Karma is Best Served Personally

Danni sits perched in the big, white oak tree, binoculars in hand. She’s learned over time that it is better to be removed from her ideas, the orchestrator of them, but not the actor. This is not an easy thing to accept for her. She swings her legs anxiously while carefully watching her new hire, a boy she vaguely knew in high school.

The boy’s job is to pass along a note to a master chemist, someone Danni knows too well. The letter is carefully written with syntax far from Danni’s typical notes in a handwriting that couldn’t be more different than hers. The chemist is an old friend of Danni’s; directly speaking to him would’ve been faster, but too easy to trace back to her. The note is vague intentionally, but considering they’ve worked together before, he’ll know that this explosive cannot be deadly, just frightening. The look of a bomb without the fatal effects of one. Something to spook those bitches from high school, maybe make them think about their actions. If she’s lucky, they’ll think it's her and not be able to prove it, but she’ll take even a bit of mercy from them, any semblance of regret. Danni has been watching them all summer and knows their evening routine of hanging out at the house of the biggest bitch of them all, Marcy.

Through her binoculars, she can see the boy, Levi, standing and smoking by a tree across the road, his brown, shaggy hair a near-perfect match to the tree’s rough bark. She feels a sense of pride as he stands looking perfectly nonchalant. He said it was his first time doing something like this, and Danni couldn’t help but be shocked at his willingness to participate. To be a friend, or an accomplice, or a fall guy.

She sees Levi look up at a group of men leaving the chemist’s workplace. She sees Levi approach the group. She doesn’t see them interact because there are too many cars on the street. But she is able to see them walk away from each other, the kid pulling out another cigarette as he glances up, sees her, and nods, confirming that he did as he was supposed to do.

Danni spends the rest of the week restless, waiting for the text from Levi that the explosive has been dropped off. She can’t focus on her work as the days at her town’s library slip by hot, mind-numbing, and slow as molasses. She reads to the neighborhood children, puts books back where they belong, and cleans the tables without any thoughts entering her head aside from the arrival of the explosive and putting her plan into action.

She itches to be able to do everything herself, but she can’t risk getting caught, not again. These girls tormented her and got to go off to college and live their lives, but she is stuck with her high school diploma and a lousy job. She is always reliving everything they put her through, so this plan has to work.

If her Mama knew about her plan, she would say Danni’s getting obsessive again, that things are better when you move on and let go. But she can’t. Every time she sees those girls, or anyone who looks like them, she starts uncontrollably sweating and shaking, and it's pathetic. She hates it, hates the power they have. They can go anywhere and not be bothered, meanwhile, Danni has to worry about them popping up at any given moment, talking about her. She lives in fear, and to make things fair, they should too.

Her Mama has always had too much sympathy for them, telling Danni that their cruelty comes from insecurities, that they’re just jealous. She always told Danni to rise above their actions. In Danni’s opinion, karma isn’t working fast enough, and their insecurities seem to have taken them to higher education, boyfriends, and fulfilling lives, so she is going to bring what they deserve upon them.

She blames them for her inability to go to college, even though her Mama thinks that if she simply moved on, she could be in college by now. Danni was never dumb, but no one could succeed in a school in which the best part of your day was fantasizing about your suicide in class as a way to ignore the constant rumors about you flying around. Whore. Virgin. Freak. Prude. Misandrist. Anything these girls could think of, true or not, so that nobody would remember they were once friends.

One day, as Danni gets ready to leave the library, about a week after the passing of information went down, Levi walks in, hair in his eyes as always, cigarette glued to his lips.

“Hey, pretty lady. You come here often?” Danni rolls her eyes as Levi’s lips move slightly upwards.

“What are you doing here?”

“Lookin’ for you. Why the hell else would I be here?” He gestures around at the empty library before looking back at Danni.

“Okay, well, what d’you want?” She asks while waving for him to walk with her as she heads out into the street.

“I haven’t received our explosive and I’m bored as fuck. I thought this plan would bring some excitement into my life, and yet another day passes and nothin’. I mean, I’m glad to take the money regardless, but you seemed hellbent on revenge, and I’m only getting more bored here. Also–”

“Oh, for the love of God, I know! If it were up to me, it would have been done already. I ain’t no chemist. Are you?”

“What? No, that ain’t what I agreed to.”

“I know. The explosive will arrive eventually, and everything will happen. Eventually.”

“Whatever, man. All I’m saying is summer is gonna end soon, and they’re gonna go back to college. Senior year for them! A whole life a-waitin’. And you and I are gonna be the two bums left in this town who have never accomplished nothin’. Not even a successful prank. ” Before Danni replies, he walks away from her.

“Levi! It’s gon happen!” He doesn’t turn around, and she fumes her entire walk home.

Danni never asked if Levi knew anything about the rumors spread about her. She wanted to when they ran into each other, and she hired him, but was too scared. He’s a year younger, so he may have never heard anything, and he readily agreed to help her with her revenge, but she worries he’s heard things or that he is only doing this to find out if the rumors are true. She tries not to think about it, but her entire walk home, she can’t help but get the idea that he knows more about her than she knows about him out of her head.

Once at home, Danni gets a text from Levi: Equipment arrived. Is tomorrow the day?

She replies yes and tells him when and where to meet her. She spends the rest of the evening imagining the reaction from all five of them as they realize what’s happening. This image in her brain is enough to get her through dinner without fighting with her Mama. That night, she lies imagining all the outcomes of her plan. She can’t wait to see them all shocked at the gesture, appalled by the audacity. These thoughts allow her to fall asleep peacefully.

After her shift at the library, Danni meets up with Levi outside of Marcy’s. He has the box in one hand and a cigarette in the other, putting it on once he sees Danni.

“Why hello there. Any second thoughts?” He asks. Danni laughs in response and then points out the pool house, which is always unlocked.

“I’m gonna go in there with you and we’re gonna wait. When we hear footsteps, you set it off, and we run like hell. I’ve already traced the best route, so follow me. Got it?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The two walk into the pool house together, careful to be as quiet as possible. Once inside, the two take time to look around the place in awe. Rugs with intricate patterns, sculptures and art in every direction, furniture that costs as much as a house. Danni touches everything in sight, unable to keep herself away from all the valuables. In middle school, when Danni and her victims were friends, they would hang out in the pool house sometimes, but Danni had forgotten the grandeur. The awe she had back then did not go away with the hate she had developed.

Danni walks over to one of the windows to see the whole group approaching.

“Levi!” She points to the window, and he quickly moves into action. He bends down below the coffee table as Danni moves to the back door, their escape. She opens it and glances back to see the girls getting closer. She nods to Levi, who sets off the three-minute timer, and they both run out the back door, slamming it behind them.

Danni knows her way around these streets and sprints as though chased. She runs up a nearby hill to get a better view of the show, checking her watch to make sure she looks back in time to see it happen. Levi and Danni are far away enough to not get harmed and try to catch their breath as they wait to hear screaming. Before they hear anything, they see flames.

The whole place catches on fire in what seems like an instant. The beautiful pool house appears swallowed whole by massive flames.

Levi looks over at Danni, unsure of what is going on, but one look at Danni’s face tells him that this was not part of the plan. Her mouth is set firmly in a frown, and her brows are knit together. Her head shakes slowly, and she struggles to find words. Levi looks back at the scene in time to see three girls running from the house. Three of the girls find safety on the pavement, but are not unharmed. Levi and Danni never see the last two escape.

Levi and Danni both stand still like statues, unsure of how to proceed until they hear sirens in the distance. The sound forces Danni into action.

“Come on, Levi. Let’s go.”

“Danni, I don’t reckon that was supposed to happen that way. D’you plan for that?”

“No! I wouldn’t lie about planning a fuckin’ murder. Now let’s go!”

“Maybe if we just confess…”

“That’s the dumbest idea ever.”

“Who gives a shit at this point?”

“Me!”

“We can’t undo it, Danni.”

“Well, fine. If you wanna stay here and explain your crime to the cops, then that’s your choice. Me personally, I’m getting the fuck out of here.” Danni starts to run away, and Levi runs up beside her. Danni leads the way to her house.

Once there, the two drink water, try to calm down, and think.

Levi is sitting on the couch, bouncing his leg up and down. Danni is pacing the length of the room, muttering to herself and occasionally stopping to focus on biting her nails. She can’t wrap her mind around what happened, about what she made happen. She doesn’t know the fate of the girls, but that is beyond her. All she can think about is how things got so messed up. It was supposed to scare them. Not only did it hurt them, it may have killed them, at least some of them. Danni tries repeatedly to understand how an explosive meant to be harmless was able to ignite a fire that fast.

After twenty minutes, she starts to form a theory.

“Hey Levi?”

“Mmhm?”

“I’ve been tryin’ to think of where this all went wrong. The one thing that I was not a part of was the handoff of the note.” Levi sits up and stares at her more closely. “Now the note, admittedly, was vague, but I’ve done shit like this before and so a chemist I’ve worked with before would have known to make a harmless explosive with my clues. One I didn’t know, however…”

“No! There ain’t no way.” Levi says, standing up. He places his hand on her upper arm. “You gave me a description of him.

“Yeah, but not a picture.”

“Okay, okay. Describe him to me again.”

“Blonde with short hair,” Levi nods.

“About 6 feet tall,” Levi nods.

“Usually has painted nails,” Levi nods.

“I can’t think of anything else significant,” Danni sighs.

“Eyebrow piercing and glasses. Brown eyes, freckles,” Levi adds, staring intently into Danni’s eyes. Danni backs away, shaking her head.

“No. No. That wasn’t him.” The two stare at each other blankly, hardly even breathing.

Danni breaks the silence first: “We can’t change anything now. I may be a killer. I may be a terrible person.” She waits for Levi to say something, but he doesn’t. “I-. I may have done something that will haunt me forever, but I will not go to jail. I can’t. We fled the crime. We can’t go back, we can’t admit to anything.”

She and Levi walk to her room. She grabs a suitcase and starts filling it with clothes. Levi stands silently, still unsure of what to make of this. Once she finishes packing, she turns to Levi. “You have a car at your house that we can take?” He nods after a brief hesitation and then leads the way to his house.

Levi packs his stuff into a bag, crying the whole time, looking around and realizing what his actions are costing him. He doesn’t want to leave his home. He doesn’t have much going on in this town, but at least he has a family and some potential. He wanted some entertainment when he agreed to this, but would have settled for boring if he knew this is where the desire for adrenaline would take him. Danni doesn’t shed a tear and doesn’t express emotion beyond the fear of getting caught. Levi worries he’s leaving his home for a psychopath, without the chance to even get further than community college and a job at a record store.

He kisses the pictures of his family members goodbye and leaves a note on the kitchen counter. The pen ink smears with his tears, so he has to rewrite it three times. Danni doesn’t say anything, but her foot tapping shows she just wants nothing more than to go. They get in the car, and as Levi starts driving and his tears slow, he says, “I have some friends in North Carolina. We can go there for now.” He drives without a response and doesn’t stop until they're across state lines.