Stages of Jane

This is a work of fiction. No matter how visceral the details, this narrative is a calculated, delusional fabrication. Every perpetrator, victim, and witness; every suspect, subject, and bystander; every institution, organization, and burial site is a construct of the author’s design. From the hunting grounds to the dumping grounds, these settings and atrocities are a fictionalized stage for a fictionalized descent.

Should you encounter a detail you think you know, or a tragedy that mirrors your nightmares, understand that any resemblance to lives lived or lost, whether they be the breathing, the buried, or the missing, is a chilling coincidence. This is not evidence nor confession. Any blood spilled in these pages is ink, nothing more.

Copyright © 2026 by r c leone

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form  or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Published by Osetion, LLC

First edition

September 8, 1967

In the beginning

In the moments after a volcanic eruption, there are repercussions that radiate death and destruction with catastrophic impact. Lava and pyroclastic flows bring immediate biological death to anything, and anyone, in their path. The ashfall however, provides a much more comprehensive, long-lasting devastation to life.

Jane is the same.

The blood covering Jane, dripping from her face, soaking her clothes, is one such example of an immediate repercussion. It’s not her blood. But it is an indication of biologic death. The long-lasting devastation of life is just beginning.

The path of Jane Ashfall started normal enough. Coitus. Conception. Commencement. Through the varied steps of existence, a life is developed into an entity that could not be predicted with utmost accuracy from the beginning. In hindsight maybe. In therapy of course. Impacts compounded over time, as one would realize with consistent financial discipline, generate outsized future returns. Discipline performed delivers very different results than discipline endured. Both manifest significant outcomes. You may want to be a party to one, but your wellbeing is predicated on avoiding the other.

So, Jane sits on the floor in this dark room. Covered with blood. Contemplating life. A fresh, bloated, balding corpse at her feet. Bare feet. She tilts her head, squints in thought.

Where are my shoes?

Without further concern, Jane uses the couch she’d been leaning against to rise to the occasion. Fat boy was done. His bravado bigger than his brain. A normal case, amongst other size differentials. That little brain registered its mistake as Jane carved a smile connecting his carotids. Not enough time for his other head to react, although the testis may have retreated with haste. As Judo being the gentle way, using an opponent’s weight against them, Jane eviscerated Bob as he fell toward her. Each inch of fall, coupled with each step Jane backed away, provided an effective, if not drenching, end to this pathetic giant. The seconds it took felt expanded in that moment. Fleeting afterward. The bigger they are the harder they fall for Jane. And she loved it.

Tommy

Tommy ruled the house.

From the beginning Tommy could do no wrong. The first born was the prize. Full ceremonial weight of the first grandchild, the first nephew. Lineage. A biological gold standard. Jane was the surprise. Eleven months between them. Twiblings. One planned. One not.

Jane took the brunt of the joke before she understood it. “Oops, there’s Jane.” was a typical refrain at gatherings.

There was a baby book for Tommy. Thick. Occupying prime shelf space for quick updates and sharing. Behind plastic sleeves, his life was curated: first smile, first tooth, first step, first birthday. Tommy held up by proud hands at every gathering. Enjoying his time in the sun.

The photographs told the story plainly. Tommy held. Tommy celebrated. Tommy the subject of every frame. Jane missing or at the edge. Standing beside her mother. Not held. Not centered. Not touched. Present the way furniture is present. Acknowledged when necessary. Moved when inconvenient. There if you looked.

No one looked.

There was no baby book of Jane.

No room on a shelf, or in a drawer.

At family gatherings Tommy was the trophy making its rounds. Jane sat where she was put.

Her aunt stumbling around her in the kitchen doorway. "Oops, there's Jane." A minor obstacle. Noted. Navigated. Forgotten.

At dinner, gatherings were a sea of shared laughter and clinking silverware. Tommy performed, and the sea rose to meet him. Jane watched from whatever coordinates she had been shipped to. If she occupied a space intended for someone else, a chair, a corner, a view, the correction was swift. “Oops, there’s Jane.” As though her existence required a manual adjustment every single time.

Jane wandered into a family photo being taken. Her uncle lowering the camera. "Oops, there's Jane." Everyone shooed her out of the picture.

Jane was a deserted island in this sea of a family.

The house was the same. Not a home for Jane.

Tommy's needs arrived first and were met first. Tommy's preferences shaped the day. What was watched. What was eaten. Where they went and didn't go. Tommy moved through the house with authority. He didn't know he was a tyrant. He was a toddler. He was simply living in the world that accommodated his every whim.

Jane lived in the gaps Tommy hadn’t occupied, yet. In the spaces Tommy's attention hadn't dominated, yet. Tommy would snatch a snack, or a toy from Jane. Jane would cry. Jane would be scolded. Shaken. Spanked. Tommy would push, poke, and pinch Jane. Jane would cry. Jane would be blamed. Berated. Beaten.

Jane stopped crying.

Tommy's birthday filled the house.

Balloons. A clown. Mom baked a cake.

The family sea at high tide. Everyone singing.

Tommy blew out his candles like a boy who knew his wishes would come true. The dining room table buried in presents. Tommy tore through them like they owed him something. The sea rose to meet every reveal. Aunts. Uncles. Cousins. Grandparents. And friends.

Jane watched from her island.

Jane's birthday was on a Friday.

Store bought cake after dinner. One candle.

One gift. Wrapped in Sunday comics.

They sang. Dad checked his watch.

Jane blew out her candle.

Mom cut the cake. Tommy took the first piece

Dad took his piece to the living room. His show was starting. Mom sat down with her piece watching Tommy inhale his piece, then he took Jane’s. Mom was reactionless.

Jane opened her gift.

Weebles.

Her family gave her a wobbly family of her own. Jane lined them up on the table. A mom. A dad. A brother. A sister. A dog. Tommy grabbed the sister and started singing.

“Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down. They won’t fall down. No, they don’t fall down. Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down…”

Mom cleared the table. Cake in the trash. Off with the lights. Party over. Tommy threw the body of the sister on the table as he made his way toward Jane. He had peeled her face and clothes off. Stripped of her identity.

Jane watched it spin, wobble, and come to an upright stop.

Tommy took the rest of the family on his way out.

The laugh track from Dad's show broke in from the living room. Tommy’s singing drifting off down the hall.

Jane, back on her island, alone in the dark.

Kindergarten

The hallways of School #7 smelled like industrial floor wax and spoiled milk, mixed with a sick sweetness of juice boxes. The fluorescent lights buzzed with a frequency that Jane noticed on day one. She noticed everything. The linoleum curling under the leaking water fountain. Mrs. Ketterman’s eye twitch when the class was out of control. The way the other children moved together like a single organism, as though they had a rulebook Jane didn’t. At five years old she knew she was different.

The school was a gauntlet. Sure, the teachers and aides guided them along their day, but there were sharp angles and silent observations Jane was in tuned to. Her vocabulary and motor skills far outpaced the rest of the class. While the other children collided in a chaotic symphony of primary colors, Jane sat on the periphery, a seismic island that the natives avoided.

Except Barnaby.

Barnaby was a child beast. Constructed out of spite and processed carbohydrates. A monumental man boy with no neck beneath a buzz cut head. Bristly on a good day. He didn't walk. He encroached. Room #7 at School #7 was its own kingdom. Barnaby its self-proclaimed ruler. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, even with kindergarteners. Barnaby singled out Jane with predatory instinct. A gazelle standing apart from the herd that no one would defend. No social armor.

She read books alone during recess. Thick picture books that were more book than pictures. An obvious seriousness that made the children uncomfortable, as though she were studying something they had missed. All the more attractive to Barnaby.

For three months, Barnaby made it his mission to break Jane. It began with small things. A shove in the coat room. A hand full of sand deposited into her lunch bag, in her face, in her hair. Her drawings crumpled. Her arranged crayons scattered. Each incident was calibrated just below the threshold of adult intervention. Genius maneuvers conducted within the margins of plausible deniability.

Each successful attack meant escalation was possible. Then came "The Squish". Whenever possible Barnaby would invade Jane’s personal space. Jane would resist. Retreating in most instances, until her back was to a wall, which was where Barnaby wanted her. He would then press his whole being into her, squishing her to the wall. No one could see Jane struggling, obscured by this gelatinous mass suffocating her. Jane wouldn’t cry out. Attracting attention was not something Jane did. Barnaby’s instinct knew this. All predators possess such innate understanding of their prey. Their prey, not self-aware enough to mitigate this weakness.

The teachers, distracted by the bureaucratic nightmare of twenty-five screaming toddlers, saw a "rambunctious boy" and a "sensitive girl" whenever they did indeed observe “The Squish” being delivered. They told Barnaby to respect personal space. They told Jane to use her words. Their error was considering her silence a sign of submission. Jane told her mother once.

"Don’t be dramatic. Just ignore him. He probably likes you for some reason."

The seismic island vibrated. Pressure began a slow, imperceptible accumulation. Mother was not useful. At least not for all sake and purpose at this time. Hindsight is revelatory. It wasn't the sadness of a bullied child. Jane wasn’t sad. It was the fury of a powder keg not yet denotated. Jane was mad.

She stayed quiet. She watched. She catalogued. She knew there was a part of her brain that was extraordinarily good at watching. At measuring. At storing. This natural inclination had not been used, as much as just functioned on its own. Until now. Jane found her inner predator. Now she could see her prey’s vulnerabilities, as clear as Barnaby had instinctively seen her’s.

She learned his patterns.

He struck in transitional moments. Between activities. In the chaos of lining up. When Mrs. Ketterman was writing on the board with her back turned. He was never cruel in ways that left obvious marks. He was, in his horrible little-boy way, almost elegant about it. What he didn't understand, being only five, and with the ignorance that prey carried, was that Jane was watching him now.

Barnaby wore the same red sneakers every day. Maybe endearing on any other child. On Barnaby, they were warning lights. Jane didn’t need to look up from her reading to recognize Barnaby’s impending attack. He broadcast it. Red sneakers standing in line? Line up somewhere behind them. Once the sign was registered Jane’s mind did the rest to keep “The Squish” and Barnaby’s other tactics immobilized.

The Tuesday ‘Reading Celebration’ was one of Jane’s favorite events. Mrs. Ketterman had spent two weeks building it up with the gravity of a religious holiday. There would be certificates. There would be stickers. There would be a special sharing circle where children read aloud from their favorite books.

Against her parents’ advice, Jane brought her favorite book. It wasn't a picture book about a hungry caterpillar, or a runaway bunny. It was Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales. Her parents were right about the challenge carrying it around. Thick, heavy, gilded pages, reinforced corners that survived a century.

During the transition to the reading rug, Barnaby saw his opening. As Jane knelt to set her book down, Barnaby stomped her small, pale hand. The thin carpet provided little cushion against his weight and force. She didn't scream. She looked up. Barnaby smiled down at her. He leaned his weight onto the foot, twisting it like he was extinguishing a cigarette. "Oops," he mouthed, his eyes glinting. As he swung around to sit, he kicked her sending her sprawling. He laughed. The class laughed. Mrs. Ketterman joined the circle wondering what was funny.

The seismic island vibrations intensified. Magma began to dissolve the mantle protecting life around it.

Jane rose. She didn't cry. She didn't call out. Mrs. Ketterman told her to sit and wait for her turn. Instead, Jane picked up her book. She stood very still. In that stillness her chest got warm. It got warm, then hot in a way she had never felt before. She didn’t know how to react. A spreading warmth that moved up through her throat, her cheeks, her ears. The top of her head tingled. The heat flowed to her arms and legs. Frantic butterflies in her stomach. Her fingers got hot as they tightened around the book.

Moving with fluid precision, that no five-year-old should possess, striking Barnaby full force on the bridge of his nose. The sound of a wet branch breaking. Barnaby’s eyes went wide, with instant tears. His smile evaporated. Mouth opening to let out a roar that died in his throat as the second strike landed on his forehead.

Strike three. Four. Five.

Barnaby hit the floor. His head thudding against the same thin carpet he relished just moments before. Jane followed him down, straddling his chest. She swung the book with both hands, a rhythmic, metronomic violence. The blood came quickly. It sprayed in a fine, artistic mist across the pastel-colored "Alphabet Wall". It splattered Jane’s clothes, and the children sitting nearby. It coated the golden-embossed letters on the cover of her book.

The classroom fell into a momentary vacuum of silence, amplifying the thwack-squelch of the book meeting Barnaby’s face. And then chaos. "Jane! STOP!" Mrs. Ketterman screamed, frozen in her own fear. Children running, screaming, crying everywhere all at once.

But Jane was elsewhere. She was in the dark woods of the stories she loved. She was the wolf. The witch. The Queen.

By the time an aide pulled her off, Barnaby’s face was a bloody mask of trauma. His rule was over. He was a sobbing, broken heap of a boy, his buzz cut matted into a wet crimson cap. No crown today.

Jane stood in the center of the room as the chaos continued around her island. The heat cooled. Peace washed across her shores. Joy even. Her book was as much a mess as she was. She didn't mind. She wiped a streak of Barnaby’s blood from her face. She felt lighter. She grinned.

“Oops.”

As the principal led her away toward a future of psychological evaluations and immediate expulsion, Jane passed the remaining children. They parted like the Red Sea. Still not comprehending the full weight of what just happened. Not aware that wasn’t even an eruption. Just a shift in the thinning mantle.

Barnaby required two stitches. The cuts were superficial, as head wounds go. Dramatic in the way that head wounds are. The blood outsized relative to the damage. His nose was broken, but he returned to school the following Monday bandaged and bragging. Back to bullying. Somewhat easier now, with everyone traumatized and sympathetic.

“Good thing Jane isn’t here!” Barnaby threatened.

Jane had learned something important about herself. Even if she too had trouble grasping the full weight of what happened. She wasn’t party to the police statements or the court appearances. She was a cooperative participant in the psychological evaluations. Questioning her capacity for violence, which she had also been surprised by, but that violence, when it arrived, didn’t feel like losing control. Even though that’s what everyone kept hinting at. It was the opposite.

It felt like she had full control.

She carried that knowledge with care. The way you carry something fragile. Something you don't yet know what to do with, but you know it’s important.

Judo Summer

Over the summer break Jane started Judo, as suggested by the school’s therapist. Instill discipline. A pathway to rejoining mainstream classroom education. From floor wax, spoiled milk, and juice boxes to chlorine bleach, industrial citrus cleaner, and the rhythm of bodies hitting the floor. The Judogis needed to stay white, so the mats had to be clean. Blood was going to be a problem here. Jane felt out of sorts in her loose-fitting uniform and bare feet.

Sensei Mark greeted all the new students, ushering them to sit with him to observe the class. Some of the new children held their parents in fear, but Jane followed Sensei Mark without hesitation. Sensei Mark explained the warmups. The tumbling. The falling. The holds and throws. The chokes. Jane was getting excited. She didn’t fully understand why. She didn’t care. This was an opportunity to learn and practice hurting others. This is the good discipline. This is what they want her to do.

Learning to fall didn’t make sense. Falling wasn’t the intent. Throwing. Choking. Inflicting was the intent. Falling was a failure. Jane had not yet learned the value of breaking a fall. Taking an impact. But it was a quick lesson learned on the mat.

Its value became vivid when Dad was watching soccer. A player faked a fall, drawing a penalty against his opponent. On TV it was obvious. Dad was furious. Safely falling had value in the dojo and beyond. Timing was everything. Jane remembered the criers at school were comforted. Rewarded. Home was different. Jane’s brain was building the logic, as her twisted life evolved.

Jane didn't look at faces. She looked at feet. Bare feet meant no red sneakers to track. So, she watched the way a heel lifted, turned, twisted. Once Sensei Mark explained center of gravity, an advantage little Jane had being vertically challenged, she started to watch bodies. A shoulder tensed before a push. Hips shifting, pivoting. She was looking for the moment. That split second where advantage could be taken. She didn’t have the skills to take the advantage yet, but like any early stage artist, she envisioned what she wanted to do.

On the mat her first partner was a boy. Older. Taller. Another dense child with weight to impose on others. They gripped. Jane felt the boy's weight shift and moved to redirect it the way she had watched others do. As they were instructed. The geometry was clear in her mind. Her body didn't speak the language yet. She pulled and pivoted her hips but failed to control his mass. She was face down on the mat before she understood what had happened. The boy’s weight settled her into the mat further with each breath. Exhales were easy. Inhales were impossible. His breath was warm and damp against the back of her neck.

Jane went still.

This was too familiar. The helplessness of weight imposed. The way it flattened breathing. The way the world narrowed to the pressure and the smell. Barnaby's intention had lived in that weight. Hot and deliberate and pleased with itself. This boy's weight was different. Incidental. He wasn't trying to do anything to her beyond what the exercise required.

Jane filed that distinction. The position was the same. The meaning was not. She wondered what that meant about the position itself. Whether it was neutral. Whether what it meant depended entirely on who was delivering it and how.

She stayed still and began to take inventory. His weight was distributed forward, toward her shoulders. His hips were higher than they needed to be. His left arm was lazy. She could feel these things clearly. She didn't know what to do with the information yet. She catalogued it anyway.

The Sensei appeared at the edge of her vision. He crouched down to her level.

"Tap," he said.

Jane looked at him.

"The mat. Tap it. It means you submit."

Submit?

Jane considered this. A signal. A language the body spoke when words weren't available. But submit? That meant failure. She couldn’t breath, so she tapped out. The boy climbed off. Jane rose, turned, and looked at the boy with the same attention she'd given his weight distribution thirty seconds ago.

He wasn't Barnaby. He was just a boy who had been in the right position. She had been in the wrong position. She corrected for Barnaby. She needed to correct now.

Jane returned to her stance.

Sensei Mark watched Jane for a moment longer than he watched the other children. He began correcting her after the third attempt. Not her failures. Her relationship to them. He had watched children cry, rage, quit, deflect blame onto their partners. Jane did none of these things. She failed and went interior. Made an adjustment he couldn't always see and tried again. It was a quality he had spent years trying to teach adults who never quite got there.

He started with small corrections. Foot placement. Hip angle. Where to look. Not on hands or feet but the center of the body, where intention lived before the body expressed it. Jane received each correction without acknowledgment and applied it. No thank you. No smile. Just the adjustment, already made.

He demonstrated a throw using Jane, so she could feel it. He walked her through it once. She fell. Made an adjustment he didn't suggest. Fell again differently. On the third attempt he felt the geometry click through her. He could see it in her stillness afterward. The way she held the configuration in her body like she was memorizing it from the inside.

"Again," she said.

He gave her a book before she left that evening. Old, worn at the spine, advanced well beyond the junior class. He set it on top of her bag without ceremony.

Tommy Again

Tommy didn't knock.

He never knocked. Knocking would have acknowledged that the room belonged to someone. That the someone inside had standing. Tommy never extended Jane such courtesy.

Jane didn't look up from her studying. Her core began to tremble. Heat.

"Get out."

The diagram on the page showed the precise angle of leverage required for an arm bar. Jane mapped it against what her hands knew. Running the geometry in her mind. Feeling it, as she had never done it. Too advanced, Sensei Mark noted.

Tommy kicked the book out of Jane’s hands.

She watched it slide across the floor.

The warmth of the moment tingled throughout Jane’s body. She sized Tommy as she stood. Natives don’t always recognize the danger they live with. Prey isn’t situationally aware either.

Jane was still.

Tommy shoved.

The same flat-handed opener, in the same familiar manner he had done numerous times before. An old move. His signature move. He didn't understand that Jane had been taking his move apart every time it was performed. Learning its structure. Reading his movements. Cataloging the precise moment for redirection.

She wasn't there when his hands arrived.

His wrist was hers before he understood the shove had failed. She twisted the geometry, along with his arm. His momentum provided the power. Tommy’s face hit the wall first. Jane driving his wrist behind him, up toward his shoulder. An angle of pain. Tommy was in shocked confusion. A grunt escaped as he lost his breath hitting the wall. Jane relented the pressure to keep Tommy from crying out. But not her grip.

Tommy twisted. Jane adjusted. Reminding Tommy of the pain. Tommy stopped.

“Get off me!”

Jane walked him out. Steering him through her doorway. Across the hall. His feet responding for a body that understood the situation better than its owner did. They caught the carpet going into his room. A surprise complication for them both. Down they went.

Tommy lost his breath again hitting the floor.

Jane’s brain went to work. There was still an advantage here. She repositioned as they fell, wrapping an arm around Tommy’s throat, locking in the choke with her other arm around the back of his neck. Jane surprised herself with this move. Tommy’s pulse was frantic against Jane’s forearm. Tommy’s fear fueling Jane’s heat. She was ecstatic. A lesson learned. An advantage maintained.

She brought her mouth close to Tommy’s ear.

"Shut up."

Tommy’s position was familiar to Jane. She had memorized it from his side. Had been face down on the mat. Catalogued the precise texture of this helplessness. The way the world narrowed. The way breathing stopped being automatic.

She knew what she was handing him. She had his whole terrified body telling her everything she needed to know. She constricted as Tommy exhaled. Tommy couldn’t see her smiling, and her voice didn’t provide any comfort.

"I’ll kill you next time."

His hands came up, pulling at her forearm. She let him breathe.

From downstairs the familiar sounds arrived. Their mother's voice. Their father's. The cadence of people who considered shouting up a staircase an adequate substitute for concern. Tommy's body shifted under her. Mouth opening with an impulse toward the weapon he had always had against her. He wanted to scream. He wanted the sun to warm to him.

Jane tightened.

"Shut up."

Tighter.

Tommy went still.

Jane was feeling the totality of this moment. She wanted to know it completely, but knew this wasn’t that moment. This was the thing she had been moving toward.

“Tommy?!” came from downstairs. Concern for the prized one.

“You fell.” Jane breathed into Tommy’s now compliant brain. His body knows, even if he doesn't.

Tommy hesitated. Considered.

Jane provided a tightening reminder.

"I fell." Tommy's voice cracking, floating down the stairs. Rearranged. Diminished. A voice that had learned something in the last sixty seconds that it would never unlearn.

Jane let go.

Concern for Tommy arrived, “You okay?”

No concern for Jane forthcoming.

Tommy complied with a, “Yes.”

She pushed hard on Tommy’s back as she stood. She looked down on Tommy reorganizing himself on the floor. His head cocked. He met her eyes. Paused for permission. She felt the room. She felt his silence as he stood. Maintaining eye lock the whole time. She felt the weighted quality of power shift. It was no longer his silence. He belonged to her.

Owning is a benefit, but not the intent. Inflicting is the intent. Jane wanted more in this now fleeting moment. She shifted her gaze. Tommy’s head turned to follow. Tommy’s prized fish tank.

He was allowed to have a pet. Jane was not. She didn't look at him. She didn't need to. She could feel him behind her as she approached the tank. She unplugged the filter. The hum died. The silence magnified. She could feel everything. The water settling. Tommy stopped breathing as she scooped the fish out of the tank, flicking them to the floor. One by one at Tommy’s feet. Tommy's tears. The fish dying. Jane would have to settle for this.

Tommy sniffled. Jane scowled, pointing a little finger in his face as she walked by.

“Leave me alone.” Not a threat. An edict.

The rumble of the earthquake settled. The natives took the warning. Jane was sad it was over.

Elementary School

Ms. Albright had announced the upcoming Valentine's exchange with the enthusiasm of a woman who had not yet lost faith in the concept. Love and compassion were essential in her 3rd grade classroom. There would be witty, caring cards. There would be sharing throughout. That was the concept. It rarely worked out. Jane had little expectation, and less enthusiasm to participate.

On the day, it was also announced that Chrissy had a very special surprise involving Gus, the class pet Guinea Pig. No one was to peek, as Gus’s cage was covered until the big reveal. Everyone looked. Except Jane. She had noted it the moment she arrived. She noted the cover. She took note of the prohibition, returning to her prized Judo manual. The classroom assembled itself around the rituals of the day.

Most of the class gathered around Chrissy's desk. Not unusual, as Chrissy was the self-anointed Queen of the class. No one disputed her reign. It wasn’t a physical imposition as Barnaby was in kindergarten. This was much more about social hierarchy. The farther away from Chrissy’s desk, the further away you were from the heartbeat of the class. Jane was at her desk across the room.

This was not accidental. Chrissy had organized the exchange with herself as the origin point from which all acceptance radiated. Ms. Albright had suggested the children circulate freely. Chrissy had suggested they go desk by desk together, which was a thing that sounded generous but was not. Desk by desk together meant Chrissy led. Chrissy decided the route. Chrissy's card landed first at each desk and established the temperature for every card that followed.

The class assembled behind her with the unthinking compliance of children who had spent three years learning which direction the current ran.

Jane watched from her periphery without looking up.

She had studied this organism before. The way it moved. The way it followed Chrissy's social current without awareness that it was following anything at all. They believed they were making individual choices. They were reading Chrissy's choices and performing agreement. Jane found this more interesting than threatening. A school of fish. A flock of birds. A swarm of bugs. Collective movement that felt like freedom from the inside.

Chrissy's box was thick with cards sorted by category. A cruel and precise taxonomy. The funny cards for the boys Chrissy found acceptable. The pretty ones for her inner circle. The ones with longer messages for the girls whose loyalty she was actively cultivating. The teacher mandated minimum for everyone else.

Jane watched Chrissy work the room. The performance of each delivery. The way Chrissy's face adjusted for each desk. Warm for her circle. Bright and performative for the boys. Neutral and efficient for the outliers.

The procession moved closer.

Chrissy's entourage each had their cards ready. A small flutter of pink and red envelopes being shuffled toward the front of the group as they approached her row. The mechanical preparation of children following a current they couldn't name.

The procession reached Jane's desk.

Chrissy did not stop. She continued walking, her eyes finding the next desk, her body language performing a smooth and complete erasure. Jane's desk was not a stop on this route. Jane's desk was a space the route passed through without acknowledging. The entourage followed her lead. Cards were withheld. Eyes went elsewhere. The current moved on. Jane filed the insult. She understood it before it happened. An escalation of erasure. Chrissy had decided long ago that Jane was not worthy.

Jane turned the page.

She didn't see John.

Jane saw most things. She read a room in seconds. She felt weight shift before bodies expressed it. She catalogued patterns and ran them forward in time. She had files on every child in this classroom. Their tendencies. Their allegiances. Their relationship to Chrissy's current.

John's file was thin. John was invisible to Jane, as Jane was to everyone. He existed at the same social coordinates as Jane on Chrissy's map. Outside the organism's awareness. Not a threat, just irrelevant.  Not useful enough to be cultivated. Just there. Taking up a desk. Breathing the same institutional air.

He appeared at the edge of her desk when the procession had moved on, busy with its social commerce. A small figure. Careful. His apprehension was a beacon to Jane. Someone approaching something dangerous but intriguing. He had a card in his hand. A red envelope.

“Happy Valentine’s Day.” He blurted as he moved away, leaving the card on her desk. He didn't wait to see her face. He didn't wait for a response. He had delivered the thing and removed himself before Jane could process any of it.

She looked at the card.

She looked at John's back, retreating to his island. Arranging himself to appear as though nothing had happened.

She looked at the card again.

She didn't know what to do. She had actions for predators. She had actions for prey. She had actions for the social organism, and its queen. She did not have an action for this.

She set the card at the top of her desk, unopened, returning to the safety of her book.

The bathroom break came at the natural seam in the day. Ms. Albright organizing the line with cheerful efficiency. The aide attended to the boy who could never find his shoes. The room briefly became a space of institutional inattention.

Jane did not need the bathroom. She needed clarification.

She waited. The last child through the door. Ms. Albright's back faded away. The aide's attention distributed elsewhere.

Jane walked to Gus’s cage.

She looked around the room again, then removed the cover. What was the big secret?

Gus blinked up at her from inside a tight-fitting yellow sweater. His breathing was a bit labored given the restrictive outfit Chrissy had crammed him into.

Poor Gus.

Jane reached in and picked Gus up. He was very warm and very small. Lighter than she expected. His heart vibrated against her palm with rapid, fragile urgency. He had no defenses, and wasn’t sure whether he needed them or not. Gus was frightened.

Jane felt her warmth begin its familiar movement in her chest. A slow build. Spreading throughout. She hadn't come here with intent. She had come here with curiosity. The intent arrived as though it had been waiting. Preying.

She thought about the procession. The silent followers. Chrissy making nothing feel like something. Chrissy’s upcoming show. Using Gus. The class assembled to witness it.

The warmth tingled.

Jane was quiet and quick. Gus did not suffer beyond the moment his neck snapped. She arranged his limp corpse in the cage the way she found him. Smoothed his yellow sweater. Replaced the cover. Returned to her desk. Back to reading.

Her warmth settled but stayed for the show.

Ms. Albright brought the class back with the energy of the event. Chrissy took her position beside the cage with the composed excitement of a performer who rehearsed this moment. She looked at her audience. Made sure she had everyone. She owned the room.

Jane was attentive.

"I've been working with Gus all weekend," Chrissy said, allowing a modest pause. "And I taught him something really special."

The class leaned forward as a single organism. Ms. Albright smiled. The aide watched from the doorway.

Chrissy lifted the cover.

"Ta-da."

Silence.

Gus was very still in his yellow sweater.

Chrissy's smile held its position without quite reaching her eyes. "He's probably just tired. He was doing it all weekend so he's a little—" She reached in picking him up. Her smile changed quality. Stayed on her face but weakened. "Gus." She shook him with the tentative urgency of someone who already knew but wasn't ready to know. "He's just sleeping. He does this."

Ms. Albright moved to intervene, knowing already.

The class was still. Not a peep.

"He's dead!" rang out like a fire alarm, startling everyone. The yell from the boy who can’t find his shoes, now a sleuth. Certain. Loud. The pin pulled from a grenade before Ms. Albright could throw herself on it.

The room detonated.

The criers cried. The curious pressed forward. “She killed Gus?” Ms. Albright intercepted some. The aide tried to hold back others. Chrissy dropped Gus to the floor. Her hands splayed to avoid spreading this infection contaminating her. His corpse landed on the thin classroom carpet with a soft final thump.

Jane smiled in the midst of this new chaos.

"Oops."

She marveled at the class movements now. No longer a singular organism, synced to Chrissy. Disarray in all directions from her island. Except John. He too sat at his desk, like Jane. Smiling.

He knows?

Jane’s heat cools. Joyous emotions fleeting. She breaks eye contact with John, to consider the red envelope he delivered. She picks it up. Turning it over and over in her hands. She opens it. A card. Simple. Hand drawn heart. John made this for Jane. Inside, careful handwriting: Will you be my Valentine?

Jane looked at the card for a long moment.

Around her the room was crying, prying, and trying Ms. Albright's dissolved control. Chrissy now a shambles with the aide.

Jane looked to John, who was still smiling, then back to the card. What was this? Something she didn't have a name for. Something without a file or action to draw from. Without a category. Jane didn't know what to do.

Middle School

Middle School brought a new world. Various students from across the district’s smaller schools were now together. On the verge of High School. Not just another year with the same personalities. The comforts and concerns, that became normal. The gradual evolution was now disrupted.

Lockers instead of cubbies. Metals instead of woods. Seven daily adjustments. Crowed, noisy hallways to navigate. Cliques and social hierarchies magnified and divided to extremes. Hormones begin to influence thoughts and behaviors.

Jane noted it all on day one. Tiring.

Division by sex. By athleticism. Intelligence. Music. Couples. Specialized splinter groups. Everyone was cast to a place in the caste system.

Cady was the amplified dominator of the fembots. Chrissy was a ghost, never having recovered from her Gus Killer incident. Cady was sharper. Cady took. She didn't work the current. She was the current. Her circle was smaller. Deliberate. Quality over quantity. A tactical strike team. She moved through the building with unquestioned authority. Unapproachable. Untouchable.

And then there was Barnaby. Spotted across the cafeteria on day one. Bigger. Substantial. Encroaching. A posse now, instead of a solo-soldier. Everyone read him correctly, adjusting their trajectories away.

He didn't see Jane. Jane saw him.

This wasn’t Kindergarten.

John was by the windows.

Jane found him the way she always found him. Not looking. Just aware. She didn’t recognize or appreciate John’s gradual evolution, given they had been in the same class for years now. He had changed though. Still somewhat invisible but taller. Tighter. Smoldering. He carried a sketchbook the way Jane carried her Judo manual. Like it was part of his body.

He was drawing the cityscape from the window’s vantage. A grey skyline of an earthtone city that had known better days. John captured the image accurately, evoking a feeling of loneliness.

Jane watched him as she passed by.

The same rhythm they had been finding and losing since third grade. Parallel coordinates. Occasional intersections. A quality of mutual awareness that neither of them had language for and neither of them pushed toward resolution.

In the library he sat two tables away. Close enough. They read in the same silence without acknowledging it. Sometimes John drew. Once he dropped a narrow drawing on Jane’s book as he walked by. It was a bookmark with a ponytailed stick figure in a Judogi striking different poses down its length.

Jane smiled. Marking her page.

Their lockers were twelve apart. They had developed a language of peripheral awareness over the last three years that functioned better than most people's direct communication. It seemed enough. Neither of them knew how to make it more nor did they know why they might.

Cady knew.

Cady had instincts. Insights. She knew what John was becoming, even if Jane and John didn’t know. Where Chrissy had been a blunt instrument of social hierarchy Cady was a scalpel. She read people. She read rooms. She identified value. Pursued it. Possessed it. The confidence of someone who had never been denied what she wanted.

She wanted John.

Not only in the way a social beast wanted things. As a trophy. Cady found John interesting. Attractive. Desirable. She lingered at his locker. Touched his arm when she laughed. Asked to see his sketchbook with the careful performance of someone who actually wanted to see it. John was politely present during these approaches. Not cold. Not warm. Present in the way he was present with most things. Giving enough to be kind without giving what Cady was actually reaching for. He was just ignorant. He did not know he was developing a super power.

Jane watched.

Cady's hand on John's arm. John's mild smile. Cady leaning in to look at something in the sketchbook. Making body contact.

John's eyes found Jane's over Cady's shoulder.

Something passed between them in that look that had no name and needed none. Cady felt the current shift without seeing it. Her hand moved to John's jaw. Redirecting. John's eyes came back to her. Cady scowled back at Jane.

Jane closed her locker. Not sure how to file Cady’s actions or intent. Jane was ignorant too.

The cafeteria at peak population was seven hundred students organized by the invisible social architecture. Cady's table central. Barnaby's table adjacent. Two hierarchies orbiting, overlapping each other with the competitive awareness of neighboring kingdoms.

Barnaby's table was loud. For attention. A controlled weather system of performed dominance. His posse laughing at the right moments. Responding to his rhythms. Weaker members sitting close enough to be associated without being close enough to be targeted. Protection through proximity. Or at least they hoped.

Jane's island at the periphery. Book open. Studious and aware of everything.

Jane noted the moment Barnaby’s attention shifted. Then Cady’s. Heads turned from their tables. Target acquired. They stopped talking, laughing. Silent positioning. The predator's pause. Calculations running behind the eyes before the body committs.

John entered. Lunch tray in hand, scanning for the art kids. A loose affiliation rather than a proper clique. They didn't have Cady's territorial precision nor Barnaby's physical enforcement. They just occupied available space. Space that shifted day to day. No demands of each other, or others. Flocking for protection. Knowing that any one of them was a target, at any time. Hoping today was not their day.

John was oblivious. Jane was not.

Barnaby rose from his throne. Conversations paused. He moved through the cafeteria with unhurried confidence. He owned the room. His surprised posse assembling to trail their leader. Bodies parted the way around his mass. His gravity visible in the room through the actions of others.

John failed to recognize the approach. Barnaby was already too close. Already in the geometry of the strike. Barnaby reached out flipping John's tray. A hard shoulder thrust knocking John to the ground with his lunch. The sound was significant. Attention was drawn. The social organism registered the disturbance. Some thankful.

John and his lunch on the floor.

Barnaby looking down at him. "Oops."

His posse laughing. The sound of it practiced and hollow. Performance laughter. Hyenas.

Cady was on the move too. She wasn’t oblivious either. She  rose from her table with deliberate pace. Timing Barnaby’s finish.

Most fled the scene, or at least took up a safe distance to observe. Time was dilating for Jane. She was compelled to move forward. Not sure why. Like a first responder knows someone is in need. She didn't decide to move. Her body just did. Her heat was on. Tingling from the top of her head, to her toes and finger tips before she arrived on scene.

The slow motion of the world distorted sounds to silence. Barnaby soundlessly looming over John in his mess. Cady crouching beside John. Cleaning him. Claiming him. Her hand on his arm. Her eyes seeking his. John stunned as prey is from the first hit. Awaiting the kill. Tray in hand for defense if needed.

Jane threaded her way between tables. Through the tightening crowd. Her eyes locked on Barnaby.

She grabbed John's tray. He resisted until he saw it was Jane. Their eyes convey their thoughts.

“Help!”

“I got this!”

John released his grip on the tray.

Barnaby, Cady, and the crowd watching Jane.

Everybody watching Jane and John.

Jane stepped between John and Barnaby tray at the ready.

Barnaby rewrote the kindergarten story many times. Each revision more favorable for him. Each version further from the truth of a small girl inflicting him. The story he carried now was the one where he'd been blindsided. Caught off guard. Where it wouldn't happen again. His own heat now full force.

"You want some Janie?"

He feigned a sudden attack with his hands. Expecting a flinch. A retreat. Testing. Laughing back at his posse for their response.

Jane didn't flinch.

She closed the gap instead.

Not touching him. Just closer.

She feigned an attack with the tray.

Barnaby's body read it before his mind did. Instinct and muscle memory. His weight shifted back. His feet found John’s mess. The mess Barnaby inflicted. Karma sucks.

Barnaby went down hard. A turtle on its back. Arms and legs flailing. The room fell silent. Adults struggled through the administrative calls to break it up.

Jane looked down on the future ghost of Barnaby.

“Oops.”

She softly tossed the tray to Barnaby. Almost courteous. He caught it easily. His reflexes working fine. His body functional.

Jane turned to leave.

John was on his feet now. Cady embracing his arm. Supportive. Jane passed on her way back through the crowd. Their eyes met again.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

A full beat held between them. Time returned with the noise and chaos of the cafeteria.

She kept walking.

Behind her Barnaby's posse was laughing. The sound different now. Uncertain. Barnaby still on the floor refusing hands reaching down to help him.

"Bitch." Fading behind her. Thought by Cady. Uttered by Barnaby. Quiet enough to be deniable. Loud enough to be a promise.

Jane knew this wasn’t over.

Cady started. She was now a fixture at John's locker before first period. Early. Ernest effort. Cady had always been precise but this was commitment to a cause.

John didn’t stand a chance.

John accepted the attention with the mild smile he gave most things. Cady leaning against the adjacent locker. Talking. Incessant. The locker’s owner waiting. Not interrupting. Cady’s body angled toward John. Closing the space around them without requiring contact. An architecture of intimacy. Private in public.

Jane observed from her locker.

She noted Cady's attention. The timing. The positioning. Cady was building something. Constructing a world around John.

Jane wondered why.

She noted this without the vocabulary to know what to do with it. She had files for predators. She had files for prey. She had a file for Cady that was growing with each observation. What she didn't have was a translator.

What was this hollow feeling that grew in her? Why did she care if Cady was around John? John has been around Jane for years.

That afternoon Cady was in the library. Cady was never in the library. John was drawing. Cady beside him. Close enough to see the page. Her hand finding his arm when she laughed at something he said. John's eyes came up once and found Jane's across the room.

Jane looked back at her book. Her hollow grew. She noted it. Filed it. She didn't have a name for, but this file was getting crowded.

This file was beginning to consume most of Jane’s attention. Between second and third period. The hallways are at peak population. Bodies moving in both directions with the same compressed urgency between class.

Jane did not recognize the gravity displacement that was occurring around her. She wrongly assumed the crowd thinning was the rapid decay of time as students ducked into classrooms before the bell.

The shove came from behind. A flat handed push between her shoulder blades. Hard. Jane launched into the student ahead of her. That student turning with irritation that dissolved immediately. He instead stepped to the side as Jane stumbled to regain her footing. She knew before she could stabilize. Another shove slammed her into the wall.

Barnaby’s glare seared across Jane as he passed. “Oops.” Moving down the hall with his posse. Unfazed. Normal wrath in his path. But Barnaby had made a decision. He was running a new pattern now.

Jane was stunned as the bell rang.

Lunch brought another surprise. Cady had John sitting at her table. Not her central seat. A peripheral one. Close enough to be claimed. A promotion from the art kids. John sat there once. Twice. His sketchbook open beside his tray. Cady's circle adjusting their current to include him without comment. The organism absorbing him the way it absorbed everything Cady decided was worth absorbing.

Jane watched from her island.

She noted John's mild discomfort in Cady's orbit. The way he drew more at that table than he talked. The way his eyes moved around the cafeteria. Peripheral awareness. Waiting for someone to recognize the situation. Call foul. Out of bounds.

Cady was talking. As always. Animated. Her hand on John's arm. John's eyes trying to catch Jane’s. Reaching for something between them to restore normalcy. But things were different now. A different quality. More complicated. More weighted. Jane felt it. John felt it. The current wasn’t making the connection. The communication wasn’t being relayed between them as before.

Cady felt it too. She took John's jaw turning his head back to her. Cady’s eyes connected with Jane’s. The current connected. The message was clear.

Jane returned to her book. She turned a page she hadn't read. A prop in her own performance now. Another feigning move. Attempting to mask the hollow feelings that consumed her.

In the hallway between fifth and sixth period Jane passed John heading the other way. Their eyes met in the passing. John's face doing something that wasn't quite his mild smile and wasn't quite anything she had recorded before. A reaching again. He was trying to say something but didn't have words.

Jane didn’t understand.

She held his eyes for the beat they always held. Hoping to receive the message. It didn’t come through.

The hollow came. Fuller. Heavier.

She didn't know what to do.

Days blurred as Jane grappled with thoughts of John consuming her attention. She couldn’t get him out of her mind. She climbed the east stairwell between classes. Always crowded. She let the pace of the crowd carry her mindlessly forward. Three floors of students compressing into the same bottleneck. The chaos of bodies and backpacks with the aggressive social physics of adolescence.

Jane acknowledged the positioning plays typical on the landings. She looked up to confirm the final flight. Some of Barnaby’s crew waiting on the left. Observing Jane as she observed them. No Barnaby in sight. Jane shifted her own positioning to make the quick right at the top. Opposite the potential threats. Keeping in sight in case they made a move or gestured in her direction. A head nod.

Barnaby appeared ahead. In her lane. Locked on her. He swiped the one kid between them aside like he was paper. Jane attempted to stop. To prepare. The crowd pressed from behind.

The impact was full force. Both hands to her chest. Barnaby's full mass driving through her. Jane lost her breath. She was off her feet. Gravity wasn’t helpful. Now the crowd parted. Instead of giving Jane a point to stabilize on she was falling down the concrete stairs. Her body turning from Barnaby's momentum. Feet still finding air where the steps should have been. Arms flailing for something. Anything.

Her elbow bashed into the cold metal railing. A bolt of lightning pain, but at least something to grab. Her grip closed on it. Her body knew what to do. Ignore the pain. The threat was still active. She swung toward the wall. Barnaby rolling her tighter to it as he passed. Crushing her hips to the railing. Her face and knees to the wall.

Jane collapsed to the stairs. The posse landing a few kicks to her side and arm as they passed as well. The crowd moving around her now. A few irritated looks. No one acknowledging what had just happened.

Jane held the railing.

The threat had passed but this wasn’t going to stop.

This wasn’t casual bully Barnaby.

This wasn’t Kindergarten.

Cady swept down the hall on fire. Her circle trailing behind. Something was happening. More joined the pack to see what was going on.

Cady slowed at Jane's locker.

Not stopping. Just slowing enough to confirm Jane’s presence. Their eyes connecting. Words unspoken.

“Watch this.”

“I’m watching.”

Jane turned to track Cady to John’s locker.

John was there. Charcoal on his hands from art class. His sketchbook going into his bag. He looked to the commotion heading his way. A mild smile for Cady. Cady didn't return it. She took his face in both hands and kissed him. Not a social kiss. Not the tentative exploratory kiss of sixth graders finding their way toward something. A deliberate. Thorough. Public kiss. Designed to make a statement to everyone assembled.

John's hands came up. Surprise in his body. He didn't pull away. Just held Cady’s upper arms. His eyes were closed. Then open. Expecting the kiss to end. Then closed. Then open again. Looking for Jane over Cady's shoulder.

“Help me!”

His expression wasn’t as shocking or traumatic as the altercation with Barnaby, but similar. And the message was coming through to Jane. The hollow became something structural. Load bearing. The kind of thing that once present reorganizes everything built around it.

She turned away.

She didn't know what to do.

She still had nothing for this.

She closed her locker.

She walked away without looking back.

No one saw her tears.

Time heals all wounds, except those inflicted during puberty. Adolescence is a time for lifelong friendships, and emotional scarring.

Jane was at her table in the library. Her Judo manual open. Not reading it. A prop once again. John sat down across from her. Not two tables away. Across from her. Their established distance collapsed without discussion.

Jane looked up.

John opened his sketchbook, turning it toward her. A charcoal portrait of Jane in the library. Just as she was now.

No words.

Jane’s tears started as she admired the drawing.

John was craning to make eye contact.

She closed the sketchbook and covered her face.

She sobbed.

John reached out to her hand.

Jane pulled back at his touch. Gathering her stuff she fled the scene. Never making eye contact. No words.

John sat for a moment longer. Tears welling in his eyes now. He moved to his table to have his cry.

The hallway crowds thin out on Friday afternoons. Students filter toward buses and the parking lot. Running for the freedom of a weekend. Jane approached her locker. Bag open. Books in her hands. Her mind on John, but John isn’t around. Better that way.

She felt the displacement.

Too late.

Barnaby's mass arrived from behind. His full weight pressing her into her locker. The metal vents cutting into her cheek. Her books and bag scattered to the floor. Too familiar. Helplessness of it. The Squish.

Barnaby breathing down her neck. Mouth close to her ear.

"You're gonna pay."

Jane was still.

No fear. She was cataloguing her errors.

Barnaby held for a moment longer than necessary. Making sure she felt the full weight of it. Then he pushed off. Hard. Jane's forehead hitting the locker.

There was blood this time.

Barnaby laughing down the hall.

High fives all around.

Jane stood there. Shaking her head. Wiping the blood from her face. It was time.

Jane had a quiet refuge within the chaos of the school. Not looking for it. Just exploring the building. Noting exits. Acoustics. Traffic patterns at different hours. The way the institutional geography sorted itself. The east corridor behind the gymnasium had registered immediately as private. Useful. A space that the building's official function had no claim on after a certain hour. Even little claim on throughout the day. Kids snuck out there for all sorts of reasons. Making out. Smoking. Teachers did the same. Jocks used it as a short cut to the practice fields.

Jane enjoyed the bench in the sun outside the heavy doors. The practice fields empty and quiet. The stillness of it. A distancing from the building's noise and hierarchy and the organism's endless current. A space that belonged to no one.

She went there to collect herself.

After the Squish she needed a moment there. The hallway was empty as expected. Including the blind corner where the corridor bent toward the locker rooms. She walked its full length slowly.

She stood at the heavy door. The afternoon sun through the narrow window warm on her face.

She pushed through.

She sat. Eyes closed. Feeling the sun on her face. Thinking about what she was going to do. Excitement surging.

She sat for a long time.

When she went back inside she walked the hallway's full length again. Slower this time. Reading it. Measuring it. Not as refuge. As terrain. The blind corner. The locker room door. The distance from the building's occupied spaces. The heavy doors.

She loved this space.

This is where it would happen.

Jane was too aggressive at Judo. From the first exchange her partner felt it. A seventh grader named Paul who had been training for two years and knew Jane's rhythms the way all of her regular partners knew them. Precise. Patient. Deliberate. Jane's intensity was always present but always controlled. Always purposeful in the way that made her both difficult and educational to train with.

Tonight her intensity had a different quality.

She threw him. Hard. The mat receiving him with a sound that turned heads across the dojo. Paul getting up with the careful movements of someone taking inventory. Jane already back in her stance. Waiting.

Sensei Mark watched from the edge of the mat.

Paul came back in. Jane threw him again. Same technique. Same force. More deliberate the second time if anything. Paul on the mat longer this time. Something in his face changing. Not fear. A recalibration. Jane had changed the exercise.

He got up. He came back in. He was a good partner.

Jane threw him a third time. This time she went down with him. Her arm finding his throat in the transition the way it had found Tommy's throat. Her weight settling. Her forearm across his windpipe. Paul's hands coming up to her arm. Finding nothing useful.

The dojo had gone quiet.

Paul tapped. Once. Twice. Three times.

Jane held.

"Jane."

Sensei Mark's voice from the edge of the mat. Not loud. Not alarmed. The quality of voice he used when something required his full attention.

Jane released. She stood. Paul sat up, his hand at his throat. His face red. His eyes watering.

Jane looked at him on the mat. Something moved through her. Not the heat. Something adjacent. Focused.

Sensei Mark was beside her.

He didn't speak. He watched Paul collect himself and move to the water fountain. He watched the rest of the class resume with the careful peripheral awareness of students who had seen something they weren't sure how to process. Then he looked at Jane.

"Jane."

His face was the same face it had always been. Not frightened. Not angry. Reading her the way he had always read her. He had been reading Jane for six years. He knew the difference between her intensity and her intention.

He knew what he had just seen.

"Killing your opponent stops your growth." A pause. Not for effect. Because the next part mattered and he wanted her to hear it. "You need a rival to improve your art."

Jane held his eyes.

He held hers.

Sensei Mark had never elaborated with Jane. He had given her corrections and the book and the occasional look that told her he saw more than he said. This was one of those looks. Wider than Judo. Wider than tonight's session. A look that said I know what lives in you and I am telling you something important about what to do with it.

Jane gave him the small nod she gave corrections worth filing.

He moved back to the class.

Jane replayed the sparing session over and over. These were the moves she wanted to master. Her muscle memory was conditioned. She was ready.

Jane couldn’t sleep. Her excitement and anticipation were peaked. The heat throughout her body was constant now. All nerve endings aligned. Tingling. Ready. Waiting for a seismic release. The shell of the mantle protecting human life was thinning by the minute.

The school day dragged on. Jane sped through the corridors as if getting to class faster would get it over faster. She was a blur, and everyone around her was blurred. Barnaby was the only body in focus. She had clarity whenever Barnaby was near. And Barnaby was focused on Jane. There were no surprise encounters today. They were aligned for destruction.

When the last bell rang Jane ducked into the library to wait out the extracurriculars. Barnaby would be at football practice for at least an hour. He was slow to transition after practice. Usually, the last one out of the locker room. Jane had it timed out.

With time to spare, Jane began.

John was at his locker as Jane passed. He was a blur as everyone else had been today. From John’s perspective she was acting like he didn’t exist. So, John stepped in her path. Jane swerved to go around him. So, John grabbed Jane. Stopping her.

“Jane.”

Jane came out of her trance. She didn’t have time for this. Whatever this was. She brought her arms up and through the gap between them, breaking John’s weak grip on her.

“I have to go.”

“We need to talk.”

“Not now.”

Jane moved on. John fell into step beside her. Not touching. Just present. The way he had always been present. Parallel coordinates.

She ignored him.

He stayed with her through the first corridor. The second.

She kept walking. Her heat waning. The hollow rising.

Jane stopped.

She turned to John. Seeing him. Feeling him. His eyes reaching for her. They stood at the edge of something neither of them had the vocabulary for.

Jane looked at the east corridor.

She looked back at John.

The hollow and the heat didn't belong together. They couldn’t occupy the same space. There was only room for one. There was only time for one.

Jane turned to the east corridor.

"Jane."

Her name. Out loud. The most exposed thing he had ever done since a red envelope on a third grade desk.

She walked away.

"Jane!"

The hollow in her chest expanded. She felt it pressing outward. She felt the heat underneath it. She felt the heavy door at the end of the corridor and the bench in the sun and the future ghost of Barnaby and John's charcoal portrait of her face. She felt the tears she had hidden from everyone all of it simultaneously pressing against the inside of her chest with nowhere to go.

She walked on.

John didn't follow.

She felt him watching her go. She felt the current between them pulling taut as she moved away from it. Felt it stretch. The hollow waned. The heat rose.

She picked up her pace.

The east corridor was empty. The overhead lighting dim, casting partial shadows. The heavy doors at the end of the hall. Afternoon sun breaking through the narrow windows. Contrasting the dark.

She loved this hallway.

She took her position outside the locker room door. Dropped her bag against the wall. Her weight balanced. Her breathing even. Deliberate.

She was ready.

Barnaby came out of the locker room alone. His posse no where to be seen, or heard. As expected. He was rolling his shoulder. Looking at his phone. Oblivious.

“Barnaby.”

Jane used her words.

Barnaby stopped. He smiled.

The kindergarten story and the cafeteria story running against each other and against the staircase and the Squish and the hallway outside her locker with his mouth at her ear. All of it running fast and arriving at the same conclusion it always arrived at.

"Janie."

He dropped his bag and advanced on Jane.

Confident. Unhurried.

Jane waited until the geometry was right.

She engaged.

His size was the instrument. His momentum her power source. She found his wrist and his center and redirected everything he was bringing to her. The throw was clean. Precise. As practiced.

Barnaby hit the floor. Hard. Concrete.

That shoulder lit him up. A deep growl of pain.

Jane smiled.

"Oops."

Barnaby lay still for a moment. Processing. His face running through confusion and pain and then arriving at fury. He sprung up. Taking inventory of his shoulder’s range of motion.

He came again.

Faster this time. Angrier. Less geometry. More force. Jane redirected it the same way. His own speed making it worse. The concrete receiving him harder. His head hitting the wall on his way down. Landing on his side. He saw stars with his pain.

Jane stepped back.

"Oops."

Barnaby’s breathing ragged. She could see it happening in him. The thing she had been engineering since the first throw. The rage building past the point where calculation lived. Past the point where Barnaby could hear anything except the sound of his own fury demanding resolution.

He got up.

His face was red now. His head hurt. His shoulder was wrong. His arm. His leg. He didn't care. He pulled in a deep breath. Letting out a full throttle sound.

He ran at her screaming.

Jane felt time slow. This was it. His full momentum. His full mass. His full fury compressed into a single vector aimed directly at her. Everything Barnaby had. Everything he was. Coming at her all at once.

She took one step to the side.

She found his momentum.

She rode it down.

They hit the concrete together. Jane on top. Her arm finding his throat before they fully landed. Locking in with her other arm around the back of his neck. Her weight settling across him. The position as familiar as anything she knew. More enjoyable on concrete than it had ever been on a mat. The lava was flowing through her in torrents.

Barnaby's hands came up. Grabbing. Pulling. His legs kicking against the floor. His body not ready to submit in the mouth of a predator.

Jane tightened.

"Oops."

This one was different. She heard it herself. The difference between the first two and this one. The first two had been precise and deliberate. Almost playful. Mocking. This one was something else. More final. The word at the end of something rather than the middle of it.

She tightened on each exhale. The technique exact. The concrete cold under her knees. Catching the sun squeezing through the narrow windows as she squeezed the life out of Barnaby.

Barnaby's movements began to slow.

The flailing losing its urgency. His hands dropping away from her forearm. His legs going still. The body submitting to its fate.

Jane was about to burst.

It was right there. Hot. Alive. The feeling of totality. She had been looking for this feeling without knowing what it was. Every moment led here. This is what she wanted. Needed. Clarity.

She tightened.

"Jane!"

Her name. His voice. Urgent. Coming fast. Breaking through the roar of the lava flows.

Not now!

"Stop!"

She tightened.

John grabbed Jane. Pulling hard. She resisted.

The hollow cracked in. An unwanted vent releasing desire.

"Please!"

No one ever said please to Jane. Such a simple request. John's voice breaking through. Quenching. Was he crying? The hollow rose. The heat waned. The moment lost.

Jane felt it happening before she understood it. The tears arriving without permission. Without warning. Rising through the heat and the hollow simultaneously. Venting. Jane cried over Barnaby's stillness. John's hands on her. Everything she had been moving toward fleeting.

Her grip loosened.

Not because John pulled it loose. Her own hands. Her own decision made in the fraction of a second between Barnaby's stillness and whatever came after. The release was right there. Her hands released anyway.

She let go.

She stood.

Barnaby didn’t move. His breathing ragged.

Jane looked to John.

He was already crouching beside Barnaby. His hands moving with the efficient attention of someone assessing damage. His face tight. Focused. He looked up at Jane with tears in his eyes.

She ran to the heavy doors, breaking through into the sun.

Wiping her own tears away she screamed.

A primal release.

Not the release she wanted.

Just refuge.

Barnaby regaled the crowd from his wheelchair. Black eyes. A broken nose. A neck brace. A cast from his shoulder to his hand on one side. A brace from his hip to his foot extending his leg on the other. John pushing the wheelchair.

“There were like four of them. They must’ve snuck in the back door. Waiting in the hall. As soon as I came out of the locker room they jumped me from behind.”

“I saw at least two of them kicking him on the ground when I came around the corner.” John corroborated.

“They really wanted to win their homecoming game.”

Or so the story went.

Summer Camp

The bus ride took four hours. They shuttled Jane off for the summer. A break they said. Give her a fresh perspective they thought. Jane wasn’t supposed to know. They were taking Tommy to Disney World.

Jane watched the city give way to suburbs. The suburbs thinning. The green thickening. The highway narrowing to two lanes. Then one. Trees replacing the flat urban geometry of everything she knew. The Adirondacks arriving. Mountains? The smell of clean pine air.

Jane inhaled.

She had a window seat to herself. Always an island. Her bag her companion. Her Judo manual, now her bible, open in her lap. Reading the great outdoors instead. The way light moved through the pine canopy, than through the institutional fluorescents of every building she had ever occupied.

Camp Pukapele occupied forty acres of Adirondack wilderness on the western shore of Lake Kumupele. Cabins arranged in a loose constellation around a central lodge. A waterfront with docks and canoes. The smell of cold water and dead fish. A fire pit they referred to as the bonfire. Mess hall. Arts and crafts. Archery. A ropes course that they described as character building. Giggling, screaming children running in every direction.

Jane noted all of it on arrival the way she noted all new environments. Exits. Acoustics. Traffic patterns. The institutional geography sorted itself even here. Even in the wilderness, among children who had never met, removed from their schools, their hierarchies, their established coordinates.

The organism reconstituted itself almost immediately.

Same current. Different setting. The pine trees and the lake providing new scenery for the same social physics since kindergarten. The girls who clustered immediately around the loudest most confident girl in the cabin. The boys whose physical size and demonstrated dominance established the order before anyone had learned each other’s names. The outliers finding their coordinates at the edges of things.

Jane was her own island. Wherever she was. The social organism flowed around her island the way it always had. With one difference.

Boys were looking at her.

The organism's performed attention calibrated to unknown social values here. Your home value did not come with you. She had spent life being invisible. The looking was new information.

She had to figure out what to do with it.

As she explored, Jane came upon an expansive rock outcropping at the lake's edge. Removed from the main waterfront. With sun. Accessible but not trafficked. Good sightlines in three directions. The rock was warm, almost hot as the day progressed. She sat. Feeling the heat transfer to her body. She lay down. Sun on her face, eyes closed. Tingling as this hot rock coursed throughout her.

A new refuge.

The counselors managed the first bonfire with cheerful authority. They understood that teenagers needed a controlled environment for the social rituals that were going to happen regardless of supervision. Music from a portable speaker. The fire large enough to be impressive without being dangerous. Counselors positioned at the perimeter with the casual alertness of people pretending not to watch.

Jane sat at the fire's edge. Her island relocated to a log twice removed from the front row of logs. She watched the organism assemble itself in the firelight. Familiar hierarchies from the school cafeteria now rendered in orange light. A bit more loose given it’s early stage of development.

Select counselors told stories, led songs, engaging the campers in simple interactions. Laughs and claps led to a somewhat relaxed, borderline fun evening.

When the fire died down the counselors guided younger campers back to their cabins. Older campers were left to find their own way.

Not everyone went.

Jane noted the pairs and small groups drifting toward the tree line. A practiced casualness of pretending to be heading somewhere. The darkness of the Adirondack woods receiving them. Quick glances back as they disappeared.

Jane noted the counselors' attention consumed with the youngsters.

Then she followed. A recurrence of curiosity. No intent.

Jane moved through the dark woods in cautious silence. Unfamiliar terrain. No path. Dim light. Unseen pokes and prods manifesting as if the trees were alive. Thwarting her stealth. Surprise strikes to her face. Attempting to blind her. Forcing her to listen. Softening her steps to eliminate her own noise. Avoid detection. Enable echolocation.

The woods were full of the sounds of teenagers finding each other in the dark. Jane moved between them like a current. Noting. Filing. A boy and a girl against a tree. Kissing. Touching. Two girls whispering on a fallen log. Soft tones, sharing something they wouldn't share anywhere else. A group of boys pushing and wrestling one another. Feats of strength. Laughing.

Jane was disinterested.

She was turning back toward the camp when she heard the girl's voice. She couldn’t make out the words. It was the tone. The frequency of someone performing comfort.

She moved toward it.

Enough moonlight was coming through the canopy to see a large boy. The carriage of someone who had always been the biggest in the room. Organized his personality around that fact. He was standing too close to the girl. The gravity of his mass holding her against the tree. Though Jane couldn’t see her. Her presence, and discomfort, was assumed by her voice.

Her nervous laugh.

The boy had a knife. The moonlight flashing on it as he swung and flipped it. The knife moving through his fingers. Opening. Closing. The fluid motion of a balisong in practiced hands.

He wasn’t threatening her with it, yet. Just present.

Jane was mesmerized.

The knife moving through his fingers was precise and beautiful. Fluid. An extension of his hand. A dangerous extension. To himself and others.

She wanted it. The knife and the skill.

The girl laughed again in the wrong frequency. The boy pushed himself into her. A squish of sorts. The knife still moving through his fingers. Present. Not aimed at her. The threat living in the proximity rather than the act.

Jane watched from the dark.

His confidence. Her discomfort.

The knife.

The hollow and the heat rose in Jane. Simultaneously in a way they never quite had before. Activating flows. Growing to torrents. She hugged the tree she was hiding behind. Stabilizing herself. Intensifying the feelings.

The boy pushed harder. His free hand on the girl’s body.

She resists. Jane feels it.

He stops flipping the knife. Holding it open and upright.

Jane can’t make out their words.

His tone is stern. She isn’t laughing.

She’s trapped.

Jane can’t breathe.

He goes in for a kiss. She twists her head away. He twists her head back, moving the knife under her chin.

She relents. Hands pushing his chest. He savors her. An extended invasion.

He relents.

She gathers her breath in that instant, darting away in the dark. Back to camp.

He takes a deep breath. A moment more flipping the knife, before he stows it in his pocket, heading back to camp.

Jane breathes again.

Back in her cabin Jane lies on her bunk. Her senses still tingling. Her hearing peaked. Listening to all the sounds of the night still coming through the cabin screen. Insects. Frogs. Owls. The distant whispers and giggles still playing out in the dark. Predators and prey stalking and surviving the best that they can.

She thought about the knife.

She thought about the boy.

She felt herself as the girl. As the boy.

The hollow and the heat simmered.

The gentle sound of the lake caressing the dock, waves on the distant shore, rocked her to sleep.

Morning mail call was a public display of the social organism. Your name being called was a badge of honor. Validation that the outside world valued your being. You value in the camp organism could be improved. Especially if you shared a care package. For some, it was validation that camp was the refuge, although no one would admit it. A few kids were gradually realizing that their outside value was diminished.

Jane valued herself. She wasn’t heartbroken when the counselor confirmed the end each day, “No more mail today.” She was anticipating the announcement. That ritual morning release.

“Jane Ashfall!” rang out surprising Jane. She wasn’t sure she heard it right.

“Jane?” the counselor was looking right at her. Hand outstretched with a red envelope.

No mistake.

“It’s a card!” “Who’s it from Jane?!” started the out loud crowd commentary. “She never gets mail.” “Who would send her a card?” was the quieter under current.

She took the letter with apprehension.

John.

She read it, before committing it to the bottom of her bag. Under her Judo bible. John’s careful handwriting on lined paper. No card. No drawing. Just words. Words closing the gap between what he felt but couldn’t say. It wasn’t for here.

She would answer it. In person. When she knew what to say.

Here and now she wanted to find the balisong boy.

Not accidentally. Jane didn't find things accidentally. She had noted his coordinates during the bonfire. His cabin. His schedule. His position in the camp's social hierarchy which was substantial but not total. A predator in his natural environment. Comfortable. Unaware of being observed.

She sat near him at breakfast without sitting with him. Close enough to be noticed. Far enough to be deniable. She recorded every movement he made. Precision. Intention.

She noticed when he noticed. An interesting island to explore. She felt him deciding. Choosing his approach before he moved. He sat down across from her.

The gravity of his size matched his confidence. Confidence in his calculation of success. He said something. An opening. The weak vocabulary of a boy. Jane didn’t care. Didn’t even hear what he said. Amazed at the ease by which she manifested this encounter. Predator and prey.

She held his eyes. Said nothing.

He tried again. A different angle. She noted the adjustment. He was trying to read her. Looking for an opening. A vulnerability. A gap in any armor she might have.

Jane revealed nothing. She never had armor. Boys like this always assumed vulnerability. An island adrift. Alone. Lonely.

She let him mistake it.

She smiled.

They snuck away. His idea. Jane's plan all along.

A nod. A time. A location. A path behind the equipment shed led to the lake's northern shore where waterfront supervision didn't reach.

He brought the knife.

For joy. Jane wasn’t surprised. The knife was part of him the way Judo was part of her. He probably didn't leave the cabin without it.

They sat on rocks above the water. The Adirondack afternoon pressing down through the pine canopy. The lake flat and silver in the midday light. He talked about himself. His football. His town. The things he'd done. Feats of strength. Power. Prowess.

Jane listened. Not for the content. For the patterns. The narcissism made audible. She didn’t have words for the patterns yet. Machismo. Bravado. But she understood someone who needed to be witnessed. And she wanted to see the knife.

She asked about the knife.

His face changed. The talking-about-himself frequency replaced by something more alert. More present. He liked where this was heading, even if he didn’t know how she knew.

He showed her.

The balisong flipping open and closed in his hand. The fluid motion she had watched in the dark. Full sun not as enticing as the catches of moonlight. First times can never be relived. Up close it looked more intricate. The handle halves rotating around the blade. The sound of it. The way his hands knew it without looking.

"Can I try?"

“It’s dangerous.” He smiled

Jane stared deep into his eyes. He stopped flipping. She ran her hand up his thigh, grabbing his arm.

“Give it to me.”

He relented.

Jane felt powerful. Her lava flowing.

The weight was the first thing. Balanced. The handle halves shifting as she held it. She turned it over. Studied it.

She tried the motion she had watched him make. Slow. Deliberate. Mapping the geometry against what her hands knew. The knife moved wrong. Her fingers in the wrong place. The blade provided her first lesson. Drawing first blood.

“Let me show you.” He took the knife back as Jane sucked the blood from her finger. He demonstrated in slow motion, explaining the choreography.

She adjusted. Tried again. Better.

He corrected her.

She tried again. And again. And again.

They came back the next afternoon. And the next.

The rest of camp receded. Scheduled activities attended with the minimum presence required. Meals eaten in haste. The thing that mattered was time with the knife.

The knife and him.

She was a fast learner. By the fourth afternoon the balisong was opening and closing in her hand with something approaching fluency. Not his ease. Not yet. But the geometry was becoming familiar. The weight was becoming known. Her hand was developing its own relationship with the knife. Independent of the boy.

But the boy watched. Stayed in contact with her body. His hand over hers now and then. Excuses to touch her. Linger.

Jane allowed it. Enjoyed it. Basking in these newfound sensations. Side by side on the rock as she commanded the balisong. His arm around her. Hand on her hip. Holding her close. The heat and the hollow always together now. With the knife. The boy was just the carrier, but he wanted to be more.

On one occasion she was late for their rendezvous. Balisong boy was skipping stones across the lake waiting. When she arrived he took her into a tight full body hug. She embraced his mass in a friendly manner. A couple taps on the back to say hi. Signaling a typical end to the custom. But he held her. His breathing heavy in her ear. Down her neck. Followed by his lips, his mouth. Tasting her.

She considered his positioning, moving her hands to his arms, attempting to push back away. Judo instincts cycling through maneuvers. He shifted his weight as his hands began to roam her body. Fully sucking her neck now.

Jane increased the pressure of her push, “Did you bring the knife?”

The boy raised his head away from the feast he was making of her neck. His excitement apparent against Jane’s stomach, as he pulled her tighter into his body. Holding her with one arm, he flashed the balisong open. His eyes on her. Her eyes on the knife. He moved the knife up and down, side to side, with Jane’s eyes and head tracking in sync. As he brought the knife between them, he went in for a kiss. Jane scowled shifting away. He grabbed her hair bringing the knife to her face. Smiling.

Jane relented. His kiss was wet and sloppy. His tongue forcing its way into her mouth. Jane allowed his probing and groping as she took the knife from his hand. He was more than willing to release it, freeing him to use both hands to explore all of Jane. Once she had the knife lava permeated her being. The bumbling balisong boy had little effect on her compared to the knife.

She flipped the knife in her hand, as he made his way back to her neck. This summer of discovery was coming to an end, but Jane had what she wanted. She pushed off balisong boy. Grinning ear to ear as she darted away with the knife. He had no chance of catching her.

Jane slipped the knife into her pocket before re-entering the main camp environment. She had some basic courses today. Resilience. Empathy. Identity. Preoccupied, she would rub her shorts to feel the length of the knife against her leg.

In the mess hall that night Jane saw balisong boy come in with an entourage. He waved them on, then sat next to Jane. Not a word spoken, just deep eye-to-eye contact. He was feeling her leg under the table. Jane attempted to gain control, but once he located the knife, he extracted it deftly, sliding it into his own pocket. Observed by none. Smiling, he departed, joining his rowdy troop.

Jane was annoyed.

When they next met there was no discussion of the knife. He didn’t even bring it out. Instead, he quizzed her about where she lived, where she went to school, hobbies, and more. Jane didn’t withhold any information. They were both from Rochester. Heading to different high schools. East High for him. Marshall for her. Her brother was a year ahead at Aquinas. Private. All boys. Judo for her. Pop Warner football for him.

They were down at the lakeshore throwing rocks throughout their talk. Which was running out of steam. Up on their ritual flat rock overlook a squirrel appeared. Jane was the first to take a shot at the squirrel. She missed. And while the squirrel turned quickly, facing where Jane’s rock ricocheted, it didn’t run off. Returning to the nutty snack it was working. Balisong boy tried with equal failure. The game was on. The squirrel jumped for a couple near misses, but was determined to finish its snack. The couple was determined to connect.

The lucky rock caught the squirrel in the head. Jane’s. The squirrel spun out of sight. They scrambled up the rock to discover the squirrel twitching and flipping. Both of them stared. Jane’s lava rising. A small spot of blood visible on the squirrel’s head as its body shifted between states of rest and spasm.

Knife flashing in the sun, balisong boy grabbed the squirrel, splitting its belly open with practiced efficiency. The blood spray caught Jane in the face. Warm. Matching her lava.

He followed the trail of the spray. Grinning. Reading Jane’s stillness as shock. Maybe disgust.

Jane smeared the blood on her face. Drawing her fingers across her cheek. She looked at her finger tips, then at him.

Not disgust.

Not shock.

He was surprised. Had hoped this would be an opportunity to taunt and tease her. His grin was half strength now. He thrust the squirrel toward her. An attempt to incite fright.

Jane didn't move.

He shook the carcass to spray Jane again.

She stepped forward so more of it could hit her.

He didn’t know what to think.

She flashed back to Barnaby's blood spraying her each time she struck his face with her book. The feeling of power and joy. The pressure of her lava was heightened. Her extremities were alive. Tingling.

She beamed. Glowing.

He whipped the squirrel into the lake.

No fun if she’s enjoying it.

That night, after the bonfire he grabbed her before she reached her cabin. They had been making eyes at one another across the fire pit all night. Funny faces from a distance to make each other laugh. They had not once snuck off at night, although Jane replayed the scene from her first voyeur moment over and over, day and night. Conjuring feelings of her own, imaging herself up against the tree. Knife in play. Her favorite variation with roles reversed. Him pinned to the tree. Her with the knife to his neck. Tears in his eyes. A smile on her face.

Of course, he had other visions. Deciding to try something with her since the beginning of their meetings. The daylight make out session. The squirrel blood. Both elevated his assumptions. His logic running hot. She didn't run. So she'll let me do whatever I want.

The night was warm. The darkness complete beyond the path's edge. Away from the camp. No moon. Plenty of stars. He was larger in the dark somehow. His size and confidence created a gravity as they walked into the dark, hand-in-hand for the first time.

He steered the way, spinning Jane up against a tree along the path. This was it. He already had the knife open in his hand. Not pointing it at her. Just present. The same technique she had watched him perform before. An intended threat living in the proximity. The blade catching whatever light was available.

Jane smiled.

Not a performed smile. Not a mask to hide fear. She was excited. Heated. She noted the knife's position. His grip. The geometry of his stance. He stepped closer. Making his move. The knife choreography in play. His eyes. His mouth. His entire body an open book to Jane.

She waited for the geometry.

Then she moved.

His wrist was hers before he understood the knife had changed hands. Not a throw. A redirect. His grip unwilling, then empty. The balisong Jane's now. The blade still between them just role reversed.

He was somewhere between stunned and amazed.

Jane accelerated the little momentum he provided, swinging him around, slamming his back into the tree. A slight loss of breath as the role reversal completed.

Jane held the knife with the same ease he had. The weeks of practice now evident. The weight familiar. The balance known. The choreography hers.

She pressed the blade up under his chin. He lifted his head away from the pain she was inflicting. She still held his wrist as he attempted to grab the knife. Her threat at his chin increased. He relented. Hands up.

Jane pressed his wrist to the tree. His hand by his face. With a flash she sliced his palm, returning the knife to his chin. He hissed. His breathing sharpened.

Jane watched the blood run down his hand, to his wrist, over her hand. Fluid excitement. Dark in the moonlight. She brought her mouth to his hand, licking blood from his palm. The taste was electric. The shockwaves rolled through her.

She pressed her body into him, moving the knife to his neck. Flat. Not cutting. She felt his excitement grow against her, despite everything. Forbidden. His loss of control. Twisted. Despite the pain he was feeling. Decadent. Despite his brain trying to tell his body to run. This girl is crazy!

Jane was on the verge of erupting.

She pressed the blade against his neck. Every emotion, every thought, running through her mind and body. Torrents and currents. His skin relented to the pressure Jane was feeling. Blood starting to emerge as she edged the knife further. He didn’t resist. His breathing a rapid beat, matching his heart rate. Jane leaned in, pressing her mouth to this new opening. Sucking his life force out.

She tasted him.

Felt him shaking.

She stepped back. Taking it all in.

This was no longer a bully boy. Maybe never was. A poser. His hand bleeding. His neck bleeding. Held in position by his own desires. Positioned like a doll for her own enjoyment. His whole body under her control. As thrilling as this was. As exhilarating as this merger of heat and hollow had become. There was an element missing. The desire to end him.

Jane expertly flipped the balisong closed.

“This is mine now.”

The last morning the buses lined up on the dirt road outside the main lodge. Bags loaded. Counselors with clipboards. The organism saying its goodbyes. Tears and laughs blended as this little slice of life disassembled. Summer loves and lusts coming to an end. One last embrace. An exchange of information, hopeful for extended contact. Extended enjoyment of this special experience.

Bag in hand, balisong in her pocket, Jane made her way to the buses. Her hand rubbing the length of the knife as she walked. Grinning the whole time. Emotions still coursing through her.

“Jane!” rang out. Balisong boy waving his own excitement up ahead. His hand wrapped in gauze. Band-Aid on his neck. This was a whole new being. He hugged her tight and released.

"Hey."

Jane looked at him.

"What's your name?"

Jane smiled. Kissed him on the cheek, then got on the bus.

She found her window seat, retuning his wave.

The bus pulled out, kicking up dust behind them. Jane watched the camp dissolve in the thin brown cloud. The cabins. The fire pit. The flat silver lake. The northern shore where the rocks were above the water. The sunlight coming through the pine canopy. The dirt road gave way to the highway. The bus accelerated them back to civilization. The highway widened. The green thinned. The summer was over.

Balisong in her pocket.

Jane was ready.

High School

Jane came home as she left. No discussion. No fanfare. The house felt foreign. Not that it ever felt like comfort, but now it felt lesser. Stale. Cramped. Boring. Too small for the being she was now. Her ambitions in life recognizing the limitations this environment presented. These people presented.

Even the sounds of the house were more pronounced as she moved through it. Her footsteps on the stairs louder. The creaks and strains more noticed. As if the gravity of her presence was heavier than before. Claiming more space.

Tommy was in his room.

Jane stood in his doorway.

His room had evolved in Jane's absence. New posters. New furniture arrangement. The fish tank space on his dresser now occupied by an Iron Man figure. Boxed. Mint condition. A souvenir of a magic time. A trophy awarded during family time. Evidence that the summer had been good for Tommy.

Tommy looked up from his comic. His eyes starting a calculation of this new Jane. Threat assessment. Fight or flight. Emergency measures activating.

She crossed the room to the Iron Man.

Tommy sat up.

She turned it examining each side. Lifted to feel its weight.

Tommy jumped from his bed.

"Jane,"

She dropped it on the floor.

Not thrown. Just dropped. The box landed on a corner, crumpling a bit on impact. The figure inside shifted. Jane kicked it to Tommy’s feet on her way out. Not so mint condition now. Just a plaything.

Jane paused at the doorway offering Tommy a,

"Welcome home."

Marshall High School resembled a minimum-security prison more than it did a high school. The institutional aspects imposing on most incoming freshmen. Another new set of students from across the district arriving. Some with accumulated social identity and hierarchy to exist within or attempt to overcome. Some without. Brand new identities to develop.

Jane was both.

The social sorting began immediately.

Jock and Fox. Freak and Geek. The bookends. Everyone else, in the middle.

She found John at his locker before homeroom.

She touched his shoulder, getting him to turn. Not sure what to expect, John smiled when realizing it was Jane.

She hugged him tight.

She kissed him.

Her best Cady kiss imitation. A performance for an audience that didn’t really care. This wasn’t middle school. Brief. Direct. Jane's mouth on John's mouth in the crowded first day hallway with the organism flowing around them. A statement that didn't require witnesses but had them anyway.

She pulled back. Smiling.

"Hi," she said.

"Hi," he said.

She went to homeroom.

They found their rhythm. Their new identity as a couple.

Jane mapped the new school's private geography for them. Under a low traffic stairwell between classes. A storage room that was never locked and rarely used. The smell in there made for a bad experience, so that location was dropped. The small line of trees that separated the back of the school from the nearby houses. Invisible from the parking lot. Far enough to feel like a refuge, although it was a common area for all students seeking refuge.

They stole moments whenever they could.

Lunch periods. Free periods. The occasional class Jane decided wasn't worth attending. John never skipped but arrived late to things on days when Jane offered something better. They were figuring out the physical vocabulary they had been building toward since a handmade Valentine in third grade. Slowly. Incrementally. Two patient people who had lost all patience when separated.

Jane was the more deliberate of the two. She set terms without announcing them. John learned them. He was good at reading Jane. Better than anyone. He wasn't always right but he was always paying attention.

Jane was alive with a current of never-ending lava.

There was a tree behind the school, its trunk an assortment of carvings. Names. Initials. Dates. Declarations going back decades. An embedded social history. Class of 1974 was here. Initials inside hearts that had long since been broken. Died. Promises made by children now living with children of their own.

Jane had her lunch. John had his sketchbook. They sat in the shade, not talking, in the comfortable silence that had always been their most fluent language. She consuming. He creating.

After Jane finished eating, she studied the carvings in the bark. Circling the tree over and over, up and down. Running her hands over the history. Absorbing the intents left behind. Wondering. Searching. Deciding.

She produced the balisong, opened in an instant. The rhythmic metallic clap breaking the quiet between them. Surprising John.

"Where’d you get that?"

"Camp."

“Put it away before someone sees.”

Jane was already occupied. The blade moving through the wood with care and attention. Precision. The letters taking shape. JnJ inside a rough heart. Simple, yet nondescript. They would know.

The bell rang.

Marshall High School's organism had reconstituted itself around new centers of gravity. New hierarchies. New kingdoms establishing their borders. As much as the Freshman thought they were establishing something new, the upper classes reminded them of their lower status. Freshman Friday was real.

Barnaby had his footing. Size matters. Football had continued its work on him across the summer. He moved through Marshall's hallways with authority. There were some upper classmen that could challenge him if they wanted to, but they didn’t. Mutually assured destruction kept the hallways from becoming too much of a giant’s battleground.

Barnaby glared at Jane every time he saw her. She mirrored his intensity. Recognition that their war wasn’t over yet. Annoying. Bothersome.

The time with John was welcome escape for Jane, although it lacked completeness. Stolen moments were just that. Momentary. Interrupted. She longed for more. John sensed it. Feeling the same way. Finally, he suggested they head to his house after school. His parents were never home. Jane knew her house was not an option. Her mother always there. Tommy too.

John’s house had a pool!

They walked hand-in-hand turning down Seneca Parkway. An incredible tree lined enclave of houses much larger than Jane’s. The neighborhood was nicer too. The sun breaking through the trees reminded Jane of camp. Still fresh in her senses. City noise reminded her where she really was.

John’s house was impressive from the street. Canopy’s shading each window. Brick blended with siding upgraded the exterior, with a matching multicar garage in the back. The rectangular inground pool took up the entire backyard. They set their bags in the shade before going into the house.

John provided a grand tour. It was a modest house. No micro mansion, but well furnished, with art and books and antiques. A finished basement with a pool table, bar, projection screen, and more. Wealthy from Jane’s perspective. Comfortable from John’s. They crashed in the basement to watch a movie and make out. Nothing crazy. Just two kids exploring each other in private. They had some Heavenly Hash sitting by the pool as the sun started to set. Jane was reluctant to leave but had a long walk home. John suggested they ride bikes. They had several in their garage.

Jane didn’t have a bike. She learned to ride on Tommy’s. Sneaking it out of their garage. Teaching herself through fall after fall, alone on the sideways near her house. The wind on her face, through her hair, was a feeling like none other. Riding with John made it even more enjoyable. They were to Jane’s house in no time. Another fleeting moment. John helped her get it in their garage, stole a kiss, then sped off.

Jane floated to her room.

Their romance felt natural. They fell into routines between school and John’s house. Not much else. Weekends they were apart. Which felt unnatural to Jane. Family gatherings carried even less interest to her, as she thought of John whenever they were separated. Now that she had a bike to use, she decided it didn’t need to be that way. On one such occasion, she jumped from their car, onto the bike and sped off to John’s house.

This was the first time she arrived without John as her escort. The house seemed the same. No cars in the driveway as she parked the bike by the garage, but there were several other bikes. She debated whether to knock on the front door, or make her way through the back gate as they typically did. She could hear music coming from the house, so she opted for the backdoor.

Were they having a party?

Jane knocked and waited. Nothing.

She put her face to the glass but couldn’t see anyone in the house. The basement door was open. She knocked again before turning the knob. The door was unlocked, as was typical, so she opened it. The music was loud coming from the basement. She called out to John but nothing. So she entered, closing the door behind her. She felt out of place. Unnatural. Something wasn’t right, but once she found John everything would be fine. She stood at the top of the basement stairs hearing several voices talking and laughing, but didn’t hear John. His voice and laugh were etched in her being. There was something familiar in the mix down there, but this context was wrong. She couldn’t pinpoint who it was, but it wasn’t giving her any comfort. She called out to John again. Louder. Her concern registering out loud. Still nothing. No pause or recognition that she was in the house. So she started down the stairs. The voices and laughter seemed to be all boys. As she reached the bottom of the stairs she heard one voice rise above the others, “Wait! Wait! Wait!”

Barnaby!

As she stepped into the room goose bumps covered her body. Her inner pressures spiked. Her temperature spiked. Barnaby was holding court in John’s house. This invasion was unbelievable. John was nowhere to be seen.

Did they kill John?

Barnaby grinned ear to ear, “Janie!” as all six heads turned to her. A deer caught in the headlights. Jane was still. She wanted to cry. She wanted to beat them all to death with the pool sticks they were leaning on. She wanted to clear this infestation from her life. These worthless maggots. That mass of insignificance.

A hand from behind gripped Jane’s shoulder. Triggered. Jane grabbed the hand. Spinning. Twisting. Throwing its unsuspecting owner to the ground. The pests burst out in synchronized laughter, as Jane positioned her foot over this body’s throat. A pending death blow to crush their windpipe. Not a moment too soon Jane realized the body was John.

John was as surprised as Jane.

It all happened so fast. Jane’s mind was spinning. She didn’t release John.

“What’s going on?”

“We’re just hangin’ out babe.” Barnaby answered. Raising another round of laughs from the collective.

“It’s okay.” John offered in a soft reassuring tone.

“It’s not.” Jane fired back, throwing John’s arm she had a death grip on. She turned, storming back up the stairs before she started crying. John was quick to follow.

“Don’t go.” Barnaby mocked in the distance. One last laugh from the vermin.

The relationship recovered with an expected awkwardness of something that had been interrupted at an important moment. It needed to find its rhythm again.

John called it a misunderstanding.

Jane called it a betrayal.

Neither was willing to throw the other away.

Jane waited for an invitation before going to John’s house again. It felt different now. They hung out at the pool in the late afternoon light. Jane on the pool's edge with her feet in the water. John beside her. Close. Their shoulders touching.

"There's going to be a party," John said.

Jane looked at the water.

"Here?"

"Yes”

“Why?”

"Barnaby's idea." A pause. "He thinks it would be fun."

Jane went still. She felt the geometry of it assembling in her mind before she had words for the problem. The organism in this house. Barnaby in this house. Whatever Barnaby had been building across months of friendship, John still believed it was genuine. Jane felt otherwise. Nothing good comes from Barnaby.

"It's a terrible idea."

"It'll be fine."

Jane glared at John.

John reached over. His hand finding her hip. Pulling her closer for a kiss.

Jane redirected him. Hard. Pushing him in the pool.

John hit the water splashing and sputtering. His hair in his face when he surfaced.

Jane was gone.

John and Jane were in very different spaces now. John’s house started filling early. By nine it was beyond full. The organism at maximum density. Music from every room. The kitchen in disarray. Barnaby's posse launching chaos everywhere. The living room furniture pushed back. The pool lit from below, occupied by varied beings, of varied intent, in varied states of drunkenness.

John moved throughout with mild discomfort. This was his first mass encounter with the social organism. In his space. Which at this point had become a place he didn't recognize. Jane stayed closed. Reading the room. Trying to anticipate what was going to happen. It was the only reason she was there. Keep John safe from whatever Barnaby was up to.

Barnaby was everywhere.

His smile preceding him through every room. The patient private smile he'd been showing Jane in school hallways for weeks. Something building in it now. Closing in. Barnaby was monitoring Jane as much as she was watching him.

With one exception.

John had gone out to survey the pool. A dead body floating in the pool would not be good. Jane followed him out.

The intent came from behind.

Not an accident. Nothing Barnaby did was an accident. The full cup of beer catching Jane across her shoulder and chest. Cold. Immediate. The smell. Drenched in Barnaby's beer while Barnaby performed surprise for the people around them.

"Oops."

The crowd let out a collective “Oh!”.

Jane turned for the showdown.

Barnaby was bent over in a full body laugh.

It didn’t take much.

Jane latched onto his wrist. Clean. Precise. As practiced.

Barnaby tumbled into the pool.

A mighty splash.

Then Jane’s “Oops!” as a sonic scream.

There was silence for three seconds.

Then crowd roared out laughter.

Barnaby surfaced. The private smile gone. His rage visible.

John appeared beside Jane. His hand on her arm.

"Jane,"

"I told you this was a bad idea."

Jane left.

John turned back to help Barnaby out of the pool. Instead Barnaby pulled John in. John hit the water with surprise. Barnaby dunking him before he could orient. Once. Twice. A third time. John swimming away. Barnaby following.

Jane took a moment outside to consider whether she should stay or go. Barnaby was on tilt now. Only he knows who he’ll take it out on. John? A posse straggler? Anyone else?

The night was cold. The party noise subdued but radiating throughout the quiet neighborhood. It won’t be long before someone complains.

She heard his heavy breathing and sloshing behind her first.

“Janie!”

Jane didn’t turn. She just started walking away. She could hear him following. She picked up her pace. Still not running. Leading him down the street. Fewer street lights at the dead end. She knew there were railroad tracks somewhere in that darkness ahead. A light jog. Looking for a path. There was always a path. A gap in a fence. Kids walked the tracks all the time. Rode their bikes on the maintenance roads cutting across the city. Tried to jump the trains.

Perfect!

Jane paused before ducking through the gap in the fence. She wanted to make sure Barnaby saw her in the dark. The ambient light of the city just enough, if you’re close enough. His breathing was still heavy but he wasn’t quitting on this chase. He was focused. He saw her stop. He slowed. Caught his breath. His chest heaving.

He smiled.

Jane held his eyes to ensure his commitment.

Then she turned and disappeared. The gravel bank of the tracks was higher and steeper than expected. It wasn’t a challenge for Jane to make her way up, but it did narrow the distance between her and Barnaby. She didn’t wait for him to make his way up. The Aquinas practice fields should be nearby. They’re not lit and far from houses. Jane decided to head in that direction. She stayed on the tracks so she could she Barnaby and he could see her. She could see Aquinas as she approached from the elevated position of the tracks. Barnaby appeared further back.

She waited again.

Barnaby came down from the tracks with zero subtlety.  He was in no mood for this. He was going to bring this to an end, no matter how long he had to follow Jane. No matter where. He emerged on the edge of furthest field still breathing hard. His eyes adjusting to the light between the dark of the surrounding trees, and the unobstructed field. Jane stood at the dark edge.

Barnaby stopped, hands on knees, to catch his breath again.

"End of the line Janie."

Jane held her place as she took off her shoes and socks. Her shirt. Hands in her pockets, removing them as Barnaby approached. When in range he lunged.

In one fluid motion Jane brought the balisong out, open, before Barnaby covered half the distance between them. His momentum committed. His full mass bringing everything to her.

She planted her bare feet.

The blade met him below his belly button as his body arrived. His momentum driving it in. Jane pulling up through him as he fell. His falling finishing what his lunging began. The sound of it lost in his own sound. His breath going somewhere it couldn't come back from.

The blood came immediately.

Torrents of it. Dark and warm across Jane's feet and legs. She stepped back. Her heel sliding through Barnaby’s life and the dewy grass. She stumbled. Barnaby's fall completing what her stumble complicated. They went down together.

His weight on her one final time.

His last heartbeats working against her chest. The blood coming in pulses across her face and throat. Jane on her back Barnaby sliding across her. Baptizing her in his blood.

She was ecstatic in this moment. Complete. Every nerve ending alive. The hollow, the heat, the kill, all fused into a single current running through her entire body. Exploding beyond her.

Finally!

A complete eruption. The climactic release.

Her first.

Not a vent. Not a shift in the mantle. The full event.

Barnaby's last heartbeat sent the last of him across her face. Jane lay still beneath him. Eyes open. The cloudless sky above. The warmth starting to cool already. Fleeting.

She laughed.

She yelled

"Oops!"

Homecoming as a junior is almost special. For John and Jane it seemed more like an obligation. The social organism at full expression during this time. School spirit. Neither of them had a role to play, but they attended and cheered anyway.

The football game was the main event versus East High.

A memorial announcement for Barnaby.

Jane smiled at John's side.

His arm around her. Her head buried in his chest. The warmth of him fighting the October cold. John talking to someone from his art class. Jane present and not present. The background process always running. The people always being read.

Jane's eyes moved across the crowds.

Across the field. On the edge of the bleachers.

He raised two fingers to his eyes.

Then pointed them at Jane.

Who is that?

It took a moment to register. He was out of context for Jane. Larger than camp. Two years of whatever he'd been doing maximized his mass. But it was definitely the balisong boy.

He was locked on her. Mouthing, “I see you.” Across the field. Jane held his gaze. Not sure whether there was anything to do. She looked up at John, who was still in a side conversation. When she looked back the balisong boy was gone.

Jane scanned the East High side of the field but did not find him. Then she caught a lone figure crossing behind the endzone. He wasn’t running, but his stride was confident. His head up. Still focused on Jane.

John felt Jane's posture change before he knew why. She pulled away a little. His arm tightening to maintain contact with her. He dropped off his side conversation. Trying to read Jane.

“Jane?” John followed her intense gaze.

The balisong boy arrived.

To this boy John might as well have been invisible. His obvious intent was Jane.

"Jane Ashfall I presume." was his dry opening, coupled with a sarcastic grin.

"This isn't the place." Jane snapped.

John stepped forward. His body between them in the way his body had always found its way between Jane and whatever was approaching her. "Is there a problem?"

The boy looked at John for the first time. A brief assessment. Then back to Jane.

"She owes me something."

Jane's eyes found his. "Careful."

John's hand went to the boy's chest. A push. Not hard. Firm. The language of someone establishing a boundary with their body rather than their words. "I think you're done here."

The balisong appeared.

Not the one Jane confiscated. His replacement. The blade opened with his practiced ease. His overconfidence on public display. John's hand came back. The crowd hushed in the immediate vicinity registering the blade. Redistributing itself.

"This is between us." A finger motioning from his chest to Jane.

Jane stepped between them.

She put her hand flat on John's chest. Feeling his heartbeat under her palm. Fast. Controlled.

"I got this."

John was erased from the equation. He held her eyes for a moment, then stepped back.

Jane turned to the boy, guided him sideways along the fence. Away from John. Away from the crowd's attention. Far enough for the conversation to be private.

"Whatever this is," Jane commanded "This isn't the place."

"We should connect," His eyes scanned her.

"And you give me what’s mine."

Jane looked at him for a long moment.

"Okay."

She smiled.

"Maplewood Park. Tomorrow night."

He smiled. The negotiation concluded in his favor as far as he understood it.

Jane returned to the warm comfort of John’s embrace.

The leaves mostly down in October gave the park a crunchy carpet. Night was falling fast with shadows already hiding the unlit path. The dead leaves making everyone aware of each other. The roar of the falls in the distance could be heard as white noise in the background. The river gorge, ninety feet deep, provided the edging for the park. Its fence line guiding walkers on the path after dark.

There were still a few walkers, with dogs and without, as Jane arrived. A couple on a bench. The city's ambient light pressing in from all sides. Once the snow falls the park is alive with sledders and tobogganers enjoying the long gradual banks that isolate the park from Lake Avenue.

Snow wasn’t falling tonight.

Balisong boy found Jane on the path.

It felt like a night at camp again, just colder.

They walked together for a moment. Both aware of their own noise, and those around them. Jane pointed to a gap in the fence.

"Some privacy," as she ducked through, holding it wide to accommodate his mass. He considered the gap. At Jane struggling to pull it open further. He went through.

Jane led them a short distance into the brush. Enough that they couldn’t be seen from the path. Enough of a clearing that they had room to move.

Jane flipped the balisong out and opened. His balisong. The knife she'd taken from him in the Adirondack dark two summers ago with his blood still warm on her mouth. The knife she'd been carrying in her pocket every day since. That he'd been thinking about every day since.

"This what you want?"

He smiled. A full smile.

"And then some."

The camp poser was gone. He had grown into his mass. Knew his power. His capabilities. What he wanted. How to take it.

"Come and get it tough guy." Jane taunted. No fighting stance. Just arms wide open inviting him in.

He came in.

Jane planted the balisong below his belly button. The little momentum he provided didn’t help, but his total lack of preparedness did. Jane pulled up through him as he came forward. Smooth. Effortless. Complete.

No struggle.

Just lots of blood.

Jane’s favorite part.

His hands came up to Jane's shoulders. His weight shifted to her. She staggered her stance to accommodate his descending gravity. His grip weakening.

She pushed him off. Hard.

His legs had nothing left. His weight shifted backward. He swiped at the brush. Looking for an anchor. The branches catching and releasing him. His feet failed him as he tumbled over the edge. The river ready for him ninety feet below.

"Oops."

As it happened

Jane knocked on Bob’s door. His apartment was on the third floor of a split-up Brownstone, on the edge of a decent Cambridge neighborhood.

Bob answered the door with confidence. A solid, wide opening, as if he was standing by awaiting her arrival. His eyes took her in as his crooked smile offset the fat in his face.

Jane stood with her own confidence, in a light summer dress, with side pockets, and matching flats. Her hair pulled back in a ponytail, as it usually was in the lab. More cleavage visible than Bob was accustomed to seeing from her. His pleasure was noted.

With a sweep of his arm, Bob stepped to the side gesturing her to enter. Jane obliged. The wooden floor creaking with each of Bob’s movements the only sound. Surely the tenants below could hear Bob’s mass as he moved about. Jane removed her shoes at the door.

Bob’s smile was full now, "You didn't have to do that." he said as he stepped around her. Ensuring Jane felt his gravity as he passed. Breaking her personal space with a close casual brush against her.

Jane handed Bob her shoes as she stepped away. He placed them somewhere out of sight, returning to the kitchen area.

“Drink?”

Bob offered Jane a glass of red wine. He had two of them already poured. Jane shook her head, then as she surveyed the apartment,

"Gin and tonic."

Bob recalibrated back to the kitchen without comment. Jane moved deeper into the apartment. It was tasteful. Impersonal. The furniture probably wasn’t his. Too standard. Average residential. Not sturdy. The only piece that appeared equipped to handle someone of Bob’s magnitude was the recliner. Art chosen to suggest cultivation rather than express it. Modern hotel décor. There was a family photo on the bookshelf. Bob, center mass, with his wife and children seated below him. Everyone knew Bob was a family man from New Hampshire. This apartment was his work-life residence. His lair, as most female associates understood, and avoided.

Jane moved to the side of the windows, drawing the curtains without exposing herself to the view. Bob observed as he presented her gin and tonic. Jane set it on the coffee table in front of the sofa.

"Make yourself comfortable," she said.

Bob’s smile was permanent, as he eased into the recliner. His throne away from home. He kicked off his shoes, man splaying as he gulped his wine.

Jane crossed the room as a model on the catwalk. She crouched between his legs, her hands on his thighs. Running her hands down to his knees and ankles, Jane removed his socks one at a time. Bob enjoyed the show. His appreciation growing in his pants.

She knelt between his legs. Returning her hands to his thighs. Staring deep into his eyes.

"This night is not going well for you Bob."

"I think you know what would make it better Jane."

Jane smiled too.

"I'm going to need my program expanded Bob," Jane paused.

Bob looked at her for a moment, then laughed.

“Sacrifices are needed to get what we want Janie.”

“My thoughts exactly Bob.”

Jane brandished the balisong shocking Bob. For a big guy his reflexes were quick. He didn’t just throw his wine at Jane, he threw the whole glass at her head, rising out of the recliner over her.

Jane rolled back across the carpet, with practiced elegance, coming to her feet before he finished standing.

Bob straightened. His full height. His full weight. He was old, but he wasn’t one to shy away from a fight.

"Here's what's going to happen," he said. "I'm going to do whatever I want. And everyone is going to know you came here willingly to influence my decision." He smiled. "They always do."

He lunged.

Jane planted her feet. Her stance ready to address Bob’s mass, as she stepped into him.

In a flash the blade found his throat in a singular motion across his carotids. Taking out his windpipe as a bonus. Clean. Precise. Blood spraying Jane’s face. Her smile allowing the blood to redden her teeth.

"Oops."

Her follow-through plunged the balisong deep into him. Entry below his belly button, as he began to collapse forward to the floor. Jane crouched, pulling up through him as he fell. Eviscerating him. His momentum did the work. Jane enjoyed the show. Blood covering her head to bare feet as she rolled clear. Her lava flowing in torrents throughout her being.

Bob hit the carpet in a softened slosh. Jane settled her choreography beside him. If the neighbors were home they’d wonder what the noise was. No idea Bob just negotiated his last  shortfall. An Ashfall technically.

His blood pooled.

Jane let it come across her feet. Receiving it. The warmth of it on her. Full satisfaction. Although fleeting.

She took up her gin and tonic in a silent toast to Bob, downing it in a single gulp.

She tracked bloody footprints to the kitchen, rinsing and wiping the glass in the sink.

Where are my shoes?

Undergraduate

The SU library was quiet. Not always the case, although the expectation. The Bird was empty this late anyway. Jane preferred it that way. Her freshman coursework not exceptional in difficulty yet, but attention and preparation were needed now as Organic Chemistry loomed in her future. Jane had a table tucked away all to herself. Her island. Although she was not alone tonight.

There was a couple using the space as a rendezvous. The girl was perusing her textbooks. The guy was pawing her body. The girl giggled but pushed him away. He pulled her hair back, kissing her hard and long. She pulled away when he was done, darting into the stacks to compose herself. He looked around, dismissing Jane as he followed her.

Jane could see parts of them as they moved down the aisle. Him grabbing and groping. Her stumbling and staggering backwards. As they neared the end of the shelving he pushed her hard against the wall. Jane had full view now. The girl catching herself before her head cracked against the concrete. Tears starting to well in her eyes.

He was a giant compared to her. Compared to anyone really. A stereotypical being to Jane. Mass organized as entitlement. His weight a weapon he'd probably been deploying successfully his entire life. He moved into the space the push created. His hand finding her throat. Her hands pulling uselessly against his grip. A finger in her face.

Jane couldn't hear the threat, but she could read it.

The girl relented her struggle.

He pushed his body into her. Her hands at her sides as he resumed his attack on her mouth. His free hand probing her body.

An insignificant being of significant mass. An infestation that required extermination.

Jane had work to do.

His patterns were simple. Readable. Predictable. After only a week Jane had his movement through campus mapped and memorized. He moved with an unhurried authority like the space belonged to him. Irregular class attendance was predictable too. Monday’s and Friday’s versus Tuesday’s through Thursday’s. Regular trips to the student union, at specific hours. The remote campus park path in the late afternoon. An out of the way geography ripe for an illicit drug transaction.

Jane noted a restroom at the park's edge. The distance from the main path. The quality of privacy that the park's design offered here. Perfect for Jane’s purpose.

She noted the route he walked. The hour. The frequency.

She was watching him on the quad to confirm a few remaining details when her mind registered something familiar. A person across the quad. Something in the way he moved. A sketchbook under his arm. She felt his presence without being able to confirm his face.

She shifted her attention.

John?

The figure was moving away. Distance and angle making confirmation impossible. She looked back to the park path. Her prey gone. Jane was torn between confirming John’s presence, or continuing her surveillance.

She headed to the park.

Surveillance complete. Preparation complete.

Jane stood in front of her dorm room mirror. Her skintight lowrider leggings, bare midriff, plenty of cleavage from her sports bra top. Phone left on her desk. Balisong snug in a leg pocket. All her assets ready for action.

The park at sunset was a space unobserved. Yes, there were occasional cameras and emergency call stations. The lighting however spaced further. Some spaces bordering non-campus spaces, and residential areas, were darkened. Complaints about light pollution, with little consideration for criminal activity on a campus full of positive human intent. Student movements dwindled as the sunlight fled the campus. The path curving away from the main campus into the quieter geography where activities happened in the shadow of an institutional environment that preferred not to look.

Jane jogged.

Her ponytail bobbed in sync with her top and bottom assets. Appearing as aloof and uncaring as any other oblivious student body member. For all intents and purpose.

She curved around with the path seeing her prey ahead. Right on time. Right where he should be.

Jane slowed as she passed him. Making sure he saw her checking him out. An elegant turn, jogging backwards to seal the deal. She slowed as he continued his approach. Stopped.

He had an eyeful.

“Hi,” she smiled.

“Hey,” he smiled back.

That was all they really needed. Campus communications related to sex were simple enough.

Jane tipped her head toward the desolate restroom, waving him to follow her. He scanned around the park and followed.

He was on her before the door closed behind them. A hand on her neck pushing her into the wall. Jane miscalculated the timing. Cold tile on her face. His weight pressing in. His face close to hers breathing heavy into her ear as he worked her leggings down. Jane was able to retrieve the balisong but she didn't have the geometry she'd planned. She didn't have the terrain she'd thought. The telltale sound of the balisong flipping open registered with him. A familiar sound to them both. He refocused on grabbing her hand before she could stab him. Just enough for Jane to twist around to face him, blindly slashing the blade in a high arc toward his head.

His hand, now on her throat, tightened, as the blade found his throat. The slice arrived before either of them processed the result. Not a clean single stroke. Messier. Jagged. The angle wrong. The follow through incomplete. But a new fountain found. The blade provided what Jane was looking for, through imprecision rather than design.

The blood flowed. Gushed even. Spraying Jane’s face. She was still pinned to the wall, but his grip was fading. She didn’t attempt to break free as she didn’t want to miss a single drop of blood. Its warmth igniting her own furnace. Not the managed spray she envisioned. This was incredible. Better. The hydraulics of an open carotid at close range. She felt her eruption arriving through the faulty execution. Not the clean controlled release of a kill that went according to plan. Something rawer than that. More immediate. The adrenaline of having been in genuine danger first adding a quality she hadn't anticipated. She enjoyed but knew this wasn’t the way.

His hand left her throat.

His weight shifted back. Down to the floor. Clamoring across the concrete, slick with his blood.

Jane watched. No opportunity for a complete evisceration. The timing was wrong. The positioning was wrong. But the accidental result was magnificent. She was already envisioning a new choreography. Acquisition of prey wasn’t an issue. Manifestation needed to be better planned. Controlled.

She stood over him.

The “Oops” unspoken, but realized. By them both.

Blood everywhere, a beautiful contrast to the white tile. The restroom quieting as his struggles subsided. Jane present for every second of it. Basking in the warmth of it even as she catalogued the errors. Her poor judgement. The angle of the cut. The follow through. All of it filed for adjustment. All of it mapped against what she knew and what she needed to know better.

She cleaned the balisong.

She cleaned herself. The restroom offering limited resources. She did what she could to navigate back to the dorm for a proper shower.

The campus was transitioning from daytime to nighttime. Fewer students moving between fewer destinations in fewer directions. The park path behind her. The dorm ahead.

John again?

Same sketchbook. Same quality of movement. His presence felt. Closer this time. Thirty yards. Twenty.

Jane stopped.

She looked.

Night arriving faster than she wanted it to. The figure moving away from her. She took three steps in that direction before the abort decision arrived.

She couldn't wander. Not now. Not in this state. Too many mistakes already tonight. The figure unconfirmed. The dorm a higher priority.

A private rejoicing.

The shower was hot.

Jane stood in it until the water ran clear and then stood in it longer. The kill settling through her into its afterglow. The eruption receding. Fleeting. Searching for somewhere to go. The errors filed. The adjustments already beginning to take shape in the part of her brain that had been cataloguing and adjusting since she was five years old.

The new cut worked. Despite its execution. Marvelously. She knew now what worked and what needed to be different. The knowing was as satisfying in its own way as the kill. She was a fast learner.

She was still warm from everything the night had contained when a knock disrupted the moment. Inconvenient.

Jane opened her door.

“John!” she shrieked

Sketchbook under his arm. Mild smile. His presence felt and confirmed.

Everything the night had left in her awoke. Stronger. Her torrents. Her currents.

She pulled him in for a kiss he’ll never forget.

She pulled him in deeper.

Inside the room.

Inside her.

Tonight, a new set of firsts for them both.

John's off campus apartment was a third-floor walkup. A workout every time. A two-bedroom attic conversion he used as a live-in studio. Sketchbooks on every surface. Charcoal and graphite and the occasional oil pastel leaving their evidence on the kitchen table and the bathroom shelf and the windowsills where John left things without further thought. An artist in his space.

His muse moved in incrementally. A friend. A lover. Some clothes here and there first. Then girl stuff in the bathroom. Her Judo bible occasionally alongside his sketchbooks. The balisong stayed with her.

The dorm room remained hers. They would crash there for convenience, when a lab ran late, or they couldn’t wait. They were inseparable when not in class. The bliss of newness was connective.

Nobody discussed the transition. It simply occurred.

College is demanding. It’s designed that way. If there’s a genuine interest, rather than just a need to gain competence for a moment, the demand lessens. Jane was genuinely interested. Her first exposure to neuroscience opened a window to the brain. The mechanisms of behavior. Of aggression. The architecture of the mind that produced people like Barnaby. Like John. Like her.

She studied ravenously.

A new language of life.

She also needed a new language for killing.

There was a Judo studio near John’s apartment.

Not really a dojo as Jane had become accustomed. This place had Pilates, jujitsu, aikido, and whatever else they could find someone to teach for a fee. Competent or otherwise. Jane didn't care. She just needed willing bodies and mats to perfect her techniques. To practice her choreography.

The movement she envisioned required a feedback loop. Variability. The cross-throat slice. The abdominal strike upward pull. The crouching transition. The roll away from a falling body before it could pin her. These were not specific Judo techniques. So this studio was ideal. They were Jane's synthesis of everything she'd learned applied to a purpose.

She drilled the transitions as throwing combinations. The sensei offered corrections. Jane applied them.

He commended her precision.

She committed to perfection.

Tuesday nights John started cooking. He was great at it. Jane never cooked. Cooking was her mother’s control. Where she served with or without affection, based on the diners at the table. Homemade for Tommy. Store bought for Jane. John was an artist. With attention. With care. He found the process as satisfying as the result. Providing his diner responded favorably. Jane responded enthusiastically.

Jane sat at the table with her coursework, watching John with aimless affection. This domesticated John was inspiring and frightening. He moved through the little kitchen with instinctive ease. Jane’s confidence and insecurity were living with her heat and hollow. Not as choices to be made.

This was her life. Her existence.

"Is that always with you?"

Jane looked up from her coursework to see John pointing to her balisong on the table with her.

His ask was nonchalant, as he started setting the table for dinner. The question comfortable in this domestic cocoon.

"A girl needs protection."

"Dinner's ready," he replied bringing in something that smelled mouthwatering delicious.

The balisong stayed where it was.

Jane and John kept the apartment over the school breaks. No hassle moving out and back in. They never left. Neither had any interest returning “home” as they were already there. No one seemed to miss either of them. Tuesday home cooking happened religiously. Jane taught some classes at the studio/dojo for a little money. Their needs were simple. Their ambitions low. Spending time with one another was fulfilling enough. An island built for two.

Time moved on. Sophomore year went by in a blink. Junior year arrived differently. Once classes started things began to change in small ways. Jane’s courseload was heavier. Positioning for grad school appeared on the horizon. She was preoccupied more often. Quieter. She started to miss Tuesday home cooking nights, staying at the dorm instead. Labs ran late more frequently. As did study sessions. The dorm was closer than the apartment was. The justification was practical. Logical.

John left plates covered on the kitchen table for her. She found them cold on the mornings she came back. She ate them standing at the counter before showering. The food still good. John still good at it. The time between the cooking and the eating started growing too.

She slept in the dorm three nights. Then four. The dorm bed narrower than John's. The ceiling closer. The quiet of a single occupancy room pressing in around her. The general chaos of the dorm pushing her back to the comfort of her island for one. Familiar. Necessary.

She needed the dojo more too.

Six mornings a week instead of four. The studio opening at six. Jane there when the sensei unlocked the door. The logic of the dorm broken, as the apartment was closer. The transitions she'd been drilling developing past the point of conscious effort into muscle memory. Living in her hands and her hips and her feet without requiring thought. The cross-throat slice. The abdominal follow through. The crouching roll. Her body knew the choreography. From the inside. Memorized.

She was ready for another kill.

She needed one.

John didn't comment on missing Jane. He left plates for her. He left sketches for her. The plates were cleared, the sketches accumulated, without her there to find them. They kept count. When she did come back she found them. His record of her absence rendered in charcoal.

Once she came back to find a sketch of her dorm room door. Just the door. Closed. Accurate in its detail down to the room number. John had drawn a thing between them. Though it was really Jane. She knew it.

John was grateful for any time with Jane.

As brief as it had become.

Jane was too.

Jane’s hollow was deeper now than it had ever been. Every day her hunger growing. Her need becoming ravenous. She knew what she needed to do, and she was ready to do it.

Now she needed prey.

The campus had its patterns. The students behaved the way every group of animals behaved. The strong leading. Pushing. Pulling. The weak hiding. Getting pushed. Getting pulled. The social organism sorting a new herd into itself. Varying patterns between daytime and nighttime locations and configurations. The student union at certain hours. The library. The park.

She wasn't looking for another park restroom opportunity. She learned her lesson. She knew the experience she wanted. The release that would satisfy. She needed room. More space. More control. Better choices. Better planning. Planned execution.

She needed to choose better.

John decided to try something different.

He invited Jane on a date. A dinner date. A proper meal at a restaurant with table clothes and cloth napkins. No home cooking this Tuesday. Jane resisted, but the stack of sketches was too tall to ignore. She relented.

They dressed up a little. Nothing fancy. They were seated at a corner table by a window, a bit secluded, with a view of the whole restaurant. They held hands across the table. Staring into each other’s eyes. John was telling her something about a drawing he'd been working on. Jane was listening completely and partially simultaneously. She couldn’t turn off the hunger of the hollow. The part of her that was reading this room. Scanning. Listening. Hoping to find prey.

A large loud party was spilling between their tables and the bar. Eight or ten people. The peak energy of a celebration. Students and faculty of some kind. Their voices projecting. Fighting against one another, driving the volume higher and higher. They would self-regulate for a moment of reprieve, then get swept up in themselves again, right back up to peak volume.

There was one at the center of it all.

He was persistent in dominating the discussions. Even the ones he didn’t initiate. Jane could tell he was the one pulling the track in his direction, despite the direction others were trying to go. Jane couldn’t follow the details, but she could read the body language.

He was trying to hold court, or at the very least he was holding his fellow diners hostage. Heavy. Substantial. A self-centering gravity. A constructed existence around his own importance. The table his stage tonight. The party his captive audience. The performance of himself continuous.

He raised his laughter to drown out others. He was the one elevating the volume notch by notch. Some diners escaped. Some kept their distance in side conversations. There was potential here.

Jane focused on him, zoning John out.

“Jane?”

"You okay?"

John attempting to pull Jane back in. His eyes tracking between Jane and the noisy party.

"You want them to tone it down?"

Jane looked back at John. His mild smile. His genuine offer. John willingly stepping up for Jane whenever he could.

"No."

Jane picked at her food.

"I'm great."

She held his eyes.

"You wanna get outta here?"

John looked at her for a moment.

“Yeah?”

Then he smiled the full smile.

"Yeah," Jane confirmed with a smirk.

John called for the check.

Jane returned to study the mass further.

The waiter apologized. They were a theater group from campus. Tonight was opening night for Richard III.

Jane’s smirk became a full smile.

She attended the Wednesday performance alone. But wasn’t alone. The house was packed. Students. Faculty. Locals. It was hushed pandemonium as everyone found seats. The social organism of the student body present. Packs of students would enter together. Ebb and flow as a unit down an aisle deciding where to sit. The leader would rise to the occasion choosing where they sat. Who went in first. Picking who sat next to them. Potential prey was everywhere. But Jane wanted big game. Prey of significance. Mass. Ego. Malice.

The house lights dimmed.

The curtain began to part.

A spotlight brought him to life.

The boisterous bully from the restaurant. Alone on stage, in full regale. A complete and attentive audience at his feet. His confidence evident in his stride. In his voice. His delivery.

“Now is the winter of our discontent,” Richard III proclaimed Jane’s state of being. But was this vermin? Richard III was. But the actor?

“God say amen,” closed the performance, clearing the stage. The crowd roared to life. Applause. Whistles. Howls. It was a good performance. And there he was. The center of this universe. Beaming.

Jane remained as family and friends gathered to congratulate the players. Showering them with flowers. Platitudes. Pulling them into photos. Richard III was still a star attraction, but in between he was alone. No family. No friends. He wasn’t alone in this state. There were other players with similar circumstance. But he didn’t pause. He pushed his way into family and friend huddles. Didn’t read the social cues cast in his direction. He didn’t care.

His physicality was subtle at first. Using his height advantage for an arm across the shoulders moment. Using his mass to push through the crowds. Pulling weaker players into an embrace. As the revelry subsided the cast began their migration back of house to transform to their true selves again. That’s when it happened.

He spanned two cast members with his reach across their shoulders, pulling them both to his center. They both resisted. Pushing back. Pulling his arms off. His discontent was swift. He grabbed them both by their costumes. One in each hand slamming them to the wall. In their faces. A female student attempted to break them up, finding herself in a dire situation. He abandoned the duo to focus on her. Pushing her to the wall as well. Using his mass across her body.

The Squish.

Jane went back early Saturday morning. Back of house. She needed to know the theater's geography. No one paid her any attention. Confidence has its advantages. She walked it.

The spaces were narrow and packed with production sets, current and past. Equipment. Mechanicals. Electricals and more. The doors in and out. The loading dock. The wings. The stage. The floor under her feet. She walked the distance from center stage to the wings. The curtain was heavy. Lined. Soundless. The feeling of a private space.

The darkness and shadows of a theater provided ample opportunity for Jane’s performance.

This was it.

Jane surprised John, spending the rest of Saturday with him. The apartment felt like new life had blown in. They found each other again. Maybe for just a moment, the normalcy returned. John sketching. Jane’s work spread across the table.

John settled across the table to capture Jane in a sketch. His attention to detail noticed the colored program in the chaos of Jane’s papers and books. Richard III. He reached across pulling it from the mess. Jane’s gaze followed his hand to his face.

John’s eyes came up to meet hers,

"Should I be concerned?” a nonresponsive pause,

“You're going to plays without me?"

Jane slid a thick bound paper across the table.

The Neuroscience of Villainy: Narcissistic Personality Disorder in Shakespeare's Richard III

"I see," he said.

Normalcy continued.

Sunday was the last performance.

Jane watched again. The performance ended. The cast congregated. They departed to celebrate. Jane followed. Walking distance. The same restaurant. Jane waited. The patience of a starving predator. He would be last out. He had to be last. The performance not over while an audience was available.

Two hold outs emerged with him in tow. Pleasantries exchanged outside. They went one way. He headed back to campus. Alone. Culled from the herd. Their choice. Not his. The strongest cast to darkness.

Jane stalked him all the way back to the theater.

She went around through the loading dock into the wings. The stage empty. The curtain closed. Staying in the shadows she moved down to the empty house.

She listened.

His footfalls projected his approach.

Richard III emerged, moving to center stage. Quiet. Looking out across the empty house. Basking in the echo of something only he could still hear. Still feel.

“The King’s name is a tower of strength which they upon the adverse faction want!”

Jane clapped with vigor as she stepped from the shadows of the house.

“Bravo!”

He turned in shock.

“Bravo!”

His surprise rose to pride. An audience recalibration.

“To whom do I owe the honor?” was his attempt at gallantry

"You put on quite a show," Jane gushed as she joined him on stage.

"Of course," he gloated.

"I was hoping to get you behind the scenes." Jane suggested as she parted the curtain.

"Of course,” he beamed leading the way.

Jane stepped through, deeper into the stage behind the curtain. It was just as shadowy as Jane had hoped. Hope wasn’t a plan, but so far, the pieces were falling into place as envisioned.

He moved toward her.

Jane let him get close. Then retreated. A giggle for good measure.

He advanced again. Reaching for her.

She dodged his advance.

“A hellhound that doth hunt us all to death.” She teased. Taking her position. Hands on her hips in defiance to the king.

“To worry lambs and lap their gentle blood,” he sped and lunged.

Like lightning striking, the balisong found his throat.

The cross-throat slice opened the performance. Clean. Both carotids in one stroke. The windpipe severed.

The blood arrived in volume.

Jane stepped into it. Rejoiced in it. The warmth of it across her face and throat and hands. The hydraulics of both carotids invigorating. The gurgling. More than more.

Jane closed her eyes. She was transported. An out of body experience. Time dilated. The details of the performance available to her from any angle. Her essence circled the scene. Above. Below. Close. Far.

Her body crouched.

The abdominal strike arrived as his descent began. The pull through the fall. Smooth. A complete evisceration. Jane was electrified.

Her body stepped clear. Stood. Drenched. Blood warming her. Dripping from her. Pooling around her.

She took a bow.

Laughter burst from the house.

Jane returned to her body.

Voices getting louder.

Motors activated.

The curtain began to part.

The house lights banged on.

A spotlight struck the body.

Jane exited stage left.

Someone screamed.

Graduate

John’s apartment, their apartment, had accumulated four years of shared life on every surface. John's sketchbooks in stacks that had outgrown the kitchen table and colonized the windowsills, shelves, and the floor. Any horizontal surface worked. Jane's biology and neuroscience texts, research papers, notes, and more claimed to be organized in a way only she could navigate. The balisong always near.

Tuesday cooking had become the apartment's heartbeat. The rhythm that organized the week around itself. Jane at the table. John at the stove. The comfortable silence that had always been their most fluent language finding its deepest register in this configuration. Four years of Tuesday evenings. Not consistent, but enough to provide the comfort they sought from one another. The food always good. The silence always earned.

Jane watched John cook.

She had been carrying the letter for three days.

Not avoiding the conversation. Filing the right moment for it the way she filed everything worth understanding. Tuesday cooking was the right moment. The apartment at its most comfortable. John in his element. Jane was pacing.

“Jane?” John inquired as she appeared and disappeared.

Jane stopped and shared, "I got in."

John didn't turn from the stove. He was finishing something that required attention. Then he set down the wooden spoon and turned.

"The bridge."

Not a question. He had known she applied. They had discussed the future a little. He had watched the application take shape on the table. Abandoned and reconstituted a couple times.

"Fisk first," Jane elaborated.

"MS in Biology. Two years. Then Vanderbilt for the PhD."

John rushed her. Scooping her up into his arms. Spinning her around the room.

"Nashville?"

"Nashville!"

He put her down, holding her face in both hands, giving her a celebratory kiss. Then returned to the stove. Checked whatever needed checking. Turned the heat down. Then came back for another big hug.

They ate between smiles, googly eyes, and smirks.

Dessert was enjoyed in the bedroom.

Pillow talk was a bit more intense.

"My parents are dead to me," Jane lamented.

John held her close, "Same."

Jane looked up at him, "I'm gonna be busy."

"We’ll be fine."

Nashville is not like Syracuse or Rochester. More energy. More opportunity. From the Flour aka Flower City to the Music City. The Cumberland versus the Genesee. Jazz and Classical versus Country and Western. Rust Belt stagnation and slow death, to Bible Belt growth and prosperity.

Nashville was not ready.

Fisk University sits in North Nashville. Its campus a deliberate beauty, although needing restoration. A community with its own gravity. Its own history. This campus was not a place to hunt. Not because prey wasn't present. Prey was always present. Heavy set narcissistic male bullies existed in every institution Jane had ever occupied. But Fisk had a quality of communal attention. A smaller community feel. A more connected one. Everyone knowing everyone's patterns in a way that made the invisible people more visible.

Southern hospitality.

Jane felt welcomed.

John had learned the shape of Jane's fading in Nashville. The same shape from Syracuse. Disappearances increased as the cycle peaked. Home meals and hanging out as the cycle waned. He drew on those nights. Sketches once again accumulating as evidence of Jane's absences. Keeping track. Unspoken.

Jane’s refuge.

Lower Broadway on a Friday night was a socialization beast. Concentrated. Anonymous. Loud. Jane’s first exposure was with a group of new students after orientation. The honkytonks running their sets all night. The patrons of the bars shifting across the evening from tourists to locals to the subset of local men who treated Broadway the way other men treated offices. As a place they belonged. They ruled. Where their size and their confidence were assets rather than observations.

Jane’s favorites.

The sidewalk on Broadway was at its Saturday night peak. Shoulder to shoulder. Jane alone. The music bleeding from everywhere. Blending. Ebbing and flowing up and down the street. A tourist couple hand in hand fighting the current of the crowds to stay together. Until a storm erupted from Tootsie's forcing their separation. The girlfriend pushed away. The boyfriend escaped being trampled in the other direction. The storm never lost his footing. Nor his cowboy hat.

Jane’s attention was caught.

The boyfriend recovered. "Asshole!"

The storm smiled. His mass clearing the sidewalk around them. His Saturday night finding its purpose. Jane at the curb warming to the scene.

The boyfriend squared up. The girlfriend on his arm already pulling.

"Nothing between us but air and common sense." The storm's arms wide. Inviting. A different kind of Southern hospitality.

The girlfriend pulled harder. The boyfriend letting himself be pulled. The man watching them go with the satisfaction of someone whose evening had just improved.

"Find me later darling.” One last storm surge, “After you tuck the little boy in."

Jane followed the storm. She watched him work the rest of the block. Again, and again for a few weeks.

His pattern was consistent. Tootsie's. Then Robert's. And on. Deliberate stumbles into couples. The same smile. The same lines. The same engineered disruption. He hit more than he missed. He scored too.

He wasn't drunk. Organized. Preying.

Jane followed him home.

The parking garage he cut through was dark beyond its entrance. The noise from Broadway a dulled ruckus. The geometry of it narrow. Cool concrete and shadows.

Jane waited.

The pattern of his stride broadcast his arrival. His boots on the concrete. He was alone tonight.

Jane stepped from the shadows.

His read was immediate. A woman alone in a dark garage. The recalibration was automatic. His smile finding its new context as he approached.

Jane shifted her path around him.

He moved into her path, “Hey darling.”

She shifted again. As did he.

He grabbed her arm as they passed.

Jane slit his throat. Both carotids. And the windpipe.

His practiced crowd disruptions gave him balance. Jane had to stretch a bit to drive the blade from belly to sternum. Closer contact. More blood. All good.

Jane took a step back, “Oops,” with a smile.

The Broadway noise came back as Jane walked home. Just another Nashville night for everyone else. A wonderous outing for Jane. Skirting the diminishing crowds the further from Broadway she walked.

John was still up when she got home. Ducking into the bathroom before he saw her. A kiss to her reflection before she showered fully clothed. The evening’s evidence swirling down the drain. Running clear. The hot water cooling her heat. Prolonging the moment. Imagining the water as blood. Fleeting memory. She held it as long as she could.

John was sketching as she crossed the apartment to him, wrapped in her damp towel. Tossing his sketchbook she straddle him, planting a deep sensuous kiss in his being. Stirring him. Taking him there in the living room.

Their naked bodies made it to the bedroom before the night was done. Exhilarated. Exhausted. The Nashville night wafting in from the open window. The apartment dark and warm. Their breathing slowing. Matched. Jane still wrapped around John. John laced his hand to hers, cautious to ask, "Should we get married?" Pausing, "Have kids?"

Jane drifted off to sleep.

John had intent.

Jane had hunger.

The grocery store on a Sunday morning made the difference visible within the first two aisles. John with his list moving through the store with deliberation. Economy. He knew what Tuesday cooking required. Jane moved alongside the cart adding random things. A box of cereal. Some chips. A jar of something.

John rejoiced in this domestic version of Jane.

They moved through the store in their comfortable silence. John reading his list. Jane reading the room. Purposeful. A slight impatience.

They were passing the greeting cards and household gadget aisles when Jane disappeared. John was across the aisle searching for spices. They returned to the cart together. John adding paprika. Jane added a knife sharpener.

John squinted at Jane, "Seriously?"

Jane pulled the cart forward, "Gotta stay sharp in Nashville."

They continued on.

The checkout lines were chaotic. People jockeying for the shortest. Considering who the cashier was. Male. Female. Young. Old. John guided them to a line. A family ahead of them. Mom unloading the cart. Kid in the cart, helping. Dad pushing the cart, observing.

The kid couldn’t resist the candy within reach.

"No," the mother directed. "Put it back."

Jane couldn’t understand what the kid responded, but the tone triggered Dad. Not a discussion. Not a redirect. A hard slap to the kid's hand. The candy returned to the rack by force. The child's face running through shock then collapse into crying.

Jane knew that face. She had worn it herself before she learned that crying changed nothing. Not quite the case for this family.

The father's hand closed around the child's arm. Rough. The yank out of the cart producing a sound from the child that cut through the store. The father dragging the child toward the exit. A fast moving spectacle Jane wanted to follow.

They were gone.

Jane watched the door settle behind them. Imagining what was happening out there. Out of sight. Unrestrained. The size of him. His immediate response reflected all she thought she needed. His dominance and instinct against a lesser victim. His confidence of action.

Heavy. Substantial. The entitlement organized into mass.

“Jane?” John had moved forward, unloading the cart.

The cashier was moving their groceries through with practiced efficiency.

Jane joined John.

"I'm sorry about that." The cashier shook her head. "I hate working Impulse Alley." Her hands never stopped, "The results can be devastating."

Jane looked to the door.

Doctoral

The doors at most Broadway bars are open and welcoming.

Southern hospitality.

Some are not.

Southern narcissists.

Inflated authority egos that get off on giving patrons a hard time. Wannabe cops as bouncers. Someone who decided the ID check was a kingdom for them to rule. Large and in charge. Absolute power. Absolute corruption.

Jane had been watching him three weekends before she joined his line. She had his patterns. The way he ran the door hot on busy nights. Unnecessary touches that lasted a beat longer than comfortable. The women he waved through without the full check. The ones he gave difficulty to. Hit on. The door his domain. The men he refused entry. The confrontations that ensued.

She wanted a closer experience.

He checked her out. Head to toe. And her ID. If he could frisk her he would. An all over body grope.

He handed back the ID, but didn’t let go.

"You flying solo?"

Jane smiled with deep eye contact. Then pulled her ID from his grip. She strutted in with a quick look back, returning his wink.

The following Friday she passed by at the perfect moment. A group in negotiation. Running hot. His flex in full force. Enjoying it. Reinforcements at his back. His power most seductive while being contested.

Jane slowed her stride to catch his eye as the group was turned away. Another wink for wink.

She continued on. Imagining his smile. His elbow nudge to a co-worker to check her out. She wanted him. He was going to get her.

He’d be right.

His break from the door started with a trip through the bar. The sea of bodies parting to let him through. His subjects paying their respects. Then outside to lean against the building for a cigarette and people watching.

Jane was on the sidewalk when he came out. Happenstance positioning. She felt him lock in on her. She avoided his look. Pretended. Let him come to the sighting on his own terms.

When she looked she held it. Smiled. Winked.

Then she moved on.

She had followed him for weeks. From Broadway to home and back again. A few nights off. Always alone. No posse. No partner. Patterned existence.

Tonight, she followed with intent. Not subtly. Close enough that he could hear her behind him. Closing in. When he turned she was there. Visible. Just the right spot. His story already assembled. She’s alone. The winks. The repeat sightings. All of it running in his head as he turned.

"You followin’ me darling?"

Jane smiled.

Not performed.

Not a lure.

Happiness.

The riverfront area is not a great place for a social encounter, even in daylight. The ruckus of Broadway faded behind them. The Cumberland below. The darkness of this steep embankment deliberate. The city’s passive concealment of debris and garbage strewn down to the water. The homeless. An accumulation of the discarded and forgotten.

Jane’s perfect dumping ground.

He closed the distance between them.

Jane let him come.

His mass. His boosted confidence. Just what Jane wanted.

The balisong slicing his throat in a fluid stroke. The practiced force delivering the blood across Jane's face and chest. His weight shifting with her joy. His legs beginning their negotiation with gravity.

Jane moved to finish the choreography.

Another close contact evisceration. This one welcomed. Required. As his mass collapsed Jane spun. Grabbed his wrist. Turning them as one toward the embankment. Her center below his. His weight now on her hips. The throw simple. Effective. A practiced effort for a 3rd degree black belt. The momentum carrying him over the embankment.

The trash exploded from his impact. Scattering cardboard. Wreckage as he rolled toward the river. Jane mesmerized in the moment.

Then a yell from the darkness below. Startled. Angry.

Someone was down there.

Jane snapped back. Turned to run.

Running straight into an unmovable object. Bouncing back. Stunned. Falling to the ground. Instincts taking over. Knife extended. Slashing to defend. Decapitate.

Her focus returning.

John standing over her. His hands raised.

Surrendering to Jane.

Jane cried.

The chaotic yelling approaching from the embankment.

John lowered his hands as he crouched to help her up.

"Let's get you home."

News of another downtown murder held the headlines.

Jane stayed home for two weeks.

Her first-year PhD advisor cautioned her to stay vigilant.

She chose to stay in the comfort of John’s embrace.

His care.

Basking in the memory of the kill.

In John’s presence.

John’s sketches changed. Reflecting a new life. Simple at first. The table. The window above the sink. The Nashville street below. Closer subjects rendered in a new perspective. No more cityscapes. No skylines. No campus studies. No Cumberland from a bridge. Nor a bridge over the Cumberland. No neighborhood bars, with their people and architectures. All of it set aside.

He was drawing Jane.

Not the Jane at the table with her coursework. Not the Jane in profile reading. Not the peripheral Jane that had populated his sketchbooks since middle school. All of Jane. Every version of her he had been seeing, imagining, since third grade.

Jane soft. Her face in sleep turned toward the window. The Nashville light finding her cheekbone. Something in the lines of her that John had always known and now drew without restraint.

Jane beautiful. Not the performed beauty of the lure. The  beauty of someone who had never needed to perform it for John. Her hands. Her throat. The line of her shoulder.

Jane hard. Her jaw set. Her eyes communicating everything in her.

Jane strong. Her body in motion. Her power visible even when she was standing still. Jane Zen.

Jane the superhero. Versions of Jane that existed in his register of myth and archetype.

John cooked every night.

No exceptions. No take out. No delivery. Tuesday cooking expanded to fill the entire week. Every night a Tuesday night. Them together. Domesticated. Every evening John producing something to sustain time with Jane. Nourish her. The ritual a daily anchor holding them in place.

Jane savored it all.

She ate with a starving appetite. A new source of fuel in John's full knowledge and chosen presence. The cooking. The eating. A new intimacy. John providing. Jane receiving. A domestic life at its most concentrated.

The knife sharpener on the counter used regularly now. By both of them. John sharpening knives for food prep, with an occasional swipe. Jane sharpening the balisong, with detailed attention for prey.

They moved the furniture.

The living room reconfigured on a Saturday morning without discussion. The couch against the wall. The coffee table in the bedroom. The rug rolled back. The hardwood floor cleared into a space large enough for two people to move.

Yoga first. Jane following John's lead. His artist's body finding the poses with a grace Jane failed to recognize or appreciate before now. His symmetry. His toned, sculpted body.

Then the pushups.

Face to face. Their noses inches apart at the bottom of each repetition. Eyes locked, down and up. Smiles perpetual. Another new intimacy in shared exertion. Jane's form exact. John's form honest. Both of them inhaling each other. Over and over.

The planks were where the difference lived.

Face to face. Their forearms on the hardwood. Everything parallel. Eyes locked. Time dilated. Accumulating. The effort visible on John's face. Building. His body shaking at its limits. Jane focused and determined. Failure not apparent.

John failed first.

Every time.

He went down and looked up at Jane still holding. Her smile sarcastic. Quiet.

He had to tickle her to break her.

They jogged in the mornings. Walked in the evenings.

The Nashville streets providing the quiet of a city not yet fully awake, then settling in for the night. A pace they shared. The routes varied and meandering through different neighborhoods.

John started walking Jane to campus. His campus days well behind him. An extension of their new partnership. The domesticity of a morning commute.

He would find her lectures. Sneak in to capture a sketch of her at the podium. Pacing across a stage. Leaning against a desk. Her voice passionate in the explanations. The neuroscience of villainy. The prefrontal cortex's relationship to predatory behavior.

Jane could feel his presence even if she couldn’t see him. Afterwards joining him for lunch. A coffee. A kiss.

They walked home hand in hand.

The cycle waned.

Jane felt her hunger growing. Her hollow deepening. Her heat impatient below it. An island between eruptions trembling on occasion as the pressure built. Months passing. Pulling her back to her base desires. Seeking solitude for a hunt.

Her two lives close, but separate.

The night was perfect.

The kind of night that made being outside feel like being inside. Comfortable. Familiar.

They had each other in hand.

The night laid out before them.

They walked without destination. The neighborhood streets away from Broadway. Away from Vanderbilt. Away from everything institutional and purposeful. Just the sidewalk and the streetlights. The sounds of the city. The feelings of each other.

John was thinking about Jane.

Jane was thinking about blood.

They walked in the comfortable silence that had always been their most fluent language. John's thumb stroking Jane’s hand. Jane’s equilibrium off but functional.

She was reviewing. In her head. The mechanics of past events. The balisong finding its mark. The blood arriving the way she preferred. The warmth. The release. What would it be with John in the shadows. Watching. The intimacy of being witnessed. Not by a stranger. By the one.

John was thinking about later. The apartment. The warmth Jane carried. The quality of Jane fully alive pressing into him. Her excitement.

They turned a corner.

The bar was just a neighborhood bar. Not Broadway. No tourists. Just a local organism in its normal weeknight existence. The door open. Live music a low country thrum rather than a honkytonk performance. The kind of bar that had been in this neighborhood forever.

He came through the door sideways.

Not a storm exactly. Something more deliberate yet not as elegant. Baseball cap instead of a cowboy hat. Sleeves torn off a flannel button down shirt. Tattoos covering his arms instead. Blue jeans and sneakers. The type of man who moved through spaces as though the spaces were required to accommodate him. His size doing the work his awareness didn't bother doing. His planned trajectory through John and Jane with awkward precision.

A forced separation.

John recovered, with an immediate, "Hey!"

The man turned to appreciate the results of his efforts. His read of John running fast and arriving at its conclusion. A smile for context. A defensive man. A woman beside him. An opportunity for a dominance demonstration.

Jane knew. She pulled John away.

The man waved with some dissatisfaction.

John let himself be pulled.

They walked on. Arm in arm. Harder to separate.

Jane looked back to confirm the man’s direction.

She pulled John to a stop.

A smile. Eyebrows flashed. And nod back over her shoulder.

Jane signaled with her hands. Stay close. Stay back.

John understood.

Jane lead. John followed.

Not beside her. Behind her. With her.

The distance of a safety net. The distance of a voyeur. Present but not involved. A journey John understood. The destination acknowledged. The path unknown. His eyes never losing sight of Jane moving through the Nashville night. The current between them taut. Unbroken.

Jane sensing him behind her.

She didn't look back.

They followed him through the night. His apartment building visible across the street. A second floor apartment lit from within. He had scored, bringing her back from a bar. Their shadows moved across the windows. Embraced. Broke. New lights in another room. Shadows merged then broke.

John joined Jane on the sidewalk.

Voyeurs together.

Jane’s hollow pushing. Her heat rising. Jane imagining the kill. John in the shadows while she worked. The blood arriving.

They walked home.

The apartment received them with warmth. John's hands finding Jane before the door was closed. The surveillance's accumulated heat finding its place. Jane bringing everything the night had built in her. All new for John.

The release was mutual.

Three weeks.

The bar to home, to another bar, to work and home, and back again. This man of a lesser storm. Patterns readable within the first week. Jane and John walking his routes at different hours. The surveillance a shared activity now. The neighborhood. The garage on the corner three blocks from his apartment building. The glass paneled overhead doors dark at this hour. The hydraulic lift inside. The smell of oil and metal that reached the sidewalk even with the doors closed.

Jane filed the garage on the second week.

John could tell.

The kill night came unannounced but acknowledged.

Jane dressed with deliberation. Nothing theatrical. Nothing that announced itself. Just Jane. The balisong sharpened then returned to her pocket, where it lived.

John was at the table. Sketching.

He saw her when she appeared.

Their eyes told the story.

He closed the sketchbook.

She left.

He followed.

Her pace was rapid, but John knew where she was going. He fell into the shadows across the street. The glass paneled overhead doors of the garage lit from within. The prey visible inside. The hydraulic lift lowering.

Jane entering.

The mechanic looked up from under the hood.

A woman alone in his garage at this hour. His read running automatically. The recalibration arriving before he'd finished registering her face.

John could see they were talking.

The mechanic straightened. His full height in the garage's fluorescent light. The same flannel shirt with the sleeves cut off. The tattoos covering both arms from wrist to shoulder. He was gigantic compared to Jane.

John reading Jane's body language. Inviting him. The mechanic's posture shifting. The distance between them closing.

Jane let him come.

John was amazed at how quick it happened. The balisong swiped across his throat. The blood spray evident, even at John’s distance. Jane tilted her face, raised her chest to receive the outpouring. The mechanic staggered as Jane drove the knife into his abdomen. Pulling up through him. His mass completing the choreography the way mass always completed the choreography in Jane's hands. The evisceration fluid. Total.

He went down.

Jane stood over him in the fluorescent light of the garage. The blood pooling across the concrete floor. She looked out to where John might be. Just a moment. Then back.

The mechanics hands rough and calloused. His arms covered in black and grey tattoos chronicling his personality. Barbed wire. Pinup girls. And a heart on his shoulder. The only tattoo with color. Red. No inscription. No Mom. No name.

She crouched beside him, carving ‘JnJ’ into the heart.

They walked home together.

They showered together till the water ran clear.

Their sex continued until their energy ran out.

They caught their breath still entwined.

Neither one smoked, but John started to sketch. The giant mechanic in profile, towering over Jane. Intricate details brought the sketch to life. The expressions on their faces. Their hair. The fibers of their clothes. His tattoos. Recreated from John’s vivid memory. Including the empty red heart on his shoulder.

Jane admired John's rendering.

She took the pencil from his hand, adding ‘JnJ’ to the empty heart.

John smiled, "JnJ?"

Jane returned the pencil, “Forever.”

The headlines arrived three days later.

The JnJ Killer.

Investigation ongoing.

The media filling the empty spaces of the unknown. A demented protest against Johnson and Johnson? A disgruntled employee? A love note to the fictional profiler Jennifer Jareau? Journalists, anchors, and commentators speculating with confidence.

Jane and John just smiled.

Jane’s dissertation was 210 pages.

Predatory Cognition and the Reward Architecture of Violence: Neurobiological Correlates of Instrumental Aggression in Human Subjects.

Chapter three's methodology section had required the most careful attention. The IRB (Institutional Review Board) approved data collection (involving human subjects), described with the precision of someone who understood exactly what the approved methodology had and hadn't produced. The gaps between the approved research and Jane's full understanding of the subject filled with academic language. The gaps invisible to everyone who hadn't gathered data in campus park restrooms and theater backstages and garages across ten years of applied research.

The literature review had been Jane's private pleasure. Reading everything the field had produced about predatory cognition and finding it incomplete. The researchers working from neuroimaging and case studies and self-reporting instruments. None of them working from the inside. None of them with Jane's particular access to the subject matter. Her direct experience.

She had written the most honest dissertation Vanderbilt's neuroscience program had ever received without anyone knowing.

The acknowledgments page had taken longer than any chapter.

To my committee, whose guidance shaped this work into its final form. To the Fisk Vanderbilt Bridge Program, whose vision made this possible. To the subjects whose neural architecture informed every finding.

Then.

To John. Who has always seen exactly what I am and chose accordingly.

Jane had looked at that last line for a long time before submitting.

She left it in.

The defense committee assembled in the seminar room with their printed copies and their prepared questions. Five people who had spent the better part of five years guiding Jane's research toward its completion. They knew the work. They had read the drafts. They understood the methodology's elegance and the results' implications for forensic neuroscience and behavioral research.

They did not know what they were looking at.

Jane presented for forty minutes. The neuroimaging data. The behavioral correlates. The reward architecture's activation patterns in subjects who engaged in planned instrumental aggression versus reactive violence. The prefrontal cortex findings. The dopamine system's role in what the literature called thrill seeking but Jane understood as something considerably more precise than that.

The questions began.

Dr. Harmon first. His specialty was affective neuroscience. "Your data suggests the reward response in instrumental aggression is qualitatively different from fear based reactive violence. Can you speak to what you believe drives that distinction at the neurobiological level?"

Jane looked at him across the seminar table.

She thought about the parking garage near the Ryman. The mechanic's fluorescent lit garage. The Cumberland riverfront. The theater stage behind the heavy curtain. The campus park restroom and its messy necessary lesson learned.

"The distinction," Jane said, "lies in anticipation. Reactive violence is fear driven. The amygdala responding to perceived threat. Instrumental aggression engages the prefrontal cortex's planning architecture alongside the reward system's anticipatory mechanisms. The subject isn't responding to a threat. They're moving toward a desired outcome. The neurobiological signature reflects that orientation. Planning and reward expectation producing a qualitatively different and significantly more intense response than reactive fear."

Dr. Harmon nodded. Writing something.

Jane answered more questions with the same composed precision of someone whose data was gathered in places no IRB had approved and whose understanding of the subject matter was the most complete in the room by a margin no one present could measure.

At the end Dr. Harmon looked at his colleagues. A brief exchange of glances that Jane read in the time it took them to occur. They didn’t even ask her to leave the room.

"Congratulations Dr. Ashfall," he said.

John was outside sketching in the sun.

Her smile said it all when she burst through the doors.

"Dr. Ashfall I presume," John inquired as she approached for a massive kiss and never ending hug.

Jane flew to Boston alone. Her first flight. Her first time in Boston. An in-person interview for her first real job.

The hotel was in Kendall Square. Cambridge. Two blocks from the Genzyme campus. Jane arrived in the afternoon and stood at the window of her room looking at the street below. The cold texture of a northeastern city. But larger, wealthier, and more populated than Rochester or Syracuse.

She ordered room service for the first time.

Eating alone at the window.

The absence of John felt deep. She thought about calling him. Thought about walking around Cambridge. Thought about the interview tomorrow. Thought about what John might be cooking. Sketching.

She rubbed her pocket.

Balisong present.

Thank goodness for checked luggage.

She tried to sleep.

The panel interview ran from nine to noon.

Six people around a conference table. The committee format. Research directors. A VP of something. The hiring manager whose emails had been professional and warm. And Bob.

Jane read the room in the first thirty seconds.

Bob was the Director of Research Programs. His position visible in how he occupied his chair. End of the table. Sideways. One arm over the back. The body language of someone who had decided the conference table was his before anyone else arrived. His size filling the space beyond his chair. No one sat near him.

The interview began.

Bob talked over everyone. Interrupted. Inserting himself into the committee's questions before they finished forming them. His intelligence present and real. His need to perform that intelligence louder than the intelligence itself. The narcissism of a man who had risen to Director by being the smartest person in rooms he'd carefully selected for their population.

Jane answered the committee's questions with speed and precision. Research applications. Forensic implications. The pharmaceutical possibilities of understanding predatory cognition's reward architecture.

Bob asked two questions. Both of them statements about his own program's direction with question marks attached. Jane answered both without giving Bob the admiration his body language was asking for.

She left wondering.

To wind down her day, probably her first and last trip to Boston, Jane decided to go out. She ended up at a restaurant between her hotel and the Genzyme campus.

Alone at a corner table with a glass of wine she'd earned. The debrief with the hiring manager had gone well. The committee's response had been positive from what Jane could read. She was considering her chances and whether she wanted it when a Genzyme group arrived.

A group dinner for the research team. Many of whom she interviewed with. They didn't know she was there.

Bob was of course at the center of it.

The table couldn’t help but assemble around him. Bob placed himself strategically. The waiter arrived. Bob ordered for the table before anyone could open a menu. The entitlement of someone who had decided his preferences were the group's preferences.

The waiter young. Efficient. Professional.

Bob sending his drink back twice.

Not because it was wrong. Jane watched the preparation. Both drinks correct. Both returns about Bob establishing the dynamic with anyone in a service position. The hierarchy confirmed. The waiter receiving it with the performed patience of someone who needed this job.

Jane fixated on Bob across the restaurant.

The taxonomy running its complete assessment. Heavy. The construction of someone who had organized his professional existence around his own centrality. The intelligence weaponized against the people around him. The entitlement so total it had stopped requiring performance and simply expressed itself. The restaurant his room. The waiter his instrument. The colleagues his audience.

Jane thought about the balisong in her bag.

She thought about the Cambridge streets she'd been walking. The parking structures. The alleys behind the restaurant district. The Charles River not far.

She thought about John. Longed for him. His touch.

Her heat battled with her hollow.

Not here. Not without John.

The trip back to Nashville was a letdown. The newness of travel already gone. People pushing and shoving to get through lines. Get on the plane. Get in their seats. Flight attendants acted like they were doing you a favor doing their job. The Uber took forever. Drivers cancelled twice.

Jane was exhausted when she stepped through the door, “Honey, I’m home!” She called out hoping John was there.

He was.

Days dragged on waiting for a call from Genzyme that might not come. Every unknown number answered just in case. The scammers and telemarketers getting time with Jane like never before.

John stopped checking Jane’s reactions after every call. Life entered a space of not knowing what was next. John reassured her that everything would work out. They would figure something out. Jane started to recognize John had taken care of them all along.

When the call finally came Jane was more relieved than excited. She knew their time in Nashville needed to come to an end. All good things do. So, she called out to John, “Boston?”

John rushed in. Scooping her up into his arms. Spinning her around the room.

"Boston!"

He put her down, holding her face in both hands, giving her a celebratory kiss.

“Let’s hit it hard!”

They went out Saturday night.

John and Jane hand-in-hand down Broadway.

Dinner at the Merchants Hotel. Second floor. Table clothes and napkins. A real sit-down meal.

A stroll around Broadway afterwards.

The honkytonks at their peak. The organism in full expression. Music from everywhere. The tourist current running.

A fond farewell.

They walked the length of it.

She saw him working the sidewalk. An instrument of authority. Not a wannabe. A badge. A uniform. Metro Nashville PD’s heightened presence since the murders. An old school beat cop making his rounds. And then some.

A homeless man loitering with his world in a shopping cart. This cop arriving with a vengeance. His baton striking the cart first. Belongings scattering across the sidewalk into the street. The homeless man reacting to his stuff, not to the cop.

The cop redirected the man’s attention. A push sending him into the wall. Baton forced into his back holding him there. The performance of unchecked authority.

Jane watched.

The homeless man fearing for his stuff, oblivious to the words from the cop. The cop releasing him, then shoving him to the ground, watching him scramble to collect his treasures. Smiling with the satisfaction of a job well done. Onward with his beat. Spinning and flipping his baton with one hand. His mass authority clearing a path before him. His subjects grateful for his presence. At least in his mind they were.

John felt Jane’s tension in her grip.

He watched the same spectacle. Had the same feelings of disgust.

They nodded to one another then kissed.

His beat ran the long riverfront block spanning first and second avenues North, capped by Broadway and Church Street.

They didn’t have much time for surveillance but beat cop's patterns are institutionally consistent. His patterns of harassment were consistent too. A few drunks. A few tourists. Then the big beats for the homeless.

Jane was ready the first night they saw him, but followed through to confirm. There were other cops on nearby beats that occasionally overlapped. Tonight their beats appeared offset.

Jane approached with the Broadway noise behind her. The tourist current thinning as the geography moved away.

She saw him ahead. Someone on the ground getting a boot to their side. The baton at the ready. The body curled taking the impacts as they came.

Jane slowed. Reconsidered. Stopped. The timing was wrong.

Too late.

The officer saw her in the distance. A witness to his acts. The baton pointing at Jane as he advanced, "Freeze!"

Jane was still. John stopped in the shadows. Undetected.

The officer was close now. Out of breath. His baton coming up. The first poke arriving at her shoulder. Testing his authority. Establishing.

Jane deflected.

Her forearm redirected the baton. Clean. Fluid. A simple movement her body knew well.

This changed everything.

The baton came up for full power.

Jane moved into him.

Her hip checking in. Her hands securing his wrist. Grabbing a fist full of uniform. Accelerating his forward momentum. The throw effortless.

He had skills too, grabbing at her through the trajectory. His training running its own response. His muscle memory taking people down for a living. Both of them going down together.

The pavement receiving them.

Both taking it in stride. The threats still active. The officer's training working against her. His body rolling toward dominance. His size seeking her compliance.

Jane was faster. More agile.

Her arm finding his throat before he completed the roll. The choke locking in with her other arm around the back of his neck. Her weight settling across him. The position as familiar as anything she knew, on a mat or not.

His hands came up. Baton leashed to his wrist. Finding her forearm. His countermeasures working against the choke. Jane tightening against the counter. His fingers working at her sleeve. His legs sprawling for leverage.

He was strong.

Stronger than any previous prey. His body conditioned by years of professional physical confrontation producing a resistance not yet encountered. Jane adjusting to it. Patient. Tightening further on each exhale.

His efforts panicked.

Jane’s progression working. His pulse maximized. His breathing minimized. Jane was steady. Determined.

John was panicked too.

Then all was quiet.

Jane held longer to ensure.

She released to take a fistful of his hair. Pulling his head back. The throat exposed in the alley's dim light.

The balisong making its mark. The blood flowing away from her. A disappointing effort.

This was not the plan. The choreography stifled.

She rolled him over in his own blood.

His badge glinting. Officer Cottus.

A primordial force of nature.

Jane finished the broken choreography, opening him. Spilling him out on to the pavement.

John grabbed her arm, nearly taking the balisong to his throat, "We need to get outta here."

Jane felt unfulfilled. Officer Cottus stole her moment.

Her empty victory needed a release.

She cut his sleeve open at the shoulder. Pulling it away to reveal his pale skin. No tattoos on this pure shoulder antemortem.

Jane cut the heart in first. The outline. The balisong moving through a new choreography. Just for Jane and John.

Then the letters inside it.

JnJ.

The radio on his belt burst alive.

"Cottus. What's your 20?"

The JnJ on his shoulder still oozing.

She took a deep breath.

Jane was ready for Boston.

In the end

Jane looked down the hall, not sure where Bob set her shoes, though she knew it wasn’t far. She caught her reflection in the bathroom mirror, giving her pause without fright. This wasn’t her first blood bath.

The light came on harsh and white. A simple washroom. White toilet. Tasteful tile. A large mirror above the sink.

Jane smiled at her reflection. Bob's blood on her face. In her hair. Down her throat. All over her dress. Her hands. She still held balisong, open, caked with blood.

She took her time with it all. Basking in the moment. Communicating with herself in silent facial expressions. A wink. Raised eyebrows. Faking a look of shock. Trying on various smirks and smiles.

Then she leaned forward.

She pressed her mouth to the mirror. Kissing herself. Full. Deliberate. The bloody imprint of her lips left on the glass. Evidence of her love in Bob’s blood.

She cleaned and dried the balisong before returning it to her pocket. She left the rest. She wanted to prolong the feelings. No one would notice.

She found her shoes by the entry table where Bob had put them. She wasn’t ready to confine her feet, so she just carried them with her out into the night. A big breath of night air. The din of the city all around her. She stood on the stoop for a moment.

Jane was ready for anything.

John took her shoes.

September 8, 2000