All You Wanted
When Bradley Martin is fourteen years old, she is voted the most beautiful girl in White Pine Bay High School.
It isn't an official poll, of course; it's a bunch of bored freshman running around collecting names on a battered notebook – prettiest girl, most handsome girl, and ugliest girl and ugliest guy.
She's a little shocked when someone tells her, but it's not that much of a surprise.
People have been telling her she's pretty since she understood the word.
She feels bad when she sees the names scrawled down in the "ugliest" category. Before leaving for the day, she finds the girl who won and leans against her locker, mumbles something about "stupid people" and flashes her a sympathetic smile.
"For what it's worth, I think you're pretty," she offers, then walks away.
The look of wonder on the girl's face makes her feels uncomfortable.
The day after Bradley's fifteenth birthday, there's a school shooting on the other side of the country, and it's all anyone at White Pine Bay can talk about.
"Can't you just imagine?" Lissa asks her, "Just going about your business and suddenly, pop, some kid kills you cause he was a loser and a half. It's depressing."
"Maybe the kid just needed somebody to be nice to him," Bradley tells her, starting to feel hot in the chest and frustrated. She doesn't know why she doesn't want to listen to Lissa today, but she just doesn't.
"Well, yeah, I guess," Lissa replies, but she's obviously uncomfortable and lets the conversation go, which is fine by Bradley.
That night, she pictures a million Bradley Martins, spread out over the globe, keeping an eye on who might shoot up their school; grabbing a million arms in unison and pulling them back from the brink.
She doesn't know why the thought fills her with as much panic as it does.
When Bradley is sixteen, she learns to drive. Her father buys her a shiny new car the day she passes her test, and she sets to work driving her friends around town.
They hit all the best parties and stay out as late as they want.
Bradley sneaks in at night and listens as her parents speak in hushed tones that she can't quite decipher. She clasps her hands because she doesn't want to hear, doesn't want her perfect world to shatter into dust around her.
Not yet.
Bradley meets Norman Bates when she is seventeen years old. There is something troubled behind his eyes that draws her to him, makes her want to befriend him.
That draws her into bed with him when her whole world falls apart, when the house of cards does not simply fall but is ripped apart and torched and dunked in a lake.
Letting her lips play against Norman's is better than tearing herself apart with her nails, than grabbing every breakable thing in the house and smashing it until everything is bleeding like her mind is.
But she doesn't love him.
When she thinks about it, she doesn't know what it means.
She lays back on the bus and considers what goes into the making of a whole other person, because Bradley Martin is seventeen years old and she has killed a man, and she is not sorry. For the first time in her life, she is not sorry about a single thing.
Bradley Martin is also, for all intents and purposes, dead. She wonders if Bradley Martin, as she'd dreamed her, had ever really existed, or whether she had been pulling tropes and tricks and fashions from every high school movie since she had discovered she was pretty and that pretty meant "popular" and that "popular" meant that there were things she could get away with that others could not.
She has a new name, a new hair color, and a new attitude. She's going to do what she has to do, make the decisions she has to make.
She will survive, and she won't feel sorry about it. Not for a second. She will be queen of her own destiny.
Her eyes are wide and her vision is blurry when Norman comes running up the street, staring around like he's seen a ghost.
She wants to cling to him, to burst into tears, to throw off the past few months and every horrible thing that happened. She wants to tell him, to confide in him, to have him remind her that she's still Bradley Martin in there somewhere.
But she doesn't tell him, not yet, not when she stays in a deserted motel room and asks whether there is something wrong with him. She doesn't tell her that there is something wrong with her, too.
And when he climbs in her car and agrees to drive to somewhere else, somewhere uncharted and mysterious, she does not tell him that she's seen the world out there and that it's scary and hard and cold and that she isn't sure Norman Bates will do any better at surviving than Bradley Martin did.
They find a room to stay at in a rooming-house where the owner doesn't ask many questions. They've sold the jewelry to pawn shops and have enough to last months.
They find jobs, eventually. Under the table stuff, but it could be worse.
Bradley works as a waitress and Norman as a janitor.
But now they're Kennedy Drake and Charles Potter.
And they're happy – at least, Bradley likes to think they are.
They've been together for six months when Bradley starts to feel sick. Norman is caring… at least, most of the time.
There are the other times, those when his eyes glaze over and he starts yelling things at her, things about how she's taking Norman away and that she needs to go away herself.
But Bradley doesn't go away – where would she go?
She learns to lock doors to keep herself in and to keep Norman out.
She learns not to turn her back when his eyes go dark.
It's just another system to live with, and it's better than being alone.
She names the baby Geri, after her father. She is tiny and pink and wriggling and Bradley doesn't know quite what to do with her when the doctors hand her over. She seems too small, too fragile, too breakable.
They send her home to Bradley and Norman in their one-bedroom apartment and Bradley guesses that this is what being a mother is.
Being endlessly, hopelessly confused, and feeling like she is drowning.
For two high school dropouts, they make a halfway decent living. Bradley finds a club to dance at and Norman has moved from maintenance up to running a jewelry counter at a department store that didn't feel the need to check his references.
They leave Geri with a nice old lady while they're at work, and for long stretches of time Norman is loving and attentive.
Bradley gets a lot of attention up on stage.
It makes sense. Wasn't she the most popular girl in school, after all?
Geri gets older, and they send her off to Head Start. The days are long without her little girl to keep her company, and Norman begins to "drift", as Bradley thinks of it, more and more often. His eyes change, and he becomes someone else, accuses Bradley of being a slut and a whore, demands to know why she took Norman away.
She locks herself in the bathroom and tells herself that these will pass.
She takes pills and tells herself that these episodes are all in her head.
She rubs body butter over the bruises, because if they smell nice, maybe they'll hurt less.
She changes her hair from black back to blonde and for a little while, that helps.
The first time Bradley runs into Caleb Calhoun, she thinks he's a nice man. He has a daughter, too, and a far off, sad look in his eyes.
Bradley likes talking to him and in a childish way she likes his too-big tan coat. There's something of her father in him, maybe.
Something dangerous.
When Norman sees him there's fire in his eyes and she knows that he knows him from before and that there will be hell to pay.
She grabs Geri and hides in a closet, waits for Norman to stop banging and yelling and talking about himself in the third person.
Waits for him to settle down and become Norman again.
When he comes back down to Earth, he tells her that Caleb Calhoun is a bad man, and that she should switch Geri's class so she never has to see him again.
"We have to keep her safe. You don't even know all the bad people that are out there, Bradley. You don't know the kinds of things that they do."
She tries never to talk about the past, or even to think about it. All that matters is the future, the future and Geri and her and Norman.
Their family.
She won't let Geri lose her father.
Even if she has to cover up the bruises and take pills to sleep through the night.
Because sometimes when she turns and looks in the mirror, for just a second, she sees Bradley Martin smiling back at her.