I raised my hand and experienced the almost erotic pleasure of Allen cowering. But before I could deliver the blow, Tina grabbed my wrist, the pads of her fingers pressed into the flare of my pulse. I hadn’t even heard her come up alongside me, and a strange, thrilling second passed, one in which I allowed her to restrain me.
“You’re better than they are,” she said into my ear. I had no idea who they were, but somehow I knew she was right.
Allen turned to her, tears running down his face and snot puddled in the bow of his lip, and he spit on her. He spit on her. Tina looked down at the glob of saliva on her soft cashmere sweater, then back at me, aghast. What the hell are you doing here? I swore her expression said.
“I don’t know what’s gotten into you,” I growled at Allen, seizing him by the back of the neck and forcing him up the stairs. “You are going to take a time-out until you calm down.”
Allen was inconsolable, wailing that he hated me, he hated Tina, he was going to tell, and I would be sorry. I shoved him in my bedroom and slammed the door. When I came back downstairs, the scraps of Allen’s drawing had been thrown in the trash, and Tina had left without me.
PAMELA
Tallahassee, 1978
Day 8
Two days after Denise’s funeral, a few of the Turq House guys came over to clean up the blood. One of the officers recommended a solution of two parts bleach, one part water, with a wink, as though he were letting us in on the secret ingredient in an old family recipe.
The room that Eileen and Jill shared was a nightmare. I never got over it. How the girls in the bloodiest room were the ones who survived.
There wasn’t much to do in Denise’s room, though I spent the longest in there, hiding anything that might embarrass her in front of all the cute shaggy-haired boys who would have jumped at the chance to take her out, open the car door for her, buy her dinner, go home and tell their friends—I kissed Denise Patrick Andora. Guys included her middle name when they talked about her, like she was the serial killer.
The tube of hair lightener that she used on Abbott and Costello—right sideburn was Abbott, left Costello, and don’t you dare mix them up—went in a drawer, along with the pair of pantyhose that had seen better days, left to dry on the inside knob of the door. The photographs of friends and prints of surrealist masterpieces I left hanging above her bed, but I took down the astral page she’d torn out of that month’s Cosmopolitan, from the comprehensive booklet the editors put together every January to help readers plan “the best year of their lives.” I removed the tack and sat cross-legged on Denise’s bed to read her horoscope. In June, Denise was supposed to reorganize office procedures, slipping into her boss’s shoes as if they belonged to her （which soon they would）。 According to her planetary prophecy, she would find herself in Lisbon or Madrid come September. Her most dynamic day of the year was still ten months away. I began to vibrate, inwardly, a buzzing under my skin that I can only describe as the instinct to kill. There was something about Denise’s excitement for a future she would never get to experience that made me murderous with grief. I couldn’t stand the idea of anyone coming into her room and pitying her, or, worse, judging her for having the audacity to make plans when she should have known God would laugh. That was a real thing people said down here, but fuck God for laughing and fuck Cosmopolitan too. I was a Virgo, and nowhere in my horoscope did it foretell any of this.
The last thing I did for Denise: I got down on the floor and I put my nose to the carpet where the hair mist bottle had been cast aside. The officers had long since removed it, put it in a box with all the other evidence, but I wanted to make sure it hadn’t left a stain, that innermost private smell. There was a lot that others would expect of me over the next year and a half of my life, but this was the only thing I knew Denise would ask if she had the chance: to do what little I could to allow her to hold her head high, even in death.
There was no stain and no smell, but I cracked the window anyway, and then I went outside and jogged three and a half blocks in the cold drizzle to the iron university gate, where I pulled up some of the purple cornflowers planted at the base of the brick pier. Sophomore spring, a Seminole flute player performed on Landis Green, telling sunbathers that at one time, this land was nothing but a field of purple cornflowers, which the Muscogee relied on to pack the wounds of their warriors.
Back at The House, I arranged the flowers in a water glass and placed it on the windowsill. I practiced walking in, taking exaggerated inhales at the moment I crossed the threshold, checking to make sure the hallway didn’t smell any different than the room. When all I could detect was the damp mulch of the flower beds and my own hair spray, some chemical activated by the rain, I told the boys to come upstairs.