Page 47 of Serial Killer Games

“Tonight.”

I shiver and nod. “Where?”

“I need some help with that part.”

“I’ll take care of it for you.” I want to sayI’ll take care of you.

“It’s something I need to do myself,” she says. “But…I want you to help me.”

“No. You can’t. You can’t do it,” I tell her, and she stares at me, bewildered. “I’ll do it. It doesn’t matter if I do it.”

And then I say it to her. I tell her the secret that’s been scratching with splintered claws at the underside of my floorboards. I tell her the secret I haven’t told anyone.

“I’m going to be dead soon, anyway.”

The room erupts into cheers when I say it, and I startle, but Dodi doesn’t even register the noise.

“You’re dying,” she says. “You’redying.”

“Yes.”

She pulls her hand back from mine like she’s touched fire.

“How long do you have?”

“Table sixteen!” a voice calls out from the stage.

“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “I’ll be around long enough to take care of your husband’s murderer.”

“ ‘It doesn’t matter,’ ” she echoes. She shakes her head, slowly, stunned. “You’redying, and you think…you think I want you to kill my husband’s murderer.”

“TABLE SIXTEEN!” the voice calls again.

Dodi pushes back from the table, and I make to stand, too, but she stops me and slips away in the dark. The woman at the other table watches all this, then leans in and whispers something to her tablemates.

I regret letting her go a second later. I can’t see which direction she went in. I don’t know if she’s coming back. I stand up again, and someone behind me huffs and leans dramatically to one side to let me know I’m an asshole.

“Dodi!” I hiss, and a man shushes me, and—

There she is. Dodi.

I watch her step out of the lip of blue shadow and into the spotlight onstage. She doesn’t blink away the light. She scowls into it, clutching her big, heavy purse to her stomach. The woman at the other table goes deathly still.

“Namethiskiller,” Dodi breathes into the mic.

The room descends into awed silence. There’s something different about this speaker, and everyone feels it in their bones. Faces swivel to her, and in the darkened room, the whites of strangers’ eyes glint eerily in the blue light from the stage, like the reflective eyes of night creatures.

“I’m a newlywed, halfway through my MBA, married to a statistician who can count cards. He loves Las Vegas, although I always refuse to go with him for his tournaments. I like to have a few stubborn hills to die on. That’s my prerogative. He and I are looking at houses, and thinking about getting a dog,and starting a family, maybe, and life is fucking perfect. There’s just one problem: his back hurts.”

The people who came before Dodi were comedic, all in, working for their Golden Globe nomination. Dodi on the other hand is a terrible actress, and the room is uncomfortably quiet. No one is standing and pointing. No one is calling out names. It’s just Dodi, reciting her piece without inflection. When she stands up there, she’s just herself: irritable, bored, vicious. Cruelly beautiful.

“Lung cancer, stage four. We’re stubbornly hopeful for a year, even though he’s a statistician and he should know better—but then they find brain mets. He feels differently about that. It’s different when it’s your brain. Your brain isyou. He gets headaches. He’s confused. He can’t do numbers anymore. He can’t play cards. One day I watch him make a bowl of cereal. He pours the milk first, and then the cereal. I never could get him to pour his cereal first. Weird, right? But no, the really weird part is that he got the bowl down from the shelf last, after pouring the milk and cereal onto the countertop.

“He looks at me and tells me, ‘I’m done.’ There’s going to be too much pain. Too much loss of dignity. Too much loss of control. Too much for me, his wife, who is visibly cracking. He and I are becoming different people. He’s turning into a stranger as his brain gets sicker and sicker, and I’m turning into whoever I need to be to get through this. The problem is, he’s too weak to do it himself. So he turns to me.”

The entire room is holding its breath. It’s so quiet I feel like everyone around me must be able to hear my heart knocking in my chest.

“You Murderheads really suck tonight,” Dodi breathes into the mic. “Episode sixty-three?”

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