drywall

The room is silent. Not the kind of silent where you could hear a pin drop, or the kind that includes air and gives into the moment. It’s the kind of silence that breaks, the kind where nobody dares to breathe. Except for me.

I stand at the center of the courtroom, the wrinkles of my suit freshly pressed away, hair gelled without a flaw. Despite the tension, I am comfortable. Confident. All eyes rest on me, looking for a breaking point – a chink in my armor. But I know – they know – there is nothing to find.

The judge watches me, poised at her stand, her mask of calm breaking under my own. I feel the eyes on my back, the courtroom packed past capacity - a jury seat nobody refused.

I could smell the tension – formed from the shock, the horror, the fear. I was the last person people would expect to be standing here, and yet I am. I’m not surprised, of course. Only underestimated. To a grave degree, every person in this courtroom underestimated me: “He’s valedictorian, but that’s all he’ll ever be.” And “Don’t worry about him, he’s not in my way.” People forget that walls are thin, too thin to mask betrayal in the inches that separated us.

These people glower at my back like I’m some vile monster, whispering that I’ve “ruined my life over nothing.” They can believe whatever they want, but I know what I did, and why I did it. And I left no evidence. I’m going home a free man. Jesse never made it home. And Max is taking the blame.

I remember those words Jesse spoke on the phone with his Max, placing too much trust in those inches of drywall and wood. People say that walking through a doorframe is like a new beginning: your mind tends to blank, and you forget your keys on the kitchen table. But when Jesse walked back through the doorframe, his eyes told a different story than his smile. That’s something I’ll never forget.

Looking into the judge’s eyes, I can see her disapproval, her turmoil. She knows that I’m guilty. I know that too. But she underestimates herself. That’s why she’s been stuck on district court for twenty years, why she can’t prove my guilt, and why she’s secretly jealous that I know exactly what I’m capable of. I offer her a grin. She recoils.

It’s the same grin Jesse saw that day, walking back through the doorframe, acting like he forgotten everything he’d said. I pasted on a smile, a mask that I’d crafted just for him. My glower had bored into him like daggers – a prerequisite. He’d apologized, but not about the cheating, not about stealing my work, not about labelling me as “just” what I appear. It was an apology for taking a call.

They played that call in court today. The silence was broken by the crackling of Max’s voice over the speaker, cunning and triumph laced through his words. A façade. “Did you get it?” Max spoke of my work. Mine. But Jesse had taken it, nevertheless. Reassured Max that I was “just me” – harmless, worthless, stupid. They underestimated me, just like every person in this room. Max I expected it from – he’d always been shallow, thought highly of his low self. I found it amusing.

Max sits behind me now, silent for the first time in his life. His cunning is ripped away, replaced with the fear and weakness that I’ve always seen. He knows what I did, and so he sits at the opposition’s table, a witness to a crime he cannot prove. Max is stupid, and everyone overestimates him.

I turn to him: two real people looking at each other, one with a clear-cut path and the other with a broken mask he desperately wants to repair. Max and I are not so different – both of us desire deeply. The difference is that Max has limits, like most weak, overestimated people. The night that Max saw Jesse’s body on the floor of his apartment, he knew that I have no limits. As I stood with the police, pointing fingers at a man only innocent for one crime, I saw his mask break, falling onto the floor where Jesse’s blood had soaked into the rotten hardwood.

Both here and there, I play innocent. The traumatized student, a victim caught in the middle of a violent fight under no fault of my own. A textbook nerd, trapped in the realities of a cruel world. Though I’m not textbook, of course, I am clever: the splattered blood on Max’s shoes was the only evidence found in the crime, and the police needed a closed case. All I had to do was wash my hands.

So here I stand, in my freshly pressed suit, my combed back hair, my scrubbed fingernails. Max and I look at each other for a moment longer, before I break the tie and turn back to the judge. The silence swallows her whole.

I watch her jugular move slowly up and down, the thick flesh of her neck tense and sticky with sweat. Her meaty fingers grip the gavel, the wooden stick unmoving despite her will. She knows I’m guilty. Max knows. Everyone knows. I know. I smile, innocently, my eyes trailing down her dripping face to the white knuckles gripping decision. Back to her eyes. Her pursed lips. Her anger reflects the helpless lawyers, police and crowd that wait defeated behind me.

Son of a bitch.

Her mouth spits the curse without sound, but passionate. The gavel lifts. I grin, wider, my teeth baring, lips pulled taut against my skin. Bam.

The room echoes in her defeat, and the crowd chokes at my success. They all underestimated me. Max did, Jesse did, they all did. I turn away from the judge to the crowd, all hunched over, mouths agape like soulless statues aghast at their own stupidity. They stare, eyes wide, and I stare back. If you can see the whites of their eyes, it’s range.

And suddenly, the silence is no longer. Somebody is laughing. A maniacal, guttural cackle that escapes its maker with a force. A meaning. Nobody would underestimate someone with such perspicuous purpose. I begin to tremble, my chest heaving, cheeks burning from the will of my mouth to open wider, to project my success to everyone who’s ever seen me as “just.” Everyone watches, stone still and silent, glued to their sad wooden seats as I stand in front of them in my clean pressed suit – the image of success. Of somebody that they will never underestimate again. Somebody that will stop at nothing to get what they want.