Page 19 of Serial Killer Games

It bursts out of him so forcefully, it must have been building pressure this whole time. Dolores looks down at her smooth, colorful arms, and I do too. I spot a death moth, a bottle of poison, a claw hammer.

“ ‘Women these days’?” Dolores intones. “My great-grandmother was covered in traditional batok tattoos. I’m very old-fashioned.” There’s something different in her tonenow. She has the better part of a bottle of wine in her system, and her give-a-fuck meter is running on E. “It must be hellish being conservative. To wake up every day terrified of the things you don’t understand. Just think of all the interesting people you can’t be friends with. And what’s it like being a man? Going through life thinking women exist to be decorative elements in the visual landscape?”

She turns to me. “Your dad’s a creep. You came by it honestly.”

There’s a stunned little silence. Laura blinks several times at the tabletop. Andrew’s mouth falls open once again, and when his eyes meet mine, there’s raw fury in them.

Dolores stands and takes the bottle of wine around the neck and shoves it in her purse. She sways ever so slightly. “I’m not sticking around for the main course. It would interfere with my alcohol absorption. Adios, amoeba,” she says to my uncle. “It was lovely meeting you,” she says to my aunt. “Maybe next time you can show me pictures of Jake dressed as an altar boy or whatever twisted stuff he used to get up to.”

And with that, she stalks off across the restaurant, flames smoldering in her footsteps as she goes.

9

The Girlfriend Removal Expert

Jake

“I’m sorry, Jake,” Aunt Laurasays in a small voice. “We’ll get the bill. Will you call me? Ireallylike her.”

I realize she thinks I’m going with Dolores, so I do just that, leaving Andrew practically smoking around the edges and Laura resigned to an evening spent placating him. I almost duck to give her a quick hug and kiss—it’s been years since I’ve done that. I’ve been trying to wean her off me.

I catch up to Dolores in the mezzanine just as she pulls the wine bottle out of her purse. She holds it out to me when she spots me.

“You need it more than me. Your dad—”

“He’s not my dad. They’re not my parents.”

Her face puckers in confusion. “You look like them.”

I do, and it’s been a source of irritation to my uncle since I went to live with them. They couldn’t have children of their own, and I was the disappointing consolation prize. The last thing he wants, ever, is for me to be mistaken for their son.

“I look like my aunt.”

“Yes. And you stone-face just like him.”

“He would stone-face at me and I had to stone-face right back. They raised me after my parents died.”

She doesn’t hand out the automatic apology. She just examines my face for tells of emotion and tucks away this bit of information in my case file.

“So that’s how you know so much about ghosts,” she says.

Her reference to our rooftop talk is random and confusing, and I don’t want to get into any of that. Dolores is like a wisp of smoke, and she could slip away into the night at any moment. In her red dress, with her tattoos on display, and truth serum running brightly in her veins, I feel like I have the real Dolores standing in front of me, not the one camouflaged in a monochrome corporate disguise playing an elaborate game of cloak-and-dagger from Monday to Friday. I need to make her linger. I need to hook her in, snag her interest. I need another stroke of brilliance, like I had with that doll.

She looks at me expectantly, and just as I open my mouth, my phone buzzes in my pocket. I send it to voicemail without looking at it. Then it starts buzzing again. I know who it is. There’s only one person in my life who feels this entitled to my attention.

“Will you wait for me?” I ask Dolores.

She tips her head to one side, like she’s listening to a little devil on her shoulder. “Sure. Why not.” She sits on the lip of the indoor fountain and pulls out her phone, and I step across the mezzanine, out of earshot, to return the missed calls.

The first was not Grant, after all. It was my uncle. He’s left a voicemail.

“Howdareyou tell her I’m your father—”

I delete it without finishing. The second was Grant, so I call him back.

“Jake.”

We’re one syllable in and I can already feel a headache coming on. He cuts right to the chase in anguished tones.

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