He's eight when ma finds him cutting up the cat, blood slick on his hands and smeared across his neck. Jason smiles, tells her he's figuring out how the kitten works, and proudly points to the clumps of pink and red he reached in and pulled out. He doesn't understand why she's crying, John told him people only cried if they were hurt or scared. He doesn't understand why her eyes widen when he tells her he knows the cat is dead, tells her it stopped shrieking after he cut it. Jason still doesn't understand when she wraps her arms around him and sobs. He knows something is wrong when she tells him to never let anybody know what he did. When he wants to know why, ma smiles at him through her tears and tells him he's special, the kind of special that can get him taken away.
The next day, John comes home from school and tells him what ma wouldn't, that people would hurt him for tearing things open, even if it was only to see how they worked. He asks questions then, and the answers seem so simple but John looks sad when he hears them.
He learns what the word sociopath means; he learns that he needs to pretend.
He is ten when he is introduced to baseball, and he loves it immediately, loves running across the field and swinging a bat. When he is eleven, he starts to imagine they're skulls and not balls that fly when he swings. Jason is twelve when he steals medical textbooks and looks for hours on end, and he is twelve when he picks up a knife again.
He buries the dogs in the flowerbed of the house next door.
Jason is fourteen when he wakes up wet and hard after dreaming of cutting open one of the guys from school, watches him writhe beneath him, marking him with needles and knives.
He is fifteen when he tells ma he likes boys more than girls, and the relief on her face hurts, even though he knows it's better to have a son that's queer than one that likes to kill.
Jason is seventeen when he beats in the head of an asshole that calls him a fag. He doesn't think he can resist that rush again.
A woman in a purple dress shows up at the house four months after he turns eighteen, offering a place in a company called BLU. Jason knows that company isn't a front for the cops and he doesn't care what they do, not if they're offering to pay him to kill.