Chris Adrian - A Better Angel

She sat down on my bed. “I like your room,” she said, looking around. There was light from the hall, enough to make out the general lay of the room. Our father had built it up for Colm and me, making it look like a ship, complete with sea-blue carpeting and a raised wooden deck with railings and a ship’s wheel. Above one bed was an authentic-looking sign that said captain’s bunk, while the other belonged to the first mate. While he lived we had switched beds every night, in the interests of absolute equality, unless one of us was feeling afraid, in which case we shared the same bed. The last time he slept in the room he had been in the captain’s bed, and because the cycle could not go on any longer I had been in the first mate’s bed ever since.

Molly pulled my sheets back and while I dressed she looked around the room for my shoes. When she found them she brought them to me and said, “Come on.”

I followed her, out the window, over the roof, and down the blue spruce that grew close to the house near my room. She went down our road, to the golf course around which part of our community was built. The place where we lived had once been a Baptist girl’s camp, but had in the century since its founding turned into a place where well-to-do white people lived in rustic pseudo-isolation. It was called Severna Forest. You couldn’t live there if you were Jewish or Italian, and in the summer they made you lock up your dog in a communal kennel. The golf course had only nine holes. It was a very hilly course, bordered by ravines in some places, and in others by the Severn River. The part of it that Molly took me to was a wide piece of rough on the fourth hole, only about half a mile from our houses. Though the moon was down, I could see under the starlight that rabbits had gathered in the tall grass and the dandelions. I bent at my knees and picked one of the flowers. I was about to puff on it and scatter the seeds when Molly held my arm and said, “Don’t, you’ll frighten them.”

For a little while we stood there, she with one hand on my arm, the other on her knife, and we watched the rabbits sitting placidly in the grass, and we waited for them to get used to us. “Aren’t they lovely?” she said, letting go of my arm. She began to move, very slowly, toward the rabbit closest to where we stood. She moved as slow as the moon does across the sky; I couldn’t tell she was getting any closer to the rabbit unless I looked away for a few minutes. When I looked back she was closer, and the rabbit had not moved. When she was about five feet away she turned and looked at me. It was too dark for me to see her face. I couldn’t tell if she smiled. Then she leapt, knife first, at the little creature, and I saw her pierce its body. It thrashed once and was suddenly dead. I realized I was holding my breath, and still holding the dandelion in front of my lips. I blew into it and watched the seeds float toward her where she was stabbing the body again and again and again.

In school the next Monday, Molly Pitcher studiously ignored me. The whole morning long I stared at her, thinking she must give some sign that a special thing had taken place between us, but she never did. I didn’t really care, one way or the other, if she never spoke to me again. I was used to people experimenting with me as a friend. Children, inspired briefly to kindness, would befriend and forget me like a puppy. I let them come and go.

I had given up on her by the time she finally spoke to me. After lunch, when we were all settling down again into our desks, in the silence after Mrs. Wallaby, our teacher, had offered up a post-luncheon prayer for the pope, who had just that day gone on a groundbreaking trip to his native Poland, Molly passed me a note. I opened it up, thinking, for some reason, that it might say, “I love you,” because once a popular girl named Iris had passed me such a note, and when I blushed she and her friends had laughed cruelly. But Molly’s note said simply, “You’d better not tell.” I thought that was the most ridiculous thing I had ever read. I supposed she meant I had better not write a letter to the police. She did not really know me at all, I thought to myself. She couldn’t know I wouldn’t tell.

“What’s that you’ve got there, Calvin?” Mrs. Wallaby asked. She strode over to me and squinted at me through her glasses. Before she arrived I slipped the piece of paper into my mouth and began to chew.

“What was that?” I swallowed. She brought her face so close to mine I could read the signature on her designer-frame glasses: Oscar de la Renta .

“What was that?” she asked again. Of course I said nothing. She heaved a great sigh and told me to go sit in “the Judas chair,” which was actually just a desk set aside from the others, facing a corner. She was not a bad woman, but sometimes I brought out the worst in people. Once she saved me at recess from a crowd of girls who were pinching me, trying to make me cry out. She brought me inside and put cold cream from her purse on my welts, but then, after she spoke for a while about how I couldn’t go on like this, I just couldn’t, she gave me a long grave look and gave me a pinch herself. It was not so hard as what the girls were giving me, and it was under my shirt, where no one would see. She looked deep into my eyes as she did it, but I didn’t cry out. I didn’t even blink.

Molly came back a few nights later. At school, after the incident with the note, she continued to ignore me, except for flashing me an occasional cryptic smile. On the night of the first day of summer vacation, she came and got me again from my bed. She said nothing, aside from commands telling me to get dressed and follow her, until we passed the golf course and I started off to where the rabbits were. She grabbed my collar and pulled me back.

“No,” she said. “It’s time to move on.” We spent the night hunting cats. It wasn’t easy. We exhausted ourselves chasing them through the dark. Always they outran us or vanished up a tree.

“We need a plan,” she said at last, and quickly came up with one. We went back closer to our houses and found a neighbor’s cat by the name of Mr. Charlemagne who had run off before when we chased him, into a cat door that led into a garage. Molly positioned me in a bush by that door, then chased after Mr. Charlemagne, who up until that point had been eyeing us placidly. When she came at him he took off for his door, but I jumped in front of it. For some reason he jumped right up into my arms, looked up in my face, then turned to look at my companion. She had her knife out. He snuggled deeper into my arms, expecting, I think, that I would bring him inside to safety, but I threw him down hard on the ground. Molly fell on him and stabbed him through the throat.

Mr. Charlemagne’s death did not go unnoticed. Not that the previous deaths had gone unnoticed, but the authorities of Severna Forest — the sheriff and the chairman of the Community Association and the president of the Country Club — dismissed the squirrel and rabbit deaths as the gruesome pranks of bored teenagers. When Mr. Charlemagne was discovered, draped along a straight-growing bough of a birch tree, a mildly urgent sense of alarm spread over the community. A crime had been committed. “Sick!” people muttered to each other while they bought vodka and Yoo-Hoo at the general store. Not one bit of suspicion fell on Molly or me. Everyone considered me strange and tragic, but utterly harmless. Molly Pitcher was equally tragic, but widely admired. With her blond hair and her big brown eyes, she was the picture of innocence, and she acted perfectly the part of an utterly good little girl. Sometimes I thought it was only because she stabbed that she could play the part of her sweet, decent self so well.