The St. Ambrose School for Girls(114)

I’m not going in there to retrieve them, that’s for sure.

I take the east-side stairs up two at a time, and as I emerge onto my hall, there are more doors open than usual, more girls standing in the corridor. They’re congregating in groups, three-leafed clovers occasionally interspersed with a quatrefoil clutch. They don’t notice me, and that is normal. I notice them, and that is also normal.

I have a thought that this is the last normal anything for me. Yet I remain resolved.

This is my chance to be a hero, and not in the sense that I’m ridding the world, and myself, of a scourge. The court system will have to do that. Still, setting the judicial outcome into motion is a visceral victory, one that my disease, after it has taken so much from me, cannot cheat me out of.

It is upon this particular wave of surety and purpose that I surf through the door of my room to get the knife.

I jerk to a halt.

No, this is not right.

I rush over to the desks, which are, in contrast to the disorder in which I left them, back in proper position, lined up side by side. The crane lamp, which I had taken down to see into the crack, is no longer on the floor, but back arching over my textbooks. My chair is tucked into its proper spot, all neat and tidy.

My knees bang into the bare wood as I throw myself onto all fours and look at where the knife should be.

The dusting of dirt is gone.

When I push the desks back apart… there is nothing there. No dirty, white-handled kitchen knife with dried blood on its blade.

Like it had never existed in the first place.

“No, no, no…”

I feel reality sifting through my mind, falling like sand through the sieve of my convictions and conclusions, slipping away once again. But I know what I saw, I know what I did—

“Taylor?”

I look around behind me. Strots is standing in the open door to our room, still as a statue.

“I need your help,” I say.

“About what?” She cautiously enters and closes us in. “What do you need help with?”

I flop over so I am sitting on my ass. “I killed Greta. Jesus Christ, Strots, I killed her.”

My roommate’s double take is not a surprise. Neither is her immediate denial of my statement, because Strots is loyal like that.

“No, you didn’t,” she says.

“Yes, I did. I used the knife you told me to take back to Wycliffe for you. The night she was killed, I followed her down to the river—”

“No. You didn’t.”

“—where I stabbed her and I left her there and—”

“You didn’t kill her.” Strots goes over and sits on her bed. “I don’t know what your brain is telling you, but you’re innocent. You didn’t murder anybody.”

“I put the knife here.” I point to the desks that are out of joint. “I hid it—”

“No.”

“—and now I have to go to the police.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Yes, I do. I’m going to do the right thing for once—”

“So where’s the knife?”

I push my hair out of my face. “What?”

“Where’s the knife? If you’re going to go to the police station to confess, where’s the murder weapon?”

I point to the juncture between the desks. “It was right here.”

“Okay. So where is it now?”

I blink. I look back and forth between my roommate and the desks. “I don’t know.”

“You didn’t kill Greta, Taylor.”

I start to mumble and shake my head. “You don’t understand what I’m capable of. I’ve had a psychotic break, and I—”

“I killed her.”

Strots is looking at me without flinching as she says the words. And then, like she knows I’m doubting what I think I heard, she repeats them.

“I killed Greta Stanhope.”

There is a whooshing in my ears, the roaring sound like a tidal wave coming in, and sure enough, as it crests, I feel a battering in my body.

“No, you didn’t.” I am saying what she said to me, in exactly the same kind of firm voice. Except then my tone weakens. Turns pleading. “You couldn’t have.”

I’m thinking of Keisha now, and what she told me she saw, what her timeline was.

Strots looks down at her strong hands, splaying out the fingers. “She was going to go to the administration about me and Keisha. I couldn’t let her do that. I just… I couldn’t.”

“Strots, you don’t know what you’re saying.” My voice goes up at the end, like it’s a question, because I don’t want to lose my chance to be a hero, to finally do the right thing against my illness. And also because I don’t want Strots to lie to protect me. And because I don’t want my roommate to go to jail because then she won’t live with me here anymore. “You don’t know—”

“Greta was pissed off about Nick getting fired and everything. She thought I was the one who outed her even though I didn’t know a goddamn thing about it. She confronted me and told me she was going to take what I loved away from me, just like I did to her. I told her to leave Keisha out of it. We got into it big-time.”

“Where?”