You're No Better (Deluxe Limited Edition)

Chapter 1
A new podcast episode about my dad dropped this morning.
A true crime group calling themselves the Gore Goonies—named for the segment where they show each other crime scene photos until one of them chickens out or vomits—posted their latest episode at dawn. By eleven o’clock, it’s cracked the top ten most popular episodes in the US, nestled between NPR and Alpha Male Bootcamp.
When I press play, I’m one of thousands.
Inside this penthouse condo, one of the Goonies is saying now, was a torture chamber. I’m looking at a picture now and it’s just—it’s sickening. Knives, chains, bins of medical equipment—there’s a bedpan and a dirty mattress in the corner, and—I can’t even describe what I’m looking at, man.
Across the cinder block waiting room, Mom is arguing with a prison guard. She, or Dad, or someone, didn’t fill out the correct form to allow the documentary producer into the visiting area. Or didn’t fill it out correctly enough, or whatever. “Ma’am,” the guard keeps saying in his exhausted West Virginia drawl, “ma’am, we got strict visitation procedures,” and Mom is talking over him: “I’ll fill it out now. Are you listening? We drove four hours. I have a pen. Give me the damn form.”
The documentary producer shoots me an awkward half smile from the plastic chair beside me. I don’t smile back. Then he gestures for me to take out one of my wireless earbuds, as if we have something to discuss. We don’t.
Mom points behind her, to him. “He’s with the news.”
That’s a lie, unless we’re counting hack journalists as news anchors now.
“I don’t see no cameras on him,” the guard sighs, clearly not paid enough for this shit. “Sir! Come up here, please.”
He does, while the lengthy description of my father’s torture implements—I don’t even know what half the things in this photo are. Is that a cattle prod?—is interrupted by an ad for a dog-treat subscription box.
I’ve heard it all before. After so many podcasts, YouTube video essays, and police procedurals that definitely weren’t stealing from the headlines, you realize there’s only so many ways to rephrase the facts of a case. But the facts of the case aren’t the point. The point is how these people talk about us: the opinions they project onto the victims, the cops, Mom, me. Me especially. When they talk about me, or turn the camera to an actor who’s supposed to be me, I get stuck on it. For days. Weeks, sometimes. I listen to it or watch it over and over, until I have it all but memorized. As if I’ll finally understand it better the next time around.
When I told my last therapist about this habit of Googling my family and painstakingly cataloging the results—I had to throw her a bone, keep her busy—she said it was a form of self-harm. I disagreed. If I wanted to hurt myself, I would.
Whatever the producer says must be good enough, because the guard sulks into a back office to fetch his superior.
“See,” Mom calls after him, “was that so hard?”
And when the Gore Goonies finally get around to mentioning me, it’s not even to describe my bloody clothes in the evidence locker or the lifeless testimony I gave in that courtroom. It’s to ask if my father treated me like the girls he kept in that penthouse. If he ever forced me to do anything. If I wanted it.
If I wanted to grow up to be like him.
Shut up, we have sponsors! You can’t say that! But they’re laughing, and they didn’t edit it out, so they don’t mean it. She was ten!
I don’t know how long it takes for Mom to snap her fingers at me. “Morgan,” she’s probably saying. I pop out an earbud to make sure. “Morgan, let’s go.”
Finally. I turn off the podcast, hand my phone to another guard by the door, and step through the metal detector into the United States Penitentiary, East Early.

Mom and the documentary producer talk as we’re herded through security. Filming schedules, interview procedures, a blur of last-minute contract negotiations. “I know it’s happening fast,” the producer is saying, “but if we move quick, we could wrap postproduction before next year’s film festivals hit full swing.” I want to eavesdrop but I can’t focus. USP East Early is a stark-white cinder block cavern: The lights are too bright and the AC isn’t loud enough. One of the guards frowns at my skirt like I’m breaking the penitentiary’s dress code for visitors, again. I pick at the corner of my thumbnail until a little red strip reaches toward my knuckle.
Then we’re taken past the visitation floor to the Box. The sign calls it “no-contact visiting,” but it’s the Box. A coffin-sized room cut in half by bulletproof glass, us on one side and the prisoner on the other, connected by a black corded phone.
The first time Mom shut me in the Box with her, I had such a bad meltdown that I started hitting my head against the wall.
The correctional officer on chaperone duty unlocks the door. “If you need water,” she says, “or the restroom, you’ll need to be escorted—”
“We know how it works,” Mom huffs.
We step inside, and the door closes.
Dad smiles at me.
My thumb is bleeding now. I tuck it carefully in my fist. I know the door didn’t lock and trap us in here, but my brain doesn’t believe it, not with Dad so close. He shows his perfect teeth and his eyes crinkle, and thank god I don’t look like him. I look like my mother. I have her dark red hair and upturned nose, and when we’re mad, our upper lip twitches the same way—twins separated by twenty years, she used to say.
Dad cradles the phone to his ear. Hi, he mouths, even though nobody has picked up the receiver on our side to hear him.
I don’t move. Neither does the producer.
Mom, though, arranges herself perfectly in one of the two stools in front of the glass, lifting the phone with a flourish. “Hello, dear. Good to see you again.”
The producer offers me the second stool, but I don’t take it. Dad says something, his voice an almost-intelligible drone through the phone speakers. Mom narrows her eyes at him.
“I told you,” she says, “it’s a documentary. A docuseries. Four parts. Or six, depending on who we can get for interviews.”
The producer leans over to me. He’s in his late thirties, over twice my age. I don’t like how close he is.
“You think he’ll work with us?” he asks me.
I suck on my teeth. Mom told me to play nice.
I say, “Yeah. He’s probably bored in here.”
The producer nods like I’ve given him some great insight into the complex, twisted mind of a monster. He probably thinks there’s some genius machination in Dad’s head; that people like Dad are a species apart from us, a kind of devil brought from Hell to walk the earth. But there isn’t and they aren’t. Serial killers aren’t smart, or clever, or superhuman. They’re just evil, and cops are bad at their jobs.
Mom turns in her seat and holds the phone out to me. Her lip twitches.
“He wants to talk to you first,” she says.