Page 1 of Rot

Chapter One

I was eight years old when I watched a classmate drown at my birthday party.

It wasn’t my fault, you know. You shouldn’t go to a pool party if you didn’t know how to swim. And if you were a parent, you shouldn’t take your kid to a party and leave them there while you went off and did whatever for a few hours.

Everyone else had already gone inside to cut the cake. My grandparents and the other classmates who’d come to the party. I wasn’t sure if I’d call any of them friends of mine. I was a hard person to get along with, even back then, even as a little girl.

I watched her drown, watched her flail and struggle, and I moved not an inch to pull her from the water.

I supposed I could’ve helped her, but I didn’t. It wasn’t my responsibility to help anyone; that was a lesson I’d learned from my grandmother, Sloane Karnagy. We had the same name. Sometimes I wondered if my mother named me Sloane to get underneath my grandmother’s skin.

But, anyway, when her body floated up to the surface, her back to the sky, I decided to go inside and get some cake. I had my priorities straight at the time, what could I say?

I went in, got sung to, and everybody had their slice of cake while shivering in the AC of my grandparents’ house.

I lived with them, since my father was who he was and my mother was at some facility, trying to get better. Even back then, my grandparents blamed me for it, my grandmother worst of all. Let’s just say she wasn’t nice.

Oh, the screams that rang out when everybody walked back outside and realized a girl had missed cake—and not only that, but that she was dead. My grandmother had pulled all us children inside while my grandfather called the police, or maybe an ambulance.

The Karnagys had money. Our house was one of the biggest on the street, and there were many things inside the house that I was not allowed to touch with my grubby, greasy, eight-year-old fingers. My grandparents had money, and the attitude to match it.

My attitude came from a different place, though.

As sirens pulled up to the house and my grandfather dealt with everybody coming and going, my grandmother took me aside, away from the other girls. She sat me down on the couch and knelt in front of me, watching me with hazel eyes that seemed to know too much. She wore a frown, as she usually did when speaking with me, so tight there were lines around her lips.

“You know what I’m about to say,” she started, and I was slow to nod, because I did. My grandmother always got that look on her face when she disapproved of me or something I’d done—or something she thought I did.

“Do you have any idea how this is going to look, Sloane? That girl is dead. She died in our pool. You were the last to have seen her. Why didn’t you call for us?” She stood and pinched the bridge of her nose, pacing the floor before me.

My grandmother stopped, her nose upturned as she glared at me. “Your grandfather always thought I was crazy, but I knew from the moment you were conceived that you would be just like your father.” She nearly spit at the mention of him. “He had the rot in him. It’s why he did what he did.”

I held her stare, not wanting to look away. Even though this wasn’t the first time I’d heard this talk, each and every time I took it to heart, to the point where I’d memorized it.

She pointed at me. “You might come from Karnagy stock, but you’re also a Bovine, and your father’s blood runs strong in you. You’ll have to work your entire life to stop the rot from taking you, too. Do you understand me, girl? You have the rot in you, just like him.”

When I didn’t say anything, she made a shooing motion. “Go upstairs to your room. I’ll handle the police.”

I did as I was told, because I had to, but all the while her words echoed in my head, and I never forgot them. Not once, not even when I slept.

I had the rot in me. How long until it devoured me whole? I never got the answer to that question, not even as the years went by and I grew up. My birthdays, the holidays, nothing was without a lecture about my parentage and the rot I had festering deep inside of me.

What was the rot? When I was younger, I didn’t know. It was this invisible thing inside of a person that made them do terrible things. Like my father. Charles Bovine, the Bedlam Butcher. He liked to break into people’s houses and kill them when they slept. No one ever got away. Not until my mother slept at her friend’s house one night when she was sixteen. She’d fought so hard she’d managed to take him down—not permanently, of course, but long enough for the police to arrive and for them to arrest him.

It wasn’t without loss. That was the night I was conceived.

I came from death, and my grandmother never let me forget it, nor did she ever let me simply exist in peace. Everything was my fault. It was my fault my father was a serial killer, my fault my mother went insane after having me and had to be taken away for her own good. It was my fault I had the rot in me.

The rot was a curious thing. Unable to be seen, one could only feel it. Some days I sat in school, daydreaming, picturing it bubbling up inside of me. When my anger snapped and I lashed out, I imagined it was the rot doing it, not me.

The rot. The decay. The blackening of my soul.

I was eighteen now, and I knew, without a doubt, I had the rot in me. Still, I tried to put a smile on my face and go on, because that’s what a Karnagy did. You grinned and bore it even when your back was breaking under the strain.

Mother and I had left her parents’ house without much preparation at all. She’d finally gotten out of her psychiatric hospital and was, allegedly, cured of whatever ailment she had. I think it was because of me, because I was older now, so perhaps I didn’t remind her too much of my father.

We were going to live with her estranged sister, someone who’d never once been in my life, someone who’d thrown away the Karnagy last name as soon as she’d been able to. And she’d never looked back, not even when my mother had been raped and nearly killed.

Funny thing, time. It either healed all wounds or left a big, ugly scar. Mother pretended her wounds had healed, but we’d see.

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