Chelsea G. Summers

In the end, I chose to do nothing with what I knew

there was no immediate reason to rush anything.

Divided by what they chose to eat, these people are united by the fact that they committed crimes that caused the State to kill them. What drives killers to kill is a very personal question. We like to think that men kill because they’re men—it’s as indiscriminate as their wont to procreate. The quarterbacks in the high school of life, men are given a wide berth for murder, as they are for most things. Women, on the other hand, kill for only two reasons, or so the people w

Cheap is fine; expensive is almost always excellent.

may enjoy their sex acts tick-a-tack in tawdry motels, pilled acrylic under their backs, shag rug as pestilent as the fur of a feral dog beneath their feet, and the illuminating, flickering, cold blow of a television screen. To say I’m immune to the charms of no-tell hotels would be disingenuous. But there’s nothing as heavenly as sundry perversions perpetrated in rooms with views, high thread counts, Turkish towels, and price tags to match. Cheap is fine; expensive is almost always excellent.

We women have an emotional wiliness that shellacs us in a glossy patina of caring. We have been raised to take interest in promoting the healthy interior lives of other humans; preparation, I suppose, for taking on the emotional labor of motherhood—or marriage; either way, really. Few women come into maturity unscathed by the suffocating pink press of girlhood, and even psychopaths are touched by the long, frilly arm of feminine expectations. It’s not that women psychopaths don’t exist; it’s that we fake it better than men.

Feminism comes to all things, it seems, but it comes to recognizing homicidal rage the slowest.

I have reasons to feel forever grateful to my fake teenage girlfriends, for aside from teaching me about junk food, they taught me how to be feminine. Snuggled in their blossoming Love’s Baby Soft-scented bosoms, I learned to approximate a female—how to talk, how to walk, how to dance, how to flip your hair. How to part your lips as for a kiss but not for a bite of food. How to end your declarative sentences in a question. How to twitch your hips as you left a room. Why you laugh when you feel like screaming. Over trays of Bonnie Bell Lip Smackers and mountains of cooling fries, I learned that being female is as prefab, thoughtless, soulless, and abjectly capitalist as a Big Mac. It’s not important that it’s real. It’s only important that it’s tasty.

You can’t be a woman without protection. Condoms fail. Pepper spray can be turned against you. Information almost never does.

I’ve always been amazed by how much information is available to you if you listen quietly, read carefully, and know how to pick locks. Dorm room doors are stupidly easy; you need only a credit card and a lissome wrist. The cars of the ’70s and early ’80s had ridiculous locks—a quick pop of a wire hanger would open most, and never underestimate the ability of a young woman with a distressed look on her pretty face to persuade a cop to help her. Residential doors were more challenging, ditto locked trunks, but hairpins, paper clips, and public libraries are remarkably helpful tools for the willing mind. I