The sun.
I force my eyes open. I force them to open, to focus, like twisting the lens cover off an old camera. I see her eyes like two brown orbs floating in a sea of morning and from there her face radiates out like it’s forcing its way into the sunlight. She’s still shouting my name, sunlit velvet smacking me in the face with ice water. “OPHELIA...!”
She’s bent over me and I’m on the floor lying next to the body, a twisted grin with pink teeth staring hard at the side of my face while Kate looks in my eyes, but what can I say? I’m reaching for something, but my arms won’t move. “I...”
“Phelia, what’s going on? What happened? Who is that?”
Hands and knees now, everywhere, banging on the hard tile floor, and I can’t quite stand up, and I’m falling back down before I make it to the doorway, and I lie there bruised and sobbing because I can’t even escape the room (damn it). And everything’s sideways and all I can see are the flecks of the tile and the scratched-up steel legs of Kate’s bed and I sob and I shake and I tell her that “It wasn’t me, wasn’t me, wasn’t me.”
Retrace my steps from last night, just think back. I was sitting in Kate’s van and watching her smoke. She went back up the hill, and I started walking, and then—then there’s nothing till I woke up just now from hours of nightmares. What happened to all the lost time?
I can’t control my face, my voice. And then she’s crouching down next to me, hand on my arm, saying, “Hey, it’s okay, it’s okay.” And I stare at her face, just mouthing new words I invented while her dreads catch the sun from the window. “Ophelia, relax, breathe.”
Good advice. Good advice. I draw sun in through quivering nostrils, look into her blurred face, and trace freckles with my eyes till I can hold them steady. And when things stop spinning, her hand is there, and I take it, and she pulls me to my feet. Then I fall on my bed and she hands me the wastebasket while I vomit, and bile burns my nostrils while she patiently waits. The minutes tick by in hot breaths and cold sweats, and when the spinning finally slows down, she says, “Phelia, what happened?”
I swing a pointing finger toward the body and say something that makes no sense. Gasps escaping over the acid on my tongue, fouling the air and making me wonder how she’s holding it together. “I just—opened the closet—and—” More gasping and pointing. The gray winter sun is pouring in between the blinds, on the shredded throat of the girl. Her highlighted hair is spread across the floor, her fingers twisted in impossible, conflicting directions, jagged, broken nails darting out like scared rodents. Bluish tongue scraping the tiles. Pools of blood drying into gray-brown smears. I look away.
“Who...who is she?” Kate’s biting her lip, screwing her chocolate eyes into stern focus, fighting not to let them roll back into her head. She’s holding it together. I should try to calm down, as well.
I rise from the bed, except instead of rising, I mostly flop onto my hands and knees and inch toward the body. Then with hesitating knuckles, I nudge her face until it’s in the light, looking up at me.
Oh God, her eyes are open.
I turn away. Squeeze the vomit down into my gut and force myself to look back at the cold, bloodshot orbs. Eyes that used to be blue, turning red in the gray light.
“I don’t know her,” I say.
Honestly, she could be pretty much any skinny white chick on campus. Mousy brown hair with obligatory blond highlights. Button nose, a handful of freckles, Gap jeans, Ugg boots. People still wear those? Whatever. She’s in a pea coat and a scarf, so she must have come in from outside.
Kate is next to me now, on her knees, pajama pants collecting dustbunnies. Patting her down, reaching into her pockets. She pulls out a driver’s license. “‘Cyndi Johnson.’ You know her? Unless it’s a fake ID, I guess.” She hands me the ID, because I guess she thinks looking at it will help? Whatever. Picture looks like the body. She’s about 22, if the birthdate is right. Address around here. A student, maybe. She looks like one.
And my hand falls by my side because I can’t hold her ID up anymore, it’s too heavy. Seeing a picture, a name, an address, I can’t ignore that this thing that’s in front of me once was a human, a person, a girl with a life and a family and friends, and that now she’s a torn, twisted pile of meat, and she’s here on my floor and she’s real like a D on my transcript or a box filled with books and won’t disappear like that one that I saw in the skywalk.
My eyes are darting everywhere around the room, and then suddenly I’m looking into Kate’s eyes and I can’t look away. Like a mirror made of flesh and blood and skin and freckles. The same fear in her eyes that I’m feeling in mine. The same short, panicked breath, the same hard-grinding teeth. She’s scared just like I am (it’s clear, you can’t fake this). The air in between us is fear and mistrust with the smell of bad breath and B.O. and a mint body spray. And we stare at each other for a thousand years or maybe a second, and I see we’ve got no one but each other.
I run.
It happens too quickly to stop or think. My arms and my legs all start flailing at once, till I burst through the door and I fly down the hall and I’m closed in the elevator, sinking down toward the ground level, while Kate is left kneeling in the room with a body and blood on her hands, thinking What can I even do now.
I left her there.
I left her there...
sat. jan. 15.
10:43 am.
alone
Halfway to the front door of the dorm complex is a restroom—a shockingly nice one with granite stall dividers and an arched ceiling and a door that locks. A paean to peeing that somehow got included when they were building this place a century ago, and then, against all odds, survived the onslaught of additions and remodeling and general modernization. It’s something that almost doesn’t exist: a public restroom that invites you to lock yourself in, breathe deep, and forget about the world. You’d think a line would form at the door, but actually, one almost never does, since there’s a full-sized restroom down the hall—one with a dozen stalls and a beige floor and ugly mauve dividers. So whoever gets to this one first gets the royal pee treatment, while everyone else gets herded through the mauve stalls like cattle.
It’s a good place to hide.
I’m not sure why I came here now, though. Just to think, I guess. It’s been my go-to since freshman year, when the still air and arched ceilings put me in the mood for quiet contemplation, which is what I assumed these hallowed halls were for; and it still seems appropriate now that I realize how full of shit I was.
I’m watching the square patch of light cast by the window, the one filled with frosted-glass convolutions, because apparently someone (God bless her) decided we needed sunlight to pee. It’s crawling over the floor, and the tiles it’s passed over are cold again, leaving behind it an inevitable darkness. I lean back and I close my eyes and I run my hands over them, over the crust of seven months’ worth of urine, and when I open my eyes I’m not alone anymore. Someone familiar is here, her blond highlights peeking around the edge of the stall, her blue eyes catching the drops of winter sun. A swinging scarf as she inches closer, sits next to me, takes my hand, and says, Can I ask you a personal question? and I tell her, Sure, why not. She says, What are you doing at a state school anyway? A rich girl like you who’s passionate about writing—aren’t people like you supposed to end up at NYU or someplace? And I say to her, This was my safety. Don’t think I didn’t try. I filled out the NYU app, got confirmation, but I never heard back, one way or the other. Then I called them to ask, and they told me I’d called a month prior and retracted my app. I said I’d never done that, but it was too late, and, well, now here I am. But I guess that that’s life, right? We all start out starry-eyed, thinking that it’ll be awesome, and then it’s just one disappointment right after another. But you learn to deal. Sara wanted to graduate summa cum laude from Johns Hopkins; instead she got kicked out of Yale. I wanted to get my degree, be a writer, now it looks like I’ll get charged with murder and
hauled off to prison. So you learn to deal, right? She says, Yeah, about that. You think maybe you should go up there and help out your roommate? You left her alone with my corpse on the floor. I say, Why would I help her? I’m sure she’s a murderer now. Before I was on the fence; now, though, I’m sure. She says, But you’re ignoring that from her perspective, things look just as bad for you. I say, But I was the one who freaked out! and she tells me Emotions are complicated things, though, y’know? People react to things all sorts of different ways. Maybe she’s freaking out now. You don’t know. Maybe you should go back and see.
And she turns to dust in the sunlight. She’s gone.
She’s right, and I know that she’s right. The body upstairs in my room is too real to ignore. It’s concrete (like a concrete block, dragging me down). And where else can I go, and what else can I do?
Do I really think Kate is to blame? She seemed so damn nice last night. Last night was the first not-completely-depressing thing to happen to me in weeks.
I should have known better than to hang out with someone who lured me into the back of her van to yell at me about Jesus and aliens. I should have run away the second she started offering me cigarettes like a pedo. (I always make the worst decisions, though. First I majored in English, now this.) But there’s nothing I can do about it now.
It’s weird how those tipping points—single, small moments—can change everything in your life, and you can’t take them back. In the back of my mind, there’s a moment like this one—a thin, vague impression of how the first chasm began in my life. We would play in the backyard (my sister and I), with dolls or with cars, or pretend to be spies on the lam. Or we’d stack up the blocks in the playroom together, with her blocks on mine or with my blocks on hers. And then Mom would get up from her keyboard (which she almost never did), come to the room, and say, Wow, what a tower, you built that one all by yourselves, and then Maybe you’ll build one for me? We knew she was joking, but still the words hung in the air, while the staircase would creak from humidity, rising. I said Or we could build one for your bully, Jeff, Sara? Lock him inside and then feed him on rats? And before I was done, Sara shot me a look made of ice, one that said That was our little secret, and I knew that I couldn’t take back those words. I’d let loose a monster that used to be ours, one that used to be secret and live in the dark of our room, but I’d thrown on the lights and I’d thrown the door open, and now it was loose in the house. And for some reason, then I said, Sara, I think I should play by myself for a while. Then the sun slipped behind a small cloud for a second (just one), and an afternoon thunder that shook sunny streets till it reached my feet (up through the carpet) came through. And then I was standing there, all by myself, watching cloud-shadows track across frays in the couch, while Sara played all by herself in the attic, the door tightly shut. And so was my mother’s door—it was shut too—while behind it I heard her nails tap on the keyboard. So I hid until night in my usual place, the old secret passage that only I knew about. The one full of boxes that led from my parents’ room out toward the laundry, and it was all mine because I was the only one able to squeeze between boxes enough to fit through it. I sat in between them, straining like always to listen to voices that filtered toward me through the air ducts. A voice on the phone speaking dark second-thoughts. The boxes of Yahtzee dice rattled sometimes under feet that passed over, and slowly the darkness of night hid the sun and I knew that I had to emerge. I looked through the laundry room window at starlight reflected on puddles (how strange that the light still exists in the nighttime), while loud snores like monsters would drift down the hall from my parents’ room. But when I went to warn them of strangers asleep in the dark, it was just them in there, just my two normal parents, precarious, balanced on opposite sides of their mattress. I lay in the chasm between them and nudged them until they both snorted awake, and I warned them, and they told me, Go back to bed. Then I climbed the long staircase, and lay in my bed, and I listened to inhuman snores. They were Sara; I knew that this time; all my fears had been silly; but somehow they still didn’t sound like her. I knew when I woke she’d be different, that somehow the late nights of sitting up talking about bully-torture were over. Her cold, sterile breath in my ear with white noise, pounding like hail on the roof, or the dying stars floating above my head—
“Ophelia!”
And then I’m back in the bathroom, and the sun’s gone down, and Kate’s pounding on the door.
“Ophelia! I know you’re in there!” More banging.
Kate’s pounding fists jar me back into time and space, and it’s evening now. The night is spilling in the window, where the sun used to be, and I hear girls in the hall shuffling off to the bars. Kate’s still yelling at me, and I’m thinking, Do I answer?
“Ophelia! Ophelia, I know you’re in there. I’ve looked everywhere else, and this door has been locked all day. Let me in!”
I press my back against the cold wall, trying hard not to breathe. I’m looking toward the window. It’s screwed shut, but maybe I could find a way to open it and climb out? Let her clean up her own mess.
“Ophelia—I—I didn’t do it. It wasn’t me. You know it wasn’t me. Just please open the door. Please?”
All I have to do is wait here and be quiet. As soon as she’s gone, I can go to the cops. Or to Sara. Sara would know what to do.
The pounding’s getting slower, desperate, and then I hear a forehead hit the door with a choke and a sob. “Please, Phelia. Open the door. I’m scared.”
I heard her that time.
I don’t know why, but I believe her. The fear, the desperation. It caught me off-guard, that she’s as scared as I am—that, in a weird way, maybe I’m not alone. There’s someone outside the door that—
(But what if she’s a killer?)
(But what if she’s not?)
“Phelia, please?”
I open the door.
sat. jan. 15.
11:13 pm.
tentative.
We’re back in our room now and I can still smell her on me from when we collapsed into each other’s arms at the restroom door and we both cried. I’m embarrassed by it now, but at the moment it seemed right, and I guess she and I both probably needed it. But now we’re both wedged awkwardly back into our room, and I’m sitting on her bed, and she’s in the black mesh chair at her desk, slouching in a way that looks weirdly unrelaxed, like someone who’s trying to look at ease for my sake, even though we both know she’s not. The lamp on her desk, the small one with the red shade, is fighting with the fluorescent lights in the ceiling for control of the room. She’s absentmindedly picking at her teeth with her black nails, rocking the chair back and forth and sliding it on its wheels with the one foot she has planted on the floor. I’m hugging my knees like a girl at a slumber party. I’m in jeans but not shoes, and now that I think about it, I don’t even know where my shoes are, and the days are flying by, running together, even as the moments drag on. I can’t decide if I’ve been sitting like this for an hour or for five.
Took another one of Sara’s pills when we got back to the room. I can still taste it on my tongue.
Ophelia, Alive Page 11