I look back at Strots. She is also still, so still, in the manner of an animal. But not because she’s scared. Her stare is locked on the other girl like the sight of a gun.
I have a thought that Greta should watch what she says. And maybe where she goes after this. What is a game to her… does not look like hopscotch to my roommate.
Strots takes the cigarettes I was prepared to pose with to protect her, and as she crosses over and steps out of our room, she says something to me, but I don’t hear it.
Greta smiles as my roommate goes by her. “Going upstairs to see your girlfriend? Say hi to Keisha for me.”
Strots is already out of the scope of our doorway so I can’t catch her reaction. But Greta’s feigned look of innocence, as if she’s responding to a glare, makes me furious. I’m also worried about who might have overheard her.
Before I know what I’m doing, I am standing in front of the girl as my roommate walks off. “What is wrong with you.”
Those beautiful blue eyes shift over to me. And then she laughs. “This. Coming from somebody who’s certifiably insane? Hey, do they give you a little certificate when they tell you you’re nuts? Is that how the term got started—”
“Why do you have to do this to people?” Tears make my vision wavy. “Why do you have to be so cruel? Is it because your father spent all your inheritance?”
Her hitch of breath suggests that the cheap shot hit deep. “You don’t know anything about me.”
I think of the night I interrupted her and Nick. “Yes, I do.”
As her eyes narrow, she manages to look downright ugly, and I wonder whether she, too, is back at the nocturnal interruption that seemed to start it all between us.
“Like what,” she demands.
For a moment, I almost say it. But then I shy away. “You’re fucking mean.”
I just can’t do it when it comes to our RA. I don’t trust him. I don’t trust her. Unfortunately, I don’t trust myself.
“I’m not mean,” she says. “I just like playing with dominoes. The cascade is so much fun to watch.”
As she turns away, I put force in my voice. “Leave Strots alone.”
“Or what.”
“I’m going to hurt you.”
Greta stares over her shoulder. “Sorry, reject. Dominoes can’t fight falling. But go on and try. Let’s see what happens with that.”
I really want to reveal what I know about her and our residential advisor. But suddenly, my mind breaks free of the commonly experienced environment and takes me on a trip to an alternate version of our hallway, one where blood flows, red as the ruby studs in Greta’s earlobes, glossy and thick as maple syrup. As the girl takes her leave of me, the scent of copper floods my nose, replacing her flowery perfume, and I look down to find the carpet soaked with plasma. My sneakers schmuck-schmuck-schmuck through it as I turn and go back into my room.
I slam my door so hard, I make myself jump.
As I look around, I see walls running with blood. There is so much of it, there are pools forming on the floor, licking up the feet of our bed frames, swamping Strots’s still-packed luggage, seeping into our closets.
I feel the cloying squeeze around my ankles as the levels rise. I slosh over to my mattress, searching for higher ground. I open my window, so that it will run out and not drown me, a river’s worth of Greta’s blood flowing freely down the back of Tellmer, landing on the cars, making its way to the low point of the streambed in a tsunami that knocks over trees and consumes the straggly brush.
My last cogent thought is that I’ll bet Ms. Crenshaw never thought she’d have to roll up Nick Hollis’s windows against the likes of this.
chapter TWENTY-FOUR
When I finally return to my body and my version of normal awareness, I am sitting on my bed and it is dark out. In the glow from the security lights, I can tell that the walls of my room are once again white, the floor is dry, and my roommate’s packed things are not sponges to be wrung out for the benefit of the Red Cross. I lift my hands. There is no blood on them. I inspect my sneakers. They are free of the kinds of stains you have to call the police about. Likewise, my pant legs are clean.
As I go to close my window, I nonetheless have to double-check the parking area. Thanks to the outdoor illumination, I can see the faculty cars. The back lawn. The trees and the ground cover that obscure the river’s edge. Everything looks right.
I am so relieved that I begin to shake. I am also disoriented and weak, as if the hallucination required calories even though my physical body didn’t go anywhere.
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.