It takes several moments for her to calm down enough to take a seat again.
“Alright,” she says. “What did you say back to him?”
“I just stared at him. Truly impressed with the absolute magnitude of his bullshit. He was lying so intensely that he actually believed it. He had been telling himself fairy tales late at night while working on the sculpture. Pretending that it represented this and that, while shaving away the bits of his memory that recalled the exact dimensions and proportions of my sketch.”
“Did you pull it out of your folder? Shove it in his face?”
I shake my head.
“You will never convince someone who has already convinced themselves. And you damn sure can’t reason with them. I left his office, wondering what I had hoped to get out of that encounter at all. Did I actually think he would publicly admit that he stole it? That he’d credit me for the work? Did I forget how humans operate? There was never going to be resolution, or any kind of justice. I suppose I wanted to see acknowledgement in his eyes—shame, apology. But he robbed me of even that. He was so deep in delusion that he would fight my allegations with all the outraged fervor of a man who had actually been wronged.”
Mara lets out a sigh of frustration, understanding only too well what it feels like to be on the wrong side of a power dynamic.
“He was only a professor, but he was far more powerful than me in that particular space. I was an infant in the art world. He could crush me under his boot if I dared make an accusation. Blacken my name before I even got started.
“I was furious with myself. I had failed to see Oswald for what he was. Failed to see his real intentions for me. I was blinded by my desire to be nurtured and cared for in this endeavor that was personal and emotional to me. I felt humiliated—not only from the theft, but because I didn’t see it coming.
“I stormed out of his classroom, almost running into Shaw. He was eavesdropping with his ear practically pressed against the door. I could have cheerfully ripped his head off his shoulders, but I just shoved past him and kept walking.
“I told myself I’d let it go. I ripped up the sketch—there was no way to build it anymore without being called a plagiarist myself—and threw my efforts into new projects.
“I was having success at school. Getting the accolades I craved from professors and fellow students. Maybe I really could have gotten over it. Especially if Oswald made efforts to make it up to me.
“Instead, he did the opposite. And again, this was me not fully understanding human psychology yet. We both knew there was a debt between us. I wanted it repaid. But if Oswald acknowledged the debt, he would have to acknowledge what he did. And he couldn’t stand that.
“The sculpture he stole was the most acclaimed of any he had ever made. It sparked a renaissance for him, renewing interest in all his previous work. Buoying him up to new heights in his career.
“The more success he gained from it, the more invested he became in believing it was all his. At first this manifested as him avoiding me in class, interacting less with my work. But soon that wasn’t enough—he had to enforce his narrative that I was talentless, that he was the real artist. He started marking me lower, and even criticizing me to other professors. Telling them I was lazy, that my ideas were unoriginal. Protecting himself, in case I ever decided to pipe up. He didn’t know I had already torn up the sketch.”
Mara rests her hand on my thigh, understanding two things at once: first, the pain of being slandered to the people you most want to impress. And second, the fucking rage when that slander is based off a lie, the exact reversal of the truth.
“It ate at me, day after day. This man stole from me, and he wouldn’t even acknowledge it. He was punishing ME for it.
“I began to notice all the other things about Professor Oswald that were loathsome. As his ego swelled, he became more and more arrogant in class. More inappropriate to Valerie. More careless of which days he was supposed to lecture. More boastful about his own work.
“I began to feel there was only one way to right the scales. I could hardly sleep or eat. The itch to remove him from existence became physical. It made my heart race every time we were in class together.”
Mara lets out a soft sigh, understanding what I’m about to tell her: the real crossing of the line.
“I had killed twice before. When I killed Ruben, I thought it would be the only time. I knew what he was, and I knew that even if I handed him every dollar of my father’s estate, he’d still cut my throat in the night because I’d once annoyed him. I had to do it—it was him or me.
“The mugger in Paris happened all in instant, in a burst of rage that left the man’s brains dashed on the wall before I’d even realized the other two had run. He scared me, that was the problem. My fear overwhelmed my self-control, and I acted without planning.
“Now I was contemplating something very different: a murder I would plan ahead of time and execute without real need. The damage had already been done, or most of it anyway. Oswald was slandering me, still impeding my career. But this was as much about revenge as protecting my future interests.”
I pause, truly pondering on my state of mind at the time.
“I believed I was gaining more and more control of my emotions by the day. I thought that made me powerful, and better than other people. I had my emotions locked down so deep that I hardly felt anything anymore. My anger at Oswald was one of the first encounters that had stirred me in a long time. And I was angry. I was emotional. Much more than I would have admitted.”
Mara squeezes my thigh. She still fucking feels for me. No matter what I did. Whether it was justified or not.
“I gave him one last chance. I asked him for a letter of recommendation for a study abroad in Venice. It was a competitive program—only two students would be selected from our school.
“Oswald fixed me with this look of pretend sympathy, and said with what I’m sure he thought was complete sincerity, ‘I wish I could Cole, but I really don’t think anything you’ve made this semester justifies that sort of recommendation. Maybe next year, if you really come into your own.’
“I had just made a sculpture that had the whole classroom buzzing with envy, every student in that room wishing they’d thought of it first, and several of the girls snapping photos on their phones. Oswald gave it a B+. I could have killed him for that alone.
“From that moment forward, I started making plans. That was when I created my method, that served me flawlessly since. I found an abandoned mine shaft, not on any map, far away from hiking trails. You’ll know where that was, because it’s where you and I first met.”
Mara’s mouth falls open as she finally realizes what I was doing that night. I wasn’t in the woods to find her—I was there to lose someone else.
“I spent four weeks researching forensic evidence, and four more planning the event. It all went off exactly as I planned. I entered his house via an unlocked window I’d scouted before. I wore a full containment suit. Knelt on his chest before he even woke up, already strangling him, pinning him down with my weight. He looked up into my eyes and I saw the comprehension on his face. He knew why I was killing him. I wanted him to know. I finally got the acknowledgement of what he’d done. It passed silently between us as he died.