The Killing Jar

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  For the women who raised me—Kathleen Knott, Amy Jespersen, Borgny Erickson, and Gertrude Knott

  All that lives must die,

  Passing through nature to eternity.

  —Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1

  PROLOGUE

  THE KILLING

  I try not to think about it, that time I killed a boy.

  But the problem with trying not to think about something is you’ll think about it even more.

  So that’s what I do. I think about it. I dream about it. I obsess.

  But I never, ever talk about him, the boy whose life I took. I didn’t want to kill him. At least … I don’t think I did. Or maybe that’s just what I tell myself so I can live with what I am. What I did. How I did it.

  I was ten years old, and so was he.

  His name was Jason Dunn, and on the outside he appeared as normal as his name. His family lived next door to mine on the outskirts of town. My bedroom window gave me a direct view of the path to the river. I watched Jason take that path every day after school. He always came back smiling to himself in a way that made me feel cold and queasy, like I’d eaten something bad. So I followed him, and I found out why he smiled like that.

  Jason liked to kill.

  Insignificant things mostly. Small murders that would go unnoticed. He chopped up worms into wriggling segments and fried them with a magnifying glass. He pulled the wings from moths, or misted trails of ants with hairspray and set them on fire. Miniature tortures that parents tend to write off as boys being boys. Cruelty as a phase, like puberty.

  Jason’s preferred method of torment was to put butterflies in his killing jar, the kind entomologists use to kill insects quickly without damaging their specimens. There was a swab of poison in the bottom, a fast-acting toxin. Although Jason had a corkboard where he pinned dead butterflies and moths, beetles and spiders—he brought his collection to school every time we had show-and-tell—he wasn’t in it for the scientific observation. He just liked to watch things die.

  But then he went too far.

  My twin sister, Erin, is allergic to everything with fur, so our mom wouldn’t let her have pets. Still, she secretly adopted a stray orange cat with a missing ear and a scar over one eye that liked to hang around our house, especially after she started leaving food out for it. She named it Clint Eastwood because its squinty eye reminded her of the classic Eastwood glare, and Erin was going through a spaghetti western phase. It turned out the cat was a female, though. She had a litter of kittens in the shed behind our house. Erin and I visited the mother and brought her clean towels and bowls of tuna fish. We watched her kittens jitter and worm about, figuring out how to use their weak limbs, mewling in tolerant protest as Clint licked them clean. Their mother purred like an engine while her brood fed.

  One day the kittens’ eyes were sealed tightly shut. The next they were open and black, and fuzz covered their bodies.

  But when we came back to see them the next day, the kittens were gone, and so was their mother. Erin was distraught. She begged me to search the woods for her cat and the kittens. She just wanted to know they were all right. Erin couldn’t be a part of the search because of her “condition,” which was what we called it for lack of a name that ran the gamut of my twin’s maladies. Defective heart. Weak bones. Anemia. Asthma. Severe allergies. Autoimmune disorders.

  It was better that Erin didn’t come with me to search for her pet anyway. Better she never had the image of what I found trapped in her head.

  I knew as soon as I found Clint Eastwood’s mangled body by the river, surrounded by her drowned litter, that this was Jason’s work. But if I needed further proof, I got it when I saw him at school the next day, his hands covered in raw, red scratches. Clint Eastwood put up a fight. Good for her.

  I told Erin I couldn’t find Clint Eastwood and the kittens, but in truth I buried them in the woods and marked their grave with a pile of river stones. While I dug the grave with my bare hands, I thought about how I was going to make Jason pay for what he’d done.

  I could have told my mom what Jason was up to, but I doubted she would believe me. Jason was an expert at hiding the monster inside him. He was unfailingly polite to adults. He never got into trouble at school. He was quiet but not too quiet. He played sports, but he wasn’t too aggressive, never pouted when his team lost. He was everyone’s idea of the perfect kid, and I had no evidence to prove otherwise.

  If someone was going to teach Jason a lesson, it had to be me. I wanted it to be me. Because even though Erin and I didn’t have the kind of uncanny twin connection that allowed me to read her mind, I felt it when she was in pain. She was a part of me and Jason had taken from her one of the few things that made her happy.

  So I was going to take something from Jason, because I could. Because I had recently come to understand that I wasn’t like other people.

  “You have a gift that very few people in this world possess,” my mom had told me in confidence. “But you must never use it. Promise me you’ll never use it, Kenna, because you’re too young to control it, and if you start I don’t know if you’ll be able to stop.”

  So I promised, but my promise was a lie. If someone tells you that you’re special, that you can do something extraordinary, you have to try it at least once.

  Three days after I buried Clint Eastwood, I trailed Jason into the woods, observing him, stalking him the way I imagined he stalked his doomed victims. He caught a monarch butterfly in his net and let out a whoop of triumph before inserting it into his killing jar.

  “Can I see?” I asked, stepping from the trees and walking slowly toward him, my arms hanging loose and casual at my sides. I didn’t want to seem like a threat. Not until it was too late.

  He clutched the jar to his chest, like I might try to take it from him. “Why?” he asked, his eyes empty, not the eyes he showed to adults. These were his real eyes. His vacant crow’s eyes.

  I didn’t answer his question. I lowered my gaze to the jar and the butterfly trapped inside, its crisp wings the color of Halloween, velvet black and flame orange. The butterfly beat against the walls of its glass prison until it lost the will to fight and drooped against the bottom like wilted lettuce.

  Jason’s empty eyes beamed with excitement then, and fury uncoiled in me like a rising cobra.

  He never saw it coming. I grabbed Jason by the wrist and felt something unfurl from my skin, connecting me to him like a shared vein. His mouth opened in a distended O, but he couldn’t scream. I didn’t give him the chance. His life, his essence, a sensation like rising and expanding, like I’d swallowed a sunrise, flooded my body. At the same time, Jason’s color waned from pale to waxy gray. His skin shriveled into a dehydrated shell. The hair fell from his head in hunks. His eyes turned black as underground tunnels and his cheekbones protruded in chalky, white wings.

  When he fell, his killing jar hit a rock and glass exploded like brittle firewo
rks.

  I’ve never told anyone about the hurricane of raucous, feral energy that poured from Jason into me, so heady and rapturous that it almost lifted me off the ground. It told me I could do anything. Run a thousand miles. Swim an ocean. Live forever. Raise the dead. Anything. It was all within my grasp.

  It told me I was a god.

  I knelt beside the shattered killing jar and cupped the limp butterfly in my palms. I touched its wing with the tip of my finger, and watched as a hair-thin strand of white light emerged and attached briefly to the insect’s thorax. The wings stiffened and twitched. A moment later the monarch juddered into the sky and vanished from sight.

  Then I ran. Not because I’d killed Jason Dunn, but because it was the only thing I could think to do with the energy boiling through me like rocket fuel. I raced through the woods, across the river where Jason had drowned the kittens, and into the mountains.

  When I finally returned home two days later, the euphoria that had filled me after I killed Jason was gone, and I needed it back. I was certain I would die without it, or that I was already dead, because that was what it felt like to lose the light I’d taken from inside Jason. Who knew there could be such light inside someone whose soul—if he had one—was so dark?

  I could tell as soon as my mom opened the door that she knew what I had done. And what I wanted to do. To take again, and take and take. To drive away the dead hollowness inside and replace it with perfect euphoria.

  A fever took hold of my body and pushed acid sweat from my pores. My stomach seized and cramped and I doubled over, retching up searing bile. My organs ached like they were shutting down. My blood thickened and decelerated to an oily crawl in my veins, and my heartbeat slowed and then revved, slowed and then revved. A sensation like I was covered with biting insects tortured my skin until I scratched it raw.

  “You were right,” I told Mom, sweating and holding myself and raking my arms bloody. “You have to take me away and lock me up or I’ll do something terrible.”

  Mom said nothing, only nodded and gave me some of Erin’s pills to knock me out, and when I woke up I was in an empty room alone. A room with a locked door and no windows. I wasn’t sure how long she kept me there. Five days? Ten? Thirty? I lost track of time as the fever melted my skin and invisible pincers snapped at my insides. Imaginary army ants chewed on my flesh and my stomach heaved and heaved, even when there was nothing inside it. My throat tore and I coughed blood until I passed out. I tried to forget why I was locked in the room. I tried not to hear my mom crying when she brought me food I couldn’t keep down, telling me she was sorry … sorry for what I was.

  When she finally let me out, I was string thin and wasted and unwashed, but I was under control.

  Mom studied me a long time before responding.

  “What you did to that boy … you can never do that again.”

  “I know,” I told her.

  “We can never talk about this,” she said. “Not ever. We have to pretend it never happened.”

  “Okay.” I began to cry. Both of us did.

  “You have to be normal. Be just like everyone else.”

  “I’ll be normal. I will.”

  Mom and I never talked about my dangerous secret again, or about my confinement, or about Jason Dunn. Sometimes it feels like we haven’t really spoken since the day she let me out of the locked room. We move our mouths and sounds come out, but we never actually say anything.

  Aside from my mom, no one knows the truth about me, and I hope they never will. What happened with Jason can’t happen again. I won’t let it, though every time I touch another person, I feel the life contained within them like a bottle waiting to be uncorked. So I never touch people if I can avoid it, just like I never tell anyone what really happened to Jason Dunn. I keep distance between me and everyone else because the temptation is too much. Often I wake in a desperate, greedy fever, remembering how taking Jason’s life felt like drinking sunlight and eternity, and I want more. So much more.

  I want life. Not my own, but theirs. Every life but my own.

  But I try not to think about that either, because thinking leads to wanting and wanting always, inevitably, leads to taking.

  GRAY GIRL

  Sometimes you forget you’re alive until you’re scared to death. As I took in the massing herd of festival attendees, I felt more alive than I had in years. Alive and sick, my stomach churning like a cyclone. I should have skipped dinner, and probably lunch, and breakfast, too, because I was likely about to lose them all in front of hundreds of people.

  “Nervous?” Blake asked, eyeing me from the driver’s seat. The endless line of cars we’d been trapped behind began to move, and a parking attendant wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt waved us forward.

  “Nope,” I said, my voice trembling. “Not a bit.”

  “Seriously?”

  He looked so hopeful I hated to disappoint him. “You know how people always say they have butterflies in their stomach when they’re nervous? I have ostriches. A stampeding army of ostriches. I envy the people who have butterflies. They don’t know how lucky they are.”

  “A.,” he said, “you have nothing to be nervous about because you’re going to kick ass. B. I’m stealing your ostriches. Think of it: an army of savage, alien ostriches living on a squishy pink planet that resembles the lining of a stomach.”

  “Sounds homey,” I said. In a week, Blake would have drawn a whole new comic inspired by my anxiety and posted it to his blog. “You better at least dedicate the story to me.”

  “To my reluctant muse, Kenna, and her stomach full of ostriches.” Blake grinned at me, but seeing my expression his amusement curdled to a sheepish cringe. “Are you really freaking out?”

  “You said this was a small festival,” I reminded him. “I was not prepared for this.” I gestured toward the stage, and the sea of festivalgoers.

  “Well … I’ve never been to a music festival. I didn’t have anything to compare it to.”

  A female parking attendant wearing tube socks and cutoff Daisy Duke shorts directed Blake toward a space that looked barely big enough to accommodate a motorcycle. By some miracle, he managed to wedge his rattling 4Runner into the space, and the short-shorts-wearing attendant gave him a double thumbs-up and a dizzy grin. Blake smiled back at her, and a pang of jealousy gonged in my chest.

  He’s not your boyfriend, I reminded myself. He can check out whomever he wants.

  Still, I couldn’t help glaring at Short Shorts through the passenger window. She sneered at me and turned away, but not before I read the words printed on her tie-dyed festival shirt:

  Folk Yeah! Fest 2016

  Folk You!

  Folk Me!

  Folk Everybody!

  “Either way, it’s too late to back out now,” Blake said. “Someone’s already blocked us in.”

  The parking was tandem, and we were jammed in front and back. There would be no leaving until the festival was over. Until my song was over.

  My heart began to pound so hard I could feel it in my kneecaps. “Can we sit here a little longer?” I asked.

  “We need to get you signed in.”

  “Please? One minute. That’s all I need.” That was not all I needed, but it was all I was going to get.

  The engine idled. An old-fashioned string band called Long Way Home played through the speakers. I’d introduced Blake to them as part of his musical reprogramming. When I’d first met Blake at the beginning of our junior year—after his family moved into the house next door that used to belong to the Dunns—his iPod playlists had been in a sad state, filled with such no-brainer, Top 40 hit makers as Miley Cyrus, John Mayer, Maroon 5, and, God help me, Ke$ha.

  “Ah, you’re a music snob,” he’d deduced after I told him every twelve-year-old girl in America called and said she wanted her taste in music back.

  Blake had good-naturedly shrugged off my teasing. “So I’m not a music person.”

  “That’s because you’re listening to t
he wrong music.”

  “Then teach me, Wise One,” he’d challenged, and I accepted. Three months later, Blake was not only listening to Tom Waits and Father John Misty and a few dozen other respectable musicians, but I’d started giving him guitar lessons. I suspected he still listened to his Top 40 staples when I wasn’t around, but even a music snob like me couldn’t turn my nose up at a song solely because it was popular. I just tended to like things old school, before voice modulation software and glorified karaoke competitions that churned out universally acceptable talent.

  But then two weeks ago Blake threw down a gauntlet of his own—a gauntlet that came in the form of a flyer announcing a music festival called Folk Yeah! Fest. And one of the features of the festival was a competition for emerging artists. Participants would play one original song in front of the Folk Yeah! audience. The audience members would vote, and the winner would have a song professionally produced and included on the Folk Yeah! compilation album.

  Blake had signed me up without telling me, claiming it was better to ask forgiveness than permission. I tried to decline, but it was too late. Blake had told Erin about the competition and she demanded I go through with it.

  “It’s my dying wish,” she proclaimed, making me wince. I would never get used to Erin’s cavalier attitude toward the likely chance of her own premature death.

  “You play that dying-wish card once a week,” I said, but Erin propped her garden hose arms on her bony hips and narrowed her eyes at me behind her thick glasses.

  “If you don’t play at this festival, I’ll never forgive you,” she amended.

  I sighed and said yes, as if I’d ever had a choice. It was impossible to say no to Erin when I didn’t know how much longer she’d be around.

  “Your minute is up,” Blake said, and killed the engine. Long Way Home’s hectic but harmonious guitar/banjo duet went silent, and the muffled strains of live music coming from the stage replaced it. My heart started beating in kick-drum bursts. The passages between my throat and lungs narrowed, signaling an oncoming asthma attack. I fished in my bag and found my emergency inhaler.