Slaughter Daughter by Eve Langlais

7

As interestin my case waned, so did my visits with my lawyer. Which was fine. He was just a reminder that my life sucked.

Given my group home was across town, I never returned to my school, and I was glad. I’d seen what they were saying online. Mean shit about me. Even my so-called friends—in other words, fucking strangers who never even smiled at me in the halls—gave interviews, claiming they knew my family had issues with no reasoning behind it. The parents were even worse, with one PTA bitch going on and on about the fact that my mom sometimes brought prepackaged goods to the potluck events. That cow didn’t mention that those treats tended to disappear before her healthy zucchini, no-gluten, no-sugar, no-fucking-anything-good cake.

I knew I should ignore the online crap, even as I listened to every single interview. Read all the articles. Cried over some of the meanest comments.

I couldn’t entirely escape the morbid curiosity that followed me.

Where were the bodies?

Who’d died in those pentagrams?

What were my parents trying to do?

Where were they?

People persisted in thinking I had the answers. The internet sleuths were all convinced that my parents had done it, even though none of the trace evidence collected from the scenes matched anything in our house. As a matter of fact, nothing existed to connect my parents to any of the crime scenes. And they’d yet to find the one in the video, which, depending on which expert you talked to, might have been doctored.

A few people called the tip line, looking to collect the reward by saying they’d found the basement depicted. All those statements turned out to be false.

Just like all the supposed rumors about me were fake.

A killer like her parents.

She chokes out guys when she has sex.

She’s pregnant with the Antichrist.

And the more disgusting claimed pregnant with my daddy’s baby.

I’d have preferred that people hit me. Bruises would have healed. What they did to my headspace… It broke me for a while.

Suicide, not something I’d ever contemplated before, haunted too many of my waking moments.

Despite changing schools, I couldn’t escape the whispers—not in the halls, not in the cafeteria. They talked about me in the group home. Kids younger than me but tougher. I soon discovered a world where fists flew if you dared to object.

I quickly developed thick skin. It didn’t stop the barbs—It’s a full moon next week. You gonna sacrifice one of us?— but it dulled them.

Teeth gritted, heart tucked into a safe room that no one could touch, I went to my new school and did my best to keep my head down and not talk to people. I only had two months left before I graduated. Two months that felt like an eternity, given my parents’ reputation followed me.

It amazed me how little it took to be bullied. Merely existing in my case. I was shoved into lockers with demands that I show them what my parents taught me.

They taught me to tie my shoes. Ride a bike. Cook very poorly—mostly because I loved watching my dad putter in the kitchen, making me something homemade instead of that store-bought crap. Mom bought the crap because she hated what she called wasting her time on something she could easily afford. But Mom did love her closet. She’d be appalled if she saw my clothes of gray on black, no makeup. I heard people muttering, “Emo freak.” I ignored them. I just wished they’d forget I existed.

I made it, week by week, to the goal line of graduation, feeling more and more depressed as it neared. My third-choice college rescinded my admission due to moral concerns.

Assholes. The letters made me burn with rage. Maybe I was a killer like my parents. Because when I read their words, I wanted to light their schools on fire.

My psychiatrist said it was a normal response. Maybe he was a serial killer, too. I sure as hell hoped so because Dr. Werner was so boring. “Tell me, Abby, how are you feeling today?”

If I told him I wanted to peel off his face and stick it to a window like one of those clings you bought during the holidays, would he give me a prescription for pills I could sell? Jobs were scarce. I was working ten hours a week and not saving enough to do anything. I had submitted a last-minute admission to a trade college with no money to pay for it and little time to apply for grants.

“I’m feeling okay.” The safest answer with my doctor. I didn’t need the group home restricting my food choices again, claiming the salt in my diet made me experience violent thoughts. Ha. What truly made me consider violence was the number of times I’d had to sit in this office, or one very similar, since my parents went on the lam.

Selfish bastards. It was so unfair. They’d ruined my existence. Took away my happiness and my future.

And they were cruel about it. They’d given me a taste of suburban life, one I’d thought so boring, though now wished I could have back. I even missed how my parents rushed me through my breakfast in the morning despite the fact I’d never been late. While doing my homework, I’d have to start over with a fresh sheet at times because of the tears that fell as I recalled Mom showing me how to do my math then cursing when I told her they didn’t do it like that anymore.

“Stupid new math!” she’d rail. “Why couldn’t they leave it the way it makes sense?” It drove her nuts. Maybe that was why she’d indulged in sadistic rituals that ended in blood and death.

Perhaps I should mount a challenge against the new math and hold up a sign that read: See, it drove my parents to murder.

Except I still didn’t believe they were killers.

The video was the only thing linking them to the pentagram killings, and it had as many people debunking it as believing it. It might have died away, except, a week before graduation, someone stumbled across a pentagram in a condemned building. The blood within the shape belonged to the body found slumped beside it. Gerald Huntington. Apparently, he’d worked with my dad.

The cops finally had a body. Now, they just needed to find my parents.

With a body making charges possible, interest in the case resurfaced. Someone scrawled Slaughter Daughter on the garage door attached to the group home I lived in. Tina, who owned the place, was actually happy about it because it meant she could charge the state to replace it.

I tried to close my ears to the now very elaborate theories people had had time to construct. The most popular being that Mom and Dad were practicing Satanists, sacrificing people to open a doorway for the dark lord. A cool idea in a supernatural television show, not so neat in real life. People treated me like a fascinating freak instead of a person.

“Did you know?” they’d ask with wide eyes as if they were the first.

I kept my shrugged reply short. “I thought they were atheists with a Christmas tree.” Who celebrated epic Halloweens. My dad used to go all out, making us the scariest house on the block and handing out full-sized chocolate bars.

Since the internet already ran wild with the notion that I was the Antichrist, being raised by Satan’s loyal servants, I chose to make my reputation even more interesting by starting an online rumor that my parents would return on my eighteenth birthday to sacrifice me and use my virgin blood.

It led to many offers to take my virginity. Boys who’d snicker at me in the halls sidling close and saying, “Meet me in the locker room after school. I’ll save you from your parents.”

Idiots. I wasn’t a virgin, but I preferred to remain single. Especially since I had no idea how to explain to a potential partner, “By the way, everyone thinks my parents killed people for the devil.”

Refusing to let boys take turns saving me meant that even more rumors popped up. I withdrew and took the term hermit to new levels. All my caseworkers were convinced that something must be wrong with me. Why didn’t I have friends? I probably drowned kittens or set dogs on fire. Pulled the wings off flies.

If I did, I could guarantee that no one would ever find the bodies. Couldn’t be charged with murder if they never found a corpse.

Why had my parents gotten sloppy? Did they want to get caught?