The St. Ambrose School for Girls(72)

My roommate is going to kill the girl.

Greta’s luscious mouth is wide open, gaping, gasping for air that cannot get down into her lungs. Her eyes are peeled even wider, the whites showing around the blue in a full circle. Her spun-gold hair is tangling in a blur. And that sound, that hollow, horrible sound of a head impacting solid wood, is the loudest thing in the universe.

“Stop,” I whisper, too scared to yell. “Please… stop—”

I am shoved out of the way, my body ricocheting off to the side and banging into a table, hitting it so hard that I dislodge one of the phones’ receivers.

It’s Keisha. She’s jumped into the fray and now she’s forcing her arms around Strots’s rib cage, her body bulging with muscle as she hauls back, using her powerful thighs, putting all of her strength into it, her athletic build in direct battle with Strots’s. As girls watch in a crowd at the archway, and I brace myself against the table I fell into, no one knows whether Keisha will drag Strots back in time.

There is an eternity before we have our answer.

With the same abruptness the attack began, its ending arrives in the blink of an eye. One moment Strots is still trying to crack the back of Greta’s cranium; the next, Keisha’s determination overrides Strots’s urge to kill. The two of them go flying backward, the energy necessary to break the bond with Greta’s cervical column so great that they pinwheel across the room and slam into the far wall.

Keisha doesn’t let go. Even as she hits the hard-stop of the plaster, and a sharp sound suggests something might have been broken and not necessarily the laths, her dark forearms remain belted around Strots’s torso right below the breasts, her knees extending out on either side of Strots’s thighs, her legs braced so that her feet get the most traction.

Over in the middle of the room, Greta curls onto her side on the floor, her sloppy hands pawing at her neck as if she has no idea the constriction is gone. As her long, bare legs swing over the floor, I see her underwear beneath the hem of her skirt. They are pink. They are silky. They are a reminder I do not require for so many reasons.

Strots points a finger at Greta. In a booming voice, she says, “You stay away from her! You leave her the fuck alone!”

As the words register, I look over at my roommate. There are tears on her face. She’s crying in fury, and I know it’s from pain that only the three of us know the source of. Yet I’m very sure that she attacked only to defend me. Just as I could only really despise Greta after I knew what she had done to Strots, my roommate’s the same way.

It’s hatred, not unrequited love, that burns in her eyes.

“You leave her alone!” she hollers again.

Greta lifts her head from the carpet, and I’m prepared to see tears in those blue eyes. Except there are none and she doesn’t appear to be afraid. She is absolutely furious in spite of the fact that she’s still coughing, still gasping for air.

Even though she has to know that, if Keisha hadn’t interceded, she wouldn’t be alive right now.

Francesca and Stacia fight through the tightly packed bodies and run over to their friend, their despotic leader. In their white outfits, they’re like nurses to a patient, but as they reach out, Greta punches their concerned hands away.

“Don’t fucking touch me,” she spits at them.

As they rear back, Greta plants her single shoed foot on the rug and stands up on her own. Her hands are trembling, but she doesn’t seem to notice as she jerks her white skirt down, yanks her white shirt back into place. After this, she gathers her hair and sends it back over her shoulders with impatience. The sight of the marks on her neck makes my stomach roll anew. The brilliant red band that encircles her throat is neon against her delicate skin, and there’s blood on her lower lip where she must have bitten herself with her front teeth.

But she doesn’t appear to care.

She takes a step toward me. And another. And another. In the background, the receiver I knocked off when I hit the table begins to let out a beep-beep-beep-beep of alarm. But it’s not as if we need further notice that this is an emergency, this is an awful emergency, this is a really, really terrible emergency.

I cringe back and shield my face with my arms, thinking that Greta is coming at me.

She is not coming at me.

She’s going to Strots, who’s still fighting to get at her, and I measure Keisha’s strong arms. I pray that she can keep holding on because if my roommate gets loose, there’s not going to be a second chance for a rescue. She’s going to drag Margaret Stanhope across to the table I hit, and she is going to use the edge of it to snap that girl’s head off at the top of her spine. After that, she’s going to hang up the phone with the same steady hand she uses to make her bed every morning, that which was messy taken care of.

I can see it happening, clear as day. Yet none of the still-imminent threat seems to register on Greta. Her head must be hurting, her throat must be on fire, her lip must be throbbing, but none of that seems to matter, either.

She stops right in front of Strots, and puts her finger in my roommate’s face. In a low voice, she says, “You shouldn’t have done that. You should have just left it alone.”

As she speaks, a single, bright red drop of blood falls from her lower lip and lands on the front of her bright white shirt.

She turns away. The crowd parts for her. Francesca and Stacia look at each other, and then run after their leader.