Guilty
I was sixteen when it happened. I didn’t mean to do it, but the police didn’t believe that. Actually, nobody believed it since I had been bragging earlier that week that if Josh bothered me again, I was going to smack him up the side of the head. I was talking to a bunch of girls, swaggering around like a fool, bragging that I was mean and tough and that asshole better not threaten me again or else I was going to give him what he deserved. What a joke now that I think back. Josh, who had done nothing but torment me since we were both 5, surely got the last laugh on this one. “Hey, Perkins,” he use to say, “you’ll never be anything but some guy’s girlfriend.” I have to admit, there’s more truth to that statement than I’d like to say.
When I got caught after those three days of hiding in my parents’ cabin in the woods, I tried explaining what happened, but nobody was listening. Even my parents didn’t question my guilt. Mom’s big brown eyes just sagged deep in their sockets and Dad, oh Christ, Dad looked as if the lines in his face had deepened by about a mile. They walked into that stuffy gray room in the police station, took one look at me and both just crumpled into each other’s arms, as if they’d seen some ghost from Christmas past that brought back the worst memories of my childhood. Their son, the killer. “How could you?” were the only words either of them said.
People all over town might as well have been screaming those words. I didn’t meet one person, including my own lawyer, who ever wondered if this wasn’t a premeditated act. No, they all just looked at me as if I was one of those kids wearing black on a rampage at the local high school. They couldn’t see past Josh’s death to wonder if there was another story, a simpler one that nobody would have believed anyway. Except for Josh’s mother, who looked at me with a mixture of sadness and curiosity, as if to ask, “Did my son’s bullying finally catch up with him?”
I did hit him, that’s true. I did bring about his death, that’s a fact. Did I mean to? Hell, no. I just wanted to scare him, to show him that he had to leave me the hell alone. I was a skinny kid and he outweighed me by forty pounds. Who could blame me for picking up the first thing I saw to fight him off? How could I know that board laying on the ground near my dad’s shop had a big fat ten penny nail positioned just in the perfect spot to go straight through his temple?
The truth is that it doesn’t much matter now what anybody thinks. I’m here in prison for life. My parents come twice a year to see me: my birthday and at Christmas. Silence the rest of the time.
Hell. I’m glad I’m somebody’s girlfriend here. Otherwise, I’d die of loneliness.
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