It was like a little explosion. The twigs and weeds went up instantly, and all of the ants stopped dead in their tracks and shriveled into tiny black balls. Donna crouched down next to the fire and watched, laughing and pointing, and while he knew it was wrong, he also thought it looked kind of neat, and he helped her pick up some of the stray ants that had escaped, the ones outside the fire range, and drop them into the flames. They crackled and popped as they burned, and the two of them spread out, looking for other bugs. Donna found a beetle and threw it in. He kicked a grasshopper across the dirt and into the fire. They tossed in a whole bunch of spiders and crickets. Donna found a kitten and was about to drop it onto the blaze, but by that time the flames had died down to almost nothing, and the animal got away.

He was glad.

It went on from there, though, and it got worse over the next year or so. They buried a hamster alive. They skinned a dog. He remembered holding a neighbor girl down while Donna… assaulted her with a stick.

She loved it, all the violence, all the torture, all the death. It excited her. As kids today would say, she “got off” on it.

Then she started demanding sex.

They did it and he loved it, but even there things changed, got rougher, and the type of sex she wanted became more unusual, more exotic.

Unnatural.

He was tempted to try what she wanted, of course. But he was more frightened than anything else. She scared him, and that was what finally brought him back to his senses and made him realize that what they were doing was wrong. They’d never been caught, never gotten in trouble for anything they’d done, no one had ever told. But he knew it wasn’t right, and he latched on to this as a way to put a stop to it all, to end the whole thing and just… backtrack.

So he broke it off. He stopped seeing her. She’d want to play and he’d be busy; she’d try to sneak into his room and he’d make sure his doors and windows were locked. Eventually, she just… went away. He was not sure how, exactly. There was no final fight, no big to-do, they simply stopped seeing each other, and then one day he noticed he didn’t have to make an effort to avoid her anymore. She was gone.

He did not see her again until he was eighteen.