My hand trembles as I stare down at the broken timepiece. I release the rock back into the pile in the sack, flex my fingers. Sweat trickles down my temples. A bird flutters its wings too loudly.

The silence is unsettling.

I can hear my cells decaying. Membranes dissolving. Molecules splitting and devouring the necrotic matter. The stronger cells leech off the weak as they deteriorate.

Self-destruct.

When I emerge inside the chamber, I’ve been reborn. An all-new synthesis of a man. What I have to do has never been more clear.

A thousand ticking hands, a thousand glass faces peering down, reflecting her beautiful face back at me.

I empty the sack of rocks.

I am a curer of disease.

My life’s work cannot succumb to one malady—one deviation in the design.

She’s my illness…and there’s no cure.

Elimination.

Bully

Blakely

Cruelty is a disease.

My second-grade teacher told me this. It was Kyle Sellars—with his seven-year-old sausage fingers—who snatched my Malibu Barbie and stomped her into the mud. I stormed after him, tackled him to the playground dirt, and shoved his chubby face in an ant bed.

His wail silenced the playground as kids formed a circle around us.

Appalled, Mrs. Fisher sent me to the principal’s office for disciplinary actions. Mrs. Fisher was new that year. She didn’t yet understand that you do not discipline a Vaughn.

My mother was called into the office. A socialite, Vanessa Vaughn rarely made trips to her child’s preparatory school. That was the nanny’s job. But she did that day, and by the next, our class had a new teacher.

I sometimes wonder what happened to Mrs. Fisher. Although I do recall what she said to me on the playground, her eyes wide and pale face aghast. Because no one had ever spoken to me like that before.

“Cruelty is a disease, Lauraleigh. It will fester inside you like cancer.”

I was confused. Tubby Kyle was the bully. How was I the cruel one?

Mrs. Fisher had been right, though.

I have a sickness inside me, a black rot.

Infectious to anyone other than me, it’s poison.

Over the years, I noticed I was different, abnormal. People were these strange emotional creatures that sucked the energy right out of me. It became more and more draining to try to pretend, to fit in. I took steps to learn how to blend.

As for Kyle, his pus-filled pimpled face did heal with no outer scarring, but the internal damage was deep-rooted, the seed of fear planted. He never fucked with my Barbies again.

So what lessons were learned from that childhood experience?

1. Don’t bother my mother while she’s at spin class. Or ever, really.
2. Authority is easily displaced.
3. Bullies are cowards who respond to strength.
4. And the biggest lesson of all: I am not like others.