“It doesn’t solve anything,” she says.
“Neither does you jumping out that window. You and I don’t belong now, but maybe…” I clear my own throat. “Maybe it gets better. In the future. Maybe things change for people like you and me.”
“You don’t know that.”
“And neither will you if you die tonight over something you didn’t fucking do—”
“I did do it—”
“No, you didn’t—”
“What’s going on here?”
I wrench around to the door. Keisha is standing just inside our room, her eyes bugged, her arm shaking as she holds the doorknob.
“Shut that fucking door,” I snap at her. “Right now.”
She recoils. Then she steps inside and closes things up, too shocked to do anything else.
I point my finger at her like it’s a gun, my voice low and threatening. “It’s such a shame what happened between Nick and Greta. Can you believe he killed her. And then hanged himself this afternoon. It’s really a tragedy. Isn’t it.”
Keisha’s wide eyes go to Strots. Then they return to me.
I am prepared to beat the facts into the girl if I have to. To protect my roommate, from herself, from the world, I am prepared to do whatever it takes.
Except I don’t need to start throwing punches, as it turns out.
After a long moment, Keisha slowly nods. Then she crosses her arms over her chest, lifts her chin, and gives me a steady stare.
“Yeah, Nick Hollis killed Greta Stanhope and hanged himself,” she says evenly. “Real fucking mess, but at least it’s over now. And we don’t ever have to think about it again.”
I look down at Strots. “Isn’t that right.” When my roommate doesn’t respond, I say, “Ellen, isn’t that right.”
Strots’s eyes start to water. A tear escapes out of the corner of one of them. Then she looks across our dorm room at the girl she loves.
“I’m sorry, Keisha,” she says hoarsely. “I am so sorry.”
chapter THIRTY-SEVEN
It’s a week later before I’m able to go to Wycliffe for lunch. Over the intervening seven days, I survive on the soda, Little Debbie snack cakes, and chips that I buy every afternoon at four p.m. at the gas station down in town. I use the money I earned over Columbus Day weekend to feed myself these junk food staples. And I keep to this schedule because it’s difficult to go back right after classes and settle down in my room. I need the cold air and the walk, so I buy only enough to get me through one twenty-four-hour period at a time.
But woman—or girl, as the case is—cannot live on that diet forever. For one, real food has started to call my name. For another, I feel like I’m wasting cash and I’ve been poor for too long to be comfortable with such extravagance.
Although I have had another windfall of money. After Nick Hollis was found in his apartment, my mom came to see me again. She was really worried about my mental health, more so than usual, that is, and it was a relief to reassure her I was honestly doing okay. That I was taking my medicine regularly and managing myself well. That, in spite of everything happening around me, I was staying level. Before she drove back home, she gave me two twenty-dollar bills. One was old and soft as a facial cloth. The other was brand spanking new, still stiff and smelling of ink.
I am going to save her money, along with, as of today, the rest of my wages. I’m determined to return home with both those mismatched twenties. Maybe I can take her out to dinner or something with them.
The nicest thing about seeing her, more than the cash or the news that she broke up with her most recent boyfriend, was that when she told me she’d see me in a month to take me home for Thanksgiving break, I found myself looking forward to the vacation. I’m going to be buoyant as I wait for her at the curb with one of my two suitcases. Probably the blue one.
Black’s kind of depressing.
And you know, as I leave Palmer Hall after class and cut across the lawn, crunching through colored leaves with a clear sky overhead, I decide I’d really like a hamburger. I’m hoping they’re available on the cafeteria line. If not, pizza. Or a turkey sandwich.
I glance around at the girls who are to’ing and fro’ing with me along the sidewalks. All my life, I’ve heard grown-ups say that youth is resilient, and I’m witnessing that firsthand. We had yet another mandatory dorm meeting the morning after Nick Hollis’s body was removed from his apartment. More grief counselors came in. There was more crying in the phone room. Classes were canceled that day.
A lot of girls went home again that weekend. But they came back on Sunday.
And now, things feel pretty close to normal. My contemporaries are laughing and talking in groups around campus. Classes and tests are the same. The rhythms of the school have resumed.
It’s not like nothing happened. But no one seems to be dwelling on it.
Well, not in my age group at least. The teachers and the administrators and the RAs are still stressed and strung out. You can tell because they’re all exhausted and distracted at the chalkboards when they’re teaching or when they’re grimly striding between buildings for meetings. I’ll bet parents are still freaking out. I know my mother is.
This stuff with St. Ambrose is the one story in People magazine that she’s said she doesn’t want to read. The point of voyeurism, after all, is that it doesn’t happen to you. It doesn’t happen to your daughter. It’s not so close. She says she hasn’t watched the evening news, either, and has no plans to for a while.
When she was here, she asked me if I wanted to come home.
I told her no. I wanted to stay.
She asked me if I felt safe in the dorm.
I said absolutely.
When I get to Wycliffe, I go in the front door and drop my book bag with the others in the open area. Through the arches of the cafeteria, I see girls standing in line at the buffet with their trays, and ones clustered around the milk bar, and others sitting at tables.
I venture into the cacophony, pick up a plastic tray, and get in the queue. The food is abnormally interesting to me, which is what happens when you eat the same three things over and over again for a week. I’ve lost some weight, and I need to get on that, but right now, I’m not inclined to push myself to do anything. I just kind of want to go along… and be normal. Whatever that means.
But I do snag that hamburger. And fries.
I’m on the way to my solitary table off to the left, by the trash bin, when I happen to catch a glimpse of Francesca and Stacia. They’re sitting with their group of girls from our dorm, and Francesca is holding court, her hands gesticulating as she speaks to her captivated audience.
Greta’s replacement has marked her territory, and successively asserted her dominion over the clique. It didn’t take her long, and part of that, I suspect, is because no one else really wanted the job, considering the last head of that lofty social circle woke up dead on the big rock down by the river.
Francesca had been waiting for her chance all along, I decide as I sit at my empty table. And I wonder if she didn’t attempt a coup on Mountain Day, couched in terms of threats about the relationship with Nick Hollis. Greta, unsurprisingly, defended her turf like a boxer.