Sociopath? by Vicki Williams Page B

although
he felt an ache in his gut, he wanted so badly to put the gas pedal
clear to the floor. After they’d eaten, he took her back to Heron
Point and dropped her off.
    And then he drove to an isolated highway,
where he knew there was generally very little traffic and he’d
never seen a cop, and he stomped on it. He felt the car respond
instantly. It seemed to him it was like the stallion, reveling in a
rider that would allow it to go all the way. And just as he
thought, it was like riding or skiing or boating, only more of an
adrenalin-rush than any of them. It was like sex, maybe even a
little better, because he didn’t have to think about pleasing
anyone but himself. He didn’t have to call the car Sweetheart for
fear of hurting its feelings. Although, it was, of course.
    He patted it on the dash, “Come on,
Sweetheart, let’s take it on home.”
    They raced down the road together. He wished
they could just keep going to the end of the earth.
    *
    On his birthday night in his bed, Lane told
him wistfully, “I wish I knew of a new thing to give you for your
birthday, Rafe.”
    He smiled, the genuine full out smile hardly
anyone ever saw but her, “Honey, you don’t have to give me any new
thing, I’m happy with just the all the old things.”
    * *
    The other kids at school figured he enjoyed
rubbing their noses in it when he drove into the school parking lot
in the Corvette on Monday morning. They would never have understood
that, although he could definitely be calculating at times to
achieve a desired end, he usually never even gave much thought to
how things, like him having a particular car, would affect others.
The Corvette was all about him and no one else. He was naturally so
self-focused that the idea of wanting to possess something simply
because it was prestigious wouldn’t even have occurred to him.
    On the other hand, it didn’t take him long to
realize that the car attracted girls like a 75 percent off sale at
the Riverlook Mall. And he also realized that it opened vast new
horizons in that he could now consider the younger girls who didn’t
drive because he could take them to the cabin himself.
    Rhonda Fisher felt her heart drop when she
saw Rafe unwinding his lean brown body out of the Corvette in his
tight jeans and leather jacket. She saw the lock of black hair
hanging over his forehead. She saw the quick white smile gleam when
someone whistled at the car. She knew exactly what it
portended.
    “Shit,” she said to herself, “as if it wasn’t
bad enough already.”
    *
    “Guess what?” she told Linda Dee when they
were having dinner at Big Wong’s that night. “Rafe Vincennes came
to school today in a brand new blue Corvette.”
    “If we’re lucky, maybe the little fucker will
kill himself in it.”
    * *
    He didn’t though. When graduation night came,
there he was. He was valedictorian of his class, of course.
Technically, he’d had enough credits to graduate last year at 15.
His senior year he’d only taken college prep courses. He also
graduated with the highest ever grade point average, which would
have been even higher if they hadn’t had an arbitrary ceiling
beyond which no one could go. In addition, he’d racked up more
athletic letters than any Benedict student ever had. He gave a
short, funny speech, saying all the things adults like to hear from
kids, almost none of which he believed. Rhonda Fisher knew he’d
been inundated with offers from colleges wanting him to attend - on
academic scholarships, baseball scholarships, football
scholarships, basketball scholarships. He could have applied for
other kinds of scholarships and grants as well, in math and science
and English, although so far as she knew, he hadn’t tried for any
of them. She assumed he’d be attending Princeton in the fall as all
the other Vincennes boys, except for Wyatt, had.
    A few of the Benedict staff noticed that
Rafe’s parents weren’t in attendance. It was said they were on a
Mediterranean