Because it is in charge of all of this. It planned all of this.
I realize with a flush of dread that, in fact, it has been running the show all along.
My illness took the panties from the back of my closet and then piloted me down to the parking lot and that tree and that car before I had any conscious idea of what to do with Greta’s underwear. I start to cry as I remember wondering how I’d known to go down there. At the time, it had seemed like a coincidence that had led to a logical conclusion, and I’d been grateful for the arbitrary linkage.
Now I know it wasn’t any random extrapolation.
It was my illness growing and changing, maturing… so it could take over in a new way. I see that the panties and the Porsche were a trial run to measure how compliant I could be, one that I misinterpreted as a magical synchronicity of unconnected elements.
I bang my head back into the solid wall I am up against. I don’t even feel the pain. I don’t feel anything as tears roll down my face and drip onto the bottles in my hand and my lap, bottles that I do not remember buying after I murdered the girl I hated for threatening the only friend I have here at Ambrose.
The only friend I’ve ever had, really.
And the endgame? Well, it was all supposed to lead here, wasn’t it, to this moment, in this boiler room. Because I cheated my madness out of its previous attempts to get this plan going when I decided to restart my lithium.
“Why do you want me dead?” I ask my illness. “My death kills you, too. You’re so fucking stupid.”
As the cap to the aspirin flies off and the bottle nearly follows, the tiny pillow of cotton wedged into the neck of the clear plastic container is all that keeps the pills in place. I try to fish the wad out, but my hands are trembling so badly, it’s impossible to get a grip on the fluff. I lose patience and slap the open neck into the palm of my left hand, over and over and over again.
And then I slow down.
And stop.
An idea has formed in my mind, and the glow of its logic is so soft that at first, I cannot see much of what the cognition is. The more I focus, however, the clearer it becomes, emerging from the bog of my consciousness, coming forward to me, fully formed and somewhat beautiful.
Why do you want me dead? My death kills you, too. You’re so fucking stupid.
I think I’ve gotten that all wrong, actually.
There have always been two sides to me. The one grounded in the common reality. The one that is not. The latter has always won when it wants to. Even on my medication, it’s never far off, only held at bay, a storm destined to break through the prevailing weather pattern and hammer at my coastal village.
I think of Greta, tormenting me. Making me miserable.
Driving me to the brink of suicide.
I look at my left hand. My skin is red from the smacking, but the cotton ball is out and there are aspirin, chalky and perfectly round, on my palm sure as if it is a plate.
I try to imagine what would have happened if Greta had survived. She would have kept coming after me, until I dropped out. Or worse.
I think of my rage at her, that unfamiliar emotion coming out of me, unleashed and thirsty for blood.
What if that anger wasn’t really about Strots? What if, instead of trying to get me into trouble, my illness was determined to protect me? What if… it had taken the wheel and used my body as a tool for its own survival? What if it knew that sooner or later I would break under Greta’s torment, and by then it would be too late. What if it knew me and my resolve better than I did.
I didn’t think I could kill someone I hated. I didn’t think I was physically strong enough. But what if I wasn’t the one in control… because my illness recognized that for it to survive, Greta Stanhope had to die.
I think back to waking up that morning with the towel on my head, and I wish I had gone through my laundry bag to see where the bloody clothes I’d worn were. Except now… I’m thinking I wouldn’t have found any. My illness would know to destroy or clean whatever I was wearing.
It is very, very smart.
And suddenly, I see how Greta was killed that night after which I woke up so confused and groggy. I know now that I took the knife that I was keeping as a shrine to Strots and followed the girl out to the river when she went to have a cigarette alone… because she was pregnant, and the game she had started with Nick Hollis had gotten way far away from her, and threats concerning my roommate aside, she needed to get ahold of herself and figure out what to do.
Or wait… no. I approached her in the hall outside the bathroom and told her we had to meet in private. I intimated that I knew about her and Nick and that she’d better be down at the river at the appointed time or I was going to tell the administration. Or her father. No—tell the press.
She’d be furious that I had something on her, but she wouldn’t be scared. I’d never been a threat to her before because I’m a loser who’s insane. She wouldn’t be on guard at all.
When Greta arrived at the river, at the talking rock, I would step out of the shadows. She would face me and throw out an insult. About my body. My looks. My lack of prospects across all levels of the teenage experience. No one else would be down there with us because, though she isn’t threatened by me, her name hasn’t publicly been linked to Nick Hollis yet, and over and above that, she doesn’t want the pregnancy stuff to get out. She’s on a fishing expedition to learn what I know or what I think I know.
I would have the knife hidden at my thigh and I’d keep it out of sight. I would let her broaden her verbiage from an insult or two into a full-blown slam session against me, and the rant would release much of the tension she feels, given the bind she is in…
All around us, I hear the river gurgling softly and I smell the damp earth. I see her face in the moonlight, the tasteful makeup, the glow of her blond hair, the brightness of her red cashmere coat, one that is the same hue as the red cashmere sweater Nick Hollis has worn. I think to myself that, like the Guns N’ Roses CDs, she bought this particular piece of outerwear because of him.
She’s so into herself, so riding her wave of derision, that she doesn’t notice me switching my grip on the knife’s handle or bringing it forward. I time things perfectly, because unlike my conscious mind, my illness knows exactly what to say and when to say it:
How many times did you fuck Nick in that Porsche, anyway?
Greta stops her rant and stares at me, clearly wondering whether she’s heard me right. It is in this moment of her confusion that I stab her for the first time. Right in the front of the throat.
So she can’t scream.
And then I overpower her. She stumbles back off her flats—blowing out of her left shoe, which was why her foot was bare when I saw the body—and my illness uses my weight to keep her down as I mount her like I am straddling a chair. I stab her again. And again.
I smell blood and I hear a different gurgling than the river’s flow over its rock bed, the sounds of death rising up through the knife wound that opened her larynx like a can of tomatoes.
I leave her a little bit alive. I sit back on her pelvis and I watch her mouth gape for air, like a guppy’s. Her face is speckled with blood, and some of it is coming out of her mouth. It looks black against her pale white skin in the ambient glow of the night. The spots on her clothes are getting bigger and bigger, stains looking for more legroom.