Jeff Lindsay - Dexter is delicious

I wondered what Deborah was going to do. It was selfish of me, I know, but I hoped she was starting to get very worried about me. I had been gone just a little bit too long by now, and she would be sitting in the car and grinding her teeth together, tapping her fingers on the steering wheel, glaring at her watch, wondering if it was too soon to do something and, if not, what that something ought to be. It cheered me up a little-not just the thought that she was certainly going to do something, but that she was fretting about it, too. It served her right. I hoped she would grind her teeth so hard she needed dental work. Maybe she could see Dr. Lonoff.

For no other reason than because I was anxious and bored, I took out my cell phone and tried to call her again. It still didn't work.

"That won't work in here," Samantha said in her slow and happy voice.

"Yes, I know," I said.

"Then you should stop trying," she said.

I know I was new to having human feelings, but I was pretty certain that the one she was inspiring in me was annoyance verging on loathing. "Is that what you've done?" I said. "Given up?"

She shook her head slowly with a kind of low-pitched two-syllable chuckle. "No way," she said. "Not me."

"Then for God's sake, why are you doing this? Why did you trap me in here and now you just sit there and smirk?"

She turned her head toward me and I got the feeling that she actually focused on me for the first time. "What's your name?" she asked.

I saw no reason not to tell her-of course, I also saw no reason not to slap her, but that could wait. "Dexter," I said. "Dexter Morgan."

"Whoa," she said, with another syllable of that annoying laugh. "Weird name."

"Yes, completely bizarre," I said.

"Anyway," she said. "Dexter. Do you have anything in your life that you really, really want?"

"I'd like to get out of here," I said.

She shook her head. "But something that's, you know. Like, totally, totally, ahh… forbidden? Like, really wrong? But you want it anyway, so much it's like-I mean, you can't even talk about it to anybody, but it's all you can think about sometimes?"

I thought about the Dark Passenger, and it stirred slightly as I did, as if to remind me that none of this had to happen if only I'd listened. "No, not a thing," I said.

She looked at me for a long moment, her lips parted but still smiling. "Okay," she said, as if she knew I was lying but it didn't really matter. "But I have. I mean, there is something. For me."

"It's wonderful to have a dream," I said. "But wouldn't it be a lot easier to make it come true if we got out of here?"

She shook her head. "Um, no," she said. "That's just it. I have to be in here. Or, you know. I don't get to-" And she bit her lip in a kind of funny way and shook her head again.

"What?" I said, and her coy act was nudging me even closer to an uncontrollable urge to rattle her teeth. "You don't get to what?"

"It's really hard to say, even now," she said. "It's kind of like…" She frowned, which was a pleasant change. "Don't you have some kind of secret that, you know… you can't help it, but it makes you kind of, like, ashamed?"

"Sure," I said. "I watched a whole season of American Idol."

"But that's everybody," she said, waving a hand dismissively and making a sour-lemon face. "Everybody does that. I mean something that… You know, people want to fit in, be like everybody else. And if there's something inside you that makes you… You know it's totally wrong, weird; you'll never be like everybody else-but you still really want it. And that hurts, and it also makes you maybe more careful? About trying to fit in. Which is maybe more important when you're my age."

I looked at her with a little bit of surprise. I had forgotten that she was eighteen, and rumored to be bright. Perhaps whatever drugs they had given her were wearing off, and maybe she was just glad to have somebody to talk to for the first time in quite a while. Whatever the case, she was finally showing a little bit of depth, which at least removed one small layer of torture from durance vile.

"It's not," I said. "It stays important your whole life."

"But it feels so much more hurtful," she said. "When you're young, and it's like there's a party going on all around you, but you weren't invited." She looked away, not at the blood, but at the bare steel wall.

"All right," I said. "I do know what you mean." She looked at me encouragingly. "When I was your age, I was different, too. I had to work very hard to pretend to be like everyone else."

"You're just saying that," she said.

"No," I said. "It's true. I had to learn to act like the cool kids, and how to pretend I was tough, and even how to laugh."

"What," she said with another of her two-syllable chuckles. "You don't know how to laugh?"

"I do now," I said.

"Let's see."

I made one of my perfect happy faces, and gave her a very realistic that's-a-good-one chuckle.

"Hey, pretty good," she said.

"Years of practice," I said modestly. "It sounded pretty horrible at first."

"Uh-huh, well," she said, "I'm still practicing. And for me it's a whole lot harder than just learning to laugh."

"That's just teenaged self-involvement," I told her. "You think everything is harder for you, because it's you. But the fact is, being a human being is very hard work and it always has been. Especially if you feel like you're not one."

"I think I am," she said softly. "Just a really, really different kind."

"Okay," I said, and I admit that I was starting to feel a little bit intrigued. Who knew she would turn out to be such a person? "But that's not a bad thing. And if you can just give it some time, it might actually turn out to be a good thing."

"Yeah, right," she said.

"And you can't do that if you don't get out of here-staying here is a permanent solution to a temporary problem."

"That's cute," she said.

She was back to being flippant again, which frayed at my new human temper. She had begun to seem interesting, and I had opened up, started to like her, even felt real, actual empathy for her-and now she was slipping back into her aloof, teenage, you-can't-know disguise, and it made me just a little bit cranky and filled me with the urge to shake her up. "For God's sake," I said. "Don't you understand why you're in here? These people are going to cook you and eat you!"

She looked away again. "Yeah, I know," she said. "That's what I want." She looked back at me, her eyes large and moist. "That's my big secret," she said.

It's funny how many little sounds you can hear when you think you're sitting in absolute silence. For example, I could hear my heartbeat lub-dubbing away in my ears, and right next to me Samantha took a long, slow breath-and beyond that there was a metallic whirring sound as the little fan ticked on and blew more cold air across the length of the walk-in refrigerator, and I even heard something scuttling in a piece of paper under the cot I sat on, probably a palmetto bug or cockroach.

Even with all this thunderous noise, the most overwhelming sound was the all-enveloping white noise of Samantha's last words as they crashed and echoed around the little room, and after a while they stopped making sense to me, even the individual syllables, and I turned my head to look at her.

Samantha sat unmoving, the annoying smile once again in place on her face. Her shoulders were hunched and she looked straight ahead, not really avoiding eye contact so much as just waiting to see what might happen next, and at last it was more than I could stand.

"I'm sorry," I said. "When I said they're going to eat you, and you said that's what you want-what the hell do you mean?"

She was silent for several seconds, but at least her smile faded and her face settled into a look of dreamy thoughtfulness. "When I was really little," she said at last, "my father was always away somewhere, at a conference or whatever. So when he finally came home he would read these stories to me to make up. You know, fairy tales. And he would come to the part where the ogre or the witch eats somebody, and he would, you know. Make these eating noises and pretend to eat my arm, or my leg. And, you know, I mean, I'm just a kid, and I love it, and I'm like, 'Do it again, do it again.' And he'd go, 'Gobble gobble,' and I'd be laughing like crazy, and…"