I called out her name and Jill turned fearfully, like she thought I might be mad about the flesh on the right side of her face, peeled back to reveal the very bone the fashion magazines told us to highlight with blush. She was trying to speak, but her tongue kept getting pushed under by thick currents of blood.
I took off down the hall, flapping my arms strangely and cawing for everyone to get up. One of the girls opened her door and asked blearily if The House was on fire. I guided Jill into the girl’s arms and, in a moment of cogency, instructed her to close the door and lock it behind her. In my peripheral vision, someone else wandered into Jill’s room and screamed that we needed a bucket. I thought we needed to start cleaning up the bloodstains Jill had left on the carpet before they set, and this made absolute sense to me at the time.
I went into room twelve on the right side of the hall and hollered for the girls in there to call the police. When they asked why, I had to stop and think for a moment. I do not remember saying this, but the author of one of the more ethical true-crime books wrote that I did. “Jill Hoffman has been slightly mutilated,” I was alleged to have said, calmly, and then I walked at an unhurried pace to the bathroom, got a bucket from under the sink, and went into Jill’s room, thinking I was going in there to scrub a stain out of the carpet.
Jill’s room was wet, her sheets submerged in a dark, oily spill, the yellow curtains splashed with so much blood they strained on their hooks, heavier than they’d been seventeen minutes ago. Her roommate, Eileen, was sitting up in her bed, holding her mangled face in her hands and moaning mama in her low country twang. Eileen was a loyal listener of Pastor Charles Swindoll’s radio show, and though I was not at all religious, she’d gotten me hooked too. He was always saying that life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you react to it.
I shoved the bucket under Eileen’s jaw and pried her hands away from her face. Blood and saliva hailed the metal base, indeed sounding so much thicker than water.
“Take this,” I said to a junior who had followed me into the room. She turned her face away, gagging, but she held that bucket for Eileen until the ambulance arrived. “Don’t let her cover her face or she’ll choke.”
I went left out of Jill and Eileen’s room, toward my own. It was just like taking rounds at chapter on Monday evenings. The count started at the front.
Most of the girls were startled awake as I barged through their doors and hit the lights, raising the backs of their hands to their eyes, tonguing sleep crust from the corners of their mouths. Though their faces were scrunched up irritably, they were at least in one piece. Insanely, I started to wonder if Jill and Eileen had gotten into a fight with each other, if things had perhaps gotten out of hand. But then I got to room eight. A girl named Roberta Shepherd lived in room eight. Her roommate was away on a ski vacation that weekend, and unlike the others, Robbie did not moan and groan when I told her to wake up and turn on her light.
“Robbie,” I repeated in the schoolmarm voice they all mocked me for behind my back. “I’m sorry, but you have to wake up.” I was stepping into the room, my adrenaline performing the function of courage. But it turned out there wasn’t a need to be brave. Robbie was asleep with the covers pulled up under her chin. I walked in and touched her shoulder and told her that Jill and Eileen had been in an accident and the police would be here any moment.
When she still refused to respond, I rolled her onto her back, and that’s when I saw the thin scribble of red on the pillow. Nosebleed. I patted her on the shoulder assuredly, telling her I used to get them when I was upset too.
Out of nowhere there was a man in a uniform by my side, bellowing and blustering at me. The medic! Get the medic! I went out into the hallway, feeling at first wounded and then incensed. Who was he to yell at me in my own house?
The hallway seemed to have morphed in the brief time I’d spent in Robbie’s room, into a crawl space of surrealism, crackling with the radios of pipsqueak campus officers not much older than we were. Girls wandered the halls wearing winter coats over their nightgowns. Someone said with total confidence that the Iranians had bombed us.
“There’s a weird smell coming from Denise’s room,” reported Bernadette, our Miss Florida and, as treasurer, my second in command. Together we went around the curve in the hallway, sidestepping two slack-mouthed and useless officers. I wondered if maybe Denise had forgotten to wrap up her paint palette before going out for the evening. Sometimes she did that, and it emitted an odor like a gas leak.