Pretty, Nasty, Lovely

by Rosalind Noonan

  They crossed the lawn, pausing at the edge of the hilltop to take in the towers and lights of the north campus that filled the panorama below.

  “Top of the World. You see that?” Rory said. “We’re lucky.”

  On their left were the majestic peaks of Chambers Hall, and straight ahead were the rectangular towers of the North Campus Bridge, an ugly suspension bridge that served the campus well. Across the darkened ravine were the houses of Greek Row, the Craftsman-style structures from the old Merriwether estate. Beyond that were modern, square boxes of glass—university buildings that dotted the distant hillside. The darkness between buildings consisted of green things—boxwood hedges, jasmine bushes, tall cedars, and Douglas fir trees, some of them hundreds of years old.

  The Merriwether campus was a balance of nature and architecture that seemed museum-like to Rory at times. His friends from home couldn’t believe it when he posted photos on Instagram. It was so picture-perfect he half expected a camera dolly to swoop down on the old mansions on Greek Row or the bridge over the falls or the windows of the old buildings sparkling like diamonds in the sunset.

  “Amazing,” Rory said aloud.

  “What?”

  “Where we live, dude. It’s a beautiful patch of the planet.”

  “That it is.”

  Right now the campus was still and dark, like a model train village with the low-wattage lights twinkling. Even in the vise grip of pressure, Rory could still recognize the natural beauty that surrounded him. He wasn’t one of those ungrateful morons who trashed the place and then flunked out mid-semester.

  Something sounded from the direction of the ravine, like the harsh cry of a crow.

  “What was that?” Adam’s eyes grew round.

  “Someone on the bridge?” Focus narrowing, he squinted toward the flicker, an object moving in front of one of the bridge lights.

  A large bird? Something flapping near the deck of the bridge.

  No, not a bird. A person.

  The breath left Rory’s lungs as the small commands were barked in the air. A girl was mad at someone. Who? No one answered. The only voice was hers, lashing the air. Was she talking on a cell phone? “You promised. You promised.” The words traveled through the emptiness over the ravine, as if amplified by the surface of the water.

  “Did you hear that?” Adam asked.

  Rory lifted one hand to shut his friend up, and Adam hunched his shoulders as they listened. She was raging now. Growling. She was pissed, but her words were muddled.

  Adam’s face went pale. “Is she going to jump?”

  “She’s probably thinking about it.” A sudden rush of adrenaline told him this was the real deal. Shit. Alarm shivered up his spine, but it would be hard to shake the buzz.

  “We need to stop her,” Adam said, voicing the obvious.

  Rory stared hard, wishing he could close the distance between himself and the distraught girl. He wanted to fly through the night like some superhero, be on the bridge now, hold her back. Sure, he could run to her, but that would take precious minutes, far from an instant intervention.

  Something moved again on the deck of the bridge. A large bird flapping its wings in front of the dull amber light.

  “She’s pacing,” Rory observed. “She’s on the edge.” Stalling? A rumbling of hope in Rory’s gut urged him forward. Maybe he could get to her, talk with her. “But I don’t hear her crying anymore.”

  “Is that a good sign?” Adam asked. “Do you think she—”

  Rory was already running, tearing down the hill, legs pumping like pistons as though someone’s life depended on him to rescue them. With each breathless stride he pushed himself harder.

  Get there. Get there. Get there.

  He raced ahead frantically, knowing that, by all standards of logic, it was probably too late. Too late, but he had to try.

  CHAPTER 3

  On our campus, when the lights of emergency vehicles flashed over the landscape from the access road leading down to the ravine, it meant only one thing.

  “Another suicide.” Angela Newton squeezed the straps of her backpack as dismay shadowed her beautiful light-brown face. “There’s an ambulance down there now, and look at all the searchers. You were right. They think someone jumped.”

  Earlier, as we’d walked to our Monday morning class, we’d seen some orange traffic cones and yellow caution tape roping off a small section of railing at the center of the bridge. Angela had thought maybe they were going to do repairs, but that sick feeling in my stomach didn’t ease as I spied the sheriff’s SUV near the bridge and a second police vehicle on the access road to the ravine. Cops did not come out for bridge repairs.

  While we’d been in class, the small police presence had blossomed into a full-blown crime scene with flashing lights, rescue crews, and spectators. Now I knew my instincts had been dead on. Someone had jumped from the cordoned-off spot on the bridge.

  We stopped at a juncture in the footpath to stare at the panorama. Students stood three deep on the North Campus Bridge, while college staff, cops, and paramedics lined the street. Across the ravine, on the flattest treeless portion of the riverside drive, two media vans sat with their antennae projecting up toward the sky. This portion of the picturesque river canyon that crisscrossed our campus—a tear in the land filled with rock, trees, and a few spectacular waterfalls—was now overrun with invaders, rescue workers in shrill orange vests who dotted the landscape.

  This was not going to end well; it never did.

  I glanced behind me, wishing I could return to the nineteenth-century cafés of Manet or the amazing dotted landscapes of Seurat. Someone else’s life, some other time and place. But no. The lift I’d gotten from viewing slides of colorful impressionist paintings in art class began to drain away, giving way to the chilly November morning. A shudder rippled through me. When I’d awakened that morning my most pressing issue had been trying to avoid my former boyfriend at an upcoming party that his frat was throwing. That seemed so junior high compared to this.

  “How do you think they found out this time?” Angela asked.

  “Usually someone sees something in the river.” The splash of bright color in the river that turned out to be a jacket. The doughy raft of a floating body. “Unless the jumper leaves something behind on the bridge. The guy that jumped from the Stone Bridge left a pile of neatly folded clothes on the bridge wall.” I would never forget the photos of his clothes folded beside a coiled belt and running shoes lined up like two sleeping cats on the bridge. Like a monument to everyday life. Maybe it was freaky, but I had studied those things in newspapers and online articles. Images and details. I needed to know the truth, the awful facts, before I could let it go.

  I thought of the police tape on the bridge this morning. “The jumper probably left something behind on the bridge. That’s probably why it was marked off this morning.”

  “That’s right. Maybe it was a suicide note.” Angela coiled a braid around two fingers. “Most of them leave a suicide note, right?”

  “Notes are found in only a small percentage of suicides. Something like one out of six.” She was asking me because I was a nursing major and my sisters thought I was their resident expert on all things medical and psychological. While I was getting pretty good at articulating muscles in the cadavers we dissected in the lab, my knowledge of suicide came from my own research. I’d been somewhat obsessed since the crash that killed my mother and sister. “The cops didn’t find notes for the three suicides on campus this year,” I added.

  “That seems so sad,” Angela said forlornly. “To kill yourself and not leave behind a hint of what was bothering you.”

  “It’s always sad,” I said as we stared down at the rescue workers. A slight man wearing an orange vest and skullcap was raking through the tall weeds in the riverbed with a heavy white object like a giant comb attached to two ropes. What would he find there? A wallet? Some discarded condoms and cigarette butts? Or worse. I imagined the giant comb m
aking a dull thudding sound as it hooked on a body. “I can’t watch this.”

  “Oh my God.” Angela grabbed at the sleeve of my denim jacket. “Those are divers in the river. They must have seen something. Oh, for sure there’s a body in the water. I can’t deal with this shit.” She let out a breath. “Do you think it’s the real deal?”

  “Looks like it,” I said, feeling myself withdraw from the cool November morning.

  That familiar defense system rose within me as I braced myself for the inevitable bad news and sorrow that would sweep through the campus. Steel doors slammed shut as the cold front settled in my heart. The news would be tolerated in public, tamped down until a later time when I could panic in private.

  “Why does this keep happening here?” Angela asked. “This is how many this year?”

  “This will be the sixth since January. The thirteenth in two years.”

  “Unlucky thirteen.” Angela tugged on her braids again. “We’re living in Suicide Central.”

  “Not according to statistics, though it feels that way.” I turned away from the river, trying to regain equilibrium by staring at the staunch concrete towers of Chambers Hall. I had read that the number of suicides at Merriwether was on par with other universities of its size with approximately 12,000 students. The thing that made it so obvious on our campus was the method, using one of the five bridges to launch into the afterlife. When someone jumped from a bridge, their death was more of a spectacle than someone who overdosed or slashed their wrists on another campus.

  “When I toured this campus with my parents, we thought the river running through it was spectacular, like some western resort,” Angela said. “We didn’t know about the suicide problem. I guess that’s a good thing. My parents probably would have sent me somewhere else. That would have sucked.”

  “I can’t imagine being here without you, boo.”

  Angela was probably my best friend in Theta Pi. There’d been an instant bond during rush, helped along by the fact that neither of us were really classic fits for sorority or Merriwether culture and we both desperately wanted to fit in. Unlike the average upper-middle-class Merriwether student, I was the daughter of a poor musician, working my butt off in the nursing program, making ends meet with a scholarship and the savings of two jobs I’d held down during a gap year. After losing my only sister and moving a lot in high school, I wanted a place I could call home for four years.

  Angela had been drawn here by her boyfriend, Darnell, a center on the basketball team, after she realized that her “mixed race” status brought her a chilly reception at most of the colleges on her wish list. Even here at Merriwether, a female student had sized her up at orientation and asked, “What are you, exactly?” And Angela had answered, “Um, a person?” Half Iranian and half African American, she had a dark, exotic mystery about her that made some people stare in curiosity. I thought it was kind of cool to turn heads, but sometimes she got annoyed and sneered the gawkers away.

  We were staring into the gorge, where two boats were churning through the water and a group of the searchers had been signaled to come over to the riverside. If they found something, I didn’t want to be around to watch. Vivid images like that were hard for me to shake; I knew that much about myself.

  “Looks serious down there.” I turned away. “I can’t. I don’t want to be part of the sick audience.” I kept my gaze straight ahead on the bridge brimming with people who’d come out to watch the recovery effort. We had just left our Visual Arts class—an early-morning hassle, but an easy A if you made it to class—and the best way back to Theta House was over the North Bridge. “Look at the crowd. Think we can push past those rubberneckers? I need to get home and grab my Psych notebook.”

  “They’ll let us through. They’d better, ’cause I gotta pee in the worst way.” Angela grabbed my upper arm and guided me forward. “Let’s do this with Theta Pi charm and grace.”

  We walked up the approach, passing a sign that read THERE IS HOPE, MAKE THE CALL. A number for free counseling was listed, but we had learned that there were serious consequences to reaching out to campus counselors. Proof that nothing in life was really free.

  Angela and I stayed close and tried not to engage the watchers crowding the rail in their fleece jackets, hoodies, or quilted vests. I held my breath, trying to stay away from the drama of the scene, but there was no avoiding their comments on the activity below, which seemed to pick up as we reached the middle of the bridge.

  “Did you see that? All that long hair. It’s a girl.” The male voice could have been calling a basketball game.

  “Could be a dude with long hair.”

  “No dude wears that shade of pink. What’s it called? Magenta?”

  “Crawl out of your cave, man. I’m a dude and I love pink.”

  “You’re full of it.”

  So they thought it was a girl wearing pink? I shivered, hoping I didn’t know her. Even the suicide of a total stranger was going to be upsetting; I knew the ripple effects of a tragedy, the mothers, fathers, sisters, and friends who ached in grief as they fumbled through a world of loss. I’d been twelve when my mom and sister, Delilah, had been killed in a car crash that left me unscathed; I understood how the tragedy of a few seconds could impact the rest of your life.

  “Oh my God. The divers are pulling up a body. Look! Over there.”

  Exactly what I did not need to see.

  Beside me, Angela squeezed my arm. “I just wanna cry,” she whispered so that only I could hear.

  “I know. Just keep moving.”

  My own instructions slipped away the minute we saw them facing the river, the Greek letters Theta Pi embossed on the back of a few jackets. From the long hair sweeping over their shoulders it was hard to identify individual sisters at first, but I recognized the two blondes. Our president Tori Winchester stood at the railing in her swaggering pose, hand on one hip, while Courtney hovered nearby, shifting from foot to foot. As always, Tori was model perfect, her bomber jacket pulled tight above the swell of her rump shown off in tight blue jeans over shit-kicking western boots. Two other dark-haired sisters stood close, hugging each other, but I didn’t recognize them from behind.

  “There’s our girls,” Angela said, slowing down and calling to them.

  The minute they turned toward us, I could tell something was very wrong. Everyone had been crying, eyes watery, noses pink. Even Courtney, one of the toughest nuts to crack, was crying. The dark-haired girls, Mia and Megan, seemed to be holding each other up, one sob away from total collapse. Only Tori remained calm and distant, though she was squinting at us fiercely, as if bracing herself against a storm that couldn’t be avoided.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “The body.” Tori gestured over her shoulder. “The cops think it’s Lydia.”

  Lydia? The slow-talking, self-absorbed rock of a girl seemed like the last person who would jump.

  Angela held up her hands in disbelief. “Are you shitting me?”

  “She was gone this morning when I woke up.” Courtney swiped at her red nose with one sleeve. “I thought that maybe, finally, she had snapped out of her thing and gone to class. But when I called her cell, a man answered. It was a cop. He said they found her phone on the bridge last night, and . . .” Her voice broke as a tear rolled down her cheek.

  “But it could be a mistake,” I said. “Maybe she left her phone on the bridge and—”

  “Denial runs deep,” Tori said coldly. She never hesitated to interrupt. “Some guys saw her. They saw her jump.”

  “What?” Angela sounded skeptical. “Why didn’t they stop her?”

  “They tried. Said they couldn’t get to her in time.” Tori cocked her head to one side, her thick, pouting lips worthy of an advertisement for BOTOX. “It’s so sad.”

  Tori didn’t seem sad at all, but she knew it was the right thing to say. There is a word for people who don’t feel empathy for others, and in the year I’d known Tori, I’d come to see her
as the face you should find next to a textbook definition of sociopath. A harmless one, but still, not nice.

  “Who were the guys?” I asked. “Do we know them?”

  “Two Omega Phis,” Courtney said. “Rory MacFarlane, and that Adam kid with the glasses.”

  Of course she remembered Rory’s full name. He was one of those good-looking slacker guys who made you feel like his best friend when you talked to him. His near miss for a medal in snowboarding at the last Winter Olympics made him something of a celebrity on campus.

  “Rory MacFarlane,” I said. “Lydia would have loved to see him rushing to rescue her.”

  I closed my eyes against the image of a solitary figure on the bridge, an indigo sky behind her as she leaned forward and fell to the earth in a graceful swan dive. Or had it been awkward and ugly? Her arms flailing, legs kicking to try and stop the inevitable.

  A knot was growing in my throat, threatening to choke me. Don’t panic now. Take deep breaths. Stay on solid ground. I imagined a brick inside me, solid and heavy as Tori’s heart. I was not going to fall apart here. I was going to be strong. A brick.

  “I still can’t believe it,” Angela said.

  “Shit happens,” Tori said softly, as if soothing a child. “Mrs. J is down there with the rescue team.”

  “Identifying the body,” Megan said breathlessly. “Poor Lydia.”

  Tears glistened in Mia’s eyes as Megan supported her with one arm. “We couldn’t see her face, but her black hair was all stringy when they pulled her out of the water, and—and—”

  “Shut up! Just . . . stop,” I said, cutting off the description, which was already bringing up a graphic image I didn’t want in my head.

  * * *

  “We offer the family members a look at their loved ones before burial,” the funeral director said. “Sometimes it helps with the grieving process.”

  “I think we should,” Dad said.

  No, no, no.

  But he pushed, and I caught a glimpse of my mother that overshadowed my memories of her life. When it came time to view my sister, I left the room.