I lower my eyes to Detective Bruno’s shoes. Florsheim. I’ve seen them for sale in the mall back in my hometown. They’re cheap and have plastic wedges at the heels instead of blocks of contoured wood. They have mud on them, from him chasing after me. From him trying to find clues down at the river.
“Teenage girl stuff.” I rub my eyes again. “Who they were dating, what they didn’t like about them, where they were going to go for breaks. You should talk to Francesca and Stacia.”
“I will.”
I look him in the eye. “Are you allowed to ask me all these questions? I’m a minor and I have no legal representation.”
“This is just an informational interview. And we’re almost done.” He clears his throat again. “I understand you take medication.”
“Would you like to see it?” I lean forward but can’t quite reach the bottom drawer on the far side of my chair. I have to get up. “It’s lithium. I take it because I’m bipolar.”
When I face him again, I hold out the orange prescription bottle. He shakes his head and puts his palm up in a vertical no, like he could catch the disease if he touches the container.
“Explain to me what that means? Bipolar,” he says.
“Some doctors call it manic-depressive. I have mood swings. Big ones.”
“So you get sad and then happy?”
“Something like that.” I almost keep the sharpness out of my tone. “I’m mostly sad, to use your word.”
“Do you ever get angry?”
“Anger is about power. I have no power. Not over my illness—and not over Greta, if that’s where you’re going. Not over anything. I just endure. It’s all I can do. She was just one more thing I had to put up with, and if you think an essay about living with my disease is a big deal, I can tell you right off that words on a page are nothing compared to the reality.”
The detective stares at me. After a moment, his eyes go to the label on the little bottle, and something about the compassion that flares in his face makes me realize that he truly doesn’t think I did it.
As I go to put the pills back, I start to breathe easier. It is not until this moment, when my heart rate slows and I take less-restricted breaths, that I realize I have been frightened I might have done something very, very bad.
That’s why I ran away, and it wasn’t from the police. They were incidental.
I was running from the terror that my mental illness might have taken the wheel not to go inward into my mind, but to travel outward, into the world. I might be powerless, nothing more than a fragile identity stuck inside the bag of skin I was born into. My disease, on the other hand? It can create a black hole out of my bed, a tidal wave from my hair, a fantasy about success just because I used some black dye.
It is so all-powerful as to be godlike.
“What are you thinking about, Sarah?” Detective Bruno asks softly.
“I didn’t like Greta,” I hear myself say. And then I continue, because he doesn’t think I’ve committed murder, and I’m taking his professional opinion as fact. “I maybe even hated her, and I definitely hated what she did to me. She was like my bipolar, though. She made things harder for me, except it wasn’t personal. My disease isn’t personal. It’s not about me, although it affects me and my life. Greta was just the same, shitting on me because I lost the residential lottery and ended up in the room across from her. But I was going to get through whatever she did to me. I was going to survive because I’ve already gotten through so much worse.”
I think about the boiler room in the basement and am aware that that last sentence is more bravado than conviction. But I’m riding a buzzy crest of exemption, and it’s making me feel optimistic.
“You’ve been to a place that’s helped you, correct?” the detective says.
“A mental hospital, you mean.” I nod. “Yes. I tried to kill myself. Twice. I was an inpatient at a facility that’s an hour away from my small town.”
He gets points for looking subdued, as opposed to judgmental, and I wonder, if he happens to have a son or a daughter at home, whether or not he’s going to hug that kid a little tighter tonight.
“Have you ever tried to hurt someone before?” he says. But he already knows the answer.
“No. Never. You can check all my records. I have no history of violence toward anyone else.”
He nods like this is new information, but I sense it’s an act. He probably already has a copy of my essay. They’ve been here for seven or eight hours, haven’t they. Talking to people, talking to administrators.
“Well, I think that’s all for now. Thank you, Miss Taylor.”
The other officer, the one in uniform, heads for the door like he was done with the interview about ten minutes ago. Detective Bruno talks a little bit more. I am no longer hearing him.
As he turns away, I think about Greta’s domino taunt, the one she made a lifetime ago. I’m still angry at her, even though she’s dead—especially as I recall her threatening to get at Keisha.
And it’s easy to be courageous, given that the whole back-from-the-grave nightmare is something that only happens in George Romero flicks.
“You do know that Nick Hollis was sleeping with Miss Stanhope, right?” I say.
chapter THIRTY
The following day, everything is in chaos. Church services on campus are canceled. Grief counselors are brought in. Girls jam the phone room, crying to their parents. Several mothers and fathers even come by and remove their precious cargo from the proverbial overhead compartment. Clearly, in the minds of most of the community here, the airplane is going down in a ball of fire.
From the window of my dorm room, I am watching one such evacuation roll out. The parents are rushing around the BMW like flies on chicken salad, moving, always moving. They’re inefficient as they put toiletries and a suitcase in the back seat, and then have to transfer the pink, and no doubt fragrant, load to the trunk.
Obviously, they aren’t putting their darling daughter in the boot.
The girl who is getting out while she’s still alive is one I recognize from my history class. She is red-eyed and puffy-faced, but her hair is curled and she’s wearing a coordinating outfit of Black Watch plaid extraction.
She looks honestly scared, though. I know how she feels.
After the family unit gets into the sedan, father behind the wheel, mother on the front passenger side, progeny on the bench seat in the back, the doors of the BMW shut all at once, as if they coordinate these things as a rule. Then they do several rounds of back-and-forthing in the parking lot and take off as if there is a murderer with a raised knife about to jump on their rear bumper.
I flop back on my bed. When it comes to Greta’s death, there are two camps in the dorm. Half of the girls, led by Francesca and Stacia, are the ones who once idolized Greta—and also likely resented her in private. They’re vocal in their mourning and have turned Margaret Stanhope into a beacon of style and goodliness that the world has been tragically cheated of. This is a solid platform on which to shed many theatrical tears, and having watched them wrench their fistfuls of Kleenex in their hands, but dab carefully at their made-up eyes, I believe that although there is some real grief there, getting swept away in the drama is their main driver.