This is the space to tell us how you would answer the writing prompt that appears in CrimeBits on page 265.
He hadn’t been born bad. He didn’t think so, not now. He’d had plenty of time to think about his life and there wasn’t anything he could pinpoint as a child. He’d been a little different, may- be, but not overly so. It wasn’t like he would torture animals, or bully other kids.
He’d been . . . normal. That’s all. Just a normal kid.
As normal as you can be anyway. Ordinary, nothing special. He wasn’t bottom of his class, but he wasn’t top of it either. He was, like seemingly everyone else he knew as kid, in the middle. Just drifting by.
When he’d met her, he’d been the same. He was sure of it. She was the one who had changed him.
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Whatever she said the move was, he went along for the ride. Not to impress her. Not to flatter her. Nothing so…boyish. He just believed in what she was doing. He wasn’t her dog. He wasn’t her knight either. More like her steed. And like a new steed, he had to be broken in. Things started simply enough. Lifting bags of groceries from the online order pickup shelf. The kind of thing they could do while high and laugh about later. But that only kept her sated for so long. Soon, instead of just snacking on the stolen groceries and trashing the rest, they would take them to a food bank and dump them in the street out front to get run over. Before long, the laughter stopped coming later.
The poisoning of swimming pools at hotels wasn’t as funny for him. But it wasn’t funny enough for her. So, it became poisoning swimming pools at hotels during charity events. That was her kind of funny. He may have been on a slippery slope but somewhere inside of him was still that middle-of-the-road boy. Asking her to scale back on the depravity would surely ruin his standing with her, whatever that may be. Instead, he faked botching one of their little stints so convincingly that she either felt sorry for him or got spooked that he might get them both caught.
He was confident it was the latter, but either way it worked. They cooled their jets with a return to petty larceny, this time of Post Mates deliveries instead of Prime groceries. It was a nice change from deli meat and sparkling water. Some people ordered massage gadgets from Target, cosmetics from Sephora, even pricier consumer tech from Best Buy. It was gratifying getting free luxuries and a hell of a lot less disconcerting than what they had been doing.
Until that one bag from Walgreens.
They had expected pads and Doritos. Maybe probiotic supplements. Instead, it was someone’s digital photos as prints. For kicks they tore open the cardboard envelope and flipped through them. Benign at first- the recent snow, some panoramic shots of a lake. Then came the unexpected.
Grainy, low light shots of the two of them carrying buckets to the hotel pool after hours.