Stares burn into me, the guys still watching, when my arm twitches beneath my baggy hoodie. They notice. Of course, they notice.
And, of course, I have to straighten the damn napkin.
I do it quickly. It’s still not perfect, and it’s still goading me as I try and fail to ignore multiple things around me.
“Killers shouldn’t be allowed back in the town where they committed murder,” one says with the same arrogance that covers his entire demeanor. He speaks without fear, as I exhibit nothing more than odd behavior, which he also comments on. “I wonder how the neat freak ever coped with the blood on his hands.”
“He was always fucking weird,” another confirms. “No one wants that kinda scum here.”
Settling my disagreement with the napkin, I side-eye them, my eyebrow raising in a challenge that these guys don’t back away from.
“Yeah, you, we remember what the fuck you did,” another voices, full of confidence. “And none of us are afraid of you.”
That confidence disintegrates when my attention flicks back to the knife.
Something is still off with the napkin, but I can’t keep staring at it despite the voices in my head threatening cruel deathsfor people I hardly care about if I don’t straighten it again. I shouldn’t acknowledge such thoughts, but unlike what these people think, just as Mom always said, I have a hero complex and a deep-rooted desire to prove I’m a good person and worthy of someone’s love.
I don’t want to be thought of as a monster, and I’m failing terribly.
I allow my eyes to wander to the teen girls on the other side of me. They’re also talking about me between sips from pastel pink smoothies. At least, they have the decency to do it quietly.
“Everyone in this town knows how he took a knife from the kitchen and dragged it across his mother’s throat.”
My baggy hoodie stops anyone from seeing the goosebumps rising on my arms at that remark.
I know these guys are trying to bait me. It’s pack mentality. From elementary school, Lincoln—their ruthless leader—always had to be the top dog.
I won’t give them the advantage of knowing the shit they smear into my ears hurts like fuck. That it’s awful having to walk into my broken home and not find my parents there. Not hearing my mother sing as she paints old dressers, reviving them into something new and beautiful, or Dad and his traditional Irish stews warming the house, and their aroma fighting the paint fumes for control of the house. That I miss the childhood I never got to have.
“Yeah, and I heard he licked off the blood before plunging it into his father. Fucking sicko!”
With wide eyes, all three teenage girls stare at me. I want to tell them that they have nothing to worry about and that the stuff said is bullshit, but talking isn’t something I do.
A narrow smile that may come off creepier than intended is all I offer.
The girls stare around me when Lincoln opens his big mouth again.
“You know the rumor is?—”
He gets cut off from voicing another pile of bullshit when Clara, the waitress who is somewhere in her sixties, drops a plate in front of him.
“Everyone in this town and the surrounding ones know what the rumor is, and it’s just a rumor—gossip created by people like you who like to spread it. I don’t want any trouble here, boys. You let him be.”
“You don’t want trouble, but you accommodate the freak? No one else in town does.”
“He is not a freak, Lincoln.”
“He’s a murderer.”
“And a survivor. I remember what happened in the years before.”
According to Clara, I killed because I survived a maniac clown in childhood. A man in face paint and striped trousers, who caused all my scars, the ones on my skin and the ones inside my mind.
She isn’t wrong to think he broke me.
He did.
And just as I’m about to turn down the dark road, which is memory lane, she talks again.
