Heather. Story extract.

Don't know if I like this

Heather was just seventeen when the killings took place. This small detail was repeated in the weeks and months following the events of that unthinkable day in 1976 constantly, both by the newspapers sent out all across the country, and by the locals who, in a stage-whisper, would tell passing tourists that they had known the perpetrator personally. People were obsessed with the fact that she was seventeen. Only nine weeks away from her eighteenth birthday when it all happened. If only she could have put up with it for just a couple more years, they would say. Gritted her teeth, kept her head down and trudged onwards through it, then none of this would have had to have happened. So much could change between the ages of seventeen and twenty, especially for pretty young girls like Heather who had lovely white smiles, who had eyes so bright and knowing (though they would later claim that she had always been dead behind those same blue eyes), and whose bodies filled out frilly lace dresses so nicely. She could have become a nice, normal adult in that time. Finished school and moved away from the close-knit rural town filled with the unforgiving classmates and parents that she had hated so much. Maybe she would have even found a husband, moved in with him, raised a few kids, and looked back and laughed at all of the sick ideas she had formed in her sensitive young head back then, and thanked God sincerely each night before she lay down her head that he had given her the strength not to go through with it.

But that wasn’t really possible, and Heather knew better than anyone else that there was no other way that her life could have turned out other than like this. And no matter how painful she had made life for herself and others, it was inevitable to her that things would have always turned out this way.