Friends of sociopaths, what was your most uncomfortable moment with them?
Early Signs and the Human Mask
I taught my sociopathic friend how to fake emotions, so he learned to manipulate everyone. And then he decided to destroy my life. I met Elliot when I was 14 and he was 12. My mom told me to go be friends with the weird kid down the road because she felt bad for him.
As I walked over to his house to ask him to play for the first time, I was building up this image in my head. So by the time I knocked on his front door, I expected to be faced with a kid who was picking his own boogers and rubbing them all over himself for him to pee all over me.
But I was wrong. Very wrong, actually.
because outwalked a normal 8-year-old boy who smiled a normal smile.
“Um, so do you want to hang out together, you and me?”.
“Yes.”.
He cut me off with excitement, and I guess he noticed how takenback I was from his reaction because that’s when his face immediately switched into a much more solemn expression.
“Hey, so did that seem happy to you?”.
“Do you think I did good?”.
I just stared at him blankly, not knowing what in the world he was talking about.
“Oh, sorry. I don’t really understand like feelings and stuff, so I’ve been practicing”.
I awkwardly laughed before trying to change topic and asking him what he liked to do for fun. And that’s when he told me to follow him into his back garden. He pointed to the corner and showed me his bug orphanage.
Dozens of jars filled with insects. Some had missing limbs, some upside down, some already dead.
“They’re the ones nobody wanted, so I let them scream here instead”.
He announced proudly.
And just before I could run out of the house screaming, he started tweaking out.
“Why are you so weirded out?”.
“Gh. This is literally the coolest thing ever”.
“Do you ever feel like nobody gets you?”.
Back then, no one really knew about the concept of sociopaths or anything like that. You were either the same as everyone else or different. And to me, it was very clear that he was different.
And maybe it was my only child loneliness or the fact I didn’t grow up with a father.
But either way, I decided to treat him as a little brother. We spent almost every day together after that. He’d relay to me how his day at school went. Meanwhile, I’d write everything down on a piece of paper and tell him how a normal person would react to everything he was telling me.
After just a few weeks, he got really good at this, and we began to call it putting on the human mask. He had even managed to make friends outside of me.
It all seemed so positive that I had no clue how much damage I was doing until he turned 13 and found out about pranks.
You see, there was one problem I was never able to give him real advice on, and that was his boredom. Elliot would beg me to tell him the secret, how everyone doesn’t just unal alive themselves since everything in life is clearly a distraction from death. I hated when he talked like this.
Like, how do you teach a sociopath how to enjoy something?
At first, I tried to keep him entertained by letting him pretend to light me on fire, and I’d pretend to be super hurt. I should have known it was just a band-aid solution.
I remember visiting him a few days after that and saw a spark in his eyes that I didn’t recognize.
“Alex, Alex, guess what?”.
His sudden happiness made me smile until he told me its source. Turns out he had managed to cut a kid’s heavy backpack as he was running for the bus and he fell like a sack of meat.
Elliot then burst out laughing like it was the funniest thing to ever exist. I told him it wasn’t funny, expecting him to study my explanation like always, but instead he just said,
“Dude, I don’t care anymore. This is the best I felt in my entire life”.
He refused to listen any further, so I just shrugged it off. But then every day for the next week, he was coming home with new stories, each worse than the last. And then came the breaking point.
He told me he had put plastic shards in a kid’s sandwich to see if anyone would notice. And because nobody did, he took a bite and started coughing until Red came out.
I got up to tell his mom. But then Elliot said if I told anyone, he would make my mom pay for my betrayal.
So I just said, “Okay,” before heading home.
After that, I had every intention of cutting him off. But there was one thing I had forgotten to account for, and that was his mom. Because to her, her son had just lost his best friend for no reason.
So, one day she showed up to my house and invited us to his talent show. And when the day came and we were sitting in the audience, I figured it’d just be a short singing solo and then I’d never have to see his psychotic a ever again.
But I was wrong. Instead, he took a bird out of a box on the table.
He then took a knife, cut it open, and let the red pour out onto the stage. The audience laughed, thinking it was fake, but then he kept going. A second, then a third.
By this point, one of the children in the audience was crying, and I myself felt bile begin to rise in my throat.
I remember staring into Elliot’s face, desperately searching for any sign of guilt, any sign that he had suddenly regretted what he had done. But instead, he was smiling ear to ear. That’s when I heard the sirens outside.
Turns out, a teacher had called the police during the performance. Mrs. Gonzalez, the music teacher, had slipped out of the auditorium as soon as she realized what was happening. The chaos that followed is still a blur in my memory.
Screams from the audience as people finally realized what they were witnessing. Teachers rushing the stage. Elliot standing there with blood soaked hands, still smiling as if he’d just performed a particularly impressive magic trick.
The metallic smell of blood mixed with the scent of panic, sweat, and fear and confusion.
The police took him away that night, but somehow he was back at school the following week. His mother had convinced everyone it was an elaborate magic trick gone wrong, that the birds were already dead, that Elliot was just a misunderstood boy with a flare for the dramatic.
She had tears in her eyes as she explained to the principal, the police, anyone who would listen that her son would never hurt a living thing. I knew better. I had seen the bug orphanage. I had heard his stories. I had watched the light in his eyes as he described causing pain.
