Boring Girls

  BORING

  GIRLS

  A NOVEL

  SARA

  TAYLOR

  eCw

  For Lance Webber, my friend —

  and the blue sky over Griffith Park

  It seems like everyone I talk to wants to know two things. One is whether I’m a serial killer or a mass murderer. The way I understand it, a serial killer kills people over a length of time and doesn’t get caught for a while. A mass murderer does it all in one go and gets caught in the act. I’m going to have to leave it up to them to decide, because Fern and I did both, and I’m really not an expert.

  People like to label things. The news people need to know what to call us in the headlines. They need to figure out which names to list us beside when they’re categorizing killers. I’ve even heard the word “massacre” used to describe everything that happened at the end. We wanted it to be dramatic, but not because we wanted to make a big scene. It had to be dramatic so that no one would figure out what was happening until we were finished with it. We needed to have time. And we had definitely been thinking about it for ages, so I guess you could call it “premeditated.”

  The other thing they want to figure out is why. And I keep telling them and telling them. I’m always telling them the same thing. But they don’t believe me. My answer isn’t good enough. They want more. They want to be able to blame something else, and other people, and have a long, complicated chain of events that add up to who Fern and I ended up being so that they can reassure themselves it can’t happen to just anyone.

  Not just anyone can become a killer. That’s what they want to think. It takes special circumstances. Two young ladies from good homes cannot commit a massacre without something very evil and unusual happening, the fates aligning to produce this sort of thing.

  Well, they’re right, but it has nothing to do with my family. They keep asking me about my parents. Did my father hit me? Did my mother verbally abuse me? Did I have a creepy uncle who touched me? Did my father and mother touch me? No, I tell them. Over and over. And I’ll tell you now: my parents raised me well. I love them very much. And even though they aren’t too interested in talking to me right now, which I understand, I will always love them. They were always good to me and my sister. I had a nice childhood. And from what I know of Fern, she did too. And I keep telling them that, and they act like I didn’t answer the question. They always ask again.

  What about the music I listened to? The music I played? Hasn’t it always been easy to point the finger at that sort of thing? The music, the video games? Setting young people out of their minds onto killing rampages? The parents wringing their hands and blaming the vicious rock stars for warping the innocent? Running through their schools with semi-automatic weapons, gunning down nice people who listened to nice music?

  If you want to blame the music, it wouldn’t be hard. Fern and I like death metal. Dark, heavy, disgusting death metal. Filled with lyrics that a lot of people don’t like. Most of the people in these bands are guys. Angry-looking guys. And I mean, these bands have names that seem tailor-made to be blamed for a massacre: Deathbloat? Bloodvomit? Torn Bowel? And, of course, Die Every Death. I can’t leave them off the list. Lest we forget.

  So how easy is it to point at me and Fern and then slide that pointing finger to our CD collections? Really easy. I mean, let’s be real. Torn Bowel? I totally get why somebody’s mother wouldn’t like the sound of that. Too bad. They’re some of the nicest guys I know, and I’m sure they’ve been hounded by the press about me and Fern, and I feel bad about it. They didn’t kill anybody. As much as they might have written songs about murder, they never did it. I’m sure they’re facing a lot of questions now, simply because they’re our friends. They’ll have to explain the music to outraged activists and families and journalists and church folks and talk-show hosts. A lot of bands will. Ones we were friends with, ones we weren’t. I’m sad for that. It wasn’t their fault.

  I’m sure there are murderers in the world who listen to nice acoustic folk music or play the harp or something. Killing people isn’t exclusive to those of us who listen to Torn Bowel. People were murderers before there was recorded music. Before radios. Before running water. The whole thing is silly.

  You can’t blame music. You can blame me.

  And you can damn well blame the people who gave me the reason to do it.

  I tell them over and over again why we did it. It’s very simple. Maybe we should have dealt with it differently. Maybe we should have exercised forgiveness. But in my opinion, some things cannot be forgiven. Some people cannot be looked at with compassion. It’s kind of ironic, because the people judging me believe that I should have been compassionate, but they aren’t looking at me with any. Everyone is a hypo­crite. Everyone, deep within themselves, whether they want to acknowledge it or not, knows that there are things that they would not be able to forgive.

  Fern and I could not forgive. And the reason we murdered these people was very simple.

  It was for revenge.

  ONE

  I have always lived in the same house in Keeleford. My family never moved, I never had to start all over again in a new school. I had that sort of idyllic childhood, growing up on a street with neighbours we knew. A nice community, you know. A normal youth. A good family.

  My parents didn’t have a ton of money. We have a small bungalow, with three bedrooms, on Shade Street. Next door was Mrs. Collins, who lived alone after her husband died. Across the street was an elderly couple. On the corner lived a family with a few kids younger than me and a dog that always chased us along its side of the backyard fence when we’d walk by. When I was five, my sister, Melissa, was born. There was a little store where Dad would take us to buy candies: red jelly feet, cinnamon-flavoured lips, black licorice sticks. There was a park nearby. Our schools were in walking distance.

  My father was a high school teacher, but he worked at a school in a neighbouring town, so luckily Melissa and I would never have to face the social awkwardness of having our dad in our high school. We did, however, have to face the awkwardness of having a father who taught English and always liked to hit us up with word games.

  He would sit at the dining room table, marking his papers, and I believe he liked to compare the intellect of his students with the intellect of his daughters, always raging to Mom about our superiority, of course.

  “Rachel,” he once said to me, “can you think of a word that rhymes with orange?”

  I thought for a minute, because when I was younger, I liked these games. I liked that my dad, a teacher, would come to me for my ideas. I liked thinking that I was smarter than the older kids in his classes.

  To this particular question, I answered “porridge.”

  “Okay,” Dad said. “Now make a ‘roses are red’ poem with orange and porridge.”

  I thought for a few more minutes and then announced,

  Roses are red,

  Violets are orange.

  Goldilocks ate

  The three bears’ porridge.

  “I love it!” my father said, beaming at me. “Creative. I’ve got fifteen-year-old kids in this class who couldn’t think of that. Marilyn,” he said to my mother, “your ten-year-old daughter is writing better poetry than my class is.”

  Melissa got into it as well:

  Roses are red,

  Violets are orange.

  When it rained,

  It was a storm.

  “Brilliant!” My father applauded. I knew that mine was better. Of course, Melissa was only five, I could concede that. But I believed that my father thought me to be a genius, and it inspired me to start writing poems and st
ories. I kept many journals, which I never showed my parents despite my desire for their praise. I believed my diaries to be full of secrets that were mine alone, regardless of the irrelevance of the events they recorded.

  But I always wrote them with the idea that someone would read them. I remember being in fifth grade and receiving my first diary as a birthday gift. It had a little lock on the outside that you could easily pick. I wanted to make a good impression on my phantom audience. I wanted my future readers to be intrigued by me, to marvel at how exciting a life I was leading, to be impressed by my intellect. If my family ever snooped, I wanted them to be surprised.

  So I started making things up. Spicing up my existence. I would casually mention how a police officer had asked for my help to solve a crime and how he had admired my detective skills. I would write about how I had fought off a kidnapper who was attempting to abduct a little kid and how the kid’s parents offered me a reward that I graciously declined. My diary became filled with so much fantasy, which was more interesting to me than the dull normality I actually existed in.

  My mother worked as a receptionist in a dental clinic, and she also loved art. When me and Melissa were babies, she created paintings for our rooms: watercolour scenes, flowers, portraits of us. Her stuff was all around the house, really. And her shelves were packed with books on art history. Big heavy books with thick glossy pages filled with paintings. Those books were really something special to me, almost magical.

  I remember looking through the books with her, always focusing on the art with children. She’d talk to me about the paintings and the artists, pointing out the colours they used and why they worked well together, complementary colours — you could make blue look brighter by putting orange next to it, things like that. I didn’t really absorb much colour theory, but it was fun that Mom would do crayon drawings with us and let us use her fancy grown-up paints too. I didn’t know any other kids with moms who would do that.

  Some of the pictures in the art books were pretty frightening to me when I was little. She’d skip by sections of the book to avoid them, but I’d see quick flashes: Christ being crucified, his haunted eyes and bloody hands. I didn’t like that.

  One afternoon when I was about twelve, I was looking through one of her books by myself and I flipped to a page and froze.

  The painting was of two women. One wore a blue dress and one wore a red dress. They had pinned a very large man down on a mattress and were obviously struggling with him, and winning. The woman in blue was cutting the man’s neck with a sword, and blood was spilling onto the bed.

  I was transfixed. The women looked so calm, so focused. They were working together on this. The title of the painting was Judith Slaying Holofernes. I called my mother into the room.

  “Mom, what’s this painting about?”

  She looked at it thoughtfully. “I believe Holofernes was a cruel war captain, and Judith is the woman who was sent to kill him to save her village. You know, the artist of this painting is a woman. She’s remembered as sort of a feminist artist who did some very important things for women in her time.”

  “Who’s the other girl?”

  “Judith’s maid, I think.” My mother turned the page, and there was another painting, where Judith and her maid carried a suspiciously shaped bag. “Yes, it says here, Judith and her Maidservant.”

  “They have his head in that bag,” I said.

  “You know, Rachel, I don’t really like these paintings,” my mother said. “Don’t you think that they’re very violent?”

  “But the girls are friends. And they killed him for a good reason.”

  “Yes, they did,” my mother said. “But I think it would be nice for you to look at some other paintings in this book. That picture is very sad, and I think it’s nice to look at good things to make ourselves happier. It’s more inspiring.”

  In bed that night, I kept thinking about Judith and her friend killing the war captain, against all odds. I didn’t see how my mother couldn’t find that inspiring. I wanted a friend like that. I wanted an ally, someone to have a secret with, someone I knew I could rely on, someone I could trust with my very life if I needed to.

  xXx

  So with our father praising our intellect and my mother encouraging creativity, Melissa and I really did grow up happily. I got good marks in school, especially in art and writing classes, and I had a few good friends.

  I was not overtly social. I preferred to read or draw or write in my free time, but I went to the birthday parties and was in the school play in some minor role. I enjoyed all those things, but what I really wanted to do was be creative on my own. And my parents always supported that.

  Once I reached high school, like pretty much every human being on the face of the earth, I stopped caring so much about what my family thought of me. My dad’s cute word games became annoying, but Melissa still played with him, so I was luckily exempt. I didn’t care so much for my mother’s paintings, seeing as how I can only get so excited over a watercolour sparrow. And then I discovered metal.

  TWO

  I had never been popular, and right around the time I turned thirteen, I started realizing that most of my “peers” were annoying as hell. I watched good friends reprioritize their whole lives: instead of wanting to make up stories or read, they wanted to wear lip gloss and have all the expensive name-brand clothes and giggle whenever a boy said anything. Don’t get me wrong, I wanted a boyfriend too, but for some reason I wasn’t willing to laugh at bad jokes or present myself as some sort of airhead to impress someone. And my unwillingness to do these things ostracized me when I began high school.

  But I was fine being a loner. I didn’t mind that there were no party invitations. I preferred going home, shutting myself in my room, and working on stories or my journal or my (in retrospect embarrassing) poetry. I didn’t want to hang out with my parents and Melissa; I enjoyed being by myself.

  What I wasn’t fine with was the abuse that came with it. It wasn’t enough that I had no friends. I had to be mocked as well, apparently. I didn’t have it as bad as some kids, because I wasn’t chubby or pimply or smelly or poor. But I was “weird.”

  Some kids who got picked on desperately tried to fit in with those assholes. Which I found pathetic. They’d make fun of a kid for having stupid hair and the kid would show up the next day with a new haircut and a hopeful look on their face, which always resulted in more ridicule. They’d tease a kid for having cheap shoes, and the kid would show up with a rip-off of the expensive brand, and they’d just get destroyed for it. But they’d always scramble around, trying to please. Whether it was to actually fit in and be accepted or whether it was just to make the bullshit stop, I have no idea. But I couldn’t respect it. Which made me hate the outcast group too.

  The thing with me was, they victimized me but it didn’t have the effect they wanted it to.

  One day in ninth grade, I was sitting by myself in the hallway eating an apple. I was wearing a dress I liked, green with a purple paisley pattern. One of the biggest wastes of the earth’s resources I have ever encountered, Brandi Stone, came and stood in front of me, arms folded, flanked by two of her idiot friends.

  “That,” she said to me, “is the ugliest dress I have ever seen.”

  Brandi was one of the school’s beloved, celebrated and gorgeous. She was in my grade but partied with the older kids. I had seen many a nerd attempt to take her cruel fashion advice, only to set themselves up for more abuse.

  “This dress?”

  “Yes. That dress. It is the ugliest dress I have ever seen,” she said, smiling at me. Her friends giggled and all of them awaited my response.

  I had no idea what to say. I couldn’t believe their ignorance. Hadn’t they seen the teen movies? Couldn’t they tell that they were parodies? Didn’t they know that they are the sort of bitches that everyone is supposed to hate?

  I puzzl
ed this over while we looked at each other. I guess I was supposed to cry.

  “I said, that is the ugliest dress I have ever seen,” she repeated. “Are you retarded?”

  I didn’t say a word. I was so stupefied by their ignorance of themselves, of who they were.

  “Retard,” one of her friends sneered.

  I sat like a statue. They stared at me. I’m sure they started feeling kind of stupid. I was supposed to weakly defend myself. I was supposed to snivel, Leave me alone.

  “Stupid bitch. Stupid weirdo,” Brandi yelled at me, and they traipsed off down the hall, where they joined some older boys by their lockers and started giggling.

  So that was it. I was a stupid bitch and a stupid weirdo, a fact that they never failed to remind me of for the rest of that year. And not just Brandi and her friends; apparently they felt that my failings needed to be communicated amongst their entire social circle. Kids in the older grades who I didn’t even know shouted stuff at me as I walked to my classes. And I started feeling like shit about it after a while.

  See, it wasn’t being alone or disliked that I minded. It’s that I couldn’t understand where the hell the other people like me were. I didn’t just want a friend. I wanted an ally. I wanted a partner. Someone else who would get it. Someone who understood what it was like to not have the desire to be accepted by these people. I started feeling very lonely, which pissed me off in principle. I liked being alone, but I was starting to think maybe I was insane or something, because all I saw, all day at school, were assholes and people trying to kiss up to them. It disgusted me that it was making me question myself.

  Brandi seemed to develop an intense personal dislike for me, which I found baffling, as I had barely said a single word to her and she knew absolutely nothing about me. And yet she would literally go out of her way to call me names, to verbally assault and mock me. Teachers let her get away with things, boys adored her, the nerds worshipped and feared her. I couldn’t understand her. I hated that I was even wasting energy on trying to, but it became a daily thing that year. I hate to say it affected me as much as it did, but at least I always kept my head high and pretty much ignored what they said to me.