2

SHE shaved; I knew she had it in her. And I did my part. I really did rent a red convertible. We are those assholes and we’re cruising through the woodsy part of Rhode Island. We are your worst nightmare. We are happy. We don’t need you, any of you. We don’t give a fuck about you, what you think of us, what you did to us. I am the driver and Amy is the dream girl and this is our first vacation together. Finally. I have love.

The top is down and we sing along to “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.” I picked this song because I’m taking it all back, all the beautiful things in the world that were corrupted by my tragically ill girlfriend Guinevere Beck. (I see now that she suffered from borderline personality disorder. You can’t fix that.) Beck and her horrible friends ruined so much for me. I couldn’t go anywhere in New York without thinking of Beck. I thought I’d never listen to Elton John again because his music was playing when I killed Peach.

Amy taps my shoulder and points at a hawk in the sky. I smile. She isn’t the kind of asshole who needs to lower the volume on the music and discuss the bird and read into it. God, she is good. But no matter how good it gets, it is always there, the truth:

I forgot to take the mug.

That fucking mug haunts me. I understand that there are consequences. I am not unique; to be alive is to have a mug of urine out there. But I can’t forgive myself for screwing up, like some girl “forgetting” a cardigan after a one-night stand. The mug is an aberration. A flaw. Proof that I’m not perfect, even though I’m usually so precise, so thorough. I haven’t hatched a plan to retrieve it, but Amy makes me wish I had. I want the world clean for us, Lysol fresh.

Now she offers me her scratched sunglasses. “You’re driving,” she says. “You need them more than I do.”

She is the anti-Beck; she cares about me. “Thanks, Ame.”

She kisses my cheek and life is a fever dream and I wonder if I’m in a coma, if all this is a hallucination. Love fucks with your vision and I have no hate in my heart. Amy is taking all of it away, my healer, my Bactine beauty. In the past, I had a tendency to be intense; you might even call it obsessive. Beck was such a mess that in order to take care of her, I had to follow her home and hack into her e-mail and worry about her Facebook and her Twitter and her nonstop texting, all the contradictions, the lies. I chose poorly with her and suffered the consequences. I learned my lesson. It works with Amy because I can’t stalk her online. Get this: She’s off the grid. No Facebook, no Twitter, no Instagram, not even an e-mail address. She uses burner phones and I have to program her new number into my phone every couple of weeks. She is the ultimate analog, my perfect match.

When she first told me, I was flabbergasted and a little judgmental. Who the fuck is offline? Was she a pretentious nutcase? Was she lying? “What about paychecks?” I asked. “You have to have a bank account.”

“I have this friend in Queens,” she answered. “I write my checks over to her and she gives me cash. A lot of us use her. She’s the best.”

“‘Us’?”

“People offline,” she said. “I’m not alone here.”

Cunts want to be snowflakes. They want you to tell them how nobody in this whole world compares to them. (Apologies to Prince.) All the little fame monsters on Instagram—look at me, I put jam on my toast!—and I found someone different. Amy doesn’t try to stand out. I don’t sit alone and scroll through her status updates and home in on her misleading photographs of staged joy. When I’m with her, I’m with her, and when she leaves me, she goes where she said she was going.

(Of course I’ve followed her and I occasionally look in her phone. I have to know that she isn’t lying.)

“I think I smell salt air,” Amy says.

“Not yet,” I tell her. “Couple more minutes.”

She nods. She doesn’t fight about stupid shit. She’s no angry Beck. That sick girl lied to the people with whom she was closest—me, Peach, her fucking fellow writers in school. She told me her father was dead. (He wasn’t.) She told me she hated Magnolia just because her friend Peach hated it. (She was lying. I read her e-mail.)

Amy is a nice girl and nice girls lie to strangers to be polite, not to people they love. Even right now, she’s wearing a threadbare URI tank top. She didn’t go to URI; she didn’t go anywhere. But she always wears a college shirt. She got a Brown shirt for me, just for this trip. “We can tell people that I’m a student and you’re my professor.” She giggled. “My married professor.”

She digs up these shirts at various Goodwills all over the city. Her chest is always screaming Go Tigers! Arizona State! PITT. I tend to the stacks and eavesdrop as people who come into the shop try to connect with her—Did you go to Princeton? Did you go to UMass? Do you go to NYU?—and she always answers yes. She makes nice with the women and she lets the dudes think they have a shot. (They don’t.) She likes a conversation. She likes a story, my little anthropologist, my listener.

We are nearing the road that takes us to Little Compton and just when I think life can’t get any better, I see flashing lights. A cop is coming at us. Hard. His lights are on and his sirens are blaring and the music is gone. I brake and I try to keep my legs from shaking.

“What the fuck?” Amy says. “You weren’t even speeding.”

“I don’t think so,” I say, keeping my eyes on the rearview mirror as the cop opens his door.

Amy turns to me. “What did you do?”

What did I do? I murdered my ex-girlfriend Guinevere Beck. I buried her body in upstate New York and then pinned it on her therapist, Dr. Nicky Angevine. Before that, I strangled her friend Peach Salinger. I killed her less than five fucking miles from here, on a beach by her family’s house, and made it look like a suicide. I also did away with a drug-addled soda jerk named Benji Keyes. His cremated body is in his storage unit, but his family thinks he died on a bender. Oh, also. The first girl I ever loved, Candace. I put her out to sea. Nobody knows I did any of these things so it’s like that if-a-tree-falls-in-the-woods question.

“I have no idea,” I say, and this is a fucking nightmare.

Amy rummages around the glove box for the rental’s registration, takes it out, and then slams it shut. Officer Thomas Jenks doesn’t take off his sunglasses. He has round shoulders and his uniform is slightly too large. “License and registration,” he says. His eyes burrow into on my chest, the word brown. “You heading back to school?”

“Just going to Little Compton,” I say. And then I cover. “Eventually. Taking my time.”

He doesn’t acknowledge my passive-aggressive defense. I was not fucking speeding and I am not a Brown asshole and this is why I don’t wear college shirts. He studies my New York driver’s license. A century passes, and then another.

Amy coughs. “Officer, what did we do wrong?”

Officer Jenks looks at her, then at me. “You didn’t signal when you turned.”

Are you kidding me, motherfucker? “Ah,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

Jenks says he needs “a few minutes” and he plods back to his car, breaking into a jog and he shouldn’t be jogging. He also shouldn’t need “a few minutes.” As he opens the door to his cruiser and slips inside, I think of my prior offenses, my secret activities, and my throat closes up.

“Joe, relax,” Amy says, putting her hand on my leg. “It’s just a minor traffic violation.”

But Amy doesn’t know that I killed four people. I am sweating and I’ve heard about things like this. A guy gets pulled over for a minor infraction and somehow, through the sadistic magic of computers and system, the guy is pinned for all kinds of other shit. I could shoot myself.