The Pentagram Killer

Author's Note: This story mentions bullying and violence.

Before I killed my therapist, Dr. Emily Wong suggested that I “journal my story.” I laughed at her then as she sat smugly in her high-back, leather chair. And I laughed months later when her blood was still wet on my hands. Yet here I am, putting pen to paper in a vain attempt to explain the unexplainable.

I was deemed extraordinary at an early age. When most children were still defecating in their diapers, I was performing recitals in both piano and violin. By age nine, I had played concerti with all the major orchestras. A year later, I composed my first opera. When my intelligence was formally tested, my score was among the highest ever recorded. I was called “a miracle of evolution,” “a gift to humanity,” “this generation’s Mozart.”

My mother, God rest her soul, believed in the importance of public education, even for her miracle child. And so, at eleven-and-a-half and in the throes of puberty, I was sent to the lion’s den of Carver High.

The classes themselves were child’s play, and its teachers were enthralled by my participation and my potential. Socially, however, I was an outcast. Mother suggested extra-curriculars could fill the void. Athletics were out of the question. My arms and legs were toothpicks with flesh, my hairless chest softer than Wonder Bread.

I thought perhaps I could find a community of like-minded students in the fine arts, a theory dispelled when I heard the school’s two ensembles. The Carver High Symphony sounded like feral cats in heat, the marching band like goats before slaughter. Therefore, to placate Mother and to fill the empty hours with some form of activity, I joined Carver High’s Chess Club.

There were five members in this illustrious group. Tate “The Knight” Wagner, Brenton “The Bishop” Lee, Parvi “The Rook” Anand, Marcy “The Queen” Morgan, and Thaddeus “The King” Roberts. They called themselves the Pentagram Five—a redundancy I pointed out on my first day—and had performed well at the state tournament. My addition was the source of much hilarity. Thad quickly named me “The Pawn” and offered to be the Yoda to my Luke Skywalker.

I checkmated Thad in twenty-five turns, Parvi in eighteen, Brenton in twenty-two, Tate in five, and Marcy, because I enjoyed gazing at her ample cleavage and imagined myself climbing those twin peaks, in forty-one. Similar results followed the next week. And the next.

Word of their defeat spread among the student body like a proverbial wildfire. (I may have stoked the fire with exaggerated tales of my victories.) Thad’s humiliation was sealed when someone (perhaps me?) made a meme of him morphed into Humpty Dumpty. The caption read: THE KING HAS FALLEN! AND HE CAN’T GET UP!

To his credit, Thad took defeat well. He shook my hand after each match and said, “Way to go, Pawn.” And so, I wasn’t surprised when he invited me and the rest of the Pentagram Five to a pool party at his home.

That Saturday afternoon was calendar perfect. Baby-blue skies with a few cotton-candy clouds, temperatures in the low eighties, a light breeze out of the south. I found it odd that Thad’s parents weren’t home, but my clubmates were almost adults. They didn’t need lifeguards or helicopter mothers.

The Pentagram Five cheered my arrival with great gusto. Already dressed in their bathing suits, their bodies glistened in the sun. Marcy, in a silver string bikini, was of particular interest.

Thad shook my hand. “Ready to swim, little man?” His toothy smile was wide, his grip firm. I pictured him running a successful candidacy for mayor in a decade and was proud to call myself his friend.

“Sure. Where can I change?”

“In the pool house.”

I found a bathroom in the adjoining building. Shelves on two of its walls were filled with titles I’d read: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, The Elements of Style. I found it strange to have books in a bathroom, but Thad’s father was a history professor and his mother a corporate lawyer, so perhaps this was their norm.

I slipped out of my clothes, put on my bathing suit, and rejoined my friends. The rest of the day passed as a dream. A dream with burgers, with beach balls, with Marcy’s bikini, and with a soul-deep sense of belonging. I had finally found my tribe.

My first hint that something had gone awry came on Monday morning. All of my schoolmates gazed at me as I passed through the halls, which wasn’t altogether unusual. I was the lone eleven-year-old at Carver High, after all. This day, however, their stares were punctuated with tittering laughter.

Mark Eubanks, a calculus-class acquaintance, approached me as I was sorting through my locker. “Did you see?”

“I’ve seen many things today, Mark. Avocado toast, Paganini’s Twelfth Caprice, nimbostratus clouds. Can you be more specific?”

Mark thrust his phone in my face. “This.”

On his screen was a pair of photos. The first was of me, naked, in a bathroom. The second was a closeup of my genitalia. A caption underneath read: LOOK MA! NO BALLS!

The condition referred to in the meme is called cryptorchidism, or, to the layman, undescended testicles. My mother, God rest her soul, was a member of a radical sect of Jehovah’s Witnesses. As a result, my deformity wasn’t properly diagnosed until my early teens, leaving me without the ability to procreate.

The world tilted on its axis. My heart turned to wax and melted like a candle into my gut. After a few deep breaths, I found my voice. “Where did you find this?”

Mark shrugged. “Jamie sent it to me, but I don’t know who made it.”

I knew precisely who had created this abomination. Thaddeus “The King” Roberts. His pool-house bathroom wasn’t just housing books. It was hiding cameras.

I found Thad at lunch with the rest of the Pentagram Five. They quieted their banter as I drew near. “Thad, I need to speak with you privately.”

Brenton and Parvi snickered, Tate laughed out loud, and Marcy hid her face behind a slice of cafeteria pizza. Only Thad kept his expression neutral. “You can talk to me here, little man. What’s up?”

“You know exactly what’s up. What you’ve done is both immoral and illegal.”

Thad held my gaze. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He turned to his friends. “You guys have any idea what’s bothering the Pawn?”

Pepperonis exploded out of Marcy’s mouth. Her laugh became the table’s laugh, became the cafeteria’s laugh, became the world’s laugh.

Mother heard about the incident from Carver High’s principal, Don Bieber. She removed me from school the following day. From then on, my studies were conducted online. Any social activities—and there were precious few—were closely monitored.

The event metastasized in my mind, killing the naïve youth I had been and replacing it with someone cold and hard and less than human. As adolescence transitioned into adulthood, I realized the only way to remove this tumor was with the scalpel of revenge. Eye for eye. Tooth for tooth. Life for life.

But how does one repay another for an act so vile? Murder would be too kind, too quick, too final. Even a slow, excruciating death would not balance the scales of justice in my favor. No, the Pentagram Five needed to experience the worst pain a human could endure. A pain so intense, so unimaginable, that language fails to describe its horror.

A woman whose husband has died is called a widow. A husband who loses his wife is called a widower. But there is no word in any language that describes a person who’s suffered the death of a child.

I snuffed out Tate’s first. The obituary blamed Dane Wagner’s death on SIDS, sudden infant death syndrome, though my gloved hand over his mouth was the cause. Next came Parvi’s three-year-old girl Patricia, a tragic victim of hit and run. Marcy’s son Scott was found floating in her grandparents’ pool, and poor Caleb Lee picked up a fentanyl-laced candy at a local park.

I came to every funeral, dressed in mourner’s black, and drank their parents’ tears as if I were sipping a flute of Dom Pérignon. Revenge is a dish best served with bubbly.

I saved the best for last. Thaddeus “The King” Richard’s first child was born seven years ago today: a girl, Elizabeth Marie, six pounds, two ounces. Clad in doctor’s scrubs and armed with fake credentials, I stepped into the maternity ward, fully prepared to complete the pentagram. But as I stood by Elizabeth’s basinet and caught sight of her angel-blue eyes and cherubic cheeks, an alternative plan flashed into my mind. A bold plan. A reckless plan. A plan rich with possibilities.

And so I—

“Daddy?” A child’s voice cuts through my office. “The party’s about to start. Are you coming?”

Alas…duty calls. I have a birthday party to attend. I’ll have to finish this musing at a later date.

“Be right there, Lizzy.”