I go down to Strots’s and my room, and am disappointed that she’s not there. Then I remember the time. She has practice. She won’t be back until just before dinner, and she’ll be starved so she might go eat first at Wycliffe before she returns.
Though I try to focus on my geometry homework, nothing much sticks. Today in class, Ms. Crenshaw was even more scattered and wired than usual, and I found myself unable to look her in the eye. The police are going to want to talk to her, if they haven’t already, and to this point, I rise out of my seat and lean over my open textbook. Peering down into the parking lot, I note that her car is gone, but the other two are there. Maybe she’s at the station being interviewed right at this moment. Maybe she’s relieved that she gets to talk and make sure her name is clear.
I have a sudden image of her burning that turquoise blue sweatshirt, as well as the other strange artifacts of a romance that never was. I guess there are two reasons to disappear the items, both the disillusionment and so she doesn’t seem like a suspect.
As I sit back down, I knock my notebook of lined paper off my desk with my sleeve. Cursing, I bend over—
And that’s when I see the dirt on the floor.
My desk and Strots’s are pushed tight together under the big window, and right in between the end of hers and the start of mine… there is a trail of dry brown dirt particles that disappears into the shadowy seam. There aren’t a lot of the specks, and they are exactly the color of the scuffed hardwood, so they’re hard to see.
I look over the surface of Strots’s desk. Then my own.
Nothing dirty on anything.
I look down again. In the back of my mind, I know where I’ve seen this type of sediment before. It’s from the riverbank. I’ve brought it back in the treads of my boots, from when I was eavesdropping on Greta and the Brunettes. It’s a pain in the ass. It’s all over the bottom of my closet.
Suddenly anxious, I push my chair back, and as it squeaks, I jump at the unexpected sound. After I recover, I kneel and then get on all fours.
I can see nothing in the juncture of the desks. But again, it’s dark down here.
With a shaking hand, I bring the cheap crane-neck lamp to the floor. As its blast of light penetrates the convergence, I see something between the desks.
Something dirty.
Something thin and dirty.
Something that reflects the light through some stains on its surface.
Even though I refuse to believe what I think I’m seeing, I start to make noises, soft, begging noises, even though I don’t know from what source I’m searching for mercy. Maybe I am reaching out to God. I don’t know.
I’m not normally strong, but a gripping terror gives me enough muscle to shove Strots’s desk away.
The knife falls flat on its side.
And I recognize it.
It is the white-handled chef one that I promised Strots I would return to Wycliffe when we thought she was leaving. The one that I put, along with its plate, under the laundry bag in my closet because I wasn’t sure my roommate was really going to stay and I was pulling a Crenshaw and starting a shrine to my idol.
I try to stand up, but can’t make it fully to the vertical, so I slump in my chair and cover my mouth so I do not scream.
There are stains on the knife. Beneath the dirt that covers its blade and handle, there are dark red patches on the cutting surface—
Instantly, my mind reminds me of something I do not want to remember. It reminds me of the mortician fantasy I entertained, the one that had Greta’s lipstick smudged. And then my awareness lickety-split shifts to the rage I felt when the girl threatened my roommate, that incandescent rage nearly uncontainable.
I did experience the very thing that I told Detective Bruno I knew nothing about. I have had moments of violence directed at others. At least in theory.
At least I think it’s only been in… oh, God.
I remember the very last time I saw Greta alive. It was when she threw open my door and said she was going to take something away from Strots because Strots had taken something away from her.
“Oh… God…”
As my heart flutters in my chest, and a sickening urge to throw up churns my stomach, I try desperately to recall what happened next. I go back to that moment when Greta took off from our room. What did I do? Where did I go?
Leaving the lamp on the floor, I stumble to my closet, open it up, and yank the flimsy string to turn on the overhead light. There on the floor are the boots I wear all the time. I turn both of them over with a shaking hand. There is river mud all across the soles, the same fine silt that is between the desks wedged into the treads’ pattern of valleys.
Was it just from when I saw the body and ran from the police? Or is part of it because I tracked Greta to the river and attacked her with the knife I was keeping as a tribute to my roommate—
Outside in the hall, someone shouts.
This gets my attention. Jumping up, I decide to run—but realize I have nowhere to go if I’m looking to get away from the truth.
As implications tumble down on my head like boulders from the sky, I have only one clear thought: I should have known not to put my faith in Detective Bruno’s conclusion that I didn’t kill Greta Stanhope. Grown-ups aren’t really any smarter or more intuitive than children. They’re just bigger and taller versions of us.
Now I am moving. I am yanking open the bottom drawer of my desk—
There is an Orange Crush and a bottle of aspirin right next to my lithium.
I suddenly can’t breathe. Where did they come from? When did I buy them? It must have been after I went to the library. But why don’t I remember?
What else don’t I remember is more the question.
I hear a choked sound. It’s me, but I don’t bother to figure out anything anymore. I just reach down and grab the aspirin and the Orange Crush.
I don’t track my trip to the basement, but this amnesia is something that has evidently been creeping up on me, the holes in my memories unnoted because I don’t know what I’ve forgotten. I am a blind person who is unaware that their eyes don’t work anymore.
Busting through the door into the boiler room, I slam myself in, barricading my own escape so that I may save the other girls in the dorm from me. I am panting now, but I am not crying. This is beyond anything associated with tears.
I don’t turn the light on. There is enough illumination bleeding through the cloudy chicken-wired window of the door, the distilled glow turning everything into a potential monster. As I find a spot to hide myself, the shapes and contours of the boiler and the maintenance supplies are like things that should come at me with teeth bared—except they stay put because they know what I am just learning.
I am a murderer.
I am one of them.
chapter THIRTY-FOUR
As I take cover behind the boiler, and the heat rolling off the great archaic hunk of metal warms my body, there is only one thing to do.
With shaking hands, I bring forward the aspirin bottle, but I can’t open the child safety cap without fumbling the Orange Crush. I slide down the rough concrete wall and sit on my ass so that my lap can cradle the soda.
As I push and twist and get nowhere with the top, I probe my memory of coming back from the library in desperation, trying to recall something of purchasing that which Phil the Pharmacist doc-blocked me on earlier. But the larger question is, when exactly did my illness take the wheel without my knowledge?