Slender Man

You know how in movies and stories, the hero usually has some destiny that they aren’t aware of? Like how Luke Skywalker is destined to be a great Jedi and lead the Rebel Alliance to victory but he doesn’t know it because he’s living on Tattooine, or that Frodo is destined to destroy the One Ring in Mount Doom but he thinks he’s going to live his entire life in The Shire?

There’s a whole academic theory about it: it’s called The Hero’s Journey. People who go from small lives to some great grand thing, where they become part of something bigger and more important than they could ever have imagined.

I guess it’s why those stories work so well, because everyone wants to believe they’re more important than they really are, that any moment now some incredible thing is going to happen that turns everything upside down and they’ll breathe a massive sigh of relief because they always knew they were special, deep down they always knew it, and all the disappointments and bullshit and trudging through dead-end days will have been worthwhile.

Me? I’m destined to be a lawyer.

Glamorous, right? World-changing. I can’t wait.

I explained this to Dr. Casemiro during our first session, when we were still in the getting-to-know-you part of the process, and she told me I was wrong, that I can do anything with my life that I put my mind to, but all that proved is something I already knew, that a person can be really intelligent and really stupid at the same time.

Of course I can technically do whatever I want with my life. America’s still just about a free country, and I’m white and male and my parents are wealthy and I go to a good school, so I have about as many advantages as it’s possible for a person to have. But my options – like everyone else’s – are limited by stuff that people don’t like to talk about, because it doesn’t fit with the all-American ideal of a meritocracy, that the only thing standing between you and your wildest dreams is hard work and a good attitude.

Which, frankly, is an absolute crock of shit.

My dad is a lawyer. Three of my four grandparents were lawyers. It runs in the family. It’s in our blood.

My mom isn’t a lawyer, but that’s only because she got pregnant with me and never finished law school. By the time I was born my dad was the youngest partner at his firm, and I guess neither of them ever saw the point in her going back to work. I barely see her any more than I see my dad, though: she’s on the boards of about a dozen charities and non-profits, and a lot of the time it seems like she works longer hours than he does.

I don’t think Dad will try to tell me what major I pick when I go to college next fall, because that doesn’t really effect the path he has got laid out for his only son, a path that was set in stone when I was still swimming around in his balls. But if I suggest not going to law school after I graduate? That’s going to be a really awkward conversation.

Think of it this way:

There are things that live at the bottom of the ocean, down where only the strongest submarines can go, the ones with windows that are six inches thick. Things that are much weirder than anything in movies or novels, things that look like the guy who designed the creature out of Alien took a whole bunch of acid and just went nuts on a sketchpad. The pressure at the bottom of the ocean would crush a person to death in about a nanosecond, but the creatures I’m talking about thrive on it. They’re used to it, because they’ve never known anything else.

So. Anyway.

Dr. Casemiro likes talking about my parents. LOVES talking about them, to be honest, even though I’m still scratching my head to understand how whether or not I think my mother loves me relates to me having the occasional bad dream.

I mean, I could lie and say that they neglect me, or beat me, or that dad sexually abused me when I was little, but Dr. Casemiro has met them and I don’t think there’s any way she would buy it. They’re just too boring to have that kind of darkness inside them, even hidden away deep down where nobody else can see it.

The – equally boring – truth is that my mom and dad are kind, decent, upstanding members of the community. They probably both work more than is totally healthy, and there are times when it doesn’t really feel like they’re very interested in me, but find me a teenager in America who doesn’t feel like that some of the time. If you can, it’ll be because you’ve found someone who doesn’t have any parents, which is a whole different thing altogether.

Jamie always tells me that I’m lucky that my mom and dad are so busy, that they always have so much stuff going on. His dad’s a lot older than mine – he retired last fall, and him and Jamie’s mom decided to go full super-parent for the last couple of years before their son flies the nest. Homework at the kitchen table, both of them helping out. Parent governors at Riley, both of them going along on every college visit. His mom holding the stopwatch while he does practice SAT papers. Jamie says it feels like being smothered.

Calling Jamie my best friend seems a little bit pre-pubescent girl, and calling him my bro would mean I was the kind of douchebag who actually uses the word bro. I’ve always liked mate, which is the British word for friend, but I don’t think you can pull it off out loud unless you’re Jason Statham.

He’s my closest friend. That’ll do.

We don’t hang out all the time, because nobody ever really does that. And there have been times where we barely saw each other for weeks, or even months. There was the time Jamie broke his ankle playing lacrosse and I got really into World of Warcraft. There was the period when he was dating Lucie Goldman and just wandered around every day with this big goofy grin on his face, like he was the first person in history to ever get to third base.

But most of the time, we’re pretty tight. He forwards me every dumb thing he finds on the internet, and I text him the movies he should have seen but hasn’t, and we swap comics, and records, and we gossip about things that happened at school, sometimes barely minutes earlier. Because things happening aren’t enough: the important part is hyper-analysing them afterwards. Obviously.

I do a lot of the same things with Lauren too, although hardly anyone knows that. She’s probably my oldest friend, although it’s not the same as it used to be, at least in public. I’m not sure most people at Riley even know that we know each other, and the weird thing is that I think both of us have sort of come to enjoy that fact. Our parents are friends, and we were super-tight until we were about eight, as stupid as that sounds now. We went to different middle schools, and when we got to Riley we lived in different worlds. But we still text all the time, and she gets to show someone every weird bit of creepypasta and the horrendous gore photos she always finds weirdly hilarious without freaking her friends out and I get to indulge my mild obsession with Riverdale without Jamie wondering if I’ve lost my mind.

It works, is what I’m saying. At school, we barely acknowledge each other. And that’s OK. Because – and I’m not being hyperbolic here – Riley is a judgemental cesspit. And that’s putting it mildly. It’s mostly the same drama that happens in every school, the who-fucked-who, who-said-what, who-did-what stuff that seems so unbelievably important for about five minutes. Although Riley being Riley, there are times when the shit hits the fan from a slightly different direction.

There was the time one of the girls in my class had to go to the emergency room and get her stomach pumped because she had been out celebrating her mom winning a Tony.

About a quarter of the class of 2010 went from being THE OFFICIAL KINGS AND QUEENS OF THE SCHOOL to applying for bursaries and free lunches when Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers went under.

Last semester two kids from the class below mine disappeared after there was a coup in the Democratic Republic of Congo and their father fled to Switzerland, taking about half the country’s GDP with him. One day they were there, the next they were on a plane.

So it goes. It’s a cliché to say that nobody knows what the future holds, but it’s also the truth.

Nobody has a fucking clue.

— — — —

Excerpt of police interview transcript.

APRIL 22ND 2018, 20TH POLICE PRECINCT STATIONHOUSE, MANHATTAN, NY

Participants:

Detective John Staglione

Detective Mia Ramirez

Jamie Reynolds

Donald McArthur (Attorney-at-Law)

DET. STAGLIONE. OK. Everyone set?

JAMIE REYNOLDS. Fine.

DET. RAMIREZ. You know you’re not in any trouble, Jamie. That’s been made clear to you?

JAMIE REYNOLDS. Yeah.

DET. STAGLIONE. We get that this is difficult.

DET. RAMIREZ. We really do.

DONALD MCARTHUR. Could we dispense with the “we’re all friends here” act?

DET. STALGIONE. Your attorney’s a cynic.

DONALD MCARTHUR. Detectives.

DET. RAMIREZ. Fine. No problem.

DET. STAGLIONE. How long have you known Matthew Barker, Jamie?

JAMIE REYNOLDS. Since second grade.

DET. RAMIREZ. So more than ten years?