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“Use a better word than stupid, Bug. You’re not what?”

Easy. Deep breaths. Watch the mouth, not the eyes.

“I’m not shortsighted,” I say. “I know better than to injure somebody inside a federal prison, in front of witnesses, with my kind of record.”

“Would’ve taught her a lesson, though.”

I don’t respond to that.

“I saw the way you looked at her,” he says. “You wanted to hurt her.”

“No.”

“Don’t lie to me.”

The problem is, he’s right. Mom has been afraid of me for as long as I can remember. When we argue, my father’s words come out of my mouth. When she’s drunk, she says she’s going to lock me up for good. She says she’s going to sign me over to the state so she never has to look at me again. And yes, sometimes I want to hurt her. Sometimes I feel like a cornered animal and the only way to escape is to maul whatever has me backed against the wall.

A lot of the time, most of the time, that thing is her.

Dad says, “For what it’s worth, you were so good at hurting people.”

I close my eyes. I can’t look at him. I can’t do this.

“You were a natural. God, if you’d just kept our little secret, I could have taught you everything. I could have helped you get away with anything.”

He speaks slow and exaggerated, so I catch every word.

“But you stuck me in here,” he says. “So when you finally make a mistake, I won’t be there to save you.”

I hang up the phone.

According to the autopsy report, the official cause of death of Dad’s final victim was strangulation. It was an easy call. Her throat was crushed in on itself, scraped raw where the rope took off the top layers of skin. She’d fought so hard she’d shattered her fingers, clawed until her nails splintered and came off in pieces. The night it happened, I was ten years old and there was blood all over my hands and the cops wouldn’t let me wash them.

A mistake, Dad’s defense called it. Even with the back of her leg cut to the bone.

After investigators found the hard drive, the entire East Coast breathed a sigh of relief. The DC Ripper had been found—Dad’s reign of terror was over. They matched cold cases to photographs by the pattern of injuries. Severed tendons, pulled-out teeth, empty eye sockets. A jury member would eventually say it reminded her of The Human Centipede; you know, what the mad doctor did to those people before sewing them together.

Anyway. A day and a half after our trip to USP East Early, it’s Saturday night, and I’m almost drunk at a house party.

I nagged Alyssa until she brought me. She didn’t want to, but she gave in eventually. She said she burned up a lot of goodwill to get me through the door. “This might be good for you, though,” she admitted while she fixed her makeup on the Metro ride over. “Like, talking to people?” But now everyone else is in the living room, laughing and slamming mixed drinks made out of whatever Jenna St. Clair found in her parents’ stash, and I’m in the bathroom tearing up my hands again.

My elbows are braced on the marble sink. I’ve got a toothpick jammed under my thumbnail and I’m digging at a speck lodged out of reach. I usually paint my nails—one of the only good suggestions I’ve ever gotten from a therapist, if I can’t see the dirt it can’t bother me—but the polish chipped and I didn’t fix it. I’m going to think this is blood every time I look at my hands and I can’t do that right now.

Alyssa says from her spot perched on the edge of the clawed bathtub, “You’re going to have a meltdown.”

I push the toothpick deeper. Pretty sure this is a torture technique. Bamboo shoots under the fingernails or something.

“I’m not,” I say, as if that will make it true.

Alyssa makes an unconvinced sound and pointedly looks away.

I hate when she’s right. I thought this would be a good distraction. Wrecking myself with secondhand smoke and too much social interaction—anything to stop thinking about the broken phone, the producer’s eyes boring into the side of my head, Dad leaning in close to the bulletproof glass.

You were so good at hurting people.

I was. I am.

But there’s a speck under my fingernail, and it’s too warm in here, and Jenna St. Clair’s boyfriend said that if I make one wrong move he’ll call the cops, and I keep smelling the inside of the dead girl’s mouth under the weed stink.