“No, you didn’t,” she says.
“Yes, I did. I used the knife you told me to take back to Wycliffe for you. The night she was killed, I followed her down to the river—”
“No. You didn’t.”
“—where I stabbed her and I left her there and—”
“You didn’t kill her.” Strots goes over and sits on her bed. “I don’t know what your brain is telling you, but you’re innocent. You didn’t murder anybody.”
“I put the knife here.” I point to the desks that are out of joint. “I hid it—”
“No.”
“—and now I have to go to the police.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Yes, I do. I’m going to do the right thing for once—”
“So where’s the knife?”
I push my hair out of my face. “What?”
“Where’s the knife? If you’re going to go to the police station to confess, where’s the murder weapon?”
I point to the juncture between the desks. “It was right here.”
“Okay. So where is it now?”
I blink. I look back and forth between my roommate and the desks. “I don’t know.”
“You didn’t kill Greta, Taylor.”
I start to mumble and shake my head. “You don’t understand what I’m capable of. I’ve had a psychotic break, and I—”
“I killed her.”
Strots is looking at me without flinching as she says the words. And then, like she knows I’m doubting what I think I heard, she repeats them.
“I killed Greta Stanhope.”
There is a whooshing in my ears, the roaring sound like a tidal wave coming in, and sure enough, as it crests, I feel a battering in my body.
“No, you didn’t.” I am saying what she said to me, in exactly the same kind of firm voice. Except then my tone weakens. Turns pleading. “You couldn’t have.”
I’m thinking of Keisha now, and what she told me she saw, what her timeline was.
Strots looks down at her strong hands, splaying out the fingers. “She was going to go to the administration about me and Keisha. I couldn’t let her do that. I just… I couldn’t.”
“Strots, you don’t know what you’re saying.” My voice goes up at the end, like it’s a question, because I don’t want to lose my chance to be a hero, to finally do the right thing against my illness. And also because I don’t want Strots to lie to protect me. And because I don’t want my roommate to go to jail because then she won’t live with me here anymore. “You don’t know—”
“Greta was pissed off about Nick getting fired and everything. She thought I was the one who outed her even though I didn’t know a goddamn thing about it. She confronted me and told me she was going to take what I loved away from me, just like I did to her. I told her to leave Keisha out of it. We got into it big-time.”
“Where?”
“Outside Wycliffe. After dinner.” Strots shakes her head. “It was dark. No one really saw us. I went to her room a little later. She was alone. I told her I wanted to make a deal with her, that she needed to meet me down by the river before curfew so we would have some privacy.” Strots’s eyes are looking toward me, but she’s no longer seeing me. “I thought it through before I left the dorm. I put a hat down on my head low. I had gloves on. I had the knife in the pocket of my sweatshirt—I’d seen it on the plate under your laundry bag in your closet. I waited at the big rock for a while. I was worried she was going to blow me off. Then I was worried she wouldn’t come alone, that Francesca or Stacia might be with her. But eventually she showed up by herself, and I…”
Strots’s voice fades. When she starts talking again, she has to clear her throat. “As soon as I saw her, I chickened out. I couldn’t follow through with it. Except then… she started talking at me, and she got into last year, all the shit she did to me. She was throwing it in my face, laughing—I just lost it.”
She looks down at her hands again like she doesn’t recognize them. “I didn’t mean to kill her. Even after all that planning, I don’t know what I was thinking. But then it happened and I just panicked. I buried the knife about fifty yards away from the big rock in a hollowed-out stump. I came back here, had a shower, and hid my clothes. The next day I took them down to the gym and washed them in the industrial machines with the towels from practice. Then when no one was looking, I threw them away in the dumpster because I knew pickup was in the morning.”
Dimly, I’m aware that there are flashing lights down below in the parking area. Red and blue. The alternating colors penetrate our bank of windows and strobe the ceiling.
“But the knife…” I look to the space between the desks.
“I got paranoid the cops would find it out by the river. So last night I went down and got it back from the stump. I was lucky. They’d been scrambling and hadn’t really searched the area properly.”
I crab-walk backward across the floor, until the metal frame of my bed prevents me from going any farther. In a messy haul, I peel myself up off the pine boards and dump my body on my mattress so that I am on the same level Strots is.
“So where’s the knife now?” I ask.
She narrows her eyes. “You don’t know what just happened?”
“We both just confessed to murder,” I mutter dryly. “I’m pretty clear on that.”
“Well, see, here’s the funny part,” she says without smiling. “I was wondering what to do with the knife, you know, all anxious and shit. I came back right after my last class and decided I wasn’t going to practice. I was going to grab my cigarettes and go down into town to look for a better place to get rid of the blade after dark. When I got to our floor, I heard this weird noise coming out of Nick Hollis’s apartment. It was like a thump and then shuffling.”
She doesn’t go any further.
Through the open sash on her side of our window, I hear male voices. And then they cut off sharply, like the people, like the police, entered the dorm through the back door.
The hairs at the nape of my neck stand up. “What was the sound, Strots.”
She rubs her face. “Anyway, I just kept on going. I went to the bathroom, you know, then came in here. You weren’t back from class yet because you have chemistry lab. I got my cigs and left.” Her eyes focus on the middle ground between us. “Town didn’t do shit for me. When I returned, I came up the stairs again, and I couldn’t get the noise out of my head. It was so… weird, and hell, maybe I knew what it was in the back of my mind. I knocked on Nick Hollis’s door. Then I tried the knob. When I opened things…” Her right eye starts to twitch. “He was hanging from a belt off a hook in one of the ceiling beams. He’d knocked a chair over under his feet. I think the shuffling noise was his toes, you know… brushing against the side of the chair.”
“Oh… fuck.” I put my hands to my face. “Oh, God, is he dead? Oh, fuck fuck fuck—”
“Yeah, he was gone by then. He wasn’t moving anymore. His eyes were open… and he wasn’t, like, twitching, or anything. No nothing.” She looks down at the floor. “And that’s when I realized…”