Page 40 of A Forgotten Mistake

“Fuck if I know. I assumed you wanted me to poke at them a bit or something. Is that why you called me in here?”

She weirdly looks exasperated when I should be the one who’s exasperated. Like what did she expect?

“You want something out of me, don’t you?” I realize. “I’m going to be real honest, I don’t feel like doing anything for you.”

“Fuck you,” Abby says, and I shrug, deciding that’s permission to leave. So I get up and head toward the door as she looks at me in shock. “Where are you going?”

“I assumed you didn’t want me anymore, and I have things to do,” I say as I check my watch. I need to be at the bus stop soon… I can’t be late.

“Liam, come back here!” she snaps, but I’m already out the door. My mind is filled with thoughts ofhim. Every waking second has me running scenario after scenario through my head about how I would deal with him. How I would make him regret what he did to my mother. But most of all, how I would do it. How I would kill him. How I would dispose of the body.

I need a car, and thankfully, Lisa, my foster mother, is going out of town and Dale, my foster father, is much more lax. If I asked him if I could use the car, he’d toss me the keys. If I asked her, she’d insist on going with me as well as knowing every detail of the plan. Sometimes, I wonder if she thinks there’s something wrong with me and that’s why she constantly keeps an eye on me.

I wait until Lisa’s gone before heading down the stairs and over to where Dale is watching a game with his buddies. They’re always loud and obnoxious, and I notice that whenever they get like that, Abby refuses to come out of her room, so I know she won’t follow me and keep pestering me. Of course he doesn’t notice that… he’s not observant enough… or maybe he just doesn’t care enough. I’ve often wondered if they foster to look good and not because it makes them feel good, let alone whatever they think we feel about it.

“Can I take the car? My friends are all going to the mall, and I thought it’d be fun to get to go… if that’s okay?” I ask.

Dale doesn’t even look away from the TV as he nods. “Don’t tell Lisa. She made me promise we were spending quality time together, but why the hell would you want to spend quality time with us when you could go out with friends?” he asks. “God, when I was your age…”

His buddies laugh, telling me that they likely grew up together and are thinking about something they’d done back then. Not that I care.

“Thanks,” I say as I take the keys and head to the door. I manage to slip out without another word as euphoria ignites inside me over the thoughts of what’s to come.

Waiting in the monster’s house feels almost surreal. I’ve followed the man who killed my mother for so long that I started to question if I’d ever see the end of it. I planned for this day for so long that now that it’s here, I feel convinced I’ve fucked up somehow. When I’d met Jonah at his bus stop—when I’d looked the man who killed my mother in the eyes—a part of me had hesitated. Because this is it. This is the end of my obsession… one way or another, he will kill me or I will kill him. There is no other outcome.

He has absolutely no idea how long I’ve watched him for. How much I know about his life, his schedule, his home.

After he’d gotten onto the bus, I snuck into his home to make my preparations. I laid down a thick blue tarp that I plan to kill him on. I have gloves on so that I won’t leave a single fingerprint anywhere in the house. I’m wearing a tight hat that will keep me from losing a single hair. And right before I got here, I changedinto brand-new clothes right from the store so not a single part of me could be left at the crime scene. I parked down the street so my car wouldn’t be near the house until I was ready.

After breaking into the house, I rushed out to put my car in the garage and disabled the latch on the automatic garage door opener so his remote won’t work when he pulls up to the house. I knew this could lead to him parking in the driveway, and if he does, I’ll have to move his car before leaving, but it will keep me from having to drag a body out to my vehicle when there are neighbors all around us. If I’m lucky, he’ll leave the driveway open for his girlfriend who works nights and won’t be here until the morning, meaning that the two of us have plenty of time. I didn’t touch a single thing in his house, but as I sit on Jonah’s kitchen floor waiting for him, my eyes roam.

This is what a monster’s house looks like… not so different from any of the other homes I’ve been in, but a part of me expected it to be different. I expected it to be so awful that he was pushed to the brink, which caused him to do what he did… but the house isn’t that bad, is it? What gave him the right to destroy my life like he had? What possessed him to rip it all apart? What was so awful that I deserved to suffer like this? He seems to love his girlfriend, he doesn’t seem to hate his life… so what was it?

I start to get antsy as the hours stretch on. Is he not even coming home tonight? Did I fuck up? Did he have some other place to go? Did he go to his girlfriend’s house instead to wait?

The doorknob turns and my heart leaps up into my chest. Something squeezes my stomach that feels a bit like anxiety, but there’s something else… something darker blooming inside of me.

He’s finally home… and this will be the last time he ever walks through that door.

The last time he sets his keys down.

Because it’s so dark, he’s walked past me to reach for the lights. He has no idea I’m waiting in this room with him. I don’t want to kill him in the kitchen. The front door is made of glass, there are windows people can see through, so I have to get him to the garage.

Before Jonah even hits the lights, I rise up behind him and simply drop a rope over his neck. I know I have a brief element of surprise as I jerk him off balance with the plan to drag him into the garage. His weight hits the rope, and I realize the dead weight of a person is much different than I was expecting. I nearly drop the rope from the impact, but I can’t. I haul him back, but my momentary blunder costs me precious time… time where he’s figured out what’s happening.

He twists hard, trying to pull free while his right hand grabs for the rope and his left snakes between the rope and his throat so I can’t pull it tight. The door to the garage is merely feet away, so I get him through the door but am snapped to a stop when his feet hook on the doorframe.

“What the fuck are you doing?” he yells, and I can smell the alcohol on his breath. “You fucking?—”

He lunges up, slamming into me, and I’m rammed into the side of a metal cabinet. Pain flares into my arm as I drop my hold on the rope and pull out my knife. He smashes into me, driving me to the ground as the tarp crinkles under me and the knife is flung from my hand. I can hear the way it slides across the floor, catching on the edge of the tarp too far away for me to reach.

“Did you lay this down for me to get rid of you? That’s awful kind of you,” he says as his hands wrap around my throat and start to squeeze. Darkness washes through my vision as my lungs are deprived of even a breath of air. I drive my knee up, but it’s not enough to get him to stop.

Jonah laughs and the sound slices through me. I can see my dead mother lying there, unseeing eyes pointed my way. I cansee this man trampling over every bit of my life. I can see him tearing it apart, ripping it to pieces and destroying it.

“You actually thought you could kill me? You really did waste your fucking life. You can’t kill me. You don’t have what it takes.”

My finger catches something that must have fallen off the rack; I can feel just the tip of it as darkness closes in. I can’t help but question how I could have thought this over again and again and still fucked up this badly.

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