Page 10 of Mail Order Bride

“Try a bad decade,” Sharon retorts.

“Yeah, well, I guess you didn’t have anything to do with that now, did you?”

“We make our bed, we have to lie in it,” she says.

Maybe I shouldn’t have stolen Sharon’s boyfriend in the fifth grade, but it was worth it just knowing she’s still angry about it all these years later.

Well, almost worth it. He turned out to be a terrible kisser, a real mama’s boy, and well-known for having a wandering eye.

That was all well and good.

It was the fact that Sharon Johnson—Sharon Cleaver then—turned all the other kids against me. I was mocked, teased, and bullied relentlessly. I was ousted from the other girls, called “easy” by the boys. The rumors she spread? Some of them persist until this day. They said I was weird, and they were right. I was different. Iamdifferent. Different isn’t bad, it just is. But once you’re labeled that way, well, labels tend to stick.

“How’s William, by the way?”

She looks at me sideways as though she can’t believe the audacity. “How should I know?” She should know, and I’m positive she does. She did name her firstborn after him. Billy’s dad’s name is Robert. Her innocent school crush? The one she’s still bitter about all these years later? He goes by Bill.

I shrug.

“Can you get any slower?”

“It’s possible, yes.”

Leonard frowns at me. “Would you like me to take over? I think it’s time for your break, anyhow.”

I offer him a bright smile. “I’ve got it,” I say, and I do.

I short Sharon’s change by a dollar and eleven cents. Not because I intend to steal from her, but because I’m hoping she’ll get out to her car, work the math out in her head, and have to walk back into the store. She’s married to Robert Johnson, a big shot accountant who commutes to the city five days a week and somehow still manages to keep his wife on a short leash.

I imagine them arguing over the missing change. Bob’s the biggest cheapskate six counties deep. How he ended up married to a woman like Sharon, I’ll never know. But it feels exactly like the kind of karma she deserves.

Chapter Seven

Journal Entry

Author Unknown

Dead women can't scream. She was a goner before she hit the marble floor. I stood, listening to the sounds as they faded into silence, one by one. The last one was a knock on the front door, a final call for help that never came. The coroner would later say that death came quickly, unable to explain the number of broken bones, and bruises, and lacerations.How did she get so hurt,they’ll ask themselves, and they’ll spend the rest of their lives trying to figure it out.

At least that's how I imagined it. I wanted to make her death look like a robbery, but that would have been too fitting and too good for a woman like Sharon Johnson.

That, and it would get people talking, and the only reason I’ve been able to be as successful as I have is because I’m smart. I know how to be mysterious, how to move about a crowd undetected.

People like Sharon Johnson should learn a thing or two about that. Maybe if she had, she’d still be alive.

But she’s not. She’s currently laying on the floor of her shower, the water having gone cold hours ago like her perfectly naked body soon will. Do you have any idea the kind of patience it takes to sneak into a person’s home and wait for the right moment? Playing the waiting game for Sharon Johnson to shower was my least favorite kind. It was like an accident waiting to happen.

But happen, it did.

The authorities and her family will think she simply slipped. Maybe they’ll suspect a medical episode. Who knows and who cares? What really happened was blunt force trauma. A crack or two to her skull, a brain bleed, lots of swelling. Easily explained with a fall.

Her son was downstairs watching cartoons on the TV. He never once got off the couch, not even when there was so much commotion. I wonder how long it will take for him to find his dreadful, insufferable mommy. She should have known better than to use the idiot box for a babysitter. Not that I was surprised. There were a lot of things she didn’t know.

Sharon Johnson didn’t put up much of a fight, mostly because she didn’t see it coming. Women like her never do. But her death wasn’t a completely silent one. They never are.

Chapter Eight

Gina

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