Free Everyday Psychokillers by Lucy Corin Page A

and I couldn’t pay attention to anything. I kept pissing off my mom. I didn’t know what to do, so she sent me to the pool to cool off, to get ahold of my mind.
    So when Gwen told me about Adam it wasn’t like Ted and the bugs. Gwen wanted to make it a really good reason that I couldn’t go where I wanted to go. Like if my mother hadn’t been so busy and so exhausted she’d have told me no because it was dangerous, and not because she was busy and exhausted.
    When our skin was wrinkly and we still weren’t cool, I followed Gwen to her camper to change into dry clothes. The whole thing tipped a tiny but measurable bit when we stepped on the corrugated foldout steps. Inside, Gwen lifted the vinyl bench seat in the dinette and got out a road map. We stood over the map, dripping. Her suit was white with giant orange blooms, the kind of suit that has a brassiere built into it, and underwear built in under a skirt-flap that hides the tops of your legs when you wear it. She showed me the Turnpike and Fort Pierce. It wasn’t the same as Ted, who brought out the bugs, I’m pretty sure, so that I could watch him proceed.
    The way Gwen used her voice and her hands, it was so tentative. She showed me as a sort of geography lesson, but a geography we were discovering together: here’s where he was playing with toys at Sears, here’s where they found his head in the canal. Four giant flies, two of them the kind with green heads, were flying in the tiny kitchen space. I slapped one when it landed on the plastic table and the table shook on its one bolted leg. “Good one,” Gwen said, still studying the map, trying to decide something about it.
    I looked with her, and it was an amazing thing that map showed me, I remember: the dot on the map that meant us was smack on the beach. I had no idea. We must have been on the inland side of the black dot for me to have missed it. I knew kids went to the beach a lot, but I didn’t know the beach was right there. I thought maybe other kids had a lot of time, like the whole family would pack up the car and a basket of ham sandwiches and spend a lot of time driving there. We’d been living in that town over a year and never been to a beach. Maps hung like window shades over the blackboards at school, but no one ever pulled them down.
    Gwen set the newspaper on the little table, folded so the current article about Adam faced up, and compared the information it held to the map. She leaned over it like a detective, with that same look on her face, working to put incongruous pieces together. The paper said “spawned.” It said Adam had spawned an all-out manhunt, that they were looking for a psychopath who could strike again. Years later he spawned a TV movie and a TV series. He spawned a variety of investigations and a variety of laws and charities. Years later, in college, in my dark apartment, reading my biology textbook on the living room floor by the light of a candle lantern, I came to a section about marine animals that “broadcast spawn,” and in the mindflash it took read the phrase as spawning broadcasts , I thought of Adam, and then I skipped directly to a memory of health class at that middle school before or after they found Adam’s head, I don’t remember, the class that warned about pregnancy, when they said Yes! You will get pregnant the first time and Yes! You will get pregnant even if he, as they say, removes himself prematurely and Yes! If you sleep in a bed and sperm is anywhere on the bed you have to know that sperm will live on a sheet for forty-eight hours and sniff you out and wiggle up you while you’re sleeping. After which Mrs. Brodie—whom I can see now was so nervous in front of a chalkboard when she liked to be standing at the sidelines of the blacktop track, who couldn’t bring herself to teach the dance unit and had two girls from the high school come over for extra credit to do it