Psycho Killer Read Free Page A

emblazoned on the oversized syringe in large black capital letters. She’d smuggled the syringe into the city in a violin case stolen from a Hanover sophomore who used to play first string in the school’s orchestra—before he went snowboarding with Serena and had to be air-lifted to the hospital with a fractured jaw, a severed tongue, a punctured lung, and two shattered wrists.
    Serena opened Nate’s sock drawer and rooted around until she found the pair of balled-up neon yellow polyester Adidas soccer socks where he kept his stash of pot.
    “
What a loser
,” she could hear Blair scoff at Nate, her voice pregnant with love and longing.
“I might finally do it with you if it wasn’t for those horrible neon things.”
    Serena held the marijuana-stuffed socks in one hand and thrust the needle of the syringe into them with the other. The socks grew steadily heavier as they swelled with poison.
    Nate’s tiny sailboat alarm clock ticked quietly. The silence in the house was excruciating.
    Serena had always hated silence, and her time at Hanover Academy in New Hampshire had been full of it. Sure, she’d met some okay people up there, but as soon as she got close to someone, something always happened to spoil it.
    There was Jude, for instance. Sweet Jude. One sunny autumn Saturday he’d taken her apple picking at a hilly farm a few miles from campus. It was very romantic. But when they reached the arbor of shiny green Granny Smith apples, she’d thought of Nate. How Nate loved to snack on the crisp, tart flesh of a GrannySmith. How the green skin of his favorite apples matched the green irises of his eyes. Jude’s eyes were a dull gray, not gorgeous green. Jude’s hair was thin and straight and auburn, not thick and wavy and golden brown. Jude was from Massachusetts, not Manhattan. And although the apple picking stick in his hand resembled a lacrosse stick, Jude simply wasn’t Nate. So Serena had rammed the stick down Jude’s throat, catching his tongue and epiglottis in the little metal basket meant for catching apples and killing him instantly.
    Then there was Milos from Milan. He’d taken Serena sailing. Big mistake. Milos was still missing, his shark-eaten body floating to and fro in the icy waters between Cape Cod and the Bay of Fundy, in Canada.
    Sexy Soren, captain of the ski team, had built her a snowman, just like the snowmen she and Nate used to make in the garden behind Nate’s townhouse. When she finally made it back to her dorm, the bloody snowman was wearing Soren’s head.
    Nate was the only sailor in her life, the only builder of snowmen, the only apple-loving boy. Oh, how she missed him. How she missed New York. The thought of Blair and Nate together in Manhattan without her made her want to kill her roommate, the dean, and everyone else at Hanover.
    But the more Serena thought about it, the more she came to understand that three was not a good number. Before Nate showed up in kindergarten, she and Blair had been the inseparable-since-birth twosome, the pair. In preschool, they’d cut their hands with corkscrews and made a blood sister pact. Their friendship wasn’t supposed to die, not ever. And they were meant to be together—stopping for scones at Sant Ambroeus on their walk to school and buying the same undies at Barneys—notseparated by miles and miles of pretty New England roads. Because without Blair, she was just another beautiful, angry, misunderstood girl.
    Try merciless killer freak?
    All she’d thought about all year was how to repair their friendship. Eventually it became clear how much easier things would be if Nate were out of the picture—literally. Math wasn’t Serena’s best subject, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out that Nate was the constant variable that fucked everything up:
let Nate =
x
    s
x
+ b = guilt and shame that drove her away in the first place
    s + b
x
= sorrow, rage, murder, and more guilt and shame
    s + b = 1 + 1
    Thus,
x
must die.
    The notion of