“Do you know where Keisha’s room is?” I ask as she gives me the once-over.
“Down there. Three seventeen.”
“Thank you.”
I proceed in the direction she came from, and I can feel her staring at my back. I want to tell her if she thinks only my clothes are out of whack, she’s got no clue about the real weirdness, given the way I have spent my morning and afternoon.
As I go along, I am nervous, my palms sweaty. I’m heading for a bad number, according to my OCD, and I have no idea whether Strots is in there. It’s just before seven p.m., so she’s usually back in the dorm after dinner, having a cigarette before she starts her homework. In the beginning of the semester, she performed this ritual in our room. Lately, she’s transitioned up here. Now, because of what happened last night, I gather she will move heaven and earth to avoid our room for any reason whatsoever.
317.
I stand in front of Strots’s best friend’s door. As I rap with my knuckles, my suicidal depression knocks on my consciousness, a squatter who’s been evicted but believes it can wheedle its way back in with protestations of homelessness and perhaps the promise to do light housework.
Keisha opens the door. Her face is set and her eyes angry, and she blocks the entry with her strong, athletic body.
Before I can ask about Strots, and before Keisha can tell me to get the hell off the third floor, my roommate says from inside, “It’s all right, let her in.”
Strots’s voice is tired, and as her teammate steps aside, I’m unsure exactly how much has been shared between the two. Did Strots tell her what happened by the river? Or is Keisha just guessing something bad went down by the contours under the blanket of Strots’s change of affect, change of location, change of pattern?
Strots is sitting on a bed, underneath a black-and-white poster of Muhammad Ali in the ring, the great boxer standing over his opponent, the other man sprawled at his feet, knocked out cold. My roommate’s—former roommate’s?—hair is wet, and she’s wearing an Ambrose field hockey sweatshirt and sweat pants. She will not meet my eyes. She’s flicking the strike wheel on her red Bic lighter, and my instinct is to tell her not to waste the flint. Except Strots doesn’t have to worry about money like I do, and besides, it’s her lighter. She can do what she wants with it.
Keisha shuts the door and leans back against it, crossing her arms. But I can’t do this in front of her. I just can’t. The girl’s well known to Strots, but she’s a stranger to me—and besides, I feel like she wants to throw me out the window for doing something to her best friend.
Even though it was the other way around. Or started that way.
“Can we go talk downstairs?” I ask.
Keisha shakes her head, but Strots puts her hand up. “No, it’s okay. Yeah. Let’s get this over with—”
“You went to Mr. Hollis,” Keisha says. “You went to the fucking RA—”
“It’s fine, K,” Strots cuts in. “Let me deal with this.”
I start shaking my head. “No, I didn’t go to Mr. Hollis—”
“Shut the fuck up—”
“Okay, okay.” Strots talks over Keisha. “I’ll handle this.”
Strots shifts off the bed, and even though this is dire stuff, she takes the time to smooth the blanket and arrange the pillow properly.
I look at Keisha and figure the gossip tree has reported all that was witnessed by the stairwell on the floor below. “I didn’t talk to Mr. Hollis or the administration about Strots. That wasn’t what was happening.”
“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.