, stepping between her husband and me. "That video he recommended to us was seriously fucked up."

"Who, Steve?" I asked, feeling my stomach drop.

"Yeah, _Steve_ ," Kathy replied, drawing out his name and smiling with only half her mouth, a kind of _can-you-believe-that-guy_ smile. "Something ain't right with that boy."

Steve was one of the night-shift clerks – a thirty-three year old burnout who was obsessed with unintelligible Scandinavian death metal, ultra gory movies, and heavy bondage/fetish porn. He took the job here after getting fired from his last gig at a 7-11 because it was the only other thing he could get where his entire shift would begin and end between sunset and sunrise. No one had ever seen him in the sunlight; it was entirely possible that he was a vampire – and not the like sexy, angsty kind that thirteen year-old girls have posters of. I mean like _Nosferatu_.

I could only imagine what kind of twisted midget-amputee-scat video he had subjected these kindly God-fearing folks to.

"Which one did he give you?"

"This one," Kevin said and handed me the box, which read _Cherry Popper & the Philosopher's Bone_.

"That's it?" I said, a little confused. "This is one of our most popular videos. You really thought it was that bad?"

_Cherry Popper_ was the latest release starring Jenny Jonestown, one of the biggest stars in the business, who was slowly moving away from porn and trying to break into the mainstream. Her memoirs were on the bestseller list and she was even coming out with her own fashion and apparel line for a national department store chain. As a result, most of her films tended to be pretty tame fare out of deference to the straight world's delicate sensibilities. Her new movie didn't seem like it would be the type of thing that would have creeped them out so much.

"It was pretty twisted," Kevin poked his head out from behind Karen and chimed in.

I shrugged. "Sorry you didn't like it. Maybe I can help you guys find something a little bit more to your tastes."

One of the things I love about my job is helping people find products that will bring them together as a couple. I'm sure it sounds hokey, like I'm grasping at straws to justify working a job that most people would consider distasteful or even degrading. But the way I see it, monogamy is fucking hard, going to bed with the same person every night is tedious, and if there's a video or toy or outfit or whatever that can help you keep your love life fresh and exciting, then I think that's a perfectly healthy thing.

So after a few minutes, I'd helped the Werthams pick out another video and sent them happily on their way, then I went about checking the old one back in. I popped open the case to make sure the right disc was there, but to my surprise, there was a DVD-R inside instead of a normal factory-printed DVD.

My curiosity piqued, I loaded it into the store's player that we used to show off new releases. The image that appeared on the wall-mounted TV set was a fuzzy, pixelated shot of a young woman standing in a bedroom. She looked to be about my age, beautiful in a generic, sorority-girl sort of way, with long blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail and dressed in a City College t-shirt and khaki shorts.

The camera shook erratically as the woman dropped to her knees and began tugging at the cameraman's zipper, letting his pale, uncircumcised cock flop free. She proceeded to give him a fairly uninspired and pedestrian blowjob, keeping her eyes rolled up to look into the camera lens while the soundtrack was filled with loud grunting and moaning from the cameraman.

Holy shit, I thought, cracking up. This is someone's home movie.

I wondered what Kevin and Karen's problem had been; sure, it wasn't all that arousing, but I certainly wouldn't go so far as to call it _twisted_.

Then I wondered if Steve had known that it was the wrong disc when he rented it to them. It seemed like the type of thing he'd find funny, and it's fairly common for customers return a DVD without realizing that they forget to put the discs back in the case – or that they put the wrong disc in. Once I saw a guy had inadvertently stuck his kid's copy of _Toy Story_ in the case for _Girls Fucking Goats 7_. I could only imagine what kind of harsh badness went down the next time his wife decided to buy herself a couple hours of quiet by plopping the kid in front of his favorite movie.

Meanwhile, the couple on screen had moved over to the bed and set the camera on the nightstand. Both of them were naked now with the man on top, thrusting angrily into her. I could see that he was in great shape with a toned, muscular body, but his head was just out of the top of the frame.

Suddenly, he moved his hands over to her neck and wrapped his fingers tightly around her throat. Because of the angle, her facial expression wasn't visible, but you could clearly see her starting to struggle under his weight, whipping her head side to side frantically. He kept his grip locked firmly in place while he continued to pound away. His grunting grew louder and louder until finally he climaxed, his body jerking violently as he let out an inhuman roar. He finally loosened his hand from around her neck, satisfied that she had stopped struggling long ago, her motionless body lying limp beneath him.

The video cut off, and the TV screen went blue.

\---

I watched as Steve's pasty, oily face turned blue in the glow of the screen as he finished watching the video.

"Jesus, that is seriously fucked up," he said.

"Please tell me you didn't know what was on that disc when you gave it to Kevin and Karen," I pleaded.

He shook his head. "I swear I didn't." I let out a sigh of relief so loud that I was actually a little embarrassed when I heard it. Steve didn't react to me, instead keeping his eyes locked in astonishment on the blue screen while adding, "Do you think it's real?"

"What do you mean?"

"Did he really kill her, or do you think it's just a hoax?"

"Looked pretty real to me," I replied.

"Yeah, but do you really think someone would accidentally put something like that in a rental box?"

"Maybe," I said. "Or he could have put it in on purpose. I mean, anyone who'd murder a girl during sex and film it could conceivably be fucked-up enough to get off on the idea of other people watching it, yeah?"

"I guess," Steve conceded.

"Either way, we have to take it to the police," I continued. "I mean, hoax or not, they should be the ones to figure it out, not us."

Steve agreed, and we called the police to let them know what we found. They sent a couple officers over that night to collect the video, and then the next day, a detective came by with a warrant to see our records of who had rented the film. He left his card in case another video like that turned up or we found out any other information that might be helpful. That was the last I heard about it until a week later.

I was at the store, flipping through the newspaper during an extended lull, when I got to the obituaries section and saw a picture of the woman from the video. It was a cap-and-gown senior yearbook photo, so she looked a little younger and a lot more heavily made-up, but it was unmistakably her. As soon as I saw it, I felt a chill come over me, like my blood went cold inside my veins. Her image seemed to leap off the page hypnotically, my gaze locked in on it like tunnel-vision, like there was nothing else in the world at that moment but me and that photo.

Finally, I realized that I had forgotten even to breathe and snapped out of my trance. I started to read the obituary, which said her name was Sarah Lincoln and she was nineteen years old – my age. It didn't explain how she died, but it did give the details about a service that evening.

I wasn't sure why, but as soon as I put the paper down, I called Steve. I just needed to talk to someone, and he seemed like the person most likely to understand, as unexpected – and creepy – as that was.

"Are you going to go?" he asked after I finished explaining.

"I don't know, maybe," I said noncommittally, even though I had already made up my mind that I would.

"Why?"

"I can't really explain it. I just haven't been able to stop thinking about that video ever since I saw it. I even have dreams about it. Maybe if I go to the service and find out what happened to her, it'll give me some kind of closure."

"Yeah, sure, makes perfect sense," he mumbled. After a brief pause, he added, " _Psy-cho_ ," stringing out the word in a high-pitched, sing-song type of voice.

I groaned and spat, "I don't even know why I thought I could talk to you."

He chuckled. "Look, I get it. Believe me, recovering meth freak here, I know a thing or two about obsession. It just seems like going to that wake could just as easily make things worse for you, not better.."

After a little cajoling, he agreed to come in a couple hours early so I could make it over to the service. After we hung up, I dug the detective's business card out of my purse and called him to check if they had uncovered anything about the video.

"Normally we don't give out that kind of information," he said under heavy nasal breathing, like he was concentrating on pushing the air out of his nose with as much force as possible. "But since I could see how you'd be concerned, since it was one of your customers who shot that video and all, I suppose there's no harm in telling you that the whole turned out to be a fake."

"What?" I asked incredulously. "But the obituary in today's paper – it's the same girl. How can it be a fake?"

"Look, we tracked down the people who shot the video from your list of customers, and they admitted it was a fake. I don't know anything about any obituary, but it's obviously not the same girl. Now if you don't mind, I have a lot of work to do."

The phone line went dead.

I was incensed, but decided I would try to find out so more about Sarah Lincoln before going any further. _Maybe it is a different girl_ , I told myself in my rational mind, even though deep in my heart I didn't believe it.

I pulled out my laptop and hopped online to Google her name. The top hit was an article from two days ago in the local paper that said she was found locked in the truck of an abandoned car parked in a vacant lot in the industrial sector. Her body had apparently been sitting there for at least three days; she was discovered by the tow truck driver who was sent to remove the car after it was reported abandoned.

The article said the cause of death was strangulation. The body also showed signs of sexual assault. Her parents, who identified her, said that she had been reported missing to the police when she didn't come home after classes one day. There were no clues to her killer's identity, and the car she was found in had been reported stolen weeks before.

When I finished reading the article, I felt nauseous. I started clicking on some more of the Google links, and soon the sickness gave way to a profound sense of frustration and anger. Not only was she my age, she had graduated the same year as me from our rival high school across town. Her MySpace page had a picture of her wearing a t-shirt of _Neutral Milk Hotel_ , my favorite band. My best friend Danielle was even listed as one of her friends; they both went to City College, and must've had a class together.

I sat there, staring at her picture on the screen, and raised my hand up to rub my own neck. I realized I was literally trembling with rage.

\---

I sat in the back row at the service and tried to stay inconspicuous as I sized up every man I saw, trying to figure out which of them might be a match for the killer. Unfortunately, most of them could be ruled out quickly. Her male relatives were all either too old or too young. Her older brother was the right age but too lanky. Her boyfriend was too heavyset. There were only a handful of young men among her friends, and I quickly ticked them all off – too short, too dark, too ugly.

I walked out of the church feeling just as frustrated as when I entered. Stopping at the bottom of the stairs to have a smoke, I heard a set of footsteps descending behind me, followed by a voice.

"Excuse me, but could I possibly bum one of those?" I turned to see the boyfriend standing behind me, looking distraught and weary in his rumpled, ill-fitting suit. "I quit about a year ago, but I could really use one tonight."

"Of course," I said, tapping one more out of the soft pack.

"Ah, you're a life saver," he said appreciatively as he lit his cigarette and took a deep, desperate drag. "I'm Jason, by the way."

"Marie," I said and shook his hand.

"So how did you know Sarah?" he asked in light, just-making-conversation tone of voice.

"I had a couple classes with her at City College," I lied convincingly, having rehearsed my cover on the bus ride over. "We weren't really close, but she always helped me out in class, so I felt like I should come."

He smiled warmly, "That sounds like Sarah all right. She was always helping people, sometimes compulsively so."

The small talk trailed off quickly, and we spent the next couple minutes finishing our cigarettes in silence. After crushing my butt out under the heel of my Mary Janes, I started heading down the street.

"Hey!" I heard him call out from behind me. I turned to face him again. "Don't take this the wrong way, but if you're not busy I would really appreciate it if you'd let me buy you a cup of coffee. I'm not trying to pick up on you or anything, I just really don't think I can stand being home alone right now."

My heart nearly melted. I could see why a do-gooder type like Sarah would have fallen for him, even if he wasn't exactly heartthrob material. He pulled off that helpless schlub thing perfectly.

"Sure," I said with a demure tilt of my head. "I'm not exactly in the mood for being alone right now either."

We set off together down a random street, not quite sure where we were heading, trusting in the law that if you just start walking in a given direction in any urban area, you'll eventually hit a Starbucks.

Four blocks later, I was handing him another smoke while we settled into our green table under an equally-green patio umbrella. I sipped my triple-shot nonfat no-whip mocha while he rambled sentimentally about Sarah, recounting the story of how they met, retracing the trajectory their relationship had taken, and choking up as he talked about the plans they had mapped out for their future together. He had been saving up for an engagement ring, and they were going to get married as soon as she graduated, student loans be damned. Then they'd have taken a couple years to get established in their respective careers and save up a little before settling down and having kids.

He gave a self-deprecatory laugh and looked away, trying to hide the tears welling in his eyes. "I know that all probably sounds sappy and trite."

"It's sweet," I said, my head tilted sympathetically to one side.

"The way you do that with your head, tilt it like a cat – Sarah used to do the same thing," he said with a longing crooked smile. "You remind me of her, in some ways."

The next thing I knew, I was on my feet and leaning across the table, my lips locked on his.

\---

"So what, you're like, dating her boyfriend now?" Steve asked when I finished telling him about coffee. I stopped by the store on my way home to fill him in and was rapidly coming to regret that decision.

"It wasn't a date," I said with a dismissive wave of my hand. "I was just spending time with him to see if I could get any information out of it."

"Did you?"

I held out my hand and rocked it back and forth like a see-saw. "Ehh, a little." I told him what we had talked about over coffee. Steve scoffed at a lot of it, especially when I got to the bit about their plans for the future. "Jesus, I think I'm getting a cavity just listening to this," he groaned, clutching one side of his jaw.

I grinned, "Yeah, I know. This guy is like the most painfully sincere person I've ever met. At first it's sweet, but after a while you're like, _Come on already, give me something real._ "

"You realize he's trying to fuck you," Steve replied. "I mean, not to be crass or anything, I'm just saying."

I looked down. "He's a sensitive guy who's in a really fucked-up situation. He just needs a friend to help him through it."

Steve's jaw dropped. "Oh my God. You _already_ fucked him."

"Eww," I scoffed, trying my best to feign indignation. "You're so... _vulgar_. I don't even know why I talk to you."

He didn't respond, but instead just arched one eyebrow inquisitively, like the Rock. I was sure he had practiced the move in front of a mirror hundreds of times.

"Okay yeah, I fucked him. Don't judge me."

Steve nodded his head sagely and turned his attention back to the tickle-fetish video he had on. "Did you guys do anything creepy, like did you make him call you Sarah?"

I frowned and replied in a sheepish voice, "I'm wearing a pair of her panties." I hooked a finger under my jeans and pulled up the waistband of the black lace thong I had on so that it peeked out over the top of my slacks.

"So much for closure," he gloated.

"Yeah, whatever," I said dismissively. "So, since you already think I'm a crazy person, can you do me a favor before I go?"

"What?"

"I want you to print me off that report that we ran for the police, the one that showed who rented _Cherry Popper_."

Steve mumbled something under his breath that was loud enough for me to hear but I chose to ignore anyways. When he realized the futility of arguing, he relented and fired up the printer.

I sat up that night cross-checking the list of customers with Sarah's friends from MySpace on the off chance that there might be a match, but had no such luck. Then I had the idea to check friends of friends and decided to start with Jason.

" _Jason Truman has 2,958 friends_ ," I read off the screen. "Figures that he'd be a serial-friender."

I figured I'd have better luck if I started with the people who had actually left him messages recently, and to my surprise, it didn't take long at all to find someone who was on my list.

Robert Washington.

I clicked over to his profile. He and Jason were both listed as alumni from the same high school as Sarah, although they graduated a couple years earlier. Judging from the messages they sent back and forth them, they used to be really good friends but now only got together for the occasional boozy bullshit-and-reminisce session.

I clicked to see the pictures on his profile. There were shots of him rock-climbing, mountain biking, hiking, and more than a few shirtless vanity shots from the beach. He definitely was a physical match for the killer, not to mention vain enough to be the kind of guy who makes personal sex tapes.

He also had a lot of embedded YouTube videos – all pointless, self-indulgent crap. Like clips of him doing tricks on his bike (poorly), clips of hims playing the drums (poorly), and clips of him showing off martial arts moves (surprisingly well). Looking at the smooth, chiseled definition of his muscular torso, his rippling arms, and his thick, powerful hands, I pictured the body on top of Sarah in the video. In my mind, there was no doubt that it was the same man.

\---

I stood in Jason's living room, naked from the waist down, wearing only my bra. I had stood up to stretch my legs and had wandered over to his bookcase to snoop a little while he laid sprawled out on his couch, naked among scattered Thai take-out boxes, watching a DVRed episode of Jon Stewart.

He had the usual stuff you'd find on a pseudo-intellectual twenty-something guy's bookcase – Noam Chomsky, _Capital_ , Burroughs, Bukowski, a bunch of Criterion Collection DVDs, a couple comics, and a few books on Buddhism. The only thing that really piqued my interest was a stone sculpture modeled on the _Venus of Willendorf_ , a heavy, two-foot tall hunk of rock depicting a nude fat woman with no feet, balanced precariously on the top shelf.

"Tell me about this," I called across the room.

Jason shifted himself into something approximating an upright position to see what I was talking about. "Oh that," he said dismissively. "That's just something that Sarah made in art class. Nothing special."

I drifted away from the bookcase and made my way back to the couch, draping myself across his lap. I lifted his cock from where it had laid limp against his thigh, still sticky from our earlier fuck. He moaned lightly as I rubbed it back to life, his consciousness drifting lazily between sleep, the TV, and his dick.

Keeping one hand on him, I reach out for the remote with the other, wanting Jason's full attention to myself. I tap on a button that I think is the power button, and the screen flashes off momentarily, but then flashes back on.

"What the fuck?" I grumbled and try a different button. This time the TV stayed off, but the audio kept coming through the speaker. "Fucking hell," I moaned louder and mashed angrily at random buttons.

Jason grabbed the remote away from me and calmly tapped a few buttons; everything turned off finally, but the moment was already dead.

I sank back into the couch. After a brief awkward silence, I casually asked, "Do you know someone named Robert Washington?"

"Yeah," he replied, a little surprised. "He's a buddy of mine from high school. Why?"

"He's one of the customers at the store I work at," I said, trying to keep the lie as simple and plausible as possible. "I chat with him every once in a while. I happened to mention going to Sarah's wake, and he said he knew her."

"Really?" Jason asked, obviously surprised. "I had no idea they even knew each other. I mean, Rob and I don't really see each other much anymore, so I can't think of how they had the chance to meet."

I shrugged, indicating that I wanted to let the subject drop, and then dropped my face into his lap to drive the point home.

Unfortunately, Jason wasn't that easily distracted. "Are you into him?" he demanded.

I looked up at him questioningly, playing dumb. "Who?"

"Rob. Is that why you're asking about him?"

"No," I replied. "I just thought that it was an interesting coincidence worth mentioning. That's all."

"Ah," he said, having no intention of letting the matter drop. "You know, I deliberately made sure not to be around them at the same time. You see, Rob's always had a reputation – player, ladies' man, whatever you want to call it. He could always have any girl he wanted. And I mean, come on, you've seen him. It's not that I didn't trust Sarah, it's just... a guy like me with a younger girlfriend who – if we're being honest – should be out of his league, I can't really help but worry sometimes."

"I don't want to fuck Rob," I insisted, lifting myself up to straddle him. "And I'm sure you didn't have anything to worry about from Sarah. She was a smart girl; she obviously knew a good thing when she saw it."

Jason slowly leaned in to kiss me, and I met his lips with mine, then felt him maneuver me onto his fully revived erection.

A couple minutes later, I could tell he was nearly there, while I was nowhere close. Then an idea popped into my head, one that I couldn't ignore, no matter how irrational or ugly I told myself it was. The more I tried to banish it from my mind, the stronger it grew, and until finally, I couldn't hold out any longer.

I reached out to grab one of his hands, lifting it gingerly off of my hip, then leaned forward to raise it up to my neck. He jerked his hand away abruptly, as if my neck had been searing-hot to the touch, and continued pumping away just as he had been.

He came and quickly fell asleep, leaving me to dress myself by the glow of the TV set while he snored away on the couch. I fished around inside his pants pockets until I found his cell phone, then quietly left his apartment.

Once I got outside, I flipped through Jason's contacts make sure Robert's number was programmed in. Then I flagged down a cab and had it take me to Robert's address, which I got off the printout from work.

The cab dropped me off, and I grabbed a table on the patio of the coffeehouse across the street where I could clearly see the front entrance. Then I sent Robert a text message from Jason's phone asking to him at a bar called O'Malley's just a few blocks from Jason's place, saying he had met a couple hot college girls and needed someone to take care of the friend.

A couple minutes after I sent the text, the phone rang. It was Robert. Thinking quickly, I ran inside and stood next to the coffeehouse's speakers before answering the call.

"Hello," I said in my best imitation drunken slurring.

"Hello, who is this?" Robert said with a chuckle.

"This is Jenny, who's this?"

"This is Rob. Is Jason there?"

"No," I replied. "He's in the bathroom. With my friend. But he told me all about you. Are you going to come join us?"

More chuckling. "I don't know, should I?"

"Yeah, I really want you to _come_ ," I responded, emphasizing the last word with the embarrassing obviousness that only a drunk sorority girl can pull off.

I hung up the phone, and five minutes later he emerged from the front door of his building. I waited for him to get into his car and disappear from view. Then, feeling a triumphant rush of adrenaline, I ran across the street and pressed a random button on the intercom.

"Hello?"

"Hey, it's Sarah, your neighbor from upstairs. Listen, I forgot my keys inside, can you buzz me back in?"

The intercom buzzed, and I opened the door.

The list from work said Robert was apartment 418. I ran up to the fourth floor and tried the door; it was unlocked.

These tough guys always think they're invincible, too cool to lock a fucking door, I thought to myself.

I made my way carefully through his darkened apartment to the bedroom, feeling along the wall for the light switch as I entered.

When the light finally came on, I immediately froze. It was exactly the same as the room from the video, and there was a mini-DV camcorder sitting on the nightstand.

\---

"I need your help," I told Steve when he arrived at work a few days later, which was the next time our shifts happened to be back-to-back again.

"With what?"

"Setting a trap."

He looked at me blankly. I explained about Robert and my trick to get into his apartment, and how he was definitely the killer.

"Why don't you just go to the police?" Steve asked.

"Because the police think the video is a fake. They didn't know Sarah. They don't care about finding out who killed her."

"You didn't know her, either," he snapped. Then, taking a deep breath, he put a hand on my shoulder and tried to make his voice as sympathetic as a heartless misanthrope like him could manage. "All I'm saying is that I think you're starting to lose perspective here. You're not a detective. Say this guy really is a killer, you could be putting yourself in real danger. This isn't a game."

"Don't be a condescending ass," I spat back. "I know the risks I'm taking."

"Well, then why?" he asked, straining to show some actual sincerity under all that practiced cynicism.

I opened my mouth to explain, but no words came out. "Forget it."

He let out a resigned sigh. "What's the plan?"

The plan went like this:

I had been observing Rob the past couple days to work out his routine. Every day after work he'd hit the gym, _Imperial Health Club_ , just down the street from his building. I never saw him try to pick up women there openly, but he'd definitely let his eyes wander a lot, and every once in a while he'd strike up a conversation with one. After watching him a couple times, I'd gotten a pretty good feel for his type, and figured I could fit the mold well enough with a little work.

So the plan was to show up at his gym, find my way over to a treadmill in his line of sight, and wait to catch him eyeballing me. When I did, I'd come over and talk with him, get him ask me out for a couple drinks, and eventually convince him to take him home.

In the meantime, Steve would wait outside his building until he could catch one of the neighbors leaving and enter while the front door is open. Then, he'd sneak into Rob's apartment, which would of course be unlocked, and hide in the closet with his Flip video camera.

When Rob and I got back, I'd try to recreate the conditions of the murder as closely as possible, trying to bait him into doing it again. I read somewhere that one of the reason serial killers keep using the same m.o every time is the need to relive the experience, recapture that same rush from killing, like a drug addict chasing that first-time high. It stood to reason that anyone twisted enough to film himself killing a girl and want other people to watch it would be wired fairly closely to a serial killer.

When I saw the camcorder, I'd playfully suggest that Rob should film us. And when we got to the bed, I'd coyly ask if he'd ever tried choking a girl before, since I heard it makes the orgasm so more intense.

As soon as things went far enough to incriminate Rob, Steve would appear and rescue me

I could tell Steve was less than thrilled with my plan, but he agreed to go along with it on the basis that if he refused and something horrible happened to me, he'd feel guilty. Having agreed to help me, now when something horrible happens to me, at least he'll feel absolved.

We met up at the cafe across from Rob's building. I walked up carrying my pink nylon gym bag to find him already waiting at a table.

When he saw me, his jaw dropped.

"Rob goes for blondes," I explained as sat down and pulled my freshly-bleached hair back into a ponytail, just like Sarah's was in the video.

"This is getting way too fucking creepy, even for me," Steve fretted. "I mean, we're at the point now where I'd be _relieved_ to find out that this is just some elaborate kinky sex thing for you, like you want to pretend to be her and get off on getting fucked and choked on film. Hopefully that's the worst that'll happen, you end up developing a very specific and very peculiar new fetish, while I get stuck trying to explain to a large beefy slab of nude man why I am hiding out in his closet."

I let his comments slide. "Did you bring it?"

He reached into his jeans pocket and produced his Flip.

"Cool. And what about the other thing?"

Reluctantly, he flashed open his coat just enough for me to see the butt of a snub-nosed revolver sticking out of his inside pocket.

"Rock and roll," I said as I got up and headed for the gym.

After changing, I found Rob just where I expected, riding a bike directly across from the women on the treadmills, giving him a front-row view.

It didn't take long for me to catch him eyeballing me, especially in the form-fitting lycra boy shorts and sports bra I had put on. I met his gaze, and soon made my way over to the bike next to him.

Thirty minutes later, we left the gym together and headed out for drinks. Two hours after that, the two of us stumbled drunkenly up the stairs towards his apartment, our hands ripping at each other's clothes like hungry beasts picking apart a carcass.

Once in the bedroom, I noticed that the camcorder had been turned around to face the other way on top of the nightstand – Steve's code to let me know he had was in place.

I picked up the camera and turned it over in my hands, giggling playfully as I figured out how to turn it on.

"Smile," I said when the red "Record" light flashed on and trained the camera on Rob. He smiled and reached out to cover the lens with his hands, but I pulled it free of his grasp and kept filming him. He took a couple steps closer to me and swiped the camera out of my hands, then turned it back on me.

"We'll see how you like it, now," he said.

"I don't mind," I said with a seductive grin and bit on my lower lip. Then I slowly began to peel off my clothes, swaying my hips gently as I stripped for him.

Soon, I was naked and dropped to my knees in front of him, tugging down the zipper of his pants, my eyes fixed on the camera lens, my blonde hair still tied back in a tail.

"Stop," Rob said unsteadily, the color suddenly drained from his face.

"Is something wrong?"

"I don't know, it's strange ... I just need a minute, okay?" he stammered awkwardly and then abruptly ran into the bathroom.

I got the bastard, I thought to myself triumphantly and decided I'd take the opportunity to double-check that Steve was ready, just to be on the safe safe. Rising to my feet, I carefully padded across the room and cracked the closet door open.

When I saw what was inside, it was all I could do to keep from screaming.

Steve lay crumpled in a heap on the closet floor, blood dripping from the large bullet hole in his temple, his gun gripped loosely in his hand, which hung lifelessly at his side.

My head was spinning, and I felt the panic course through my veins, rendering me completely paralyzed. I felt confused, arguing with myself that this couldn't have happened, trying to convince myself that this was somehow a trick or a dream. But most of all I just felt afraid and finally realized that I would be next if I didn't act soon.

I crouched down and pried the gun out of Steve's fingers, then leapt back up and pointed it at the closed bathroom door. As soon as Rob remerged, he saw me with the gun and the dead body sitting on the closet floor, and his face contorted into something grotesque, something monstrous.

He lunged at me with outstretched arms, but before he could reach me, I marshaled enough courage to squeeze the trigger, unloading the gun into him at point blank range.

\--

It took several hours to explain to the police what happened – or at least the most-plausible, least-incriminating version of what happened that I could think up on the spot. Eventually, though, I was able to convince them that Rob had killed Steve and that I had acted out of self-defense.

Jason came to pick me up from the police station and took me to his place. I didn't want to be alone.

That night, we made love in his bed – as opposed to the couch – for the first time. He still had a framed photo of Sarah on his nightstand – it was the same one that had run with the obituary, the senior picture. I tried not to stare at it, but a couple times he caught me and followed my gaze to see where I was looking.

It was around the time that I started realizing this might not be the healthiest relationship for me to be in.

I barely slept at all that night, still too wired from adrenaline and nerves, and was up before dawn and pacing the living room restlessly while Jason slept in.

Bravely, I decided to take another shot at turning on the TV. I managed to get the blank blue screen on at least, but instead of turning the satellite box on, I somehow managed to switch on the DVD player instead. I let out a string of curses under my breath and peered through bleary eyes at the tiny print on the remote, but then my head jerked up when I realized what was playing on the screen.

It was the video of Sarah and Rob.

I stood up, my eyes transfixed on the screen as if I were hypnotized while it played out just as I had remembered. Sarah on her knees, then the two of them on the bed, and finally him circling his hands around her neck.

But this time, when he finally let go of her neck, the video didn't stop. It kept playing,

On screen, Sarah suddenly lurched forward into an upright position, inhaled deeply, and then burst into laughter.

Rob soon followed suit, chuckling as he picked the camera up from the nightstand.

"You were right," Sarah said off the image on the screen blurred, presumably due to Rob flipping the camera around. "It made it so much more intense."

The image disappeared, and the screen returned to blue.

"He accidentally left the video in the case of a movie I loaned him," a voice said from behind me, and spun around to see Jason standing at the entrance to the room. "That's how I got the idea for making it look like he killed her. Unfortunately, when the police came knocking, he still had another copy of the original, unedited version, so he was able to clear himself. Luckily, the police never found anything that cast any real suspicion on me, anyways. All my elaborate planning, and I should have just had more faith in humanity's innate laziness.

"But, Steve..." I stammered.

"When I saw the text to Rob on my phone, I naturally became curious. So I started following you around and soon figured out what you were up to. The problem was, if you investigated Rob and cleared him, you'd naturally start looking for other suspects. So I had to give come up with a way to convince you he was guilty.

"I approached your friend and convinced him to let me come up to Rob's with him, saying I could be extra backup in case anything went wrong."

I made a desperate break for the door, but he was on top of me before I could reach it, tackling me and slamming me into the bookcase at the far end of the room.

As I felt his fingers tightening around my neck, crushing my windpipe with his thumbs, I looked up to see Sarah's Venus sculpture teetering precariously on the edge of the shelf. I renewed my struggle, not intending to get free, but instead only needing to throw my weight into the bookcase for a couple good, solid hits, enough to send the giant hunk of stone toppling down onto Jason's head.

He slumped over limply, blood gushing out of the crack in his skull. I wriggled out from under him while gasping for air, feeling the burn in my neck as I greedily filled my lungs.

And suddenly, paradoxically, I somehow found myself with the sensation of being completely empty.

### 1999

I might as well tell you up front: nothing really happens in this story.

I slammed into the heavy emergency exit door and dived into the alley behind the club, dropping to my knees and expelling absurd amounts of vomit onto the concrete ground.

As I finished emptying my guts out, I heard the clicking of two size-twelve zebra-print platform shoes following me out. Sweeping the bleach-blonde bangs from my eyes, I looked up to see a six-foot-plus Mexican transvestite grinning down at me, wearing a pair of plastic party-favor glasses shaped like the number _2000,_ with the two center zeros serving as eye-holes.

"Sure, the opening band was bad, but they weren't _that_ bad," she cooed playfully.

Rio knelt down to help me up. She was wearing her pink wig tonight, along with a fur-trimmed pea coat, black pleather hot-pants, and pink leggings. I tried my best not to get puke on her but wasn't entirely successful.

"What's going on? Are you guys okay?"

Adam poked his head out through the open doorway, his face stricken with concern. He was the token hetero boy in our little gang – an adorable, pudgy Filipino in a Sleater-Kinney t-shirt.

"I'm fine," I said, wiping the vomit residue from my lips with the back of my hand.

"I'll run inside and get some paper towels," Adam said helpfully and disappeared.

I sat down with a thump, tried to scoot as far away from my mess as possible, and rested my back up against the side of the building. Rio squatted beside me, getting down to my level but still being careful not to actually touch the filthy alley ground.

"So what happened?" she asked. "You didn't drink that much, did you?"

"No, I don't know what it is," I replied, scratching my right leg through my jeans. "I wasn't feeling well earlier tonight to begin with. Then for some reason, just being packed in there with all those people and the music so loud, I kinda had this weird claustrophobic panic attack. I just had to get out."

Rio nodded sympathetically. "You had a Gardenburger for dinner, didn't you?"

"Yeah, what does that have to do with anything?"

Rio twisted her thick, blood red lips into a disgusted sneer. "Because you have chunks of it all over your tits. Seriously, I haven't been able to hear a word you've said; I've just been staring at them bouncing up and down as you talked."

I looked down and saw that I did indeed have disgusting little chunks on my cleavage and down the front of my white boy-beater.

"Fuck. Where's Adam with those paper towels?"

\---

After Adam and Rio helped clean me up, Rio gave me her shiny pink blouse from under her coat to wear. It was too big and way too glam for my tastes, but at least it wasn't covered in puke, so I wasn't about to say no. Then we went back into the club and found Magdalena.

She was standing right where we had left her – pressed up against the stage, her eyes locked on the band with an unwavering focus, swaying gracefully to the beat. When I retook my place at her side, she turned to smile at me casually, as if she hadn't even realized I'd been gone.

"Is that the same shirt that you were wearing earlier?" she asked with just a touch of confusion.

"Yeah," I nodded warmly with a grin and leaned my head on her shoulder as we resumed watching the band.

Maggy was Rio's sister and was a year older than the rest of us. She had a classical type of beauty, like an old movie star, flawless features, an amazing body, and an elegant, regal way of carrying herself. It was no secret that I'd been harboring a hopeless crush on her for as long as we'd known each other, despite having resigned myself to the fact that she wasn't gay. I didn't think she was really straight, though, either; she always gave off a completely asexual vibe. I had never known her to show interest in anyone, man or woman, and any time the topics of sex or love or attraction came up, she'd just sit there silently with a half-smile and stare off into the distance, almost like everyone else was speaking in a foreign language she couldn't understand.

I met her through Rio when they transferred into our high school two years ago. Rio joined the newspaper, for which I was the student editor. The first time I met her, she was introduced to me by the faculty journalism advisor as Matthew, at least before he was abruptly corrected. "It's Rio, honey. Matthew is my slave name."

Her first article was a review of the drama department's opening night performance of _The Crucible._ It written completely in rhyming verse, contained a plot synopsis that in no way reflected the actual play, spent an inordinate amount of time observing and critiquing the audience's footwear, and culminated in a description of how, halfway through the second act, the theater was hijacked by extraterrestrial Nazi lizard-men in drag who held everyone hostage and demanded Marilyn Monroe's corpse as ransom. I ran it word-for-word. We instantly became best friends.

On stage, the band broke furiously into an extended instrumental jam with the guitar erupting into waves of screeching feedback while the bass and drums laid down an incessant, menacing groove. Rio started going nuts, wailing along with the guitar while she threw her arms around her sister's neck and hopped up and down in place. Maggy just giggled quietly as she buckled under Rio's weight.

I always got a kick out of watching the two of them interact with each other. They were complete opposites - where Maggy was unassuming and introverted, Rio commanded attention. Where Maggy spoke softly and always used middling words like "maybe" and "kinda", Rio spat out her opinions with violent urgency. And where Maggy never showed any kind of romantic interest, ever, Rio would try to fuck anything that wasn't locked-up and bolted-down. Which, incidentally, was the reason we had all been dragged along to the show tonight – specifically, the hulking mountain of muscles in Dickies and steel-toes hammering away behind the drum kit.

My attention was drawn more to the bassist, who had freckles and a thick mane of wild red hair and looked like she smelled of strawberries. Later that evening, I would discover she actually smelled more like oranges. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

\---

Twenty minutes later we were back out in the cold night air, hanging out in front of the club. Adam and I were clinging desperately to each other for warmth; luckily there was enough room in his baggy jacket for both of us. Maggy didn't seem to mind the cold; or rather, she didn't seem to notice. She just stood silently chain-smoking cloves and blowing smoke rings. Rio, meanwhile, was draping herself all over her drummer friend, who was named Stephen or Jason or Richard or something like that.

"So did you guys like the set?" Drummer asked while breaking away from Rio long enough to come up for air.

"It fucking rocked!" Rio declared. "Like a full frontal assault, a blitzkrieg of sound ripping through the fabric of time itself!" Yes, she was in fact completely smashed at this point, but that's pretty much how she talked even under normal circumstances.

"It was good," Adam added with a shrug. "You guys remind me of _Kill-Yr-Idols_ era Sonic Youth crossed with The Birthday Party."

Drummer's eyes shifted to me.

"You were very loud," I chimed in noncommittally.

A huge grin spread across his lips as he nodded his head triumphantly. "Fuck yeah, we were."

The club door opened, and the bass player came out to join us. "Everyone, this is Amanda. Amanda, everyone," Drummer said.

Amanda moved her hand in a single, sweeping wave to greet us all. "Do I smell cloves?" she asked in a slight but noticeable southern accent.

Maggy nodded and gave her one. While she lit it, I took her distraction as an opportunity to free myself from Adam's jacket and boot him away, making myself look as unattached and available as possible. I glanced in one of the club's windows to check my reflection, was reminded I had on Rio's goofy glam blouse, and let out a stream of curses under my breath.

Amanda glanced over at me in surprise. "Excuse me?"

"Don't mind her," Rio jumped in. "Tourette's."

Amanda blew out a cloud of smoke in a half-exhale, half-chuckle, letting her gaze stay locked on mine long enough to fill my head with all kinds of silly notions.

"So are you going to that thing, tonight?" she asked Drummer.

Rio perked up. "What thing?"

"Bonfire on the beach," he explained. "About thirty or forty people, nice little out of the way spot. You guys wanna come?"

Rio shot me a questioning look. "Sure," I said.

Drummer smiled. "And you said you can hook up some crystal, right?"

Rio nodded. "My sister has a connect."

Maggy looked a little surprised, but then nodded in agreement. "It'll take a little time, but I can get it."

Rio sang out, "The narcotics shall flow like wine as we toast the end of the world."

Drummer smiled at her outburst like a good sport. "Cool, we'll meet up with you there. Better hurry, though – the countdown begins in two hours."

\---

"All this end-of-the-world talk is bullshit," Adam said, slumped in the back seat of Maggy's Camry. "Everyone knows 2012 is when the world is really going to end."

Rio let out a disgusted scoff and rolled her eyes. "Why do you always have to take the stupidest point of view in every argument?"

Maggy cranked up the stereo, which was blasting Marilyn Manson's "I Don't Like the Drugs" to drown out the brewing debate.

Adam let his glasses slide down to the tip of his nose and peered at Rio over the top of the thick black rims. "Are you saying you seriously buy into this _Y2K_ thing?"

"Yes," she proclaimed defiantly. "As soon as the iron tong hath tolled twelve and Dick Clark's massive twinkling ball drops, every piece of technology in the world will simultaneously crash. But in their dying moments, they will become self-aware and be reborn as the Borg Christ all-mind, rising up in arms against their weak and pathetic flesh overlords, turning us into Duracells and plunging the world into a second darkness of neo-Cartesian hyper-skeptical paradox. _Technologito ergo sum_ ; I'm online, therefore I am."

"Will you guys give it a rest?" I groaned as the nausea started to return. My skin felt cold and clammy, and I was sweating like crazy even though I was freezing.

"Are you okay? You don't look so good," Adam asked me.

"I'll be fine," I said as I laid down and rested my head on his lap. "I just need some quiet time, give my ears a chance to stop ringing."

Maggy turned down the stereo, and Adam gently ran his fingers through my hair while the four of us sat in silence for two or three minutes. Which, in fairness, was an impressive length of time for Rio to last.

"Provisions!" she finally shouted, when she just absolutely could not hold it in any longer. "We must be prepared to greet the coming apocalypse. Beer! Booze! Snacks! Prophylactics!"

"I could use something to eat," Adam agreed. "And maybe it'll help Jessie feel better if she gets something inside her."

Rio snorted at his accidental double-entendre. "Yeah, like Amanda's fist."

"Don't be gross," I said and kicked at the back of her seat.

Maggy pulled over in front of a liquor store. "Okay, but we've barely got enough money to cover the beer."

"Not to worry, Adam can use his wile and cunning to procure the rest of our provisions," Rio said. "All he needs is someone to create a diversion. If only we knew someone who could pull it off with the right amount of style and panache."

\---

"I want smut!" Rio declared as the two of us walked into the liquor store. "Great heaping piles of smut." She made a b-line for the two wooden display racks of porn they kept next to the cash register.

"Do you like porn?" she asked the stunned twenty-something Lebanese clerk. "I'm sure you do; you look like the type who beats off a lot. So do I, I can't ever get enough."

She started flipping through the DVDs, reading off the titles of anything that caught her eye. " _Latex Nurses. Gagged and Bound Soccer Moms. Toe-Lickin' Lezbos._ Oh, you might like that one, Jess." I shook my head and made eye contact with the clerk, giving him an apologetic shrug. He just laughed.

"Ooh, _Vampire Nymphos Love to Suck_. Sounds artsy."

I glanced over at the front door and saw Adam enter. He began to wander up and down the aisles unassumingly, warranting no more than a split-second glance from the clerk, whose attention was understandably monopolized by Rio.

"Come on, we don't have time for this," I complained. "I thought we were just going to grab some beer and get out of here."

"Then go grab it," Rio responded. "I'm busy."

I took my time meandering down to the beer fridge at the far end of the store. Partly this was to give Adam time to work, but it was also because my vision was becoming blurred by tracers trailing off everything, and I was worried that I'd start puking again if I moved too fast. As I reached out a hand to stabilize myself against a rack of potato chips, I heard Rio asking the clerk, "So what do you recommend?"

"Well, let's see," he replied as he moved around to look through the videos with Rio.

I took my time looking over the beer selection, pantomiming as if I was trying to make up my mind. Meanwhile, I watched out of the corner of my eye as Adam surreptitiously stuffed his coat full.

"This is good, and so is this one," I heard the clerk counseling. "That's okay, but if you want to know my favorite, then... let me find it."

Finally, I grabbed two cases of PBR and lugged them back up to the front, aware that I was literally dripping with sweat. As I set them down on the counter, I heard Rio squeal gleefully, " _Daddy's Little Princess_? I knew you were a free-eeak!" She elongated the last word in a playful, sing-song way, stretching it out three or four syllables longer than it had any right to be.

The clerk slid back behind the counter and rang me up for the beer. I mopped the sweat off my forehead with the bottom of my tanktop, then set down a couple bills and my fake ID.

"Pick up a pack of rubbers, too," Rio said as she joined us. "Magnums. I'm an optimist," she added with a wink to the clerk.

"Okay, but we don't have enough for the smut," I said, trying not to watch as Adam sneaked out of the store.

"Aww," Rio whined and made a pouty-face.

"I'm sorry about her," I said to the clerk as I shook my head ruefully. "I just can't take her anywhere."

"No worries," he replied with a grin. "I was dying of boredom before you guys came in anyways."

He plucked up the bills and didn't even bother to glance at my ID. Then Rio slipped the condoms into her purse, I grabbed the two cases of beer, and we were on our way.

When we got back to the car, Adam was busy emptying his jacket of two bag of chips, some beef jerky, Corn-Nuts, an assortment of candy bars, a two-liter of Dr. Pepper, and pocketfuls of little airplane-size bottles of liquor.

The thing about Adam was he blended perfectly into the background in any situation. It was like his mutant power. It sucked for him, since it led to being chronically ignored by girls, bartenders, and anyone else he might care to grab the attention of. But it was great for anyone heartless enough to exploit it. Which, as his nearest and dearest friends, we of course were.

"Nice haul," Rio said as she mussed his hair and grabbed a tiny bottle of Jose Cuervo.

"Here, eat something," Adam instructed and unwrapped a Power Bar for me. I obligingly ate about half before I got so queasy I couldn't choke down any more.

"I think I just need some rest," I muttered and leaned my head against the window.

\---

When I woke up, I was still slumped over in the back seat of the Camry, but Adam was gone. So was Rio. I was alone with Maggy, who was pulling the car off the freeway just as a PJ Harvey song was starting up on the radio.

"Where is everyone?" I asked, groggy and disoriented.

"I dropped them off at the beach. I would've dropped you off, too, but we couldn't wake you up for anything."

"So where are we going?"

"To score the crystal."

"Oh."

We sat in silence as the Camry winded through the back streets of a run-down residential area. I noticed with some relief that my headache was gone and my nausea had subsided to an endurable level. I guess the rest had been what I needed.

Maggy came to a stop in front of a one-story duplex and killed the engine. I started opening the door, but she stopped me. "No, you're waiting here."

"It's freezing out here," I complained. "Why can't I come in with you?"

"No," she repeated, firmly. I was a little taken aback by the sternness in her voice. "Look, I'll leave the music on for you. Just stay in the car."

I watched as she got out and circled around to the back of the duplex. When she disappeared from view, I laid back down and stretched out across the full length of the back seat, sulking a little. At times, I worried that even though she was only a year older than us, Maggy thought of me and Rio as kids. Sometimes it made me sick with myself to think about how much I worried about gaining her approval.

I decided to think about something else, so I tried to remember the dream I had while I was passed out. I was standing up on the top of a hill covered with dry yellow grass. Sometimes there were a bunch of people with me, like a party, and sometimes there weren't – you know how dreams can fluctuate that way. _Mercurial_ is the word Rio had used to describe it before, and I liked that.

Everyone was gathered on the hill to look up at the sky, as if we were waiting to see something or expecting something to happen. I wasn't sure what, though.

At some point, a woman came over to talk to me. She looked about ten years older than me and dressed in a purple crushed-velvet jacket and black jeans. Her hair was cut in a chin-length bob and was a mousy brown color, like mine used to be before I started dying it. Also, she was wearing a black choker with a little silver spider hanging from it. It's funny the details that stay with you from dreams.

"What is everyone waiting for?" I asked her.

"The end of the world."

When she spoke to me, I felt dizzy and started to fall. But instead of falling down the hill, I was falling up – falling into the sky.

"You should probably get that checked out," the woman called to me as I disappeared among the stars.

That's when I woke up.

"Dreams are fucking stupid," I mumbled to myself and squirmed around on the seat, trying to find a comfortable position to lay down. Finally, I gave up and just sat upright again and scratched my right leg through my jeans.

Glancing at the dashboard clock, I noticed that Maggy had been gone for about 25 minutes. I wondered what was taking so long.

A few minutes later Maggy came back to the car, her clothes disheveled and her lipstick rubbed off. She didn't say anything, just pulled out her glass pipe, shook a tiny pinch of the little white crystals into the bowl, and sparked her lighter. After she put the pipe away, she began punching angrily at the buttons on the radio, flipping quickly through the stations. Finally, while letting out a frustrated sigh, she jammed a tape into the deck. A couple seconds later, Erasure's "Oh L'amour" started playing.

I just sat there stupidly, watching her eyes through the rearview mirror and not saying a thing.

\---

When I pulled Rio aside and explained what had happened, she just rolled her eyes dismissively. "Gawd, don't be so naïve. She never has any money, doesn't have a job, and yet somehow manages a crystal meth habit that would make Courtney Love blush. What did you think was going on?" She turned to walk back towards the crowd gathered around the bonfire.

My mouth dropped open in righteous indignation. "How can you be so fucking _cold_ about this?"

Rio whipped around sharply and snapped, "What my sister does with her life is none of my concern, and it certainly isn't any of yours."

At that moment, I realized something fundamental about Rio that I was a little ashamed not to have figured out sooner. Callousness wasn't just some affectation, a way of playing up to the drag queen archetype that she had picked up on trips to the City. For Rio, being callous was a matter of survival. I pictured her as a thirteen year old barrio schoolboy in eyeliner getting slammed up against a locker, blood dripping out of his broken nose. I had heard those stories through Maggy before, but I guess my own solidly liberal middle class background never allowed their full weight to sink in. Not giving a fuck was the only way someone like Rio could exist.

_It just bothers me that she can be so fucking good at it_ , I thought as I watched her wrap her arms around Drummer's neck and suck on his earlobe.

"Ten more minutes!" I heard a voice call out.

I rejoined the group and accepted the can of PBR that Adam passed to me. "Feeling better?" he asked.

"I'll live," I nodded.

Maggy was passing around her pipe to a few select members of the party, laughing and making casual small-talk, the drugs having loosened her up. She had re-applied her lipstick and straightened out her clothes, looking as cool and above-it-all as ever.

I pounded the beer quickly, not caring if made me feel sicker or not. I tried carrying on a conversation with Adam, but I couldn't keep my mind focused on what he was saying. I kept drifting away.

"Five minutes!" the unidentified voice called again.

I needed some space, so I walked down to the edge of the water and kicked off my shoes, letting the tide wash up over my bare feet and enjoying the feeling of wet sand between my toes.

"Hey," I heard a voice call out. "Hey, Jessica." My name was given a strange emphasis, a note of uncertainty as if it were a question, like the speaker thought she had it right but wasn't quite sure.

I turned around to see a small group of people sitting in the sand about ten yards from me. One of them was waving for me to come over and join them. It was Amanda.

I walked over and took a seat beside her. They were passing around a bong.

"Do you smoke?" Amanda asked.

"Sometimes," I replied.

"Have you ever shotgunned before?"

I shook my head and gave her a questioning look. A mischievous grin spread across her face as she grabbed the bong and took a hit. While still holding the smoke in her lungs, she leaned over and sealed her lips over mine, then blew the smoke out into my mouth. I breathed it in deeply, letting my lips linger against hers, sucking gently on her lower lip before leaning back and exhaling.

Oranges... she smelled like oranges.

"One minute!"

We got up and rejoined the main group around the bonfire. I snaked through the crowd and wedged myself in next to Adam. Then I happened to glance over my shoulder and realized that Amanda had followed behind me.

Emboldened by beer, pot, and nausea, I asked, "Got anyone picked out for your midnight kiss?"

She grinned and nodded her head.

The crowd counted down in unison.

Midnight came and went.

Amanda and I kissed.

The world did not end.

Reluctantly, I pulled my lips away from Amanda's. I opened my mouth to speak but couldn't come up with anything, so I just smiled instead. She hugged me tighter and rested her head on my shoulder.

I looked up to see Maggy staring at me from across the bonfire, shooting daggers at me with her eyes.

\---

I woke up just as dawn broke to find myself laying on my back in the sand. Sitting up, I saw that the bonfire was dead and most of the revelers had cleared out, though I wasn't the only straggler.

After finally managing to clamber to my feet, I spotted Maggy's Camry and started staggering over. Maggy herself was sitting on the hood, alone, with her knees bent and drawn in tightly against her chest.

"Where's everyone else?"

She said, "Rio left a couple hours ago with Dennis--"

That's right – Dennis!

"--and I have no idea what happened to Adam."

"We should maybe be concerned about that," I replied, bending forward to scratch my right leg through my jeans. "But I'm too fucking exhausted right now. I'll worry better after some sleep."

Maggy nodded absently, her eyes downcast, looking at my hand.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

"Nothing," she said, shaking her head as she started the engine. I glanced down and saw Amanda's phone number written on my palm in Sharpie.

We made the drive back into town without saying more than a few stray words to each other. Mostly, I was just listening to Maggy's mix tape on the stereo and remembering bits and pieces from last night.

"You don't look good," she finally said to me.

"Gee, thanks."

"No, I mean you look really pale. Are you sure you're okay?"

I shook my head. "I still feel really out of it, and I've got a throbbing headache."

"Rio usually carries Aspirin, if you want some. Her purse is under your seat."

I reached down and found it after only a little fishing around. Sifting through its contents, I noted with amusement that the condoms she bought at the liquor store were missing. Unfortunately, so was the Aspirin. I checked the front pocket to see if maybe it was in there. As soon as I unzipped it, though, I let out a loud, surprised laugh.

"Ha! That fucking bitch. After all that, she just up and pocketed it. I don't believe it!"

"What are you babbling about?" Maggy asked.

"Look at what she stole from the liquor store," I said and held up Rio's Daddy's Little Princess porno.

As soon as Maggy saw it, her face fell.

At that moment, I realized something fundamental about Magdalena that I was a little ashamed not to have figured out sooner.

Suddenly I heard a loud bang and immediately felt the car jerk to the right, careening onto the shoulder of the highway.

We got out of the Camry to inspect what happened and found the right front tire blown out.

Maggy started digging through her purse. I went around to check the trunk for a spare, but there wasn't one. By the time I returned to the front of the car, she had found her glass pipe and an empty plastic zipper bag that had at one time held a considerable amount of drugs.

That's when Maggy lost it.

"Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!"

She shrieked at the top of her lungs as she kicked wildly at the car. When she finally ran out of steam, she collapsed onto the ground and dug her fingers into her hair, tugging on it in two big handfuls.

I offered to call my dad and have him come out with AAA, but Maggy didn't respond. After waiting around for her to say something, anything, for five minutes, I announced that I was going to find a pay phone. She still just sat there silently, almost catatonic.

\---

We had blown out on top of the overpass over Highway 85, so the walk down to the nearest gas station wasn't too bad. The return walk uphill was another story, especially since I wasn't doing so hot to begin with. By the time I made it back to the Camry, I was pouring sweat, wheezing, and so dizzy I could hardly see.

Maggy was sitting on top of the parapet on the edge of the overpass, her feet dangling freely over the traffic below.

I hopped up next to her, facing the opposite direction towards her car. I was still dizzy and off-balance, and worried for a second I might tip backwards and fall over the side, but I was able to stabilize myself.

"My dad's on his way," I said, trying to catch my breath. "Should be about twenty minutes."

She didn't say anything or make any motion to even acknowledge my presence.

"Oh, and FYI, the world did not in fact end at midnight. The whole Y2K thing, nothing happened."

Maggy's lips curled into a bitter half-smile, and she let out a couple subdued chuckles. "So I guess last night was a big disappointment all around."

"What do you mean?" I asked, my head still reeling.

She turned to look at me, her face leaving tracers in its wake as it moved. "Nothing really happened in this story," she explained.

She braced her feet against the parapet and used it to launch herself forward, doing a perfect swan dive off the overpass. I peered over the side and watched her plunge between the oncoming traffic. The black asphalt turned to liquid as she passed gracefully through the surface, barely making a splash at all. It took a few minutes for the ripples to die down until the surface finally evened out again. The cars kept zipping by in either direction, paying no heed to any of it.

My right leg started itching again, so I threw it up onto the parapet and scratched it through my jeans. Then an image flashed in my head, a memory from last night of woman wearing a choker with a silver spider. I rolled up my jeans and saw the inflamed welt surrounded by a large circular rash, like a big red bullseye.

"Shit, I should probably get that checked out."

Nothing in this story really happened.

### Fake

Karen

William White sat across from me, fidgeting nervously with an empty packet of artificial sweetener while his coffee went cold, ignored on the table in front of him.

He rolled the torn yellow paper up like a tight little spliff, then unrolled it, smoothed it out flat, and then rolled it again.

I was midway through my third cup of coffee with no intention of stopping soon. I was tired and edgy, irritated at William for dragging me out at this time of night, and getting even more irritated at his refusal to get to the point.

"Did you know Philip K. Dick had a twin sister?"

I stared at him blankly.

"Her name was Jane. She died shortly after their birth. They were six weeks premature," he continued, his eyes drifting off to the window to his right. I wasn't sure if he was looking at something through it or staring at his own reflection in it.

"Dick never got over Jane's death; her ghost haunted him throughout his life, and the idea of a _phantom twin_ pops up throughout his work. Some have even speculated that Dick's inability to make peace with the loss of his sister contributed to his drug abuse, and by extension also his death at the relatively young age of 53."

He unrolled the sweetener packet, laid it on the table, placed both index fingers together in its center, and then spread them outward, smoothing the paper flat.

I reached out and slammed my own hand on top of the packet, preventing him from fiddling with it anymore.

"Sorry," he said sheepishly.

I let out a sigh. "Not that this isn't fascinating, but did you seriously call me out to Denny's at 3 am for this?"

William took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, then curled his lips into a bitter half-smile. "My whole life I've always felt like two people, like there were two sides to my personality – one masculine, one feminine. As a child, I almost convinced myself that I had a twin sister, like an imaginary friend, onto whom I projected this feminine side of me. It was like, I felt so much shame for having these feelings, wanting to dress up and play with dolls and all that – that I had to create an entirely separate identity that I could attribute these desires to."

I groaned and buried my head in my hands. This wasn't the type of mind fuck you should lay on anybody at 3 am, least of all your girlfriend. And considering that in college, my freshman-year boyfriend ended up leaving me for a man, I felt pretty sure I knew where this conversation was heading.

"Karen, look at me," he said, reaching across the table to lift up my chin with his hand.

"Why are you telling me this now?" I asked.

"I'm trying to make you understand," he said. "I'm trying to explain why I ended up committing one of the biggest journalistic hoaxes of our time."

And then he did explain.

By the time he finished, I actually wished he had been trying to tell me he was gay.

William

This isn't so much a story as it is a confession.

It all began a few years back – around 2005, I think, shortly before we met – when I was covering a big fire in the Santa Cruz Mountains for Syndicated Media wire service. Just as things were finally starting to wind down, a rumor started circulating around the base camp about one of the houses that had burned down near the source of the fire. It started out with the firefighters, quickly spread through the other rescue workers, and within a matter of hours it had made its way into the press corps.

The house was a modest wooden cabin that had probably been there since the '70s. A team of rescue workers stumbled upon it while sweeping the area for survivors. The owner was found pinned under a giant onyx statue and burned alive; it must have fallen over while he was trying to escape the blaze. Which was gruesome enough, getting burned alive, but that wasn't necessarily a story – to the press corps, that was just another stat to be tallied.

It became a story when one of the rescue workers realized what the statue was – a nine-foot-tall representation of the Hindu goddess Kali, her face twisted with maniacal fury, poised to strike with a sword raised above her head, nude but for the belt of human arms around her waist and a necklace of human heads.

That got their attention enough for them to take a closer look at what else was left behind in the cabin. Traces of goat's blood soaked into the floorboards. Charred remnants of books on black magic. Metal jewelry shaped into occult symbols. A ceremonial dagger with a pentagram carved in the hilt.

The worst of it, though, was what they found underground, in the small makeshift basement. It had survived nearly untouched by the fire due to a thick concrete lining. At first the rescue team thought it was just some survivalist nut's fallout bunker, which is probably what it was originally built to be.

But when they descended into the basement, they didn't find any of the expected emergency provisions. Instead they found an empty room with no furniture or supplies of any kind, only a seven-foot metal chain tethered to the far wall.

Someone clearly had been living down there. There were pools of human excrement on the floor – urine, feces, menstrual blood. But there was no furniture, no clothes, no sanitary products. The only other thing they found down there was a small toy piano with fingertip-sized indentations where the grimy white plastic keys had been worn down.

I heard about the cabin from a forest ranger named Dave Redstone over dinner with another reporter, Amy Hunter-Greene, with the local public radio affiliate. After a lot of nagging and plying with wine, Amy and I finally convinced Redstone to drive us out there. The fact that he had spent the last two weeks trying to nail Amy probably helped.

The drive up took about forty minutes just to navigate the narrow, unpaved back roads twisting through the charred wasteland that had once been dense forest. The cabin sat at the bottom of a small but deep valley tucked away in the middle of the mountain range, deliberately inaccessible to the casual camper or hiker.

Pulling up, I could already feel a weird, palpable energy in the place. The three of us climbed down from the jeep and approached the burned out shell of the cabin, illuminated by the headlights. We treaded lightly through the debris, and then Amy and I both froze as we simultaneously saw the Kali statue, which someone had stood back upright. We stared at it, transfixed by the way the shadow and light played on the grotesque features, so intricately carved into the stone. Redstone finally broke the spell only when he uncovered the trap door leading underground.

Descending into that basement was the most chilling experience of my life. The air felt electric; every hair on my body stood on end. My heartbeat had slowed to an almost imperceptible murmur, my breath was stilled, and I felt a coldness penetrating my skin all the way to my bones, making me feel brittle and weightless.

The stench of human waste was so thick as to be almost palpable. It hit us in a violent burst as soon as we pried open the trap door and never let up. We had to tie bandannas over our mouths just to be able to stand walking down there.

After a few minutes, it got to be too much for Amy, and she fled upstairs to be sick. Redstone followed after her, eager to play the sensitive, caring protector role. Left alone, I continued sweeping the room with my flashlight. That was when I found the toy piano.

I was never one to believe in ghosts, but _haunted_ was the only way I can describe the feeling that came over me. As soon as I knelt down and touched the piano, I instinctively spun around to look behind me, certain that someone was watching me from the darkness.

But of course, no one was there. I was all alone. Meaning that no one saw when I reached out for the piano again, scooped it up and stuffed it in my backpack.

\---

Amy and I debated for hours over how exactly to write about the cabin, or whether we should even publish the story at all. Sure, there were a lot of good, sensationalistic angles – Satanic rituals, a kidnapped girl, probable sexual abuse. But there were also a lot of unknowns, the biggest of which was the victim. If they had found the girl – alive or dead – then you would have had a real story. Without her, Amy maintained, everything was speculation. "We can't even be sure that someone had been kept down there unwillingly," she insisted. "For all we knew, it could have been a couple of weirdos playing out some disturbed sex fantasy. There are a lot of freaks in the world, after all."

Despite these reservations, I eventually did write the story, being careful not to play it as too over-the-top. I only brought up the really salacious stuff when I quoted the more speculative idol chatter I had heard from the rescue workers, mostly when they thought they were off the record.

It turned out to be one of my most heavily syndicated pieces, despite the inherent open-endedness. Based on its success, I was able to convince my editor to let me do a couple follow-ups with information I managed to dig up about the cabin's owner.

His name was Aeneas Cole, as confirmed both by dental records as well as the deed for that parcel of land. He was an associate professor of Theology and Philosophy at a local private university, and his body of published work showed an ongoing interest in the occult.

His wife had died seven years before the fire, and by all accounts it didn't take long for the grief to consume him. He bought the cabin shortly after her death and drove up every weekend religiously. Soon, he withdrew completely from his old life, quit his job, sold his house, and took permanent refuge there.

Beyond that, the trail went cold, and I soon dropped the story – at least as far as anyone in my public, professional life knew. Privately, however, I couldn't stop obsessing over it.

The plan for the hoax didn't come all at once. It was really more like a puzzle – a lot of little bits and pieces that didn't look like much of anything individually until they are laid out beside each other and a larger picture eventually emerges.

That damned piano was definitely an important piece. I kept it hidden in a box that I buried under a bunch of junk in my closet, only taking it out late at night, like it was some dark secret – something clandestine, something special. I'd close my eyes and picture that basement, the cold concrete walls, the acrid, noxious smell, the darkness. I'd imagine _her_ , how she looked, what it felt like to be trapped down there, and then lay my fingers delicately on the keys – in the grooves made by her fingers – and start to play.

As the weeks passed, I played it more frequently. Soon it became a kind of compulsive ritual, digging it out of the closet every night, playing it, and then hiding it again for the next night. Mind you, I never made claims to any musical talent, and most of what I played was terrible, pointless noodling. But all the same, I felt something whenever my skin touched those keys, an electricity surging back through my body, like touching a live wire.

Another piece of the puzzle came in the form of a chance assignment at work, an interview with an author – a ghostwriter, actually, someone who wrote celebrities' "autobiographies" for them. What fascinated me about him was the his method of preparing for a book, for being able to write convincingly in another person's distinctive voice. He immersed himself completely in his subjects' lives, not just talking to them, but living with them, shadowing them, going to the grocery store with them, sitting down at the table for family dinner, watching them interact with their kids.

It takes a certain type of person to be able to do that, to subordinate your own personality and allow another person's to take over so completely. It's like letting someone else's soul invade your body – could you be sure they wouldn't leave a piece of themselves behind? Could you be sure of finding your own identity again once theirs has moved on?

The next piece was a conversation I had with a colleague. It was a wanky, purely speculative bit of happy hour pseudo-intellectual sparring, fueled by two dollar pints and gristly, undercooked wings. The question was this: in the digital age, when so much of our existence takes place on the internet, would it be possible to actually fabricate a completely separate identity online?

My colleague, a fellow newswire reporter named Matt Marrón, had a penchant for all things bizarre, macabre, or perverse. He was the kind of guy who surfed the net for photos of murder scenes and autopsies, the kind of guy who named _Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS_ as his all-time-favorite movie. When I first told him about the occult stuff found in the cabin, it launched him into an incoherent twenty-minute rant about Crowley, Jack Parsons, and the Whore of Babylon.

Anyways, we are at the topic of online identities on that particular night because Matt had recently become obsessed by the phenomenon of pedophiles who posed as teenage girls online. He apparently spent hours memorizing the surprisingly elaborate details these freaks had manufactured to give credence to their alter egos. He hypothesized that for some of these guys, the web identities became more than a means to an end, they actually got off just on the fantasy of picturing themselves as young girls, like the way that some otherwise straight men get turned on by wearing women's lingerie. It was all about becoming the object of your own desire.

After staggering back home from the bar, I stayed up all night online – convincing myself it was just a lark, harmless curiosity – to see how easy it would be to actually fabricate an imaginary person's existence on the internet. As it turned out, it was shockingly easy.

\---

The final thing that solidified my plan, though, was an article I read about three sisters in Linz, Austria, who had been held captive in their home for seven years by their mother, completely cut off from the outside world. When they were finally found, the house was buried in trash and excrement piled over a meter high. They were kept in darkness, and by the time they emerged had skin so white that they couldn't stand prolonged exposure to natural lighting. With no one to talk to but each other and the mice that infested their house, the girls had invented their own language, a whimsical, sing-song mixture of gibberish and German that was indecipherable to anyone but them.

It was their made-up language that sparked my imagination.

Returning to the toy piano, I played a simple, seven-note figure over and over and tried to imagine what the girls' language might have sounded like. With my repetitive figure as accompaniment, I began singing random gibberish, something between actual words and pure vocalese, not thinking about the sounds that my mouth formed, just letting the melody flow through me to fit the shape and feel of the music. While I sang, I closed my eyes and saw an image of a woman – faint, ill-defined, but somehow still very real.

A few weeks later, when I happened to have a free weekend, I called up my old college roommate to hook up some acid, knowing he still hung around with the kind of people that could get it on short notice. Then I covered the windows in my apartment with dark sheets and shut off the lights, making sure it was pitch black. Once the acid started to peak, I the dug out the piano.

The drugs created a kind of phantom reverb in my head, and the music echoed and shimmered around me in ethereal waves, rippling across the darkness. For every note I played, countless others sprang from it, like a psychedelic flower blossoming infinitely – or more appropriately, like cells dividing, birthing a new living organism. Soon, I was able to actually perceive the sound as tangible light-forms, the way I imagined a synaesthetic would.

As the lights intensified, a euphoric sensation swept over me, and before I realized it, my cheeks were wet with tears. In the midst of this, a single image was burned into my mind – a woman's face again, but this time more vibrant, more alive, painted in pulsating, electric shades of pinks and oranges.

And then it was over, and I slowly came to my senses to find myself once again alone in the darkness.

A couple hours passed.

Soon daylight peeked into my apartment through the cracks between my venetian blinds. I sat in my desk chair, twitchy, restless, and coming down hard.

I couldn't focus enough to get any work done. I didn't have the strength to do anything else productive around the apartment. My stomach recoiled at the thought of food. And I just couldn't bring myself to even try to go outside.

Not really knowing what else to do with myself, I went on the internet.

I stumbled onto an online support group for people with mental illnesses. Their stories stirred something inside of me, a resonance as if their struggles were my own. They were ashamed of who they were. They felt constant, sometimes crippling, fear, knowing that their own minds could betray them at any time. They got frustrated dealing with those closest to them – family, friends, lovers – who, for all their trying, simply could not wrap their heads around what it was like to live with mental illness. They felt guilty about hurting or burdening those same loved ones. But through it all, they survived, and they were able to accomplish amazing things with their lives.

Before I even had a chance to think through the ramifications of my actions, I started typing. _Hello, my name is Zoe Amaranth. I am nineteen years old, undergoing treatment for schizophrenia and depression, and trying to remember who I am. For seven years, I was held captive in the darkness, trapped like an animal, alone and frightened. I don't know who was before that or where I came from. All I remember is the darkness._

I didn't sleep or leave the apartment at all that weekend. By the time I dragged myself into work, "Zoe" had an e-mail address, a MySpace page, a blog on LiveJournal, and registered accounts on a few dozen forums dedicated to mental illness and victims of sexual abuse.

Zoe started out as my hobby at first, something to kill a few minutes on the net while having my morning coffee. The more I immersed myself in her, however, the more she started feeling like a dirty little secret, something I had to hide from the rest of the world – even you. There were times when you and I sat across from each other, just having a normal conversation, and then suddenly I'd be hit with an intense feeling of shame. I'd remember this other piece of my existence that meant so much to me, but that I couldn't share with you out for fear of how you might react. Would you think I was a freak? Would you be offended? Would you leave? I knew in my heart of hearts that it was something you would never be able to understand. But I couldn't stop – I didn't want to stop – and soon my _hobby_ , my _little secret_ , became a full-blown obsession.

And then, one day when I was in the middle of a dry streak at work and my editor was chewing me out about my dearth of real, substantive stories, I realized that a plan had indeed finally materialized out of the disparate puzzle pieces I had been collecting, and I was ready to put it in action.

"Remember that story I did three years ago, the one about that cabin they found in the Santa Cruz Mountains after fire?" I heard myself say. My editor nodded slowly in response, his body slumped back in the chair to broadcast his exasperation.

"Well, I think I might have found the girl."

\---

Call me naïve, but I never imagined the firestorm that my article would set off.

Front page in all the major dailies from New York to LA. Feature articles in several national news magazines. Segments on 24-hour cable news channels. Invitations from network TV talk shows.

But while everyone around me was celebrating, I felt nothing but encroaching darkness, like slowly sinking into quicksand, feeling myself suffocating under the weight of the guilt and the fear of being discovered.

I was able to buy some time by citing Zoe's fragile mental state to excuse her refusal to do interviews and public appearances. And while I claimed to have met with her personally, I insisted that I promised not to release her phone number or address until she agreed she was ready.

But I knew I could only stall for so long. It was only a matter of time before people started getting suspicious, and I would eventually need to produce Zoe in the flesh.

Miraculously, my salvation appeared one morning at Starbucks. It was a flyer, a cheap black-and-white photocopy, announcing a performance by Zoe Amaranth at a local club called _Glossolalia._ I had to stare at it for five minutes just to process what I was seeing.

I took the flyer home and called the club to see if it was some kind of joke, or if maybe some band had adopted that name as a really tasteless attempt to be edgy. The manager, though, insisted that she was just woman who came in off the street to audition, and that was the name she gave.

Of course I had to show up. I wasn't sure what I was expecting, but I certainly wasn't prepared for what I found. When I saw her take the stage, I became convinced more than ever that it was a joke. She had long, violently pink hair and wore a black lace corset, red plaid schoolgirl skirt, and a pair of big heart-shaped sunglasses like _Lolita_. She was alone, just her and a single keyboard and a microphone beside a large rack of sound processors. I almost left right then and there, but before I got a chance to get up, she started to play.

I was paralyzed. The music she started playing was exactly what I had heard in my head on the night I took the acid, except it was richer, more intricate, more alive than I could ever have imagined. Then she leaned into the mic and started singing lyrics that didn't sound like any language spoken on earth. And yet it wasn't random gibberish, the way the words flowed together seemed deliberate and structured, as if it was a completely new language with its own grammar, its own consistent internal logic.

As I sat awestruck, it was like everything else melted away – there was no more club, no more people, only her and me and the music filling the vast open space around us. All sense of time and place dissolved, and I watched for what seemed like an eternity as she constructed an entire universe made of sound.

When it was over, I went back to the club's cramped makeshift dressing room to talk to her. It took me several minutes of staring at her in silent wonder from the doorway before I managed to actually say anything. Meanwhile, she shifted uncomfortably in her seat, probably trying to decide if I was there to rape her, rob her, or ask for an autograph.

"My name's William," I finally said, tripping over my words. "William White."

"I'm Zoe," she replied, her posture relaxing noticeably.

I shook my head. "No. I mean, I'm _the_ William White. I'm the one who's been writing the article about Zoe Amaranth."

She gave a gentle, amused nod. "I know; I've read your articles. It's so good to finally meet you." Then she gave me what they call a _knowing smile_ and added, "Finally meet like this, I mean. Face to face. In the flesh."

The shutters lifted, and for the first time in months I felt relieved – intensely, rapturously relieved.

"How do you feel about talk shows?" I asked.

\---

Zoe and I made the rounds on the talk show circuit together, riding the wave until public interest in her story finally faded as these things always do. After the initial media frenzy was over, I settled into ghostwriting her memoirs, for which the two of us raked in an advance so big that my share alone was more than I had made in all seven years of my career as a fledgling journalist combined.

I never pressed her about her real identity or her life before we met, since any time I even hinted at the subject she became moody and irritable. Of course, I was curious – and further, I was nervous that someone from her past might expose our deception. She had to come from somewhere, after all; she had to have parents and teachers and childhood friends out there in the world, one of whom was eventually bound to turn on the TV and wonder why she's sitting there in a pink wig and calling herself "Zoe" and talking a lot of nonsense about being held prisoner for seven years. However, after a couple discreet inquiries didn't pay off, I was content to leave it alone and not let my curiosity jeopardize a good thing.

Instead, I focused on quietly renewing my search for the girl who had been trapped in that cabin – I mean, the one who _really_ was there. It seemed likely that she died in the fire, but I wanted to make sure. If she was in fact dead, at least I would at least have a little more peace of mind to show for my efforts. And if she was still alive, I wanted to be the one to find her and make sure she was going to stay quiet.

I started by going through the records of everyone who had died in the fire, since enough time had now passed for them to sort out everyone's identities. It didn't take long for me to find a likely candidate.

Valerie Gray from Alamogordo, NM – nineteen years old when she died in the fire. According to her parents, she had gone to California with her gymnastics team at the age of twelve and never returned. That meant she was missing seven years, the same time frame as Aeneas Cole's seclusion.

The blood that they found in the bunker under the cabin was a rare type. According to Valerie's medical records, she was a match. It had to be her.

I was in the clear. Not only was she dead – and therefore unable to contradict my story – but in talking to her parents, it never even occurred to them that she might have been the girl in the cabin.

Ironically, though, in trying to make sure I was protected, I ended up bringing about my own downfall.

Somehow, Amy Hunter-Greene got her hands on the information I compiled about Valerie Gray and reached the same conclusion about her identity. She resented the the success that the cabin story brought me and somehow blamed me for her decision not to run it, as if I had tricked her. She came to see me one night and blackmailed me, demanding a share of the book advance in exchange for her silence.

I had to pay her of course. Even though there wasn't conclusive proof that Valerie was the girl from the cabin, there was enough evidence to raise questions. And I knew that my hoax was too flimsy to stand up to any real scrutiny, having succeeded based only on people's willingness to believe it in the absence of any more plausible alternative. All it would have taken was a little skeptical digging to check the IP records for the web sites that I posted on, and I would have been done.

So I paid off Amy, and then some time later she asked for more money, and I paid that, too. For the last six months, she's bled me dry. She's taken all the book money, she's wiped out my savings, she's maxed my credit, and still she demands more.

That's why I'm telling you this. I don't have any other choice, I have to come clean publicly. Tonight, before I called you, I sent an e-mail to the news desks at all the major papers and networks explaining what I'd done. But I wanted you to hear it from me first, before you see it on the morning news. I wanted a chance to explain to you why I did this thing. Not so you'd excuse what I did – I know that there's no hope in that – or even so you'd forgive me. But so that maybe, at least, you can understand.

Karen

Watching someone you love destroy himself is the one of the most agonizing, heart-wrenching experiences you could ever have.

In the weeks following Will's confession, I saw him retreat from the world, letting the guilt and shame consume him a little more every day. He stopped bathing, stopped answering his phone, and eventually stopped leaving the apartment altogether, deciding all his basic needs could be met over the internet.

I'd like to believe that I tried to help him the best that I could, but there were parts of me knew this wasn't true – those were the parts of me that felt personally betrayed by his deception, that wanted to see him punished as much as the outside world did. He was a fraud, after all – an opportunist who had emotionally exploited so many people. As much as I loved him, there was that part of me that hated him with equal intensity.

Of course, he didn't seem to want my help anyways. If anything, he resented my attempts to comfort him. I found my role in his life quickly marginalized, feeling myself become like a ghost occasionally drifting in and out of his apartment, barely noticeable except at the very edges of consciousness.

Then one day I showed up at his apartment to find that his lock had been changed and an eviction notice had been posted on his front door.

I never saw him again.

\---

That night – maybe driven by guilt, maybe desperately grasping at straws for any semblance of meaning that could possibly be wrought from this ordeal – I went to see Zoe Amaranth perform.

She was playing again at the club _Glossolalia,_ the same one where Will first saw her, having returned to playing dives after Will brought her fifteen minutes to an abrupt end. It was a bright, gaudy hole-in-the-wall downtown whose front window was covered by a large, Lichtenstein-esque pop art mural depicting a man and a woman locked in an embrace. Inside, every inch of wall space was covered with art, the lighting was harsh and unforgiving, all the tables and chairs were made of a pink hard plastic, and the bar was covered with tiny mirrored tiles like a disco ball.

I took a seat right near the front of the stage, sharing a table with a young, zealously-pierced hipster couple in matching tweed coats. After a twenty-minute wait, during which I nursed one whiskey sour, Zoe finally took the stage. Her pale, cherubic face was mostly hidden behind a huge pair of pink cat's eye sunglasses and a straight-banged wig of thick, pink hair that fell all the way to her waist. As much pains as she took to conceal her face, though, her pallid, anemic frame almost completely exposed. She wore only a black lace bra, black lycra hot pants, and a pair of twenty-eye Docs.

The giant wig and glasses made sense, given that one could easily imagine why she'd want to hide her identity. I found it strange, though, that she would so brazenly show off her body. Especially considering that I – and most women – tended to do the opposite, getting self-conscious about showing too much below the neck, but not thinking twice about walking around with our faces exposed. Then I realized, her body is a distraction _from_ her face, another layer to help protect her anonymity. In a week's time, any guy in this place would still be able to pick her midriff out of a lineup, and yet would never recognize her fully-clothed, even if she was standing right in front of him, face to face.

She led a trio consisting of her on keyboards, an electric cellist, and a guy programming beats with his MacBook. All three musicians were plugged into heavy duty processing rigs, making liberal use of digital delays and samplers in addition to more standard effects. The result was a shimmering, pulsating wall of sound cascading down on the audience like waves crashing on a shoal, much more intricate and layered than you would think possible with those three instruments.

Figures were repeated, echoed, stretched, and snipped, then looped back around on each other and embellished with colorful fills. The song shifted from frantic, arrhythmic syncopation to murky, amorphous tone poems to sweeping operatic themes, eschewing any semblance of traditional compositional structures.

Zoe's vocals fit the musical accompaniment perfectly, being so heavily-treated that at times she sounded like a full choir, and at other times she sounded as if she were singing through speaker phone held up to a bull horn. Her lyrics were not in English, although I couldn't quite place what language she was using. It didn't have any identifiable characteristics of any language I had heard spoken, be they Latin-based, eastern European, or south Asian.

And yet somehow, the emotions of the lyrics were so raw, so pure, that they translated clearly through her delivery, resonating deep within me, filling me alternately with the sensations of loss, struggle, pain, fear, and ultimately redemption. On some instinctual, primal level, I knew that through these songs, she was telling the story of her captivity.

Except that was impossible. She was a sham, a fake – just like Will. I had gone there with a hard heart and every intention to confirm her as a phoney.

But as she finished her set, I wasn't so sure. I glanced at the hipster couple at my table, seeing their faces rubbed raw with emotion, and our eyes met to openly acknowledge that we had all just shared in the type of experience that strips you down to the core human essence, beneath all the bullshit posturing and affectations.

Fifteen minutes after she left the stage, she re-appeared on the club floor, heading towards the bar. I followed as discreetly as I could, trying to look as little like a manic stalker as I could manage, but she spotted me all the same.

I squeezed in next to her at the bar just as the tender was passing her a gin and tonic over the counter.

"Mind if I get that for you?" I asked.

She flashed me the kind of half-grin you give someone when you're still not sure if they're genuinely nuts or just hopelessly awkward. "That depends, are you trying to pick up on me?"

I let out a small, self-effacing laugh and responded, "No, sorry, not like that. I just meant as a token of how much I liked the show."

She shrugged. "Be my guest."

After passing the bartender a bill big enough to cover both Zoe's drink as well as another whiskey sour for me, I offered her my hand.

"My name's Karen."

She glanced down at my hand without shaking it and gave me that same half-grin. "I know who you are."

I stared at her, frozen in place as I tried to figure out if she was for real, my hand still hanging awkwardly in the air as she threw her head back and drained her glass dry.

She wiped the back of her hand across her lips in an exaggerated gesture, then leaned in close to me conspiratorially to ask, "So should we go back to my apartment, then?"

I recoiled from her, perhaps a bit more than was called for. "No, I'm not gay," I stammered. "I mean, I'm really not trying to pick up on you. I just--"

She cut me off. "You want to ask me questions – about who I am, where I came from. But a bar this loud is crap for having any civilized conversation. And besides, these aren't the sort of questions I want to answer out in the open. So we should go somewhere quieter. Like my apartment, which is only a few blocks away."

\---

Zoe's place was a cramped, sparsely-furnished studio above a derelict storefront. We entered through a side door, and I helped her lug her keyboard and sound rig up the flight of steep, concrete stairs to her place.

After we set down her gear, she motioned for me to sit on a overturned plastic milk crate that she'd fashioned into a makeshift chair with the addition of a ratty, stained throw pillow strapped to the top. Meanwhile, she sprawled herself out on the bare concrete floor, picking a half-smoked spliff out of a glass ashtray and relighting it. After taking a healthy toke, she held it out to me, but I declined.

Aside from my crate, the only other identifiable pieces of furniture were a frameless futon mattress in the far corner and a single bent brass floor lamp that barely lit the room. There were no dressers or shelves, so everything was strewn carelessly across the floor – piles of clothes, a small cosmetics case, a few errant tubes of lipstick, a roll-on deodorant, a blackened metal pot sitting on a hotplate splattered with layers of grime, crumpled up bits of trash, and other random sundries that seemed to confirm someone actually lived in this squalor.

"So, do you mind if I ask those questions now?" I ventured, trying to ignore how inadequately the cushion protected me from the hard, uneven surface of the plastic crate.

Zoe swept aside a handful of fast food wrappers to unearth a cheap digital clock. She shook her head and answered, "Give it a couple minutes."

I squirmed in the awkward silence while she finished smoking the joint until there was absolutely nothing left for her to hold onto, feeling my butt starting to go numb from my uncomfortable seat.

Just as she stubbed out the last smoldering bit of paper in the ashtray, there was a knock at the door.

"It's open," Zoe called out.

I turned to see a woman entering the room, a scrawny little waif in a cream-colored ribbed turtleneck and a pair of dark brown slacks. I guessed her to be about my age; her diminutive frame would have made her seem a lot younger if not for her stern, angular features and the premature worry lines forming at the corners of her mouth and eyes. She had the no-nonsense look of a school teacher, or possibly a librarian, with her eyes dwarfed by a pair of thick-rimmed glasses and her dirty blonde hair pulled back into a severe ponytail.

The new woman paused noticeably when she saw me – not so much in shock, but more like amused surprise. Her lips twisted into a smirk, accentuating the asymmetry of her face. "Looks like you were right. It _was_ only a matter of time before she came snooping around."

She scooted one of the speakers from Zoe's rig across the floor, positioning it across from me. As she sat down on top of it, Zoe slid over and laid her head affectionately in the new woman's lap.

She lit a cigarette and casually exhaled a perfect ring of smoke. "So have you heard from Will recently or is the poor boy still playing the self-pitying recluse?"

I shook my head in confusion. "I'm sorry, do I know you?"

"We haven't met formally," she answered, before pausing to take another drag. "My name is Amy."

Amy

Sorry if I disappoint you, but this isn't going to be a confession. This is my side of the story.

First off, Will wasn't even supposed to come with us to the cabin that night. He only happened to walk into my tent when Redstone was telling me about it, and then invited himself along. And the only reason he wanted to go was out of jealousy that I might have been fucking Redstone, whereas he had been trying – unsuccessfully – to get into my panties ever since we'd met.

And for the record, yes, I was fucking Redstone, and yes, he was an awesome lay. Much better than Will turned out to be.

Anyways, Will was the one who talked _me_ out of running the story, just so he could turn around and published it himself, the two-faced prick. But whatever, I was still young and naive enough to let him pull something like that on me, so frankly I couldn't begrudge him a brief moment in the limelight. If the had left it at that, I'd have been happy to write it off as a life lesson and been on my merry fucking way.

But then the bastard got greedy.

When I saw his first story about Zoe Amaranth, something inside me snapped. It was bad enough that he stole my story, but to actually watch him fabricate news, to shit on journalistic integrity and everything I believe in and get away with it – actually get applauded for it – was more than I could stomach.

There was no doubt in my mind that it was bullshit – I knew it instinctively, feeling it deep down in my very fiber. The problem was that he had been too careful about covering his tracks; as much as I searched, I couldn't find any hard evidence linking him to the creation of the Amaranth posts. Sure, I could have probably proved it with IP logs, but I couldn't justify a subpoena based solely on my gut intuition.

Without that, the bastard had left himself too many outs. He hadn't actually written that Zoe Amaranth _was_ the girl in the cabin, only that someone named Zoe Amaranth _claimed_ to be the girl in the cabin. Even if Zoe's identity could be disproven, it wouldn't necessarily be proof-positive that he was lying; he might have just been careless.

Also, Zoe's delicate mental state and insistence on anonymity was the perfect excuse for her continuing refusal to come forward in the flesh. It would have also provided the cover for her to simply disappear if ever the heat became too much for Will to handle.

In short, he had thought of everything, and while I did have to concede a modicum of begrudging respect at his inventiveness, it only fed my seething, bitter contempt. I became obsessed with bringing the fucker down.

The first step was to trick him into crossing the point of no return, where he would no longer be able to excuse his lies as a simple misunderstanding. That meant helping him to finally produce Zoe in the flesh.

By pure luck, I happened across a young street musician in the park who was perfect for the part. She sat in her underwear on a plastic milk crate and played a cheap battery-powered keyboard through a busted old guitar amp. The sounds she managed to coax out of that primitive rig were the most haunting and otherworldly I had ever heard. It was as she had never listened to music before, and therefore crafted her compositions without any preconceptions about structure, tonality, or melody.

I introduced myself and invited her out to lunch. She said her name was also Amy and that she had been living on the streets for two years, ever since she ran away from her home in Palo Alto. After we finished eating, we went for a walk through downtown while I explained my plan to her. I offered $50 a week in addition to putting her up in an apartment and helping to line up gigs. She didn't take much convincing.

Once her first performance was set, it wasn't hard to make sure Will was there. He's painfully predictable in his routine, as you are no doubt aware, so a single well-placed flyer in the Starbucks near his apartment did the trick.

I wished I could have seen the look on his face when he saw it, or been there to watch him stammer like a retarded hillbilly when he met "Zoe" – but of course my presence at that first show would have made him suspicious.

Luckily, though, he was just dense enough not to think twice when I "accidentally" ran into him at another show three weeks later, after the two of them had already started taking their little song-and-dance routine on the talk show circuit. I needed to get closer to him so I could find proof that he was a fraud, and it seemed like a tight black dress and a few-too-many drinks in a dim dive bar were the quickest means to that end. Like I said, he was always painfully predictable.

If it'd make things easier for you, I could say that he struggled with guilt over cheating on you. It wouldn't really be true, strictly speaking, but what the hell, you're free to believe any fucking thing you like.

Anyways, after a clumsy, brief, and altogether unsatisfying fuck, he passed out cold and left me free to snoop around for incriminating evidence. Which I found, obviously.

Valerie Gray. It was perfect.

But I didn't turn him in – not right away. As satisfying as I found the thought of publicly shaming Will and destroying his career, I enjoyed the sensation of having so much power over him, of watching him squirm like a worm on a hook, of knowing that I literally held his life in my hands. And I couldn't stand to let it end so quickly, I wanted to make him suffer a prolonged and agonizing downward spiral. I wanted to watch the bastard implode.

So I blackmailed him, slowly bled him dry, and laughed as the guilt consumed him from the inside out – knowing all the while that it was only a matter of time before he broke and turned himself in.

Painfully predictable.

Karen

I thought I saw Will in Safeway, once. I followed him down two aisles before he finally turned his head enough for me to see his face and realized it wasn't him.

I actually did run into Amy shortly after that. She was walking down Santana Row while I was having lunch with a couple friends from work. She passed right in front of our table on the patio, close enough for me to see that she still had the shiner I gave her before storming out of Zoe's apartment. Seeing it made me smile.

All the same, I decided that I needed to get out of this city for awhile; it had too many ghosts.

I took an extended leave from work, rented a great big topless shark of a car, cleared out what little savings I had in my bank account, and hit the road.

I sped down the open highway faster than I had ever dared to drive before. I let down my hair and felt the wind whip it around wildly. I cranked up the Raveonettes on the stereo and navigated purely by instinct and providence.

Eventually, I ended up in Alamogordo.

The Grays were listed in the phone book, and the truck stop waitress was more than happy to give me directions to their address.

They were a friendly but maudlin old couple and invited me in just a bit too eagerly, betraying how desperately lonely they were. I told them that I was a reporter working on a story for the five-year anniversary of the fire. For their part, Valerie's parents willfully ignored the flimsiness of my lie and led me back into her old room, which had been converted into something of a shrine with framed pictures, old trophies and awards, yearbooks, and photo albums all gathered together in a massive mahogany curio cabinet. We spent the better part of the afternoon inspecting each item one by one while they recounted their daughter's life through fragmented anecdotes. These stories had clearly been embellished bit by bit over countless retellings until they attained mythical proportions.

And then finally, after three hours of this, they dropped the bomb on me. It didn't look like a bomb of course; it was such a simple, unassuming little thing, a cream-colored envelope measuring six inches wide by four high, made of thick, pulpy handmade paper, postmarked Santa Cruz and dated two months before the fire. They delicately opened the back flap and slipped out the single, neatly folded page inside. It was a simple note handwritten in loose, loopy script, signed Valerie.

Oh Will, you poor, hapless idiot, I thought. How could you not have found out about this? I imagined him on the phone with the Grays, too absorbed in his own bullshit to pay much attention to this old couple, talking so much that they could barely fit in a word edgewise. It's a flaw one often finds in reporters, confusing the difference between finding out what someone knows and getting confirmation of what you already believe.

Valerie had written to tell them that she was okay, that she was sorry she hadn't written since she disappeared, and wanted to explain what had happened. She ran away during the trip because her gymnastics coach, Mr. Silva, had raped her. She didn't know what to do, she was scared and confused and ashamed. She couldn't bear the thought of having to explain to her parents or teammates what happened, or having to look at Mr. Silva's face again. So she just ran away.

At first, she was too ashamed about what she had done to go to any authorities or seek help getting home. Somehow, she felt guilty because of what _he_ did, like somehow it was her fault. Eventually, she grew up and realized it wasn't her fault, but she was still ashamed – ashamed now because she had run away, ashamed at what a stupid, scared little girl she had been.

She said that life had been hard during the seven years since she had seen them, but that she would do her parents the kindness of not going into the details. The important thing was that she had survived, that she was alive, and that she was finally happy.

She was living with her boyfriend of a year, waiting tables in a vegan diner, and had just learned that she was pregnant. She promised that once the baby was born and they had saved up enough money for a flight, she would make the trip back home so her daughter would be able to meet her grandparents.

Her mother's voice cracked as she read the letter aloud, tears streaming down her face, but she didn't break down. She stopped allowing herself to break down long ago.

I decided not to return home and instead dropped the rental off at the closest Enterprise and booked a flight to Boston, where my old college boyfriend lived. We had kept on good terms, and he didn't mind me staying on his couch until I got myself set up with a new job and a place of my own.

The first night in my new apartment, I took a folding lawn chair and a bottle of Zinfadel up on the roof, sat facing west and got pleasantly smashed while meditating on the vast amount of land I had managed to place between myself and the ghosts. For the first time since that night in Denny's, I felt free, unencumbered, like I was finally my own person again, no longer trapped in someone else's shadow.

\---

That was a little over a year ago.

Tonight, a couple friends twist my arm into going with them to a charity art auction at a small local gallery. I am deep into my fourth glass of free Merlot when suddenly some familiar music starts up, a simple, haunting piano melody run through layers of echo, the waves of sound spreading throughout the gallery space like tentacles, gripping me tightly and drawing me to the source with inescapable magnetism.

And there she is, perched behind her keyboard, hidden beneath a black Venetian mask and a big wavy Farrah Fawcett wig, but still unmistakably her. I check the program, which lists her under the name Karen Jaune.

I listen to the rest of her set, and when she is finished playing, I join her onstage, seating myself on her keyboards amp.

"It's amazing," I say, "but after everything that happened, everything you did – encouraging Will's hoax, helping Amy tear his life apart, all of it – I still find myself unable to hate you."

As she listens, her face remains completely stoic, not betraying any hint of remorse, of indignation, of any recognizable human emotion at all.

"It's the music, isn't it?" I continue, wiping away the tears that have been welling in my eyes since the start of the set. "It's so beautiful. More than that, it's almost magical – the way that it makes people feel. It heals them, doesn't it?"

She nods her head and leans in conspiratorially to whisper, "Actually, it _is_ magic."

I pull back and look at her wordlessly, wondering if she's being serious or not. She manages to hold onto her straight face for all of twelve seconds before breaking into a smile so wide, it seems to expand the size of her face twofold.

I can't help but laugh along with her – a few chuckles, nothing more, but enough to release the tension.

I help haul her equipment out to a van waiting behind the gallery. Just as she's about to climb into the driver's seat, she pauses and turns to me. Pulling off the wig and mask, she reveals the short-cropped auburn hair hidden underneath as well as the slightly asymmetrical features of her face, which is just a plain, ordinary face, neither particularly ugly nor particularly beautiful.

"Goodnight, Karen," she says she wraps her arms around me.

"Goodnight," I repeat, but then stop myself. "Well, I'm pretty sure your name isn't really also Karen. It's probably not Amy, either." She shakes her head. I continue, "And you're not Zoe, and you're not Valerie. So who the hell are you?"

She smiles.

Zoe

I'm going to tell you a story.

Once upon the time, there was a girl who could remember only the darkness. Actually, she could only remember the darkness some of the time. Sometimes she remembered nothing at all, like she never even existed before this very moment.

And when this girl emerged from the darkness, she was filled with the desire to create something beautiful.

### about the author

Moxie Mezcal lives under an assumed name in San Jose, California.

For more (free) guerrilla fiction, visit:

MoxieMezcal.com
