The Impaler

And that’s what bothered her.

It wasn’t anything George Kiernan said or did—he was just trying to help, was well aware that every other woman in the department was gunning for his lead actress to fail. Someone had even written “egocentric bitch?” next to Cindy’s name when the cast list went up a month and a half earlier. Kiernan himself took it down and replaced it with a clean copy. Then he sent out a message via the electronic callboard saying that kind of thing “showed a small mind and weak character,” and warned that if he ever caught a student committing such a reprehensible act again, he would personally see to it that he or she was thrown out of the department.

Cindy pretended to shrug it all off; even wrote “egocentric bitch?” as her Facebook status. But the comment and the ongoing mystery of who wrote it—as well as all the catty whispering that she knew was going on behind her back—still bothered her. And as she watched the bright yellow numbers on her bedside clock roll over to 2:00, the young actress suddenly felt lonelier than ever.

True, she had begun to feel distant from her friends toward the end of last year, when she was still a sophomore and the plays for the following season were officially announced. Lady Macbeth was the part over which every girl in the department was salivating, and Cindy worked her ass off to get it. She rehearsed all of Lady Macbeth’s speeches over the summer between her morning job at the day care center and her evening job waitressing at Chili’s. She kept rehearsing into the fall, too, and by the time auditions came around the following spring, the seasoned junior blew away her competition—made sure to leave no room for her classmates to bitch that she got the role only because “Kiernan wanted to bang her.”

Tall and thin with jet-black hair and full, round lips, Cindy Smith thought herself an attractive woman, yes, but nothing special really. She’d had only one boyfriend in high school and dated him all through her freshmen year at Har-riot—until she found out he was cheating on her with a sorority girl because, as he said, “she wasn’t giving him enough attention.”

Now didn’t that just scream of fucking irony!

In the end, however, she was happy to break it off. She knew deep down that they had little in common, him being a jock and her being a “theatre dork.” And although a year and a half later she was self-aware enough to see the cliche in it all, the betrayal still hurt enough for her to keep the young men in the department at arm’s length— especially the egomaniac playing Macbeth.

The prick’s name was Bradley Cox, a second-year senior who wouldn’t be graduating any time soon, and who only got the lead because the competition among the men was so slim. “Big Fish, Small Pond Syndrome,” her mother called it.

Cindy thought Bradley Cox was a cliche just like her ex-boyfriend—the big-man-on-campus type who prided himself on banging every girl in the department. The kind of guy who had it easy in college, but whose lack of talent and overall mediocrity would hit him hard in the real world. Would probably end up working for his father’s construction firm, Cindy was willing to bet. Bradley had asked Cindy out at the beginning of the fall semester—told her she looked like Angelina Jolie and said he’d like to make her dinner at his apartment. Cindy politely declined, then did so a second time a week later at a cast party, upon which an inebriated Cox called her a “stuck-up whore” and said he wouldn’t fuck her with George Kiernan’s dick.

He left her alone after that, hardly said two words to her all year. However, she did catch him sneering at one of his buddies during the first read-through of Macbeth, to which Cindy had come with all her lines memorized. She got her revenge two weeks later, secretly, when Kiernan pulled her aside and said, “You know, Cindy, the title of the play is Macbeth, but yours is the performance people are going to remember.”

She had really appreciated that, but at the same time didn’t like the special treatment she always got from Kiernan.

Like her private little note session tonight.

Cindy flicked on her bedside light, and when her eyes ad- justed, she tiptoed over to her desk, making sure to avoid the creaky floorboard at the corner of the bed so as not to wake her mother downstairs.

Cindy was born and raised in Greenville and still lived at home. She wasn’t proud of it—living with her mother, that is—but knew that it would all pay off when she moved to New York City to pursue her acting career. She’d already saved up almost four thousand dollars in her three years of working at Chili’s. She paid for school through scholarships and her work-study job in the box office and hadn’t had to ask for a dime from her asshole father, either. She hadn’t even talked to the son of a bitch since Christmas, now that she thought of it; and although the piece-of-junk Pontiac Sunfire he’d thrown her on her sixteenth birthday was about to shit the bed, she’d rather walk to school than be the first to call.

Cindy’s father, an auto mechanic, ended up marrying the woman with whom he’d been cheating on Cindy’s mother and bought a house out in neighboring Winterville. Still not far enough away, Cindy thought—shit, even California wouldn’t be far enough away. The divorce went down when Cindy was in junior high school, when one day her mother came home from work crying and started throwing her father’s things out on the front lawn. Then her father came home and smacked his wife a couple of good ones for embarrassing him in front of the neighbors. Didn’t matter if he was guilty or not, he said; a good wife don’t go selling out her husband no matter what he done.

Cindy saw it all, and the ensuing divorce hit her as hard as if her father had smacked her a couple of good ones, too. But like everything else, Cindy quickly learned to see the bigger picture. That was one of her “gifts,” her mother always said; her maturity, her ability to rise above things. Cindy could tell that her mother was happier without the son of a bitch—had to admit that she was happier without him hanging around, too—and decided that it was best if she had as little to do with her father as possible.

Besides, he’d never shown much interest in her anyway.

Cindy turned on her computer—an old eMachine that took forever and made a weird clicking sound when it booted—and once she was on the Internet, out of habit she first checked her Facebook page. It was the usual stuff: a message from her best friend (who, unfortunately, went to State) and a couple of drunken posts along the lines of, “Whassup, you egocentric bitch?” from friends who had just returned from partying downtown. But only after Cindy minimized her Facebook page and saw the Google search results was she willing to admit to herself the real reason why she’d gotten out of bed.

She had googled the name “Edmund Lambert”—only a few thousand hits, most of which were links to general ancestry or genealogy pages. Nothing that Cindy could tie directly to the handsome ex-soldier who kept to himself in the scene shop.

Yeah, all the girls in the theatre department kind of had a thing for Lambert. But at the same time they were intimidated by him, and thought it strange how he didn’t smile back when they batted their eyelashes and flashed their pearly whites at him. And really, only that slut Amy Pratt had made a play for him—came right out and said she’d give him a blow job in the light booth, to which Lambert replied, “No thank you, Amy.” Amy told the girls about it in the dressing room the previous semester; said Lambert didn’t even blush, didn’t even flinch, but just looked her straight in the eye until she walked away. “Guy’s weird,” she said. “Looks you dead in the eye, all blank and creepy like he’s looking through you. Fucking Hitchcock movie, if you ask me.”

Lambert had looked at Cindy that way, too. But unlike Amy Pratt, Cindy actually liked it; liked the way he held her gaze to the point where she thought she could feel his steel- blue eyes licking the back of her retinas. Oh yeah, looks wise, Edmund Lambert was beyond dreamy—tall and muscular with dark brown hair and straight white teeth. But more than that, Cindy liked him because she could tell he was a thinker, could tell he had depth—the most genuine, no-bullshit guy in the department. Wouldn’t even give a chick like Amy Pratt the time of day.

Cindy maximized her Facebook page and did a search there, too—came up empty, not a single Edmund Lambert on the entire site.

“Nyet,” she said to herself in the Russian accent she was working on for her dialects class. “You don’t seem like the Fess-book type, Meester Lem- behrt.”

She did a search for herself on Facebook—five hundred-plus hits.

“More than five hundred of me to vuhn of you,” she said in her best La Femme Nikita voice. “Da. You cannot resist me, Meester Lem- behrt.”