Women are more polite. More sweet, as they murder you.

Dear Trevor,

Oh, poor Will Mudgett. I’ve been on the end of one of those smiles. What I’m wondering is how you know what it meant.

Are there creatures other than girls who smile like that? Maybe crocodiles, but when they rip your heart out, they don’t hand it back in that gentle, bloody way. I’m not saying that boys—or men—are any better. We’re all just as cruel. But men, I think, are more direct in their cruelty. Women are more polite. More sweet, as they murder you.

When Frances Wilkson kissed me, I thought that meant we were in love. I figured she was my girl and pictured her decorating my side when I walked into a room. The next weekend, I asked her to go with me to our school baseball game. I didn’t so much as ask, as tell her that was what I’d scheduled for us. I pictured myself walking into the bleachers with that velvety-dressed girl at my side. She’d be there, just as sure as shoes would be on my feet or a collar would be on my shirt. It was an inevitability.

But she didn’t come with me. When I asked her, she gave me one of those smiles. Actually, she worked her way up to that smile, first with a downward glance, a wringing of her hands, a tucking of her red hair behind one ear. Then she looked up from beneath her bangs and stabbed me with that smile, right in the eyes.

“I’m sorry, Hugh,” she said to me, through her upturned lips, “but I can’t go with you. Howard Castle asked me to go with him and I’m afraid I’ve already said yes.” Then, when she saw the look on my face, she went in for the kill. “I hope you didn’t think I was your girlfriend, just because I kissed you.” I think she said some other words after that, but by then all I heard was ringing.

I didn’t go to that game. In fact, I don’t think I went to a single baseball game for the rest of that year. I knew if I went, I’d see Frances sitting next to some boy who wasn’t me. And I knew she’d smile at me as if I was there. That smile would tear open the wound.

But here I am, making you afraid of girls. And I don’t want that. I want you to be one of those rare people who is not petrified by the opposite sex. I want you to be one of those people who can walk up to anyone–stranger, girl, president, king—and strike up a conversation without fear. There are such people, or so it appears.

My secret belief is that they are just as afraid as the rest of us. Fear is a universal experience, I think. Perhaps fear is even a friend. Perhaps we just have to get to know it better.

Dad