My kidnapper is Lilah, my oldest friend in the entire world. I’ve only known my parents and a handful of relatives longer. She held a gun to my head, but I probably would have gotten in the car solely because she asked. I love her. How simple, how thin, it’s not enough, but it’s all I have—it’s the truth. And if I’m striving for truth then I should also add that I hate her a lot of the time, too. That’s the price of really knowing a person, you have to hate them, if only a little bit. There is the love, you can never forget the love, but there is also the hate, boiling under the surface, eating away at the fleshy parts. 

She found me at the gas station. I don’t work there, but I spend a lot of time lingering around the edges of the lot. Every summer, they develop a snake infestation. When I was fourteen, I stopped being afraid of snakes; their long, glittering bodies cresting over the heat waves that simmer in the air were suddenly alluring. That was the summer I found a tangle of snakes behind the gas station, closer to the garbage bins and grass than the actual store. In their knot, the snakes were indistinguishable from one another, their edges blurring and melding into one monstrous snake as they twisted together and disappeared into the next. Lilah stood at my back as I crouched down on the balls of my feet and poked at the snakes with the army knife my brother had given me strapped to a long stick. All the snakes opened their many mouths and hissed, but none of them lunged to bite me. Lilah pulled me away before I could stab at them again. 

Today, just before the kidnapping, I was eating a half-melted KitKat, watching one long snake soak up the blistering heat of the day on the concrete. It was a dull brown, blending in with the dirt and the sun-bleached pavement. It would have been easy to reach out and…but then Lilah’s car pulled up, and the snake wriggled away. Her flip-flops smacked against the ground, and even with my sunglasses on it was too bright out for me to properly get a look at her. All I could see was the shape of her, and that she had chopped her long blonde hair to just above her chin. Without the weight, her hair seemed to me like feathers, fluffy and wild, floating around her ears. She dropped her hand to my head as she walked by me into the store, a casual affection, one she’d bestowed upon me countless times before. Intimacy had been a welcome reprieve from the increasingly tense silences unspooling between us in the past few weeks. I was leaving for college come the end of August. Lilah wasn’t, and we’d have to learn how to be two separate people. I leaned into her hand, happy to ride on autopilot, letting her nails scrape across my scalp as she breezed by. 

After that, there was yelling, but there’s often yelling when Lilah’s involved, so I didn’t bother sitting up and looking in through the window. I was slunk down low on the bench, trying to avoid the ire of the cashier. I had been skulking around for two hours and had only spent a dollar-fifty to buy the KitKat. Being pleasant will only get you so far if you aren’t willing to blow the guy. I liked the older female cashier better. I killed a snake for her with my army knife two summers ago, and ever since, she’s felt my presence was equivalent to that of an on-call snake charmer. 

Just before things got quite so ugly, when the chocolate had mostly melted away from the last wafer and I was busy scraping red paint away from the foil of the wrapper, I heard the cashier call Lilah a crazy bitch! Probably not the best idea. Lilah doesn’t respond all that well to the term ‘bitch.’ Guys find that hard to understand nowadays. Bitch gets tossed around a little too casually, I think, and Lilah agrees, and I’m sure, right after Lilah stuck the gun in his face, the cashier thought so, too. 

She got the last word one way or another with three hollow sounding pops. I always figured gunshots were meant to be louder, more explosive. I guess not. When I pushed myself up, balanced on my knees, and  looked in, I didn’t see the cashier. Instead, I saw chunks of drywall missing and red splatter behind the counter. The cash register was open, I noted, but then the door was chiming and I could hear the smack of Lilah’s flip-flops again. 

We looked at each for a long moment. Her purse was bulging. There was that red again—blood, I realized, in a distant, dreamy sort of way—sprayed across her skin, and in her right hand, the gun. It was limp at her side, but then she blinked—her spirit seemed to shudder back into her body in the time it took her eyes to close and then open—and the gun was in my face. “Get in the car,” she said, her voice flat. 

I wanted to roll my eyes. Lilah always had to be in charge, didn’t she? Calling the shots, ordering everyone else around. She was the queen in all our games as children, and I was relegated to princess. I still got a crown, but it was never as big or shiny as hers. Now here she was, wielding a gun like she had any clue. But then, thinking of the cashier, I supposed she did. 

“Sarah, I swear to fucking god…” she said. She sounded so weary. 

I looked past the gun to her face. Her eyebrows were pinched together in the way they usually were before she got a headache and had to go lie down in a dark room for hours. I felt, all at once, bad for her. 

“Okay,” I told her. 

I got in the passenger seat and off we went. Lilah dumped her purse in my lap. As she did, I noticed her hand had a nasty burn running from the knuckle of her pinky finger down to her wrist. I wanted to touch it, but the purse was deposited onto my thighs and her hand withdrew. The purse was pleather, baby pink with bobbles dangling off the chains connecting the shoulder strap to the body of the bag. I bought her most of those little teddy bears and metallic landmarks. 

Now, we’ve been sitting in silence this past hour, soaking in the strangeness. The car is racing down an endless road, hurtling towards the horizon. Above us, the sun hangs heavy and unforgiving. Everything in the car is solid, perfectly visible and tangible. The air conditioner is going full-force and my eyes feel dry, even behind the sunglasses. I want to roll down the window and breathe in the humid air, but there’s a creeping sense in the back of my mind that if I let the outside in, the inside will lose its firm reality. Looking out the window, the greens of the trees are lush and vivid; a strange, overpowering backdrop to the soft pinks of the milkweed and the fuzzy yellow of the dying chrysanthemum. The flowers and blooming weeds look like thin watercolors, bleeding off the page. 

Lilah feels compelled to shatter the silence.

“I got you a KitKat. It’s in my purse.” 

“Oh,” I say. “Thanks.” 

Oddly moved to have been remembered in the midst of her gun-toting mania, I open the purse. On top of what looks to be all the money from the cash register, are two KitKats. I rip open the foil, break off the first bar, and pass it to her. 

Lilah pops it in her mouth, and drums her fingers on the steering wheel. Her nails are gone, bitten down to the quick. Pink strips of exposed skin and ripped up cuticles look raw and aching against the otherwise unblemished fingers. 

She chews the KitKat, then asks, “Do you ever worry you missed the off-ramp and are suddenly going full-speed towards crazy?” 

I blink. Now she’s worried about this? “No, not really. I think I ran crazy over a while back. Total hit-and-run style.”

She laughs a little, her mouth twitching like she doesn’t really want to. I think about what people who have been kidnapped and are recounting their stories to the media say. How they survived because they did their best to soothe and placate their kidnapper. How hostages who kept their eyes down and turned over their wallets before ever being asked during bank robberies were the ones who got to walk away. I shouldn’t provoke her, shouldn’t agitate an already frayed temper. Assure the shooter who forced you into her car that no, she’s not crazy—there’s hope yet! Don’t throw gasoline on the fire and say, so we’re both looney tunes, who’s shocked? 

“Are you scared?” she asks now. 

“No. Of what?” What is there to be scared of? I don’t ask. It’s only you. 

“I killed that guy. I could have killed ten other people before him. You don’t know. I forced you into my car at gunpoint.” The gun in question is in her lap. Shiny metal reflecting back a warped image of her throat and chin. 

“You bought me a KitKat,” I remind her. 

Her laugh is a barked, choked-out sound. “I didn’t actually pay.” 

“You still thought of me.” 

“Yeah,” she says, under her breath, to herself more than to me. “Yeah, I guess I did.” 

She takes a deep breath, and I watch her chest expand. She’s wearing one of those hand-woven tops with skinny straps and a plunging neckline, the picture of a 1960s flower child if you ignore the blood and brain matter dotted across her collarbone and shoulder and chin. 

“You’re the only thing I’ve given any thought to in this whole thing, you know?” Lilah says. She turns her face to look at me, her cheek pressing against the leather of the headrest. The ends of her newly-shorn hair stick to her mouth, adhered by gloss to the corners and just under the swell of her lower lip. Her eyes are wide and round and very blue in this light. 

“I saw you on that bench and thought, whatever happens next, it’s okay. Sarah’s here. Because whenever you’re around, I just feel better.” Lilah closes her eyes, and says, more to herself than to me, “But what the fuck am I gonna do now?”  

She keeps her eyes closed and the car starts to swerve. I reach over and give the steering wheel a little push. The car jerks back into the lane and Lilah startles, sitting up and focusing on the road, muttering an apology. 

“It’s fine,” I say. “I get what you mean, though.”

She glances over at me, quick, like she’s afraid to focus on me for too long again. “Yeah?” 

“Yeah. I feel like I’m just…sleepwalking most of the time until you show up. Then I’m awake and can just be.” 

“Exactly,” she says. “That’s exactly it. Sometimes, I swear to god, I’m running on goddamn autopilot and it’s just…When I’m not trying, I’m a nightmare. Like an actual monster, running around terrorizing everyone. I don’t mean to be! I really don’t.” Her voice is high and reedy. She presses her lips together. “But if that’s who I am, why should I have to change?” She slams her hand down on the steering wheel. “It’s so much easier to just…Like with that guy!” she cries. 

She doesn’t mean the gas station attendant. I know which guy Lilah means because I know Lilah. That guy, his name wasn’t important that night and it isn’t important now, had followed the two of us around all of junior prom. He wasn’t really following us, he was following Lilah. I got asked to slow dance by Kit Perry, and it was the first and last time I separated from Lilah that night. 

The dance was fine. Kit Perry had sweaty hands and he wheezed every time we turned too quickly. He let me stick my nails into the meat of his hand when he stepped on my foot. I said, “Ouch!” with an overexaggerated cry every time he did it. Out of sheer guilt, he tolerated each stab of my nails. When I finally drew blood, he excused himself. After I was done inspecting the red under my fingernails, I realized I couldn’t spot Lilah. Or the guy. 

They were outside, behind the gym. He was on his knees, clutching his lower face, and even from the doorway, I could see the blood spilling fast between his fingers. Lilah was just standing there, her face cold, but also amused. I could tell from the faint quirk of the corner of her mouth, the raised eyebrows. Her mouth looked bright, lurid. When she saw me, she raised her hand and waved. The guy went scrambling back, like she’d called me outside to help her finish him off. 

“You’re fucking deranged!” he shrieked, and in doing so, dropped his hands from his face. It looked like an animal had bitten open his bottom lip, catching his chin, too. 

Lilah was unrepentant. She tapped a finger to her chin, all faux confusion. “Remind me again, how old are you?” she asked the guy, and when she did, I could see the blood on her teeth. 

He was twenty-seven, the cousin of a boy in our grade who had helped smuggle in wine coolers, and had no business trying to grope a sixteen-year-old behind the gym during her school dance. No police report was filed, and he faded into memory. 

“I knew,” Lilah says now. Her voice cuts clear across the blurry images of that night. “I knew he was too old to be there and that if I did something to him, he wouldn’t be able to say anything about it. He thought he had scored some dumb teenybopper, someone he could push around.”

She smirks, tickled pink, even now, at the thought of anyone having the upper hand with her. “It was easy. I don’t know.” 

“Sure,” I agree. “He was nobody. Someone to hurt.” 

She nods, her jaw tightening. Her rage quickens rather than dispersing. Again, I wonder if I should be afraid of her. “It’s fucking stupid to go into a dark alley with someone you don’t know!” she snaps. “He should have known better. We know better. All I’ve been fucking hearing since I was a kid,” she sneers. “Don’t wander off with strangers!” she croons, her voice a pitched falsetto. “But off he goes, courting danger like that.” She points her finger and shakes her hand like a disapproving teacher. 

“What happened to your hand?” I ask, my eyes catching on the burn, again. 

She clicks her tongue against her teeth, a wet noise. “Burned it.” 

“Well, obviously.” 

“Does it matter?” 

“To me, yeah,” I say. 

She white-knuckles the steering wheel and I wonder, almost absently, if she’s going to drive us off the road. She pulls over instead. 

Lilah drops her head to the space between her hands on the steering wheel and heaves another breath. I can see her spine and ribs, tight under her skin. Trapped, I think. Her bones are trapped under there. I picture reaching out and wrapping my fist around one rib and pulling until it snaps away from her body like a wishbone. I can hear the crack echo in my mind, the tear of skin as I pull the rib free, the drip of blood and meat. I lift my hand, compelled to touch. Her entire body snaps straight, like a live wire pulled taut. 

She looks at me and reaches out to pet my hair with her burnt hand. I lean in and close my eyes, content to enjoy the closeness. The spill of bloody images recedes from my mind like the tide pulling back as the moon shifts. “You’re like one of those exotic cats,” Lilah says. 

“Hm?” 

“You know, those Siamese cats. You pet ‘em, and they love it so much, but don’t wanna. It’s a whole thing when they close their eyes and let you.” 

“I guess,” I say, trying to remember which ones are the Siamese cats. 

“You never let anyone…” she says, almost too quiet to hear. Her hand falls to rest so that her fingers are curled over my shoulder and her palm is grazing above my heart. I open my eyes and give her my attention. “You want to commit an act of real ultraviolence?” Lilah leans in towards me, her face close enough to mine that I can smell the bubblegum on her breath. “No consequences. I promise.” 

I cup my hand over hers, and we’re both inches away from my heart now. She could probably reach in between my ribs. I’d let her. We stare, wild-eyed and sweat-slicked, listening to the uneven sound of each other’s breathing, the rush of blood a heavy crash in my ears. 

She withdraws her hand to run it through her hair. The blonde ruffles and sticks out at angles. The loss of her hand feels damning. A mistake, a fixed point I wonder if I’ll find myself looking back on. My skin feels hot, even with the relentless push of air conditioning. She settles and says, “Still got that army knife?” 

I press myself off the seat and wriggle my hand into my back pocket. I pull out the army knife and flick it open. “Duh.” 

“Duh,” she echoes. She moves to flick her hair back, but it’s short now and there’s nothing to toss when her hand brushes her shoulder. Either way, she’s sitting up straight and facing me. She taps her leg. “Stab me.” 

It’s like with the snakes at the gas station. If you stand there, panicking, or even just thinking, you’ll never do it. You get your fingers around the hilt of the knife and you use it for what knives are for—stabbing. With a firm grip on the handle, I swing the knife up for momentum and then down into the meat of Lilah’s thigh. She makes a punched-out noise, and I watch her face contort as she desperately tries to smooth her features back out. Always an ice queen, even when stabbed in the fucking leg. 

“Damn, Sarah. No hesitation?” she asks, wincing through her words. 

“Gift horses,” I say. I probably should have hesitated, if only to put on the veneer of being a better friend. I love Lilah, and don’t actually want to do her any great harm, at least I don’t think I do. It’s not like I’m walking around fantasizing about hurting my best friend, but sometimes, when she pisses me off in that specific Lilah-I’m-the-Queen-of-Sheba way, a film of fury blurs my vision and I can see myself lunging. 

“Ha. Alright, pull it out,” she commands, imperious even with her bleeding lance. If you don’t get the snakes in the head, they wiggle and twitch, desperate to shake off the pain. I didn’t hit bone, just soft fat on the outside of Lilah’s thigh. No major arteries, nothing special there. But still, the blade comes out dripping rubies. Lilah holds her hand out, silently asking for the knife. I pass it to her, and we both look at the knife, in her hand, bleeding her blood. 

She doesn’t even look at her leg, entirely uninterested now that the knife is out. Aftermath has never been her favorite. The crush and push of violence, the shrieking cry, that catches Lilah’s attention, holds it. A dull throb from her own injury? Far less exciting than if it was me bleeding in her passenger seat. I pull drive-through napkins from her glove compartment and press fistful after fistful to her leg until the blood stops seeping through. It’s a weak ooze now, trickling slowly down the side of her thigh, like raindrops on a window. Without wiping off the knife, she sticks it in her purse. She hands me the gun to hold.

I don’t realize how hard I’m breathing until she raises an eyebrow at me as she buckles herself back in. I knock my sunglasses back up my nose with my shoulder, press my lips together, and try to imagine violent waves slowing to a tepid roll. “Thanks,” I say. 

“Sure, but that’s only step one. A little knife play?” she asks, incredulous. “That’s not ultraviolence.” 

“No?” I ask. “Then what is?” 

She hits the gas, and I lurch back in my seat, the gun rattling in my lap and Lilah wincing at the pressure on her cut. 

The car returns to its hurtling pace. Despite the obscene number on the speedometer being the same as before, her driving now feels more purposeful, more confident. We aren’t just driving. There’s a destination in mind. 

As Lilah presses harder and harder on the gas, the cut bleeds some more. My mouth feels dry and my head full of cotton. I doubt she’ll let me stab her again. She likes to inflict. 

This was a gift, and not one I’m likely to get again. But nothing good comes to those who wait, begging with their hands out. All you get in this life is what you take. I applied to college while Lilah lazed through the autumn months like a snake in the sun. I did, she didn’t. Simple binary. Princess rising through the ranks, slinking closer and closer to the crown that’s been knocked loose on the queen’s head. I can take this, too. 

I reach over and press my pointer and middle finger into the edge of her cut. Lilah straightens in her seat, but says nothing. My nails catch the clean split of the wound. A little bit of worrying at the skin, and it lifts, then peels back. Her knee jumps. Blood stains my fingers, sticks under my nails and, as I push further, covers my cuticles, inching up towards the first knuckle. My heart beat picks back up again, an erratic drum in both my ears. This isn’t like with Kit Perry, when I only got a faint brush of blood. The blood had been tacky, not properly wet, not a real wound. 

Slowly, I start to push more, looking to see if I can deepen it. Lilah rears back and slaps me hard across the face. My vision whites out for a moment. My sunglasses go flying off my face and the car jerks as she throws her entire body weight into hitting me. I slam backwards against the window, half from her momentum, half from me hurling myself away from the hurt. Unconsciously, I raise my hand to press at the stinging pain on my cheek. As my fingers slip down my face, I understand I’ve painted her blood across my cheek. 

My blood-wet hand falls to my chest, where it curls into a fist over my heart. I count each breath. One, two, three. The air conditioner burns my exposed eyes, but I refuse to blink. Lilah stares steadfastly ahead.

We go for another fifteen minutes, silent, then pull over at what looks like the top of a hill. There’s a single picnic bench with peeling green paint revealing rough black metal. Trees dot the tall grass, broken only by a footpath leading into dense forest. 

Lilah kills the engine, grabs her purse and gun from my lap, and leaps out of the car. She staggers when her leg hits the ground. She doesn’t cry out, and I almost wish she would. The snakes, before I got smart about where to hit, used to cry out, hissing with their death rattles. I didn’t kill her, I hardly even wounded her. I wait, feeling suspended in time. She’s talking, even after she slams her own door shut, and it creates the sensation of trying to listen while underwater. Without the air conditioner, I can feel the sweat begin to gather at the back of my neck, along my spine. I flip down the vanity mirror, quick. Smeared across my right cheekbone is a red welt. It’s dark, getting darker. It’ll bruise, I can tell. The bone hurts. 

The door is thrown open and Lilah offers a hand to me. The sun is relentless behind her, and she’s haloed in golden light. Her hair glows, thin fly-away strands fluttering around her head. I take her hand. 

She kicks my door closed and my eyes catch on the blood sloshing down towards her knee. Lilah leads me to the footpath, her purse swinging where it rests on her elbow. She tucks her cheek against mine, keeping my hand firm in her own. She’s leaning on me, I realize. Unsteady, dropping her weight onto me, depending on me. “You won’t forget about me next year when you’re off at college. Not after this,” she says. It sounds like an order.

I laugh. “Is that what you think? That I’ll forget about you?” Considering she just shot a man in the chest, thrice, her murder trial alone will make it difficult to not think about her. Really, though, it’s the wound. I won’t forget that, never ever. Not after she let me cut her, not after she let me touch. Not after the smack, when she doled out her own brand of cruelty. 

She sniffs. “It’s what people do when they move away. A shedding of old skin, so you can be all shiny and new.”

“I guess, but when have I ever cared about that?” I ask, scratching at my eyebrow. 

Lilah sighs. “Fine, then you’ll shed the skin to adapt. Sink or swim, baby. You’re a survivor.” 

I can feel my face crumple at that. “You’re not dead weight,” I tell her, trying to sound as serious as humanly possible. Earnestness always makes me feel like I’ve been turned inside out. All the gooey bits put on display with a big light from the rafters shining down, white hot. But there’s nowhere to squirm away to. Lilah plastered us together. 

She just hums. We walk along the path, clinging to each other as the trail gets steep, and then loudly bounding once on even ground again. We kick at rocks, pull at the tallest strands of grass, and shriek at bugs that graze us. I feel very young, new to life, like a toddler who has just learned to walk on her own. A whole new world is available to me now. Lilah looks pale, she’s sweating and breathing hard.

We land in a clearing. There’s a great oak with a tire swing dangling from a branch. Lilah steers us towards it, and finally pries herself away from me to push me into the swing. Our skin sticks, and it burns when she pulls away, like she took a layer of me with her. I sit on the swing, mindlessly rubbing at my arm, where the skin has gone a tender pink. The sharp sting hurts more than the throb of my cheek. 

Lilah staggers back a few feet and drops her purse to the ground. The remaining KitKat, crumpled fives and singles, and two lipsticks roll out into the dirt. Not the knife, though. She stands there, dappled by sunlight through the trees, and watches me. The brilliance of the sunlight blots out the dried blood smeared into her skin. I’d say it was a purifying light, the kind that hides rather than illuminates, but I can see her leg wound clear as day. 

“I wish I could freeze time,” she says to me after a moment. “Keep us here, like this, forever.” 

It’s then that I realize she’s still holding the gun. It’s not slack in her fingers, dangling loose, but clutched tight. I stand, slowly, from the tire swing. “Lilah…” I start. I ask myself again, am I afraid to die? Am I afraid of Lilah?

Her eyes track me, and she quirks a humorless smile. “Don’t trust me?” she asks. 

“What’s the great act of consequence-free ultraviolence?” It doesn’t really feel like a question. 

She holds her hands up, palms to the sky, or rather, palm and palm holding gun to the sky. “What do you want me to say here, Sarah?” 

“How’d you burn your hand?” Courting danger. But also begging. Give me this, give me one moment where I can see you just as well as you have always seen me. 

She laughs and looks at me, hard. I cross the distance between us and take the burnt hand, the one holding the gun. I give her wrist a little shake, and her other hand takes the gun so I can properly inspect the burn. It’s red and orange and yellow, unforgiving against her sallow coloring, seared deep into the skin. It’s a thin burn, but long. I pet the tips of my fingers over it. The skin is uneven, bumps and blisters rising up like mountains on a map. If I press down, maybe use a little bit of nail, I imagine I could pierce the skin, burst the pockmarks and leave her writhing in pain. Maybe if I cut her again, split open this burn, it’ll be the equivalent of pulling back the veil Lilah likes to drape around herself. Show me, show me, show me. 

Lilah closes her eyes and says, voice suddenly small and plaintive, “My leg hurts. You hurt me.” And it’s gone, the window of opportunity, the hope for honesty. 

“Yeah,” I say. “I did, didn’t I?” She opens her eyes and all I can see is blue, starkly contrasting  the red this afternoon has been soaked in. “You gonna hurt me?” 

Lilah’s face melts into something soft, reflective. Like the water on top of a lake. Shimmering if disturbed, but pleasant and glassy when left alone. “I could never hurt you, come on.” 

“You smacked the hell out of me back there,” I remind her. 

“You stabbed me,” she volleys back. 

“Right. Then, I guess it’s the leading me into the middle of nowhere with a gun that suggests you’ve got plans to change the whole no hurting policy.” 

“Sure,” she says, waving her burnt hand. “Sure. But you came skipping along.” I open my mouth to, I don’t even know, protest? But she cuts me off and says, “Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t even matter! I’m not gonna shoot you. Drama queen. Listen, no. Okay. The gas station’s employee of the month wasn’t the first item on the grocery list if you get me? You think I just showed up with a gun? No. And I have to tell you, I’m not all that peachy keen on prison, or a life on the run, or whatever. So, you kill me, tell everyone I kidnapped you, which I did,” she says, raising her voice when she sees me gearing up to speak. “And that I took you out here to kill you. You got me first, and now you’re like. A local hero!” she says in a rush. Then, in a faux news-reporter voice she says, “College-bound-girl stops homicidal psycho. More at eleven!” It lacks her usual buoyancy. She’s practically panting from exertion. The heat, the bleeding, the plan, it’s draining her. She ducks her head. “You liked it in the car,” she says, voice teasing, a last-ditch attempt. 

So what if I liked it? There’s a difference between a non-fatal stabbing and actually killing someone. There’s that itch again, the one in the back of my mind, every time I get too angry, that if it weren’t for laws and consequences, I’d probably let myself fly off the handle and commit unspeakable acts of violence all the time. The law does exist, and I am afraid of it. But how do you stop after you’ve already started? Lilah already slammed one door in my face today, so why shouldn’t I walk through the  door that’s being held wide open, and god, I wish I was better than I am. So instead I say, “You couldn’t have done this last summer? It would have made for a hell of a college entry essay.”
  
She laughs, and I think I might hate her, all the way through, down to the bone and into the marrow. Never forget me, that’s what she wants. Maybe this will be the first and last murder I ever commit. I think of my fingerprints on the gun, and Lilah’s on my knife. The door is closing, but I think I’ve already walked through. Lilah tosses the gun and it lands at my feet. I look past it to her purse, where my knife is. I can see the hilt. I can see the end.