Psycho Pathy

The stepbrother, David, older than me by six years, was a fastidious and fussy teenager. Everything in his bedroom was orderly. His math books were organized by color, his clothing was folded and put away, and his bed was neatly made each morning. He was pathetic and cold, like a fish stranded on dry land; I instantly disliked him, and the feeling was mutual. I thought the marriage a hasty, ill-conceived idea – Blaine Curtis, a goofy Caltech mathematician seemed a poor match for mother – and his son, David, was a definite weirdo, a psycho. I was not happy, made it blatantly obvious, and decided that I would end this awkward and thrown-together marriage as quickly as possible.  

David was a complete nerd. Most evenings he was in his bedroom doing math problems probably, but I could imagine something else, something far more sinister and I shared the thought that he was abusing the internet and himself in the privacy of his room. Mother seemed uninterested in the substance of the accusation but alarmed at the very fact that I’d expressed such a thought, which was “unkind” apparently. Appealing to my “ferocious” precocity”, she suggested empathy or sympathy (I get them muddled up). “David is an unusual boy”, she explained, attempting to elicit some kind of “pathy” from me, but failing. I reminded her that I was only ten years old, that the pathy-onus should be on the psycho teen, but she was undeterred. She encouraged me to establish a relationship with David and to avoid using derisive and divisive language, and to use my imagination for more constructive purposes.

A sign, “Private. Knock Before Entering” was glued to the door, so I walked straight in and caught him at his desk watching porn. His body jerked at the interruption, he jabbed at a key, and the computer monitor went blank.

“Crap, you shocked me, I was just about to fight the princess of Agor.”

Oh, nice try, buddy. You couldn’t fool me. I knew porn when I saw it. I decided to log that little incident for future use, for a public accusation. In the meantime, I was on a hopeless mission at the urging of Mother.

“Can I have your Imperial Star Destroyer,” I asked without formality. It was a Lego set, still in its original packaging, a childhood toy. Mother told me that you can build a constructive relationship with an adversary by asking them for help of some kind, it triggers inherent altruism, something to do with ape culture and group survival (she’s a Professor of Anthropology).  

“Please knock before you burst in, and no you can’t have my stuff. Now why don’t you just go away,” said David. He pulled a silver object from the side of his computer, placed it in his desk drawer, and slammed it shut. So that was that. 

I briefed Mother on David’s selfish response to my polite request to borrow one of his toys. Mother seemed dismayed but dismissed David’s behavior as acting out, a response to change and an excess of hormones. He’d not yet adjusted to the marriage, but she and Professor Blaine were sure that time and effort would yield results, we’d be one big happy family. Alarm bells were ringing. I needed to raise the stakes.

He’d just finished in the bathroom where the mirror was still steamed up, and the toilet seat had been left up, which caused a flush of indignation. I burst into his bedroom where I encountered a bleached thing, part flappy fish, part human with a horribly malformed appendage between its legs. Mother was ferociously progressive about my education - but nothing could have prepared me for this terrible discovery. The thing, the David thing, waved its flappy hands at me, took a step toward me, and attacked. I ran from the thing between his legs.  

“She’s a liar” said David, “she’s making it up, and she shouldn’t just burst into my room anyhow”.  

My mother explained to me, in front of David, that it was entirely natural, that David should be given privacy, that he was going through change. It was a silly childhood misunderstanding. She was defending him and condemning me for tattling, but when she started talking about apes and non-reproductive sexual behavior, of genital stimulation, something snapped in his teenage brain and David went, well, ape shit on me and her!  

“All that happened is that I had a shower, and – suddenly – she bursts into my room while I’m still drying off.”

Oh, so he was the victim, not me! I was a liar, and Mother was an idiot! Psycho.

Voices rose in anger behind closed doors, Mother and Blaine determined a suitable punishment, but it was not the punishment that hurt, a routine deprivation, it was the fact that the punishment was directed at me, and only me! Did they not realize that David was a sex fiend, a nutjob, a psycho? Did they not realize that he was dangerous? I could only imagine what horrors he’d downloaded onto that USB drive that he hid in his desk drawer.

Injustice aside, things went quite well. Apparently, I’d driven a wedge between the adults, and a truck between me and David. We rarely exchanged words, and our days were orchestrated to minimize interactions. Instead of being entertained by my ferocious precocity, Professor Blaine became bored and irritated at me, asked out loud why I didn’t have any friends at school. I thought this was a particularly hurtful thing to say, but it did mark the point of no return. It was a tense and unpleasant period, and it weighed on my mother and the Professor heavily, whose own interactions became fraught and terse. Professor Blaine worked late at the University most evenings. Mother slept in the spare bedroom some nights. We settled into an uneasy cohabitation. I needed evidence against him.

I bade my time, then one day, when David was at one of his oh-isn’t-he-brilliant math tournaments, I picked the lock on his door, snuck into his bedroom, and grabbed the USB stick from the desk drawer, tucked into its retail packaging. I also took the Lego kit out of his cupboard. In for a penny, in for a pound. I wondered at his weird neatness fetishes; his bedroom was like a collector’s museum.

When David got home, it didn’t take long for him to discover the theft. “Where is it?” he shouted at me.

“Where is what?” I was sitting on the rug in my bedroom assembling the Lego kit, and it made for a fun torment to pretend that I didn’t know what he was referring to.

“You know what!” He was red-faced, steaming.

“Here, take it,” I said, cooly, I didn’t find the Lego model very challenging anyway, the whole Star Wars vintage aesthetic seemed vaguely male-specific, not that I am a slave to gender-norms, as a ten-year old with ferocious precocity, I think I have the right to my own definition of self. I started putting the plastic blocks back in the box. He was looking around my room.

“Not that. You know what I’m talking about. You took the memory drive from my desk. It’s got important stuff on it!”

Bingo, pay-dirt. How far could I push him? Perhaps I could push him over the edge. Mother and the Professor had arrived in the hallway, watching, unsure what to do, hoping – I suppose – that we could work things out ourselves. 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about”. It felt provocative, very passive-aggressive I was to subsequently learn.

“The USB drive! The fucking USB drive!”  

“I threw it away” I said, deadpan. He used the F-bomb!

From puce to pale, he started shaking.  

“You’re fucking kidding me, right?” David grabbed me by my shoulders and stuck his pimply face directly in front of mine, inches away. I could smell the mint on his hot breath.

“Yeah. You’re disgusting. I took your USB drive and threw it into the back of the janitor’s pick-up truck at school, in one of the trash bags. I did you a favor”.

He was so enraged he could hardly speak. “I… fucking… hate you”, he spluttered.

“And I fucking hate you too”, I shouted back.

“You stupid fucking moronic bitch. I had two hundred bitcoins on that drive!”

“He called me a bitch!” I declared and ran from the room, fake sobbing. I had won the battle and the war.

“What are bitcoins?” said Mother. It was the summer of 2015.

Mother divorced Blaine six months later, it was just one big mistake, the whole thing, lost time, water under the bridge, bad chemistry. I directed my ferocious precocity in new directions, with specific belligerence directed at my Mother’s occasional male friends, paramours and one-night stands, which sometimes included her ex; there was a friends-with-benefits thing going on between Mother and Professor Blaine. Mother became increasingly upset with me, “you spoil everything”, she said. "I can't believe you threw away millions of dollars of bitcoins," she said. I sensed a realignment of the stars.

Mother told me that David was doing well at school, apparently. David was doing well at University, apparently. David had a job at SpaceX, apparently. David. David. David. I still hated him. Actually, I fucking hated him. The more mother fucking told me, the more I fucking hated him. Mother met David by chance at a faculty party; he was there with his father. David had turned out to be a very nice young man, apparently. David would have been an eight-digit millionaire, apparently. Nobody blamed me; I was young and foolish and didn’t understand what I was doing and saying. David forgave me. It was more water under the bridge. There was talk of reconciliation. I objected. Mother seemed resentful of my position, of my very presence. Mother suggested that I might want to go to boarding school, a prep school for girls, I needed a challenge. She was only trying to get rid of me.

It took quite a while to find a school that would take me. My academic transcript was exceptional but for some reason I was considered “a difficult fit”. I was no longer “ferociously precocious”, being sixteen years old, but I was somehow seen as an “unusual girl”. Eventually Mother found me a place at a school on the other side of the country, in Connecticut. She seemed relieved, and I by this time, couldn’t have cared less. She, Blaine, and David, a ménage à trois of mediocrity, deserved their own little life. I had bigger plans.  

My roommate at school is a girl called Shelly Crumb. She is an avid gamer and is gearing up for college to study data science. We hit it off quite quickly. In fact, we sometimes sleep in the same bed, so closely aligned are our interests. The encryption key for the memory stick was printed on a peel-off tab on the back of the SanDisk packaging. It took Shelly a few seconds to find the wallet file amidst dozens of RPG game files. She transferred the wallet into the recovery app. David, unimaginative, had used the USB encryption key as a private key for the Bitcoin wallet as well, so it opened up and revealed its contents at the first attempt. I can’t believe that he’s much use at SpaceX, he’s probably doing some oh-isn’t-he-brilliant math that nobody understands, or he's watching porn all day.

Mother phoned but I let her call go to voicemail. "Did I have enough money?" she asked, "Did I have any friends yet?" she asked. I didn't bother phoning back. It's that passive-aggressive thing.

I actually have many friends now. More friends than Professor Blaine Curtis can imagine. With a little bit of money, you can turn imagination into reality, and you can bend people to your will. Shelly thinks I’m psycho, that I lack what she calls "pathyness". We do laugh a lot.