They killed my father on a hot day in June. The air shimmered; dogs stayed off the street. Jimmy Sanders passed out on the baseball field, and Little League was cancelled until it went back below 95. I spent most of my time in the basement, watching movies with a wet towel on my head. I had finished 11th grade about two weeks ago. I had been avoiding my mother for most of those two weeks, once going as far as climbing through my bedroom window when she was up late in the kitchen. She had been sitting at the table, her head in her hands, going NoNoNoNoNoNoNo.

My father had it coming. When I was six, he went into a convenience store and shot the sixteen-year-old clerk in the neck. He was thirty-seven the day he went into jail; forty-seven the day he went out. I woke up strangely the morning he died, coated in sweat underneath my thin sheet, for several moments unable to remember where I was.

But when I remembered I knew intuitively I could not be in my house. I decided to go to the mall. We lived in a small town in Kansas; the mall was an hour away, in a much larger town, a long straight drive through crops underneath a sky so big when I was three I stared at it for too long, got vertigo, and threw up.

I got dressed, then listened at my bedroom door. I couldn’t hear anything; the house seemed empty. But my mother had taken to sneaking around almost as much as I had. I tiptoed down the hallway, through the kitchen (empty and dusty — neither of us had consumed anything other than take-out in a month), and out into the sun on the driveway. I looked back at the house. A face stirred in the window; I turned and half-sprinted to my car (old, shitty), got in and started the ignition. My mother watched me drive away.

******

Lenny, the preacher’s son, had a crush on me. At the age of seven, when he comprehended what had happened with my father, his response was an unclouded application of Christian logic — it was my father’s fault, not mine; I should be comforted and my father should be damned. He walked up to me on the playground one day and said, reassuringly, “It's okay. God is sending your Dad to Hell, but He still loves you." He had the strange half-on, half-off articulation of a kid who remembers slogans but puts them in the wrong order. I kicked him in the shins, hard. When he was down I kicked him in the stomach. As the teacher helped him up again, nose and eyes streaming, and as I was led passively away by my ear there was a look, a wideness in his eyes that hadn't been there before. It stayed with him for the next ten years, popping up on the rare occasions our paths crossed, a souvenir, I guessed, of a hormonal combustion he experienced for the first time the moment my sneaker met the tender flesh of his stomach. The only thing I liked about him was his strangeness and his ensuing isolation.

Lenny was walking down the sidewalk three blocks from my house. He was tall and awkward, wearing khaki dress pants and a white polo shirt. He looked like an earnest evangelist giraffe. I rolled down my window and slowed the car to a crawl. “Hey!” I shouted.

He stopped and turned. His eyes widened — we spoke rarely.

“They’re killing my dad today,” I said.

“I know,” he said, nearly whispering; I had to read his lips. A look of confusion passed over his face. “I’m sorry.”

“Do you want to go to the mall with me?”

He looked at me. I had never asked him to do anything with me before.

“Well?”

“Yeah.”

He climbed into the car; we were out of town in five minutes.

****

I was six. My teachers were cautiously sympathetic but also a bit fearful, two emotions I couldn’t understand because no one had actually told me that my dad had gone into a store and shot a beautiful, popular teenage girl so her arterial blood sprayed all over the Doritos display in the first aisle. My mom didn’t let me watch the news. But one day, still in the immediate aftermath when my mother never left the house, my incredibly gentle first-grade teacher walked me home, and I saw a muted news report on a storefront window TV. I saw a sequence of images: a convenience store, a smiling teenage girl, my father, whose whereabouts for the past few days had not been explained to my satisfaction. Then, there was a picture of my house, a little white one-story, some azalea bushes on either side of the door, the whole dwelling neatly fitting in between the identical homes to the left and right. And though I still didn’t really know what had happened, I got an inkling, a sense that somehow the world had gotten very sick, and I screamed and screamed and screamed, on the street in small-town Kansas, in the golden afternoon sun.

*****

The crops around us were shimmering green, endless. “This all used to be prairie,” I said. “Isn’t that weird?”

“I guess,” said Lenny. He fiddled nervously with a pen that had been on the seat, not looking at me.

“Once I went on this fieldtrip, to this one acre of prairie they had let grow back. You were supposed to walk around and think about what it must have been like for the pioneers. But there was this McDonalds sign right there, on the edge of the prairie, and even if you closed your eyes you could hear the interstate.”

I paused. He didn’t say anything. I waited. “It’s God’s will,” he murmured, eventually.

“That’s the fucking dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” I said. He gripped his pen and looked at his lap. I knew I had been too harsh.

We didn’t speak again for five minutes. Eventually Lenny said, softly, “So aren’t you upset?” I eyed a semi-trailer in the rearview mirror, pressed down further on the gas pedal. The car thrummed as it sped up. “Cassie?”

“Yes?”

He didn’t say anything. There were another five minutes of silence.

Then, me: “How’s your Dad?” It was like I opened my mouth and tendrils of cruelty emerged like vine, without my consent, another organism living in my throat.

“He’s fine,” Lenny said, looking out the window, embarrassed for both of us. I could not picture Lenny and his father ever having a healthy relationship. Lenny believed in sin. His father was round, present at most community dinners and council meetings (in a non-religious capacity), and embarrassingly in love with his extremely loud wife. Lenny was the non-artistic fifth after the first dancing, painting, musical four. He was a misfit. He was an inherently gentle being, but he also told people that they were going to hell.

“Fine?” I said.

“Yeah.” I looked over at him; he was staring at me. His eyes were big and blue and pale, almost unblinking. I looked back towards the road. I looked over again. He blushed and looked at his hands.

“Sorry,” he muttered.

“Don’t worry about it.”

****

After that, I began to collect knickknacks off my teachers’ desks — pens and pencils, pictures, paperweights. Once, as I was helping her clean up after the bell rang, my incredibly gentle first grade teacher found the horde of stolen paraphernalia in my desk and instantly, reflexively smacked me so hard I got a nosebleed. Then she cried and asked me not to tell anyone because she'd lose her job. I couldn’t understand the depth of her rage until years later, looking back, I realized that she had become afraid of me.

****

The mall smelled like perfume and butter; there were bright lights and the noise of hundreds of people. When I was little I thought it was the circus. The glass staircase from the first floor to the second floor in the main junction astounded me. I’d climb up and down it pretending I was a princess.

I wasn’t really sure why I went to the mall anymore. I supposed part of it was that I felt diluted, Product washed over me, smelly soaps and pictures of beautiful women. Lenny looked terrified. I wandered into a corporate music store, picked up a CD. Above the row a boy’s eyes flickered up then back down, uninterested. The CD had a picture of a woman wearing almost nothing. I showed it to Lenny.

“Do you want this?”

He shook his head. I put it in my hoodie anyway.

****

Once I started I couldn’t stop. There was a period in middle school when I took everything. I took lamps out of the teacher’s lounge and stashed them in my locker. I stole entire boxes of cupcakes from bake sales. I stole money from my mother. I stole little things from classmates — trinkets they’d leave in easy reach, jewelry and pens and calculators. I stole the teacher’s edition of the math textbook, not to cheat, but just to watch him look for it for a while, before I threw it away. I would have stuffed the entire school into my pocket once everyone went home for the night, if I could. At one point I was found to have stolen an expensive locket from a rich classmate; further investigation revealed the lamps in my locker. There were virtually no repercussions. I did have to meet with the guidance counselor. She coughed a lot; she did not know how to begin. That was the first time I got caught.

****

“What are you doing?” Lenny said.

“Hush,” I said.

“What are you doing?” he said, louder.

“Sshh,” I said. I reached out and stroked his bare arm, the soft blond hairs on end from the over-aggressive air conditioning. He froze. Then we started to walk towards the exit. A store employee stopped me. That was the second time I got caught.

*****

My first grade teacher was the second person who hit me that year. The first incident was when I was playing in my front yard, a month after the girl had died. I was splashing around fully clothed in my kiddy pool, trying to drown Barbie, when an adult woman very calmly came up to me and struck me. On the side of the head, not very hard, though it still hurt a little. She looked at me. I looked at her. Her face was blank. I sat down in the kiddie pool, totally confused, soaking my underpants. She walked away. She had been the girl’s mother.

*****

Lenny held his head in his hands, not speaking. I was trying to feel concern and failing. I looked at the clock. It was one. I was hungry. The security guard had brought us to a dull white room — there were a few uncomfortable chairs, a water cooler, a clock, a dying plant. We had been there about fifteen minutes.

“Why did you do that?” Lenny said.

“I don’t know.”

He was quiet for a moment. Then, softly, “There’s something wrong with you.”

“Why don’t you tell me I’m going to hell?”

I kind of wanted him to, but he didn’t. There was a long pause. I asked him: “Do you still like me?”

“What?”

“Like, like like me?”

He said nothing, his head still in his hands.

We were given a warning — Lenny’s obvious, wordless terror softened the security guard’s heart, and after a gruff “Don’t do it again,” we were sent back out to the parking lot. We found my car, climbed in. As I sat in the driver’s seat the thought of going back home overwhelmed me, drowned me. “Do you want to go see a movie?” I asked Lenny. He did not. I put my head down on the steering wheel. The plastic was hot against my forehead. For some reason I felt very tired; I wanted to rest my eyes for a moment. I started to hyperventilate.

“Cassie?”

My breathing was becoming too big and fast for my chest; it needed a stronger body; it needed to draw in more oxygen than my brain could accept. Stars of lightness burst in my fingertips and spread upwards. For some reason my sense of smell became very sensitive.

“Cassie?”

“Give me a minute,” I said. I put my head back and leaned against the seat. My breath slowed. My head was light. Lenny touched my arm; he felt cold and shocks of the cold ran all up and down my body. I opened my eyes and we were staring at each other. I saw that flash of terror from the day I kicked him in the shins and then in the stomach. I took his hand. Outside the sunlight screamed against the hood of the car, enraged, demanding to be let in. I put one of his fingers in my mouth. Then, two.

******

I miss my father. He was a very, very bad man. I can remember early weekday mornings: his alarm clock would wake me up, sometimes, and I’d go lie in a sleepy ball in front of my parents’ front door. He’d find me and pick me up and put me back to bed. I can remember him singing The Clash to me, his voice unmelodious but confident, strong. I remember him sneaking me treats when my mom looked away. Cookies, ice cream, all those things I wasn’t supposed to have. I miss him with every fiber of my being. I’d think of the girl’s mother hitting me, and I knew, because I missed him, because all I could think of him was good, that I was evil. I was six. My mother never let me visit him in prison. I still miss him.

******

When I got to the edge of the town Lenny asked me to stop the car; he opened the door and climbed out on the sidewalk and closed it.

“So,” I said, out the open passenger seat window. “Do you wanna do something tomorrow?”

“I don’t think I should.” He wouldn’t look at me. In an obvious way, like he was certain one glance would burn his eyes out; he’d walk around for the rest of his life with charred black holes for sockets. “I have to go study.”

“There’s no school. It’s summer.”

“The Bible.” There was the tiniest tremor. “My youth group is meeting tomorrow.”

“Well call me if you wanna hang out.”

“Yeah.” He walked away, still avoiding my eyes.

******

The night before my father became Kansas’s murderer of the year, he tucked me in.