Free Everyday Psychokillers by Lucy Corin Page B

while she sat with her whistle in the bleachers and listened, with all of us, to incessant repetitions of “Let’s Go to the Hop,”—set the textbook spine bent on the desk and said with a put-on-wry-frankness, “You have all gotten your periods, right? Raise your hand if you still never got your period. Good, then. We’ll skip that. We’ll move on to psychology.”
    There’s a reason, I thought, studying on my floor in college, in the anonymous cavelike dome of space created by the candlelight, something to do with being a little kid in the seventies, I thought, that while my grandmother’s been dead for years and years and I rarely think of her, let alone anything particular about her, I remember every pattern of wallpaper in her ridiculous apartment. No wonder, I thought, remembering, no wonder there’s this kind of serial perception. I remember the overlapping golden splotches like sunspots, the interlocking metallic squares of glued-on sand, the tiny farm animals suspended in red-and-blue plaid, and I remember the pattern in her green lace shower curtain, the shapes that let the opalescent liner show through in cut-outs that looked like miniature hamburgers, and the bedspread in her bedroom with millions of pointy white flowers, and the blanket I slept under when I stayed there, with its scattering of yellow stars on vacant white fuzz.
    No one else could have done it, they say in the article. If we’re dealing with a criminal, they say, someone with a criminal mind, he might have shot the boy or something. And I say him , they say, because dismemberment is not something females are noted for. So what we’re dealing with is a psychopath, they say. Or else he wouldn’t mutilate him. What we’re looking for is something that looks like a pattern.
    That’s what I think of Adam Walsh.
    I did, I adored Gwen, and I believe that brief as our friendship was she adored me, too. For a few weeks out of the few months my mother worked at Sandpiper, I’d chatter about how I wanted to learn how to play a piano. Really I was talking about a friend from school, a girl I liked a lot who played the piano and was always saying she’d be a concert pianist, and I liked how she could say that word “pianist” and not feel foolish when she said it.
    At the end of the summer, my mother quit that job for one at a stable that seemed better. Gwen visited the triplex a couple times and one time she brought a present for me: a plug-in, three-octave Casio organ. Still, she remained an aristocrat to me. Even with the bathing suit, which I managed to imagine was like what the Queen of England must wear, for modesty, when bathing, even with the Casio and its bossanova rhythm button, it was meant to lead me to a Steinway on a stage. What funny circus songs it made. What a tinny, broadcast version of sound. I can’t see Gwen born in a broken East End flat or what have you. I see her only in her castle, a round and rosy princess clever enough to jump and land on a spongy green pillow of a hill, and to tumble along with her teacups to the stable, to pack up her pony and go.
    What’s left of the people who move through your life and make you who you are? There’s no knowing them, especially when you are a child, and you follow your folks, and you’re tied to their backsides. You know the one where the mommy says to the little kid: you can go anywhere you want, just don’t cross the street. Anywhere I want! thinks the kid. Years and years and around and around the block she goes.
    Imagine, it’s sunset over Gwen’s box on the beach. She’s watching rosy waves lap the cardboard. Behind the box, behind her back, between the dunes and the sun there are giant blond girls wearing sunglasses made of plastic mirror and bikinis that glow. Their skin is dark: there’s no telling what color it is in the distorting light. They’re sparkling with the