Part 2: A boy who killed some people

2015:

There were crepe myrtles alongside the house near the a/c condenser and they were nothing like the crepe myrtles out by the street. The leaves were longer, the flowers pinker, and the branches had grown up and out until they rivaled the height of the building.

Out front, on that plot of land some call a berm or a devil’s strip but for which I possessed no term, there were bushes of oval leaves and red flowers and the branches had only grown taller than me once, during the summer my grandfather died.

Mad Slaughter sucked at a cigarette that pointed straight out from her lips and every time she inhaled, she sucked in her cheeks like someone drinking an ice cream float through a straw. The pack on her back was threadbare camo she’d bought from the army surplus. That’s where the cool kids got their things.

She said, “I knew a boy who killed some people.” I watched her watching the crepe myrtle – the big one by the house – and she knew I watched her but Mad was not the sort of girl to mind.

“He lived in the apartment next door to us.” She turned to meet my eyes. To gauge the impact of her story.

“He was doing the woman who lived upstairs.”

This story sounded familiar.

It was my story, too, or a mirror image of my own, at any rate, and as she went on, I searched for myself in it but I was not there.

Mad would have been eight, probably, when it happened and (presumably) living with parents of good enough sense to shield their young daughter from the gory details but somehow she knew it all.

I said, “You knew Stonie, too, huh?” and immediately regretted it. She broke eye contact. I had robbed her of her story.

The pink flowers each had five petals and they weighed down the branches and the landlord never cut them back in winter like he did with the ones out front.

She said, “This is oleander,” which explained why this crepe myrtle looked nothing like the crepe myrtles out front. The flower looked fine in her hair.

She said, “The thing about oleander is it’s poisonous. If a dog is unfortunate enough to eat the leaves, the dog will die. It happens sometimes.”

I watched her walking back to the house.

Poisonous leaves.

That explained the crickets. 

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Part 1 is HERE.

References from “Fascist Dyke Motors”:

- Mad Slaughter is the real name of a real person who first appeared in a 2014 Katy post called “Adorable.”

- “That explained the crickets” refers to the death of some pets in a 2015 Katy post called “A Murder Mystery.”