“I figured as much.” Sam kicks the ground. “That’s why I was coming home.”
I can’t hide my surprise. “Really?”
Sam shrugs. He’s standing so close that I can smell his breath: peppermint. “It’s not like it was a fun scene down there. Everyone’s pretty freaked out.”
“Do they all think she killed herself?” I ask softly.
Sam shrugs. “Julian saw—”
“I heard.”
“It’s all anyone can talk about.”
I nod. It’s all I can think about. A movie is playing in my mind: someone wrapping his hand around Eliza’s arm and refusing to let go.
Sam reaches up to adjust his boy bun. “I guess the police aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.” Neither of us moves to go back to the dorm or down to the valley. We turn to face the floodlights, Sam just behind me.
“You don’t consider the students suspects?” Dean Carson asks the detective. A few moments ago, he seemed so certain that no one who wasn’t a student would be on campus in the middle of the night. Now it sounds like he’s hoping it was a stranger.
“I’m afraid I can’t rule anything out at this juncture.”
“Why would there be suspects when something was so clearly an accident?” Mrs. Hart says it like it’s a statement, not a question. It’s the second time she’s referred to Eliza’s death as an accident.
“We’ll start with the students and teachers who knew Eliza best,” Detective Roberts answers, which isn’t exactly the same thing as saying No, of course they’re not suspects or Yes, this was just a tragic accident. “The students who would have seen her soonest before …” He pauses like he’s struggling to find the find word. He can’t say accident because it might have been intentional and he can’t say fall because someone might have pushed her. “Before the incident,” he finishes finally.
“Some parents might not want their children to stay here over break,” Mrs. Hart points out. “Surely you can’t force the entire student body to stay.”
For the first time, Mr. Hart speaks. “Whatever the detective thinks is best.” His voice sounds nothing like you’d expect, coming from such a tall man. It’s high-pitched, the kind of voice that you might even mistake for a woman’s if you weren’t paying attention. A voice I haven’t heard since I was seven years old, one I didn’t realize I’d remembered. Like a song whose lyrics you didn’t forget even after years without singing it.
“We’ll secure the campus,” Detective Roberts promises, once again not really answering the question he’s been asked. “We’ll monitor everyone who comes in and out.”
When Sam speaks, I feel his breath on the back of my neck. “Yeah, but what if the murderer is already on campus?”
I shudder.
Dean Carson gestures toward the dining hall. “Why don’t we head inside?” The cafeteria is usually closed at this hour, but I guess the dean has keys. “Get you some coffee. You must be exhausted.”
Mrs. Hart nods. “Thank you.”
Sam grabs my hand and I swallow a gasp at the feel of his palm—paper-dry and pleasantly warm—against my own. As far as I can tell, Sam doesn’t own a single scarf or a winter coat other than the ski jacket he uses for weekend trips to Lake Tahoe. In fact, a few days ago he laughed at me when I left the dorm wearing a hat and gloves. “You’re not in New York anymore, Sokoloff,” he said.
Now, he pulls me toward the dorm, lacing his fingers through mine. “Let’s get out of here,” he says. “It’s almost curfew.”
None of the other students are rushing up from the valley to make it back to the dorms before our 11:00 p.m. curfew. No one’s worried about getting into that kind of trouble tonight. They’re probably more worried about walking around campus alone.
When I don’t budge, Sam adds, “Elizabeth, come on.”
I twist my hand from his and stuff it in my pocket, but I follow him down the road, careful to keep to the shadowy edges.
I can’t help looking back. Dean Carson places his hand gently on Mr. Hart’s elbow. “Mr. Hart? Won’t you join us inside?”
“I’m coming,” he answers in his strange, reedy voice. “I’m coming.”
I’m coming. I’m coming.
Suddenly, I’m in Eliza’s champagne-carpeted room at five years old, and her dad is shouting her name from the front door.
“I’m coming to get you, little girl!”
Eliza squealed with delight. “Daddy’s home early!” She pulled me out into the hallway, started dragging me toward the front door of their sprawling house.
“Where’s your mother?” Mr. Hart asked.
“Not home! Just us and Cassie.” Cassie was the babysitter.
“I’m sending Cassie home.” He knelt and lifted his daughter overhead. At the time, he was the tallest person I’d ever seen in real life, well over six feet tall. When he threw Eliza into the air above him, it looked like flying.
When he looked down and saw me gaping up at him, he winked. “Let’s redecorate.” He led the way into Eliza’s room and pulled out Eliza’s watercolors and finger paints.
“I’m only allowed to color in the kitchen,” I said cautiously. My mom thought I’d drip paint all over our house. It was fall—not even Thanksgiving yet—and Eliza and I had only been best friends for a couple of months. I didn’t want to ruin anything.
Mr. Hart winked again. “Not today,” he said.
When my mother came to pick me up later, my hands and arms and legs and clothes were covered with every color from Eliza’s paint box. Mom apologized profusely to Mr. Hart as she led me to our car. She yelled at me the whole ride home, mortified that I made such a mess of myself at the Harts’ expensive house. I never got to tell her that Mr. Hart helped me paint a horse right over the wallpaper on Eliza’s bedroom wall, picking me up so I could make it as tall as he was.
When we got home, Mom tried to wash the paint out of my clothes, but they were beyond saving. She put me into the bathtub and scrubbed my skin so hard it hurt. I tried to tell her that Mr. Hart said it was okay to make a mess, but the words wouldn’t come.
In the morning, the fog is so thick that it condenses on the trees and drips down. It sounds like rain on the roof of our dorm. I’m still in bed when I hear voices outside.
“Rest in peace, Eliza Hart. Rest in peace, Eliza Hart.”
On my phone is an email from the dean addressed to the whole student body, letting us know that today’s classes are canceled. I get out of bed, my bare feet slapping against the linoleum floor, and raise the wooden blinds to look out the open window.
There are three of them. Girls still in their pj’s, standing with candles outside Eliza’s dorm, probably right where Julian saw her arguing a week ago. Any other day, some professor would be running up the road, scolding them to blow out their candles, reminding them of the risk of forest fires.
But today, no one stops them. In fact, when another student walks by (I recognize her as a senior who probably never talked to Eliza), they hold out a fresh candle to her, inviting her to join them. She does, and soon her voice is part of their chorus.
“Rest in peace, Eliza Hart. Rest in peace, Eliza Hart.”
They gaze up at the dorm, the building that houses the room where Eliza Hart slept and dressed and studied and snacked.
Suite 308, on the third floor, a two-bedroom suite for three people to share. Eliza had the single (of course), a coveted corner room with views of the ocean on one side and the redwoods on the other. If this campus were a hotel, that would be the honeymoon suite. The girls outside knew exactly which window to gather beneath. But no one’s going to call them stalkers just because they know where she lived.
I only saw the inside of Eliza’s room once. In January.
Even at the time I knew it was a terrible idea, but I tried it anyway. (Desperate times calls for desperate measures, right?) Maybe I was frustrated after spending winter break at my mom’s, in an apartment that was always overflowing with my little brother’s fri
ends, not even in high school and already cooler than I’ll ever be.
Or maybe I’m just an idiot.
Whatever the reason, in late January, I knocked on the door of room 308. Unlike me, Eliza’s roommates were girls, and they were her best friends, the kind my parents said you were supposed to make in high school, the kind you’d keep your whole life. (I was tempted to point out that they’d met in high school and it hadn’t exactly worked out so well for them, but I kept my mouth shut.) Eliza and her two roommates had known one another before coming to Ventana Ranch, and rumor had it that they coordinated their roommate questionnaires to be sure that the computer would spit them out together. (I thought it was more likely that one of their parents had asked the administration for a favor, but I kept my theory to myself.)
Eliza probably would have ended up being best friends with whomever she lived with. Who wouldn’t want to be her best friend?
Eliza could probably find friends in her sleep. She wouldn’t have known how hard it is to make friends when you can’t go to crowded parties or sneak rides on your school’s elevator (meant for faculty only) or gossip in the bathroom or even grab food from the pantry in the cafeteria when the teachers weren’t looking. I couldn’t hop on the subway and head downtown to go shopping after school (even though the trains have windows, I can’t take being inside the tunnels), or make plans with a classmate who happened to live above the tenth floor—as high as I could climb the stairs without becoming a breathless, sweaty mess. (In a miserable irony, claustrophobia actually made my world smaller, because there were so many things I couldn’t do and places I couldn’t go.)
Eliza’s roommate Erin made me wait in the hall while she checked whether Eliza was busy. I twisted my arms across my front and shifted my weight from one foot to the other. At least the hallway had enormous windows on either end, flooding the place with watery January sunlight. (I’m okay as long as there are windows. It’s why I can manage on a plane, but I don’t drink water for a full day before a flight so that I won’t have to use the restroom.)
Not counting Christmas break, I’d been living at Ventana Ranch for four months, and I hadn’t made any friends. I’d barely made a single friendly acquaintance, other than Sam, and we only talked about the technicalities of living together. (Can I use the bathroom now, or were you gonna shower? Is there any cereal in the kitchen?) I didn’t think I had anything to lose by trying to reconnect with my old friend. Maybe we could grab a cup of coffee. Go for a walk. Even have lunch together down in the valley where everyone could see us. If my classmates saw that Eliza didn’t think I was that bad, surely they’d have to give me a chance.
“Are you hugging yourself?” Eliza asked when she finally came to the door. She had one hand on her hip, cocked to one side like she was posing for something. But Eliza Hart never posed for anything. She naturally looked like that. I can’t believe I thought I made her nervous the day she moved in here, even for a second. Eliza was the kind of girl who made me nervous, not the other way around.
I untwisted my arms.
“What do you want?”
“May I come in?” Inwardly, I groaned because I should’ve said can I come in. Technically, may I come in is more correct, but no one actually talks like that.
Eliza sighed but turned around and led the way inside. Her roommates—Arden Lin and Erin Smythe—sat on the couch facing an enormous flat-screen TV (a gift, I’d heard, from Eliza’s parents), and they giggled at the face Eliza made as we walked through the common area toward Eliza’s bedroom. I looked the other way. I told myself that they might not be laughing at me. Maybe they were laughing at something they saw on TV.
And I tried to ignore the knot of jealousy in my stomach. How could I be jealous that these three girls had inside jokes when those jokes were so clearly about me?
Erin had wavy brown hair, and Arden had straight black hair that fell like a curtain down her back, but all three suitemates wore leggings and tank tops like they’d just gotten back from the gym, and their skin was golden tan. The whole campus knew that Erin and Arden had spent winter break on a research boat in the Galápagos Islands after winning an internship contest. Eliza won it, too, but she chose not to go because of family obligations. Her uncle had won reelection to Congress in November—she’d interned for his campaign the previous summer—and she spent winter break helping out in his local office. It would look just as good on her college applications as the Galápagos internship. Better, maybe.
Eliza closed her bedroom door behind us and leaned against it, like she was scared the other girls might try to come in. “What do you want, Ellie?” she repeated, quietly this time.
The words came out faster than I meant them to: “I thought we could have dinner together or something.”
Dinner was served in the dining hall between six and eight each night. I usually grabbed food to bring back to the dorm. But Eliza always sat front and center in the cafeteria.
“Dinner?”
“Or lunch,” I stuttered, wringing my hands like a nervous old lady. “Maybe coffee.” Students could always get coffee in the student center. My palms were sweating. I hadn’t meant to just dive right in. I was going to ask her how her Christmas was. What classes she was taking this semester. I tried to direct the conversation toward something more innocuous. “I mean, how are your parents doing?”
She folded her arms across her chest. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
I blinked, taking a step backward. Since she was leaning against the door that meant I was walking even farther into her room.
Before I could answer (it wasn’t supposed to mean anything), a wave of understanding passed over Eliza’s face. “You want to be friends?” She was speaking loudly now.
I exhaled. “Not just you and me.” I tried to keep my voice down, even though surely Erin and Arden had heard the way Eliza made friends sound like a dirty word. “Erin and Arden could sit with us. At dinner. Or coffee. Or whatever.”
“I’m not about to expose my roommates to you. They already know what you’re like.”
I shook my head so hard it hurt, shocked speechless. No one here knew what I was like—that was the whole point!
“What are you doing at Ventana Ranch, anyway?” she continued. “No one comes here to learn how to write stories.”
“They offered me a scholarship—” I began, but she didn’t give me a chance to finish.
“Why did you even apply here?” She narrowed her eyes. “I got in early admission, you know.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Sure you didn’t. I was probably accepted before you even sent in your application. It was all over Facebook.”
“I’m not Facebook friends with you—”
“Oh, come on, Ellie. Tell the truth for once. Did you follow me here?”
Eliza’s window was closed behind me, the shades drawn despite her enviable view. I took a deep breath, begging my lungs to behave. Not here. Not now. “What are you talking about?” I croaked.
“It’s bad enough that you’re a liar, now you’re a stalker, too?” Eliza was practically shouting.
A stalker? It was so absurd that I couldn’t stop the laughter from building up in my throat. Even if I was, what kind of danger could I possibly pose to a girl like her? I was at least three inches shorter than Eliza, and unlike her, I didn’t start my mornings with swim practice or a rigorous hike on Trail F. I tried to swallow the sound before it came out of my mouth, but that just made it worse: It came out sounding like a cackle. I can’t really blame Eliza’s roommates for thinking I was some kind of maniac when they heard it.
Eliza stepped aside just as the door flew open. “You okay, Eliza?” Arden asked.
Eliza nodded but didn’t say anything.
“I think you should leave,” Arden said to me.
I started to say, “This is all just some big misunderstanding—” but then Erin came into the room, too. She tapped her foot against the floor, silently communicating Get ou
t of this room or else.
Eliza stayed in her room with Erin, but Arden followed me to the door.
“I’m so glad Eliza warned us about you,” Arden said as she closed and locked the door behind me. “She told everyone on day one.”
I shook my head, blinking back tears. Eliza had warned them about me?
The strange thing about rumors is that when you’re at the center of them, you’re usually the last person to know what they are. It was October before I knew why no one sat with me at meals, why no one wanted to be my conversation partner in Spanish class. (The class had an odd number of students, so I always ended up paired with Señora Rocha.)
It was Sam who finally told me, the week before Halloween. He said word had gotten out that I was a pathological liar, that my parents had moved me from California to New York not because of their divorce but to send me to a special school for troubled kids, and that the strain of taking care of me had caused them to split up.
I was so shocked I couldn’t even ask him how the rumors got started, or whether he believed them, too. And since then, I hadn’t wanted to mention it, like I thought maybe if I ignored the rumors hard enough, they’d just go away.
But until that January day in the hallway outside suite 308, I never guessed that Eliza had actually started the rumors. Sure, she was the only person on campus who knew me before, but the stories were so untrue that I didn’t think whoever started them needed to have known me.
Before I knew what I was doing, I was banging on the door Arden had practically slammed in my face.
“Wait!” I shouted. “I don’t understand.” The wooden door hurt my hand, but I kept on knocking. Why hadn’t I figured it out sooner? “Please!” I said. “Let me back in. I just want to talk—”
The sound of someone sniggering to my left stopped me. Up and down the hall, people were coming out of their rooms, watching me.
“Freak,” someone muttered, and was met with a chorus of laughter. Normal laughter, nothing like the cackling sounds I made in Eliza’s room.
They thought I was obsessed with Eliza Hart.
R.I.P. Eliza Hart Page 4