Page 25 of Caution Tape

Nolan

“You seem distant lately,” Natalie points out. The statement comes veering in from a faraway galaxy, an entirely different species of life form uttering it from her mouth.

I’m walking along a breezy downtown district with a foamy, too-sweet coffee in my hand and Natalie is staring at me curiously. I hear sirens in the far distance and while I realize they’re not for me, the thought occurs anyway.

What if they are?

Does it kick off as a frantic scramble, a bloody chase, a screaming end in bloodshed and chaos?

I smile at Natalie and wonder if it’d be a good idea to take her hostage. “I’ve been feeling a little… blah, you know?”

We walk past a boutique, and I can smell a sweet aroma wafting from the gourmet cupcake shop down the block. Natalie is fidgeting as she walks, touching her face too much and twirling her hair in that way that tells me she’s struggling to say something.

I zone out; Cora is drifting back into my daydream. Suddenly, I’m not taking Natalie hostage. No. Instead, Cora and I are speeding away from flashing police lights together with a body in the trunk and oceans of blood in our future.

“I feel like you’re not that interested in me,” Natalie from another galaxy says.

I look at her and know how easy this would be to fix. I could take her hand right now and tell her that I cherish her but I’m simply going through something right now. An identity crisis perhaps, devolving into a series of questions around what I want to do with my life, who I want to be, the usual nonsense people tell each other. Perhaps here might even be a ring of truth to it. Enough to make it resonate with her.

Or I could manipulate her into thinking it was her fault. Tell her that the relationship is one-sided and that I’m the only one working to please her. I’ll even add on that she hasn’t shown much interest in me beyond making me a fuckable accessory to her life. I could catch her accusation and hurl it back with such firmness that her lack of confidence would cause her to blame herself. Her own doubt would work against her, undermining objective truth.

“You did it again.” Natalie is snapping her fingers in my face. “You get that flat look in your eyes, and you’re justgone.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I told you something was bothering me and it’s like you don’t even care,” she complains.

I lean away from her fingers and open my mouth to deliver something to keep the relationship going. This is a small scratch on the surface of us and I can fix it with a bandage of words.

“I really don’t like you. You feel like an insect to me. Like a ladybug that has landed on my shirt. It was nice for a while… the ladybug. But now?” I shrug. “It’s time to flick you off.”

The wrong words leave me, but I watch them with a particular savage glee. The look on her face is of shock and hurt, and if I don’t leave soon there will be tears. I hand her my coffee cup—I’m not entirely sure why I hand it to her or why she takes it—and walk away. I hear her speak, once, but I’m walking too fast to make it out clearly.

It sounds like “Are you kidding me?” which makes me break into a wide smile.

The game with Cora can finally have my full attention.

Nolan

I spend the next few days in a state of mild alert, waiting for Cora to lunge out of various bushes and alleyways, checking my rearview mirror for a car that follows me for too long. I check over my shoulder as I walk around campus and wait for stern-faced detectives to appear and ask if I “have a moment for a few questions.”

Nothing happens. No black-haired girl tries to stab me, no police raids, nothing.

I’m almost disappointed.

I have to lay low for a while before picking out my next victim. They haven’t found the remains of Jerri yet and I doubt they will. But two disappearances in a mid-sized town will start to bring attention.

Though, I don’t want to settle into date nights with Natalie, turning in essays on Mondays, and going to work on Tuesdays while waiting to be myself again.

One day, after class, I ignore Natalie’s third call of the day and instead head to the store. I tell myself it’s to get trash bags, zip ties, and tools for the next kill—the first one was so, so messy—and totally, definitely not to see if Cora is working.

It’s the first time anyone has known what I am.

My parents are cookie-cutter suburbanites with jobs in offices. They are business-casual amalgamations, sweater vests and khakis. They aren’t capable of any sort of violence, of any sort of change. They are less than people; just shadows flitting from one task to the next.

Sometimes I daydream about dragging a body—hacked up and full of my teeth marks—and dropping it into the middle of the living room. What would they do? I don’t think they would react. My mother might look up briefly from her crossword and ask me not to track dirt on her rug.

My father might sigh and ask if I had decided on a career yet.

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