“And after that you saw the damp footprints in the basement?”
“Yeah.”
“This makes no sense,” I say under my breath.
“Anyway, I followed the tracks up the side stairs. They seemed to disappear at the second floor, but I don’t know if it was because the moisture had, like, worn off.”
“What did you do next?”
“I checked your room again. You were still in bed, right where you’d been.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Why?”
I wave a hand to dismiss that. “Keep going.”
I hear voices now. They’re muffled, like there are a couple of people on the side stairs, arguing.
Keisha glances over her shoulder and I become worried she won’t keep talking. But then she faces me again. “Anyway, I found Strots in the shower. I know because I looked into your-all’s bathroom and her bucket was gone from her cubby. I also recognized the smell of her shampoo in the air.”
“Did you talk to her?”
“Not right away. I waited for her out in the hall.” Keisha shakes her head slowly, like she’s remembering something that bothered her. “She wasn’t right when she came out of the bathroom.”
The back door to the dorm opens and closes. I hear more voices. Then footfalls in the corridor. They don’t come down toward the laundry room, though. They head to the opposite stairwell.
“What do you mean, she wasn’t right?” I hear myself ask.
“She was only in a towel.”
“Why’s that a problem? She was just out of the shower.”
“She had a pile of folded clothes in her hands.” Keisha shakes her head again, like she’s been over all of this a million times in her mind. “She put them behind her back. She didn’t want me to see them.”
“What did you say when you talked?”
“That was the thing. She wouldn’t speak to me. She barely looked at me. She just walked back to your room and shut the door in my face.”
“She was upset. You guys had just broken up.”
Those black eyes lock on mine. “The clothes, though. They had a funny smell. They smelled like fresh mud.”
I stare across the table at her, across her open chemistry book and her notebook and her two Bic pens, one blue and one red.
“She didn’t kill Greta,” I say.
Keisha’s voice cracks: “I think she might have.”
I blink and feel like I can’t breathe. “You’re wrong. For one thing, the timing is off.” She has to be confused about those wet footprints. And what she thought she saw in my room. And also the clothes in my roommate’s hands. “For another, neither you nor Strots was in a sound frame of mind that night. Everything only seems weird because you’re dissecting it and looking for clues.”
Keisha rubs her eyes and then drops her hands in defeat. She says something in despair that I can’t quite catch.
I reach across and put my hand on her forearm. It is warm and solid underneath her Huskies sweatshirt.
“I think you’re afraid that that’s what happened.” My tone is compassionate because I feel for her, I really do. “I think you’re terrified that she did something really bad because you love her. I think your head’s all fucked up and so are your emotions and all of that is a breeding ground for speculation. Trust me, I know a lot about what the mind can do of its own accord. In circumstances like this, you’re liable to create connections between facts that don’t actually exist.”
Keisha shakes her head. “I saw what I saw.”
“Your order of events and your conclusions are the issue. Not your eyes. Be logical. Do you really think that Strots went down to the river and murdered Greta? Like, stabbed her nine times with a knife.”
I normally wouldn’t have the guts to say something as confrontational as this, especially not to Keisha, who not only is a star athlete and on the honor roll, but who has absolutely no history of mental illness. But I know that the blood is on my own hands.
I give her muscular arm another squeeze and get to my feet. “Don’t torture yourself with hypotheticals.”
“I love her.”
I don’t know what to say to make the girl feel better. “She loves you, too.”
I mean this, but I also know the words are not really a balm. Keisha is going to be fucked for a long time. Strots, too.
And this makes me think of my mother. Jesus, my poor mother. Sure, I’m not killing myself, but is alive and a homicide defendant really much better? How about alive and on death row? Does Massachusetts even have the death penalty? I’ve never had to look it up before.
This is my first, and hopefully only, murder.
As I leave the laundry room, I am a train back on track, except I go to the left, not the right, because those voices are still nattering away on the landing of the closest set of stairs and the last thing I need is to run into anybody. While I walk along, my steadfast stride shoots me past the boiler room, and I have a thought that I’ve left the Orange Crush and the aspirin behind.
I’m not going in there to retrieve them, that’s for sure.
I take the east-side stairs up two at a time, and as I emerge onto my hall, there are more doors open than usual, more girls standing in the corridor. They’re congregating in groups, three-leafed clovers occasionally interspersed with a quatrefoil clutch. They don’t notice me, and that is normal. I notice them, and that is also normal.
I have a thought that this is the last normal anything for me. Yet I remain resolved.
This is my chance to be a hero, and not in the sense that I’m ridding the world, and myself, of a scourge. The court system will have to do that. Still, setting the judicial outcome into motion is a visceral victory, one that my disease, after it has taken so much from me, cannot cheat me out of.
It is upon this particular wave of surety and purpose that I surf through the door of my room to get the knife.
I jerk to a halt.
No, this is not right.
I rush over to the desks, which are, in contrast to the disorder in which I left them, back in proper position, lined up side by side. The crane lamp, which I had taken down to see into the crack, is no longer on the floor, but back arching over my textbooks. My chair is tucked into its proper spot, all neat and tidy.
My knees bang into the bare wood as I throw myself onto all fours and look at where the knife should be.
The dusting of dirt is gone.
When I push the desks back apart… there is nothing there. No dirty, white-handled kitchen knife with dried blood on its blade.
Like it had never existed in the first place.
“No, no, no…”
I feel reality sifting through my mind, falling like sand through the sieve of my convictions and conclusions, slipping away once again. But I know what I saw, I know what I did—
“Taylor?”
I look around behind me. Strots is standing in the open door to our room, still as a statue.
“I need your help,” I say.
“About what?” She cautiously enters and closes us in. “What do you need help with?”
I flop over so I am sitting on my ass. “I killed Greta. Jesus Christ, Strots, I killed her.”
My roommate’s double take is not a surprise. Neither is her immediate denial of my statement, because Strots is loyal like that.