The St. Ambrose School for Girls(56)


“Really.” Keisha stares me down. “What were you doing in that apartment all afternoon, watching TV?”

I debate telling her the truth. The weight of everything I’m keeping to myself is enormous and it would be a relief to get it off my chest. But I can’t go that far, not when I don’t know how much Keisha’s been told about the kiss. Besides, if all I say is that I was on the path to the boiler room with enough aspirin to overdose ten of me, Strots won’t have any context for such a revelation and will figure it was her down by the river that did it. Unlike the administrators, she knows I meant to drop that football.

“I had to wait for my mother to come,” I say.

“Is she taking you home?” Keisha demands. Like unless that’s the outcome, she isn’t interested in any reports from me.

Strots puts her hand on the other girl’s shoulder, and Keisha curses before falling silent. “I’ll be back, K.”

“Lemme know if you need me.”

“Yeah. I will.”

Strots leads the way back to the second floor. I am behind her and I have flashbacks of kids going to detention, not that that was something I ever did. I was always too busy trying to keep my head in line to have the time or inclination to break school rules. But I’ve seen plenty of others take this walk of shame.

As Strots and I enter our room, I note that Greta’s door is open and I’m betting she’s watching. I don’t look, however. I don’t need the image of her face as I go into this.

I close our door. Strots goes over to her bed, sits down, and takes her cigarettes out of the center pocket of her sweatshirt. She cracks the window and lights up.

When she doesn’t say anything, my mouth goes utterly dry. But I know she’s not manipulating me or playing a game. Strots isn’t like that. She’s a decent person. Moreover, she has no time for that kind of bullshit.

“I…” If I kill myself, it’s not because you kissed me, I want to say. “I mean, I just…”

I wish she would take control of this conversation. Provide me with a framework to speak what I need to. Lead the way as she usually does not only with me, but everyone she comes into contact with.

Instead, she takes a deep breath, her lungs deflating on a long sigh, and I have a thought that I’m well familiar with what she’s feeling. She’s here, once again. Wherever “here” is for her. I recognize the status, although not her particular location.

As I try out and discard strings of words, I think about the composers on the dorm’s frieze. I feel for their struggles to set music to the page as none of my chords fit, but my roommate and I can’t sit here forever, silent on a precipice neither of us wants to jump off of.

Before I know what I’m doing, I go over to my desk. I open the drawer on the bottom left. Then I walk across to Strots.

I hold out my prescription bottle of pills. As I realize what I’m doing, my overriding instinct is to yank back and slap my own hand for its independent thinking.

She looks up. “What’s this?”

When I shake the pills, because I don’t trust my voice and I need them to speak for me, she takes the orange bottle and reads the label.

“Lithium?” she says. “I don’t get it.”

“Do you know what it’s used for?” I hear myself say. Which is stupid. “Do you know what it treats?”

As she shakes her head, I pull up both of my long sleeves and present my wrists with their lines of scars. Her eyes widen and then she looks up at my face, her stare moving around my features as if we’re being introduced for the first time.

When I go to take the pills back, her hand releases them freely. My heart is pounding as I return them to their hidey-hole in my desk, and after they’re safe, I sit down in my chair. I’m horrified about doing this, but I’m compelled to speak for reasons I cannot fathom.

Or maybe the reasons are so simple, I miss them in my quest for complication.

Strots may not like me after this. She may want to switch roommates. She may never speak to me again. But she will not betray me. She will not use this against me. And she will never tell anyone.

And those convictions as to her character are the only reason I can go on.

“I need you to know,” I say clearly and calmly, “that it’s not about you. No matter what happens, none of it’s your fault and you bear no responsibility. And it’s got nothing to do with what happened down by the river last night.”

Strots takes a draw on her cigarette, and as she exhales, the guarded look on her face dissipates along with the smoke. “What exactly are you talking about?”

I can’t bring myself to say all of it. But I try to say enough.

“It doesn’t matter that you kissed me.” I shrug. “I know it wasn’t me you were kissing. I was just surprised and I didn’t know what to do. But I’m not upset, I’m not freaked out, and I didn’t say anything about it to Mr. Hollis.”

I keep the call-me-Nick part to myself, protecting the space he and I shared this afternoon.

“The last thing I ever want to do,” I say, “is have anyone know the truth about me. I want to keep it quiet. I have to keep it quiet. People already think I’m a freak. If they find out I’m crazy? It’s all over for me.”

I have to shift my eyes to the floor as I consider the ramifications of Greta finding this out.

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