The St. Ambrose School for Girls(83)

I look at the time on my alarm clock. Dinnertime is almost over. I have been gone for nearly two hours. In an effort to ground myself, I force my brain to enter into an elaborate assessment of the pluses and minuses of a trip over to Wycliffe for food. This is not because I’m hungry, but because I’m scared of where my mind has taken me this time.

I am afraid of the violence.

Suicide is one thing. Murder, another.

I go back to inspecting my hands and wonder, as if they belong to someone else, exactly what they’re capable of. I consider using them to unpack Strots’s duffel and backpack for her, but the butler-ing seems intrusive, even though it would provide me with proof that I have control over where I place my palms and what I grip with my fingers.

I picture Greta standing in the open doorway of her room, all gift-wrapped in her superiority and her Seventeen magazine clothes. I have spent little time thinking about her motivations, her origins, her own perspective on her behavior, particularly as it all relates to me. When you are in wartime, you do not pause to dissect whether the bullets coming at you have been shot out of something made by Smith & Wesson or Remington. And in fact, the question I posed to her was not actually an inquiry into her backstory. By asking her why she behaves as she does, I was begging her to stop in a pathetic rhetorical.

I think of my meeting with Mr. Pasture, and the self-doubt that kept my mouth shut.

I consider Nick Hollis that first night, fighting with his wife over the phone.

I remember the unshed tears in my roommate’s eyes as she talked about the girl who didn’t just break her heart, but shoved a lit stick of TNT into her chest cavity.

Finally, I hear Greta’s voice in my head: Well, then, we’re not done. Are we.

My eyes go to the bank of windows. I note the thin, single-sheet panes of glass. The fragile old crosshairs made of wood and putty. The drop down to the hard, cold asphalt of the parking area. To reaffirm the height at which I am above the ground, I lean forward to look over the lip of the sash and then I create an in vivo physics problem to solve. If I had enough of a running start, I believe I could land on Nick Hollis’s Porsche.

The idea that my body’s last earthly mission would be to smash the sports car’s hood and blow out all its safety glass has electric appeal.

The impulse stays in the holster, however.

Because for once, I want to hurt someone other than myself.

When I finally stand up, it’s not to go eat at Wycliffe. I walk to my closet, crossing the ghostly chessboard pattern of the windowpanes on the floor, and I am ultimately not surprised at my destination. I suppose it’s kind of inevitable.

There is only one thing that I can do in this situation, one piece of leverage I have against Greta. But it is a warhead that will be sure to cause considerable collateral damage—and, going with that unoriginal metaphor, it has a somewhat unreliable guidance system.

Once I let it loose, I will not be able to control the aftermath.

But I cannot let this stand. I cannot sit on the sidelines and watch Margaret Stanhope further escalate things with my roommate.

As my closet door opens before me, I am called by a higher purpose. Onto my knees I drop, landing on my backup pair of black boots, which I push out of the way even though the hardwood is just as uncomfortable. Breaking into a nervous sweat, I pat my palms along the dusty floor until I reach my ugly suitcases. I shove them off to the side.

For a moment my heart stops because I don’t see anything there—

Wedged into the dark corner… is something small and silky and soft.

And pink.

Exhaling in a rush, I wad Greta’s panties tightly in my palm and I am dizzy with relief as I extract myself and stand back up.

I stay where I am, panting and shaky, until I hear a voice right outside my door that recedes down the hall. This refocuses me. Shoving the underwear into the pocket of the jacket I haven’t taken off since I went on the promenade to Mr. Pasture’s office, I stumble out of my room. It is then that the limits to my planning become apparent.

I only have relative evidence and I’m not sure how to fix that. The panties don’t prove anything, really. Their context was the thing, not their existence.

And I still have my credibility problem with the administration.

In the hall, I head for the main stairs because I am distracted and it is a habit, but I stop as I come up to the steps. Down below, I hear many voices, and the volume of them is doubling and redoubling.

I forgot. There’s a mandatory dorm meeting now. To discuss community expectations and standards for behavior.

I look over my shoulder to Nick Hollis’s door and think of that portrait of St. Ambrose. Not fucking the students is part of those community rules, but somehow, I doubt that is going to come up.

Moving quicker now, I head for the far end of the hallway, to the stairs that will take me all the way down to the basement. I’m not clear what I’m doing, and this adds to my sense of urgency because action must be taken. Wrongs must be righted, yet I am an unreliable and feeble white knight. The dean of students isn’t going to suddenly believe me, even if I drop this wisp of Victoria’s Secret with the Stanhope name tag into the field of framed photographs on his neat desk.

The next thing I’m aware of is that I’m in the basement, and when I open the dorm’s back door, the cold slaps at me. The shallow parking lot has two cars in it now: the couple from the third floor’s station wagon and Nick Hollis’s Porsche. I stare at the vehicles as if they might take me somewhere helpful. Which is ridiculous. You can’t drive to veracity, even if “city” is part of the word.