“And why did she call you Pam Perfect?”
Veronica Ramira objected to that. It called for speculation.
“How did you feel about Denise’s nickname for you?”
“I laughed about it with her, but secretly, I was a little embarrassed by it,” I said. “Perfect is not something anyone wants to be.”
“Isn’t it?” Mr. Pearl asked with a furrowed brow.
“Not by the standards of college students, no. That’s the time in your life you’re supposed to be having fun. And I wasn’t doing any of that. I put a lot of pressure on myself to do everything by the book. I still do.” The single mother was watching me intently.
“Is it fair to say that you felt the nickname was well suited to you?”
“Yes. That’s why deep down it embarrassed me. I couldn’t defend myself when Denise called me Pam Perfect, because I knew it was true.”
When it came time for the cross-examination, Veronica Ramira reviewed her notes for a moment before rising. She had her hair clipped back with a barrette on either side, giving her a girlish, youthful effect. I knew that was intentional, an optical illusion for the jury—just as easily as one young woman could accuse her client of a horrific act, another could believe in his innocence. It was a clever touch on her part. Not that she ever got any credit for it.
“Good afternoon, Miss Schumacher,” she began pleasantly.
“Hello,” I replied. We smiled hatefully at one another.
“I want to start on Saturday night, January fourteenth,” Veronica said, sauntering around the counsel table with her hands folded comfortably at her belly button. “The evening before the attack. What time did you fall asleep?”
“I don’t know exactly, but some of the girls came into my room and said they were going to get hot fudge cake from Jerry’s, which closed at midnight. I remember they said they would make it just in time. Jerry’s is about a ten-minute walk from The House, so I’d estimate that was about eleven forty or eleven forty-five. I’d fallen asleep by the time they got home, though.”
“And how do you know that?”
“Because later, one of my sorority sisters said she came upstairs to tell me the cake was here but she found me asleep and decided to just let me be.”
“So at the absolute latest, you fell asleep at twelve fifteen in the morning.”
“Yes.” I nodded. “That sounds right.”
“And you say you were awoken a few minutes shy of three in the morning, correct?”
“That is correct.”
“Two hours and forty-five minutes is a significant amount of time to be asleep, would you agree?”
“Practically a full night for me,” I said, and some of the female jurors laughed.
Veronica Ramira was unrattled. Worrying, frankly. She had something up her sleeve; she must. “I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty groggy when I wake up from a deep sleep.”
I said nothing. There was no question.
“Did you feel groggy?”
“A little, at first. But when I came out in the hallway and saw that the chandelier was still lit, I snapped out of it. I’m a total neat freak, and when things are out of place, I get very focused on correcting them. I was determined to figure out why the timer wasn’t working. That cleared away the cobwebs.”
“Is that part of being Pam Perfect?” When one of the male jurors snickered, four female jurors swung their heads, boxing him in with severe, reprimanding expressions. His smile turned limping and apologetic.
“If Denise were here,” I replied, “and I really wish she could be”—my voice caught as I thought how very much Denise would wish it too—“she’d tell you yes.” I batted away my tears and stole a glance at Mr. Pearl. A little emotion is all right, he’d told me, but Judge Lambert doesn’t have patience for hysterics. Mr. Pearl gave me an almost imperceptible tip of his chin. Just enough.
“And what happened then?”
I went through it for the final time. The I Love Lucy rerun. The dirty plates in the rec room. The draft coming in from the back door. The thud. The reptilian impulse to run him down.
“And you believed it was Roger Yul you saw at the front door, isn’t that correct?”
“Only for a split second, and then I looked closer and realized it was a stranger.”
“The chandelier was on, though.” Veronica Ramira tipped her face up to the harsh track lighting in the ceiling of the courtroom, purpling the hollows of her eyes. “Would you say it was as bright in the foyer as it is in here?”