“What do you know about the Santa Slayer?” she asks, a scary lack of inflection to her tone.
“This is about true crime?”
“Just answer the question.”
I’m not a true crime junkie like she is, but sure I know who the Santa Slayer is. Everyone does. Some whack job who offed a bunch of mall Santas one year before Christmas. I think it was inmy senior year of high school. Next Halloween, half the kids we grew up with went as dead Santas of one kind or another.
“Some guy named Artie Sanford went ape shit on some Santas. Knifed ’em up. Is that what you’re worried about? Being stabbed randomly by some psycho? Might be too much Vixens if Jynx is getting you scared of something that random and unlikely.”
She ignores me and starts talking.
“When I was a kid, I was small. I’mstillsmall. But I was a late bloomer, and I was always in the bottom percentile on size and weight. It tended to make people extra protective of me, when that’s never what I’ve wanted. I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to look less childlike after so many years of insufferable baby talk to my face. Getting the implants, my piercings, the hair, the boots. It’s all to help me feel stronger, badder, bigger than I am naturally. I never want to be seen as small again.”
I nod, taking her hand in mine and holding it, encouraging her to keep talking.
“Anyway, when I was twelve, my growth spurt hadn’t hit yet. Some friends and I were at the mall. I went to the bathroom on my own, and, uh…”
The toe of her white sneaker nudges the ground, trying to find the words. My stomach is a ball of lead and I almost don’t want her to keep going, but I need her to all the same.
“There was a man in the bathroom. I think he thought I was a little kid, the way he spoke to me, the way he tried to lure me into a stall with him. But I was twelve, not some first-grader who didn’t know better. I stomped on his foot and ran out of the bathroom.”
Her breathing turns staggered, and her free hand comes up to wipe her face angrily. That pit in my stomach grows deeper, and I don’t want to know what she’s going to say next.
“It should’ve ended there. My mom could’ve filed a report with the police, done a sketch, and that would’ve been that. But no.”
Ice runs through my veins, chilling me from the inside out. My asshole can’t decide whether to clench like I’m sitting on a glass pineapple, or to let out everything inside me that’s turned to liquid. “What happened, angel?”
Her eyes squeeze shut. “She told my dad. My overprotective dad.”
I think I know where this is going, but I don’t stop her. I wonder when she’s ever told someone this story before.Ifshe ever has. She probably needs to say it as much as I need to hear it.
“He didn’t want a police report. He wanted to handle it himself. By the time I heard the door slam and ran out to the kitchen where they’d been talking, my mom was crying, my dad was gone, and so was the biggest knife from the block on the counter.”
The backs of my eyes sting, watching tears drip from hers. Bright teal, even in the darkness, under the moonlight and surrounded by the glow of the synchronous fireflies.
“I never saw him again,” she says, sniffling. “Except on the news.”
Amelia pulls her hand back from mine, turns to face me, and scoots herself further away.
“Weston, my birth name is Angel Sanford. Artie, my dad,isthe Santa Slayer. The man from the bathroom…he was a mall Santa. And my dad went to find him. He found the wrong one first. I guess it was a shift change or something, I dunno how that works. By the time he found the ‘right’ one, others had tried to intervene, tried to stop him, and they got killed too. A security guard, an elf, and a random Good Samaritan who thought they could take him out. He was possessed; nothing could stop himuntil he got the guy who tried to take his daughter. And then the cops showed up.”
Her head falls, shoulders shaking with a couple of sobs, and I can’t help myself. I move in closer to her again, wrapping an arm around her shoulders, and taking her hand in my other. Lips pressed against her head, I whisper, “It’s okay, you don’t have to tell me.”
“You deserve to know,” she says when she can speak again. “The whole world knows half the story. Only my mom and I know the whole one.”
Amelia collects herself, breathing deeply before lifting her head to look me in the eyes as she tells me more.
“I think by that point he realized what he had done. He didn’t want to live with himself. He chose suicide by cop rather than face the consequences of his actions. He leftusto live with them instead.”
She hiccups, and I rub her back as I try to take it in. After a minute, she gets her breath back and continues. “My dad charged one of the cops with the knife he’d used to kill five other people in broad daylight, forcing them to fire on him. Coward that he was in the end. Making someone else a killer rather than face justice himself.”
The jokes I’ve heard about the man over the years resurface, playing like a slideshow in my head, a montage of nightly news clips, skits on comedy shows, and even videos online of people pretending to pull an “Artie Sanford.” How he hated Christmas so much he took out Santaandthe elves. It circulates every year. Never once have I heard even a fraction of this side of it.
I can’t imagine having to live with the knowledge that someone you were related to, someone youloved,committed such a heinous act. But to have it be perpetrated in your name, for your honor? To have those horrible crimes be the one thingyou’re connected to when anyone hears your name for the rest of your life?
“I am so fucking sorry, Amelia,” I tell her.
What do you say to something like this? Southern manners didn’t prepare me for trauma like hers. When the worst thing I’ve ever been through is my parents divorcing, how am I supposed to wrap my head around the tragedy she’s experienced?
