The Devil Next Door

13

Macy Merchant walked home from school that day in something of a daze. She did not understand what had happened. She only knew that it left her feeling very scared. Very disturbed. She thought it over and kept thinking it over and all she came up with was a blank. An absolute blank.

It just did not make sense.

Sure, she couldn’t stand Chelsea Paris or Shannon Kittery or any of the rest of their uppity, elitist pack. But she’d never mouthed off to them before. She’d never dared. And she certainly had never attacked one of them. Macy couldn’t remember ever being in a fight. Chelsea and Shannon had been mean to her long as she could remember, but even when they shoved her in the halls in junior high or knocked her books out of her hands, she’d never fought back.

You did more than fight back, Macy, a stern voice in her head informed her. You attacked. You attacked Chelsea. You stabbed her in the cheek with a frigging pencil.

Oh, God. Oh, dear God.

Thing was, she could remember doing it just fine.

She could remember the absolute hatred and loathing she’d suddenly felt for Chelsea. It had been like a poison working its way through her, until… until she had just lost control. All of it boiled in her and she’d started calling Chelsea names.

Then she’d grabbed her.

Pounded her head off the desk.

Then stabbed her with the pencil.

And the blood… God, the smell of it. It had made her hungry. It had made her mouth water. And worse, far, far worse, it had made her horny.

Just the memory of that sickened her.

Mr. Benz had dragged her down to the office and Chelsea was taken to the school nurse. She remembered Mr. Shore, the principal, reading her the riot act, asking her again and again why she, a straight A honor roll student with a spotless record, had done something so vicious and cruel. Chelsea was being taken to the hospital. She would need stitches. And as Shore went on and on, Macy just sat there, that black poison still seething in her guts. She kept smiling even though Shore told her to wipe that goddamn smirk off her face. But she hadn’t been able to. It was like someone was smiling for her, thinking awful things and doing worse things, and she had only been along for the ride.

While Shore raged, she had stared at his belly. It was so full and round beneath his starched white shirt. What a mess it would be, she thought, if someone opened it with a knife.

Then… whatever had taken hold of her, just faded.

Macy started crying.

And not your average boo-hoo crocodile tears, but the real thing. Whatever that awful compulsion had been, when it released her, it was like she had been torn open inside, cut right to the bone, and then the blood had flowed and kept flowing. This blood was clear and ran from her eyes, but in her mind it was just as red and just as hot as blood as it spilled down her cheeks. Even Shore had melted when he saw it happen.

Macy… sweet, gentle, kind… was back and maybe he saw this.

That other thing was gone. Shore had tried to console her, tried a great many things, in fact, short of telling her it was okay, it was nothing to get upset about. But, truth be told, Macy was in such a state of tearful despondency by then, it had even crossed his mind to say that. Then the school secretary, Mrs. Bleer, had come in and did what many men seemed so incompetent at and incapable of: she soothed Macy. She talked her down, hugged her, let her know that while, yes, it was bad attacking another student, that they would work it out.

Had it been someone other than Macy Merchant, the treatment would not have been so sympathetic or understanding. But Mrs. Bleer knew Macy just as Mr. Shore did and Macy was a good kid. Smart, well-adjusted, dutiful… she was not some wildcat that routinely assaulted other girls.

Both of them kept asking her the same thing again and again: Why? Why had she gone after Chelsea like that? What had Chelsea said? What had she done? Because neither of them were ignorant of Chelsea Paris and the sort of girl she was. And the way they were seeing it was that Chelsea must have really, really done something bad this time around to get a reaction like that out of Macy Merchant, of all people.

Yes, they wanted to know why.

And as Macy walked down Colidge Street, making for 7^th Avenue and Rush Street, she wanted to know why, too.

She saw Kathleen Soames standing on her porch. She waved.

She kept walking, aware only of the thoughts that filled her head and this was enough. Clutching her books to her chest, her head slumped down, she stared at the sidewalk. The cracks in it. The anthills blossoming every few feet.

The thing that absolutely terrified her about it all is that she had felt no control, as if someone or something else had simply taken over. She wondered if that’s how crazy people felt when they opened up with a gun in a supermarket or took an axe after somebody, like they were not really to blame, that it had been someone or something else, some terrible urge that had taken control of them completely, one they were powerless to stop.

Is that how it was?

Was she now in that category?

God, there’d never been anything like this, no indication that she was crazy. She had bad thoughts like anyone else, but she’d never hurt a fly before in her life. Right then, despite the fear and sadness, she did not feel essentially different than she had two weeks before or two years before. And that was the scary thing… would it happen again? Just out of the blue would she attack someone? And have no control over it when it happened?

What a mess, what a terrible mess.

Maybe she had a chemical imbalance like schizophrenia or one of those things they’d learned about in Personal Psych last year. Multiple personalities. Good Macy and bad Macy. If that was true, then there would be medications and therapy. Regardless, her life would never be the same again. At school, she would be tagged as a psycho by some and be a hero to all the others who’d always wanted to put Chelsea Paris in her place but had never dared. Yeah, that was some kind of fame. The sort of fame she could live without.

Mom would not be happy with any of it.

Macy’s dad had died when she was five from a heart attack and, although she could not remember exactly what her mom was like before that, she had a pretty good idea that her mom was not a drunk. That she was capable of holding onto a job for more than two or three months at a crack. And that she had not been sleeping with anyone she happened to run into at the bar.

At least, she hoped so.

But the truth was that sometimes it was really hard to say who was doing the parenting. There was only the two of them now and mom was usually pretty hung over which dumped just about everything in Macy’s lap. She generally did the cooking and washing and house cleaning. She was the one that balanced the checkbook when there was actually any money in it. If it needed doing, it fell on Macy. She knew what the gossip in the neighborhood was, the common assumption that mom was a drunken whore and that Macy, with no true parental supervision, would soon enough follow in her tracks. The apple didn’t fall far from the tree, as they said.

But they were all wrong.

Macy did not smoke or drink or do drugs and at sixteen, she was still a virgin unlike Chelsea Paris, Shannon Kittery, and the rest of the pop squad. Maybe as far as the virginity thing went, there had been precious few opportunities because she was not a natural vixen with all the necessary equipment in place by the eighth grade. Still, even had she been like Chelsea or Shannon she did not think she would have hit the mattress as fast as they had. It was the same with drinking and drugs, all the other assorted temptations that commonly led teenagers astray.

Macy did not indulge because she chose not to.

Maybe she had self-control and maybe she had self-respect and maybe she was more emotionally mature than her peers. Regardless, she set a high standard for herself and sometimes she wondered if it was because of her mother and her father. Her mother because Macy was honestly embarrassed at what mom was and had no desire to be like her. And dad because he had died young and Macy had never gotten a chance to really know him, but she felt that she owed it to his memory to conduct herself in a way that would have made him proud.

Macy, of course, never admitted this to anyone, let alone mom.

Because mom didn’t like to talk about dad. Whenever his name was mentioned she dropped into one of her funks and the only person who could get her out of it was Jim Beam. Macy sometimes thought that mom wanted her to run wild, would have been much happier if her only daughter fell from grace, stopped being such a “goody-two-shoes” as she often called her.

And how was that for parenting?

Mom would get a kick out of this, though. Macy attacking another girl and getting suspended—dear God, suspended—pending an investigation. Macy had a funny feeling she would laugh when she heard, say something stupid like, well, well, you’re just like the rest of us after all, aren’t you?

And that was the thing, wasn’t it?

Macy did not want to be like the rest.

She worked hard, studied hard, set high standards for herself to follow and now that had all come crashing down. She’d assaulted Chelsea Paris. Of all the impossible, unexplainable things.

She’d never live this down.

Half way down 7^th, Macy suddenly looked up.

Looked up and couldn’t believe what she was seeing…