I Didn't Touch Her!

I don't understand how it's come to this. I've been expelled from school, I've lost the few friends I had, my own parents won't even look at me now, and all because of her. Her...even now I can't find it in me to hate her. I love her, despite what she's done to me, and I think I always will. For so many years, she's been my reason to get up in the morning and the last thing I think about before I go to bed.

Lisa; my soul mate.

I was never what you would call a "popular kid." From Kindergarten to High School, I was a fat, shy boy who just wanted to learn. I didn't want to cause trouble, and I certainly didn't want to get in trouble. I mostly floated through life like dandelion puffs on a breeze. In my kindergarten class, she was this lovely creature with soft blonde hair and a face made for smiles, and even as a child, I knew she was beautiful. She found friends easily, teachers loved her easy smiles and confident ways, and boys who would still think girls were gross for many years to come were forced to recognize her attraction. She was the belle of the ball anywhere she went, and our worlds could not have been more different.

I was what you would call a "fat child." My weight and desire for friendship made me the constant butt of any joke or the "odd man out" of any activity. Lisa sat in front of me, alphabetically our names are very close, and she became my secret obsession. I would sit behind her and breathe in the scent of her hair and bask in the glow of her beauty as she became my respite in a sea of horror. I would often pretend I was in her group of friends, privy to their secrets and a part of their oh so enticing world. I would create conversations and lunch dates and feed my imagination with thoughts of our friendship. Our make-believe friendship was more real to me than my own life, and as the years went on, it became more of an obsession than a daydream. I drew pictures of our time together, wrote poems about her beauty, and filled books with our love stories. I didn't have friends, not real friends, at least.

Lisa was all I had.

The trouble began in high school. Lisa was brilliant, always at the top of our class, but I outshone her most of the time when it came to matters academic. Lisa's one stumbling point was mathematics. She had never found math as easy as, say, English or Biology, and it became a megrim for her. I would have offered to tutor her, but the gulf between us had only become wider the older we got. She was a cheerleader and a member of the student council and secretary for the Glee club, and I was just...me. The fat boy who had grown into an overweight teenager who sat at the chess club or debate team and wished I was close to her.

When Mr. Sturgis asked us both to stay after class, I never dreamed that he would assign me as her tutor. "You need help, Lisa," he said, "and Reggie is the best math student I've had in a long time. I think, with Reggie's help, that you can pass Algebra", he finished. I could kiss him! Lisa agreed, though hesitantly, and that afternoon we met in the library to begin her tutoring session. I could barely pay attention to what I was doing as this goddess sat beside me and asked me, ME, for help on what was really no big deal. I showed her the shortcuts, the workaround, and the theories that would make it easier for her to succeed.

She got a B on her next test, and I couldn't have been prouder.

It wasn't long before our study sessions began leaving the library. She met me at the public library a few times, but one day my greatest dreams came true. As I left math class, she hands me a folded piece of paper and says to meet her there after cheerleading practice. Then she just flipped her hair and smiled at me as she strode off on goddesses' legs and said, "See you then."

The address was her home address!

From then on, we always met at her house in the late afternoon. Her parents were surprisingly accepting of a teenage boy in their house, and I rapidly became as fond of them as I was of her. Her father was an architect, and if I arrived before Lisa, he was always taking me into his study to show me his latest blueprints. Her mother was a lawyer, but after a lengthy lawsuit against the firm she'd once been with, she had won enough money to stay at home and look after her family. Working from home as a legal consultant meant she often had time to bake, and her home was always full of the smells of bread or pie or other culinary delights.

The time I spent in Lisa's house was the best time of my life. As Algebra became Geometry and Calculus, she always came back to her "study buddy." I found easier ways to teach her what she needed to know to pass, and she turned out to be a quick study once she found someone to speak her language. As we entered our senior year, I never quite asked why she still refused to acknowledge me in the hallways or why her friends still picked on me ceaselessly. I was just happy to be by her, be around her, and be part of her world.

One night after helping her through a particularly difficult bit of Calculus, she whooped with joy and turned to plant a kiss on my surprised lips. She broke the kiss in less than an instant, but it felt to me as though her lips touched mine for years. I could have floated home that night, and as I settled into bed, I knew what I had to do the next day. I would tell her how I felt, how I'd always felt, and ask her to accompany me to the upcoming spring dance. She liked me, and we liked being around each other.

What could go wrong?

I went to her locker the next morning and found her there with only a single friend around her. Rebecca Jenner, the friend in question, sneered a little as I approached, and when Lisa turned, I somehow failed to notice the furtive look she cast around before giving me a half-hearted smile. It's only in the hindsight of time that I see my mistake. I approached her as an equal. I approached her in the open. I approached her in her element.

I surprised her somewhere she felt safe.

I poured out my heart to her, right then and there, and by the end, a crowd had gathered around us. Some were snickering, and some were right out mocking me, but the mocking wasn't reserved for me this time. Looking back, I could already hear the whispered voices of Lisa's peers as they began formulating the gossip. "Lisa has a thing for pudgy nerds," "Looks like Lisa would rather hold hands with pimple-faced dweebs than go out with football players" "Ooo, sounds like little Lisa had a lot of fun at their "study sessions" and so forth. I didn't care at the time though, I was pouring my heart out to the girl I loved, and that was all that mattered.

She was crying by the time I was done. Her face was beet red, and her tear clouded eyes were scanning around for an escape. Finally, she pushed past me, sending me sprawling to the linoleum floor, and made a breakthrough into the crowd. I tried to go after her, but the crowd closed in on me, and the torrent of questions and accusations assaulted me. Where had I fucked her? How long before Brad kicked my ass? Was I so stupid to think I was anything but a charity case? On and on and on until finally, I found an outlet and went tearing towards the boys' room. I hid there all through first period and tried my best to keep my head down for the rest of the day.

I didn't see Lisa that day. I didn't see her the next day either, but I heard the rumors about Lisa and her fat little boyfriend, Lisa, and her "Study Sessions" with me and all the other rumors about how Brad was looking for me so he could kick my ass up around my ears. Bradley Daveys and I didn't have any classes together, luckily for me, but he still found me. He and his friends came across me in the bathroom near the end of the second day and backed me up against the cold wall of the boys' room.

They hit me a few times, Brad and Chuck and Gail, and as they took turns hitting me, Brad let me know the score, "You stay away from my girlfriend, you little faggit; do you hear me? I didn't mind her keeping a little nerd pet so long as she still got to cheer and I still got to squeeze into her whenever I wanted," this comment elicited some laughs and slaps from his friends, "but that's over now. She's mine, and I'm not okay with your lost puppy act anymore. I see you around Lisa again, and you're dead nerd." he punctuated this point by slamming his fist into my cheek hard enough to knock my glasses into the sink where the lenses shattered against the porcelain.

As I lay on the bathroom floor, I thought this was as low as I could get.

I was wrong.

When I came to school the next day, something had changed. I had been the target of constant teasing the last two days, but the reception I got that morning was icy. People whispered behind angry faces, and all the anger was directed at me. What had I done to deserve such scorn? I was the victim here, right? Brad had beaten the crap out of me, and Lisa had refused to even talk to me for three days. What could I have done?

The answer came in homeroom. A police officer was waiting to take me to the office where Lisa's parents, my parents, and the Principle were waiting to talk to me. My confusion turned to fear at this but confusion would make a lot of reappearances that day. The Principle invited me to take a seat. My mother was crying, and my father's eyes bore into me like a power drill. I looked to Lisa's parents for some explanation, but they both made it very clear that they wanted nothing to do with me.

Lisa had posted a message on Facebook this morning. She'd told all her friends about how I had forced myself on her during our study sessions and made her do things that I won't even mention here. My depravity knew no limits, and all the while, I had convinced her parents that I was a fine young man and a model student. I had convinced everyone of this, she went on, but in reality, I was a pervert and a rapist and when I'd talked to her at school, talked to her like we were equals, she had finally found the strength to speak out about my depravity. She'd told her parents after that, and they had called my parents to let them know what their little boy was capable of. Someone had called the police at some point, it was never made clear who, and that's how we'd come to this point.

I won't bore you with the details. My parents and I became the town blackspot for the next three months as I took polygraph tests and physiological evaluations and protested my innocence at every turn. The police claimed they had a rape kit that tested positive for something but the absence of semen was confronted with my obvious intellect. "Why would he be sloppy enough to leave evidence?" one officer asked, looking at me as though I was the lowest form of life.

The case against me was eventually thrown out due to lack of evidence, but it hardly mattered. I had been accused of rape, and any bright future I might have had slipped out of my grip. It didn't matter how good my grades were, how high my scores were, or how many testimonials I had written by teachers who believed that I was innocent. No college wanted an accused rapist in their school, and I slumped slowly into depression.

Why had she done this? Why had she ruined my life? All I had done was love her. All I had done was tell her how I felt. All she had done in return was ruin me, though, and that's what's brought me here.

I'm in her bedroom now, looking over my handy work.

I had heard her parents would be out of town, and Lisa was going to have a party Saturday night. I wasn't invited, of course. Since the incident, I haven't even been back to school, but I seem to remember where the house was and how breakable the back door is. The rock made a lot of noise as it smashed through the glass, but no one was there to hear it. For rich, intellectual people, her parents certainly have a lot of faith in humanity. I had never seen a security panel or even a surveillance camera on the property, so getting in undetected was easy. I hid in the big walk-in closet that holds all her lovely clothes and waited for her to come home from school. Her door swung open at 4:15, and imagine my surprise as she and Brad fell onto her bed in a writhing pile of teenage spirit. Some would have seen this as an obstacle, but to me, it was just another opportunity. I waited till they were well in the throes of passion before sneaking from the closet and coming up behind him. He made quite a sight there, his bare ass moving as he worked inside her, she on her knees to receive him, and neither even saw their death approach.

He garbled out something as I cut his throat, but she didn't even notice until he slipped out of her.

The begging started then; the begging and the screaming. She kept shouting his name, begging me not to, and I implored her to be as loud as she wanted. I wanted the neighbors to know what was going on. I wanted them to know how Brad had brutally murdered his girlfriend in a fit of teenage aggression before cutting his own throat out of a sense of regret. I'm pretty sure I snapped the knife off in her sternum after the fifteenth or sixteenth downward stab, but by then, she had stopped screaming.

The knife is in his hands now, I was smart enough to wear gloves, and I already have my escape route planned out.

You see, I may have never touched her, but that didn't stop me from killing her.