The Solution

I'm always a novelty at parties. Whenever I get invited somewhere, I know it's just so that whoever invited me can tote me around all night and be proud to say, "Remember the kid from that murder trial a few years back? This is him." They revel in the look of disbelief and amazement. Then the questions come. It will start out with a few people at first and then most of the room is crowded around me. The answers come as methodically as possible. There's no passion or real emotion behind them. I've been asked dozens of times before by people surprisingly less intimidating than these gore hounds and parasites.

The questions are always the same. "What did it feel like when you saw the whole thing unfolding?" (Like it was just a movie.) "Was there a lot of blood?" (More than you'll probably ever see in your life.) "How long were you locked in the closet before the police came?" (Approximately four hours, twenty three minutes, and seventeen seconds too long.) "Is it true that he raped her before AND after?" (Yes.) "Why didn't he hurt you?" (I don't know. I really don't.) "Does it still bother you?" (You get a little desensitized the forty millionth time you have to tell the story.) "What was it like when you had to testify?" (No different than this.) "Why didn't he kill himself?" (He said he was sorry over and over again.) "What was he like when you were a kid?" (Surprisingly decent.) "Did he ever touch you?" (The man never even hugged me, let alone molested me.)

They may not always be worded the same but at the root they are. The answers may not be worded the same but they always mean the same thing. At the beginning of it all, I used to ham it up. I was small-town famous because my father had raped my mother, stabbed her seventy-three times, slit her throat, and raped her again while I had been locked in the closet watching. The first few times I heard their questions it was hard. Then I learned to go with it. The more detail I gave, the more they loved it. The more people I had eating out of the palm of my hand. As time went on, their questions started to bore me and the more acerbic I got. I just became an asshole while I answered their questions. I found that wore pretty thin and I didn't get invited around as much. There was even a rumor circulating that I was going to snap the way my dad did. I think people bought into it for a while and some still do.

The nights I got invited out became fewer and fewer considering that most everyone had heard the story twice and then some, embellishing when they would relay it to their own friends. After the novelty wore off for them, I sank into the obscurity that I so longed for, only vaguely aware when I would go to work or out to eat or buy groceries that people were whispering about that wayward Anderson boy who had all that trouble. The less polite ones might say 'that weird kid whose dad fucked his ma after he kilt her'.

I wasn't expecting it when it happened. Skeeter Flintz walked up to me in his ever-twitchy way at the grocery store in the produce department, wiping at his hook nose and looking around before leaning in to talk to me.

"Tammy Peters is having a party on Saturday. Do you wanna come? It's gonna be fuckin' wicked, man."

"I don't know. Parties are all the same. Someone gets wasted, pukes on the host's carpet, and a fistfight breaks out while some cheerleader is getting date-raped by Johnny Cumsalot on the host's bed."

My not really false explanation of the party situation made Skeeter laugh. His laughs were always what several people had called 'pretty trippy, man'. He laughed like a hyena on crack, his voice ascending at least two octaves. "Don't be that way, man! Come on. It's going to be tight. Tammy made Brock go all the way to Davidson county just to stockpile. Fuckin' dry counties..."

"Saturday?" I considered quietly. "I'll be there around ten. I have to close at work."

"Lucky for you the town rolls up at five-thirty, huh?" He asked, laughing his disturbed little laugh afterward before clapping me on the shoulder and shuffling in the other direction. I flinched a little at the touch mostly because I didn't know where his hand had been.

After that I bided my time. I did my usual routine. Woke up, went to work, came home, read Bukowski until bed. Saturday night I went the extra mile and brainstormed possible responses to questions that I might get asked, placing them all on cuecards. I made up about thirty of them, all hand written meticulously neatly. I put them into my jacket pocket that night before I walked out the door, taking the time to grab the switchblade I never left with. The few times I'd pulled it out in front of someone to cut something, they'd asked if it was the same one my dad had killed my mom with. I'd included that in on the cards too, just in case.

When I got to the party, it was 9PM. I thought that the festivities would be starting a little later for some reason, but the house was already jam packed full of society's malcontents. I should have been at home there. The front door of the two-story yellow average suburban house had been jammed open with a door and I could hear the sweet strains of Rock You Like a Hurricane blasting out. As I stepped in, I was greeted almost immediately by Skeeter who led me through a crowd over to the keg. Cups were consumed in short order. I don't remember how many. Three or four, maybe. At the rear of the house there was some commotion. It was nothing I was paying attention to by then. I just patiently waited for Skeeter to introduce me around.

Finally the introductions came and I handed the cards out. I was happy that I'd made enough of them. Their faces were priceless to me. The kids all wore a similar look of disbelief at first, slowly turning into a mixture of confusion and anger as their eyes skimmed the card.

"The fuck is this?" One of them asked with a Southern twang.

"Skeeter, you said this guy was cool!"  A nasally female voice said.

"I bet I have a question you didn't put on he--" I swung my eyes to the girl who'd said this briefly before there was a loud crash toward the back of the house, and then the sound of footsteps. Suddenly there was a scream from one of the rooms toward the back as two men rushed past me. The third man had a knife and gave me what he would later call in court 'an accidental stabbing'. The first was mostly accidental, I think; I was in his way and his knife was out in a strange position. But once he realized what he'd done, he stabbed me in the lower back a few more times just for good measure. I think he was hoping I'd die so that I wouldn't be able to testify.

The sounds were suddenly becoming muffled and I remember sliding to my knees on the ground as my t-shirt and jacket became wet and warm. The circle of kids that were standing around me now watched with morbid curiosity. Their faces began to blur together more than normal. I could hear voices but they sounded a million miles away. No one was moving to do anything. It was finally Skeeter who took his old TracPhone out and began to dial 9-1-1. The feel of Tammy Peters' lime green shag carpet underneath my fingers might have been the only thing that kept me hanging on for so long. Finally my consciousness slipped away.

When I woke up in the hospital, Skeeter was there, and a few of the girls from the party. I hurt myself laughing in a doped delirium, thinking of what Skeeter would say about the girls: "Dude, this makes you a badass! Of course they wanna fuck you!" The old nurse in the room came over and told me in a stern voice that I needed to lay down and be quiet. I slipped back into my sleepy stupor for another night.

The next morning, Skeeter was still there. Either he'd been a better friend than I'd ever thought or he wanted a first hand account of what it felt like to be stabbed. It was a question I couldn't have previously answered before. Now I could. When he noticed I was awake, he put aside the dog-eared copy of On The Road by Jack Kerouac and leaned over toward the bed.

"Hey, champ. You lost a lot of blood but nothin' much else. They say you're pretty lucky though. A little more blood and you might not have been so fortunate." Skeeter looked worried and suddenly I felt bed for considering that he ever had such ulterior motives. "Is there something you want that I can get for you? I'll go to the grocery store and pick it up. You're mostly on a liquid diet, but maybe you want a book or something."

There was no hesitation in my answer. "Index cards and pens."

"Oh, okay. Sure, no problem. But when I get back, I wanna hear all about it!"