She squeezed her eyes shut. She did that every few minutes, like she was remembering something so harsh she couldn’t look directly at it. Ella hadn’t gone to the party because she was sick. She was asleep when Kevin’s scream woke her. She ran into the hall out of instinct. She hovered by the open door, probably thinking she was about to secure her position in Flora’s good graces.
“Blood,” she told us when we asked what she saw. “So much blood. Like, how did someone her size have all that blood? And she was—her eyes were open. But she didn’t even look human anymore. I was sure it was some kind of prank.”
Sully and I hadn’t been questioned yet by the police—if they were even going to bother questioning us—but Sully was a step ahead. She had ushered me into the bathroom and used a wad of damp toilet paper to wipe my smeared makeup.
“We don’t know what happened,” she said. “But don’t mention Kevin. Or Dartmouth. Or the phone. Don’t worry, I wiped it off on my skirt before I put it back in his jacket.”
My brain was too scrambled to understand. She wiped our fingerprints off, but our messages were still there. She wasn’t protecting herself. She was protecting me. I was the one who’d sent those texts. I was the one who’d told Flora to just do it, then, and stop talking about it. Kevin might not have even known his phone was missing.
“We didn’t delete the texts,” I said. “We have to—”
“It’s too late.” She smoothed my hair. I heard her subtext. Kevin was going down for this, not us.
I waited for the police to barge into the lounge and arrest me, bind my hands behind my back with a pair of cold handcuffs. But that didn’t happen. In the morning, after we had bunked up in Butts A, the police wanted to talk to anyone who had seen Flora at the party.
“Why are they asking so many questions? Didn’t she kill herself?” I whispered to Sully. The mental image of Flora’s wrists, ribboned with blood, made me dizzy.
“I don’t know. That’s what Ella said. I guess they’re trying to figure out why.” She sounded different. I realized Sully was scared, which made me terrified.
“I’m going to say something,” I said. “How can I not say anything? We had something to do with this—”
“Don’t say a fucking word. Remember, we were together all night. We have to stick to the same story. Just say we saw her and she seemed really drunk.” She gripped my wrist tightly. “This is fucked, okay? But you didn’t do anything. You didn’t put the razor blade in her hand. You were just joking around.” I noticed, acutely, that it wasn’t we anymore. It was you.
It was me.
Later, when we got more details, we would learn that it wasn’t a razor blade at all.
“I can’t do that to Kevin.” But part of me was sickened by him. If he had just broken up with Flora like a decent human being, this never would have happened. It was easier to blame Kevin than actually turn the lens on myself and see the monster that my obsession had turned me into.
An even uglier part of me—the most hideous part, which not even Sully could know about—was mad at Flora for killing herself. She had ruined any chance I had with Kevin. He would never forgive himself, or me, for what we did while she bled.
“You can,” Sully said. “He’s just a guy. There are lots more of them. He sent those messages, not you. We saw them together. It looked like they were arguing.” She narrowed her eyes. “Remember that you weren’t the only girl he played. You don’t owe him a goddamn thing.”
Maybe she was right, but I didn’t need another reminder that I wasn’t special.
“What if Kevin mentions me? He might already know we took his phone.” I was still using we, but Sully had been the one to take the phone. If she hadn’t slipped a hand inside his jacket and stolen it, I never would have sent those messages. And Flora would have been alive.
“He’s not going to mention you. Come on, Amb. It would make him look really bad. A guy isn’t going to talk to the police about a girl he fucked at a party while his girlfriend sliced her wrists.”
I winced. When Sully became weaponized, I never knew which weapon she’d become.
I was sure we would see Kevin at the police station. That was how it was in the movies, passing in the hall, a furtive glance that carried more than words. But we didn’t see him because, as we later found out, he wasn’t even there. He was out in the world again, because there wasn’t enough evidence to prove he was involved in his girlfriend’s suicide. Even after the police took his phone and found the messages. Even after they didn’t believe him when he said he didn’t send them.
Sully and I got separated at the station, but it didn’t matter. We had rehearsed the story ahead of time. My mom had made it known that she thought studying theater and acting would never lead to a practical career choice. But it led me to that moment, in that room at the Middletown police station, in front of a cop with piercing blue eyes and a badge that read FELTY. I recognized him from the crime scene.
“You lived with Miss Banning—Flora,” he said. Straight to business.
I nodded. Flora would always be Miss Banning, never Mrs. Someone Else. Never Mrs. McArthur.
“And you were friends.”
“Yeah. Sort of. I mean, I guess we were friends.”
“Did you notice any changes in Flora’s behavior leading up to yesterday? Anything that would lead you to believe she was depressed?”
I thought back to Halloween. Slash and the pilot. Hair spilling onto parquet floor. I didn’t want to do that. Flora, pulling away from everyone. Trying to tell me something I already knew.
“No. Nothing really. Although—” I paused, deviating from Sully’s script, but for a good reason. “She had an article about depression on the wall in our room. I figured it was because she was studying psychology.”
“Were you aware she hadn’t gone to classes for over a week before her death?”
I shook my head. The lump of Flora in her bed, her perpetually watery eyes. “We didn’t have the same classes. I’d have no way of knowing.”
“Did you know she was having trouble with her boyfriend?”
“No. We didn’t really talk about that stuff.”
“But you met her boyfriend. Is that correct?” He folded his hands on the table. He was wearing a wedding ring. His nails were in better shape than mine.
“He came to visit her once. I met him. But we didn’t spend any time together.” I was tacking on too many words.
“Kevin McArthur.” His name reduced to a weary breath. “You didn’t notice anything about Kevin’s behavior that would lead you to believe he was violent? Or aggressive with Flora?”
I shrugged. “No. But I really didn’t know him. I just know they met in high school and that he went to Dartmouth. I think.” Felty squinted at me, like he was deciding if I was telling the truth. Maybe he already knew that Sully and I had been to Dartmouth. Maybe he knew everything. The room tilted with my hangover.
“Dartmouth. That’s right. And he came to Wesleyan yesterday to see Flora.”
“Yeah. I guess so.”
“You didn’t go to the party with Flora,” Felty said. It wasn’t a question.
“No. I went with Sully. Flora wasn’t really into parties.”
“Sloane Sullivan.” Her real name sounded foreign, how an adult said your name when you were getting in trouble. “And you saw Flora and Kevin there together.”
“Yeah. It looked like they were arguing about something. We didn’t want to get involved with someone else’s business, so we didn’t think much of it. Lots of couples fight when they drink.”
“Were they fighting, or just arguing?”
I picked my cuticles under the table. “Arguing. Nothing, like, physical.” I paused, then added something to appease Sully. “That we saw.”
“And you didn’t talk to either of them all night.”
I shook my head, not wanting to give an actual answer, because I had a feeling Felty was waiting for me to say the wrong thing. Maybe I was alrea
dy a suspect.
“Someone at the party says you and Sloane were talking to Kevin. That you went into a bathroom with him and locked the door. Someone saw a girl fitting your description running from the Butterfields dorm later that night.”
Of course somebody saw us. There were probably hundreds of people at that party, and discretion wasn’t on my mind. Girls banging on the door while I was in that bathroom with Kevin. A chorus of hurry up, eyes on me as I staggered back downstairs, gripping the railing, underwear damp.
Sully and I hadn’t talked about this part. I didn’t have a rehearsed answer ready.
“That’s impossible,” I said. “I mean, of course I talked to guys. It was a party.”
“So you didn’t go into the bathroom with Kevin and lock the door?”
“No.” I shook my head profusely. “The only person I went into the bathroom with was Sully. Sloane. And we didn’t lock the door.”
I could tell Felty didn’t believe me. I hadn’t showered since yesterday. Maybe he could smell the boy on me. But what could Felty possibly care who I had sex with? Or who Kevin had sex with? People cheated every day. On their diets, on tests, on their girlfriends and boyfriends. It didn’t come with jail time.
I was ready to go on the offensive, to spring into a tirade at his next question. But to my surprise, he folded up those smooth hands and thanked me for my time.
“One more thing, before you go,” he said as I stood up on wobbly legs. “A search history of Flora’s laptop revealed she recently looked up how to know if you’ve been raped.”
I stared at my feet. I was wearing Sully’s Uggs, and they were too big. That was what my brain held on to instead of the word Felty had spat out. Raped. That wasn’t what happened. I thought it hard enough that I actually believed it.
I looked up at Felty. “I don’t know anything about that. We lived together, but to be honest, we were never really friends.”
* * *
After Thanksgiving, we were allowed to go back to Butts C. President Bums sent a long email about the warning signs of needing help and made sure we all knew where we could go for support. Some of the girls requested to be transferred elsewhere, but there wasn’t any room on campus. Except for me—a single in Butts A, which was only available because another student had recently dropped out. I reluctantly trooped over with my belongings packed in cardboard boxes I’d procured from the cafeteria. I threw most of my clothes out, certain I could smell Flora’s blood on them. I got called lucky. The other girls said they couldn’t sleep, couldn’t study, couldn’t concentrate in a dorm that was haunted. Somebody called it Dorm Doom, and the name stuck.
Nobody knew what was going to happen to our room, the door to which remained locked. The flooring would have to be replaced, the walls and ceiling painted, probably several coats. Maybe that was all it took to erase the traces of a girl who had lived and died there.
The facts started to emerge, kicked up like leaves in the wind. We read the news online. Flora and Kevin, high school sweethearts unraveling with the demands of the distance between them. Flora’s speechless mother and furious father. Flora’s high school friends, revealing that they’d heard from her less and less. Flora’s little sister, who said Flora had seemed sad the last time they talked on the phone. The story of a girl who covered the wreckage of her truth with a smile.
Kevin was cast as the asshole. Kevin was the murderer. He never went back to Dartmouth. The media would have followed him. Death threats popped up in the comments of articles posted online. Die, motherfucker. Kill yourself. If you won’t do it, I will. The world would be better off. Our own ACB, two years after Flora’s death, was the worst of all. Flora’s thread was its own beast, hijacked by mentions of Kevin. We should all make KM pay for what he did.
He was drunk that night. Most people thought he had come to Wesleyan to break up with Flora, and the Double Feature party was a good setting for a breakup, with alcohol as the airbag. Except things got nasty. They fought, a public spat that suddenly everyone made sound a lot worse than it actually was. Kevin got aggressive with Flora on the dance floor, prompting several guys to tell him to back off. Flora ran away, clearly upset. Kevin didn’t reply to her pleas, instead sending her increasingly horrible messages, including one explicitly telling her to kill herself.
All she did was listen. All she did was take his advice. Flora was a people pleaser.
Flora didn’t do it with a razor blade, or even a knife. Apparently it was a shard from a broken mug, other pieces of which were later found near the drain of one of the dorm showers. The sequence of events played in my head like a horror movie. Flora, shuffling into the bathroom in her fluffy robe, eyes red and cheeks ashy from leftover makeup. Turning on the shower, heaving the mug she had hidden in the pocket of her robe against the ground. Scouting out the biggest piece, the sharpest one that would do the most damage, and leaving the others.
Clara had seen her heading to the bathroom. They made eye contact in the hall, Clara said. She didn’t notice that Flora was upset because Clara had a guy with her. She had, as they passed each other, put her finger to her lips and giggled, and Flora had mirrored her. Our little secret.
Clara saw the shards later, when she went to shower. Apparently the guy she was with would only go down on her if she was freshly showered, so she scrubbed herself with a washcloth and hastened back to her room with a towel wrapped around her waist. She didn’t think anything of the fact that there was a broken mug in the shower. Probably an accident. Probably someone getting ready for the party who brought some vodka in with them. We had all done it.
I was mostly surprised that Flora had left such a mess. She was immaculate in her neatness, the only girl out of all of us who ever brought a garbage bag into the lounge and collected the chip bags and paper plates and sticky Solo cups.
But she sat down on her bed with the shard of mug clutched in her fingertips. She read Kevin’s—my—message one last time, to prove to herself that it did exist, that it was real, that he was actually that cruel, the boy she had spent four years loving. That the world had turned on her.
She did the left arm first. She started at the wrist, where tiny blue veins emerged like rivers under the fog of her skin. The sharpest edge of the blade hooked in, a puncture wound. She could have stopped there, held a wad of toilet paper over the bloody dot. The skin would have filled in around it and nobody would have known. It would have been her dark secret, the one she guarded.
But she didn’t stop there.
Most people who slit their wrists don’t actually die. I looked it up online after, consumed with the gore of what Flora had done. Most people don’t manage to find both arteries. Most people don’t have the precision, the conviction needed to go that deep. Most people get found in time and wake up in a hospital room with gauze around their wrists and a stern-faced nurse looming over them. Most people realize that they have something to live for.
She must have made a sound, because it must have hurt. But if she did cry out, nobody was around to hear it. Everyone was either asleep or at parties. RA Dawn, always nocturnal, was writing an essay with Kurt Cobain screaming in her ears, and Clara was getting fucked to a soundtrack of heavy metal. Maybe Clara did hear something—a whimper, the beginning of a scream—but the music was loud, and orgasms have a way of drowning out everything you don’t want to hear. Didn’t I know that firsthand?
And Ella. Ella was fast asleep, practically comatose on account of the Theraflu she had used to chase two Tylenol Cold and Sinus.
According to the police report, it took Flora approximately five minutes to bleed out, for her blood to turn her pink duvet crimson and spray on the walls and ceiling like some kind of demented graffiti. The Internet let me know that usually it took hours, because the human body is equipped to not want to die. Flora’s body barely put up a fight. She died between eleven and eleven thirty, and somewhere in that thirty minutes existed the time that Kevin had spent in the bathroom with me.
If I hadn’t followed him up there. If I had kept everything closed. My mouth. My legs. My heart.
If I hadn’t. If I hadn’t. If I hadn’t. He would have gone after her, and maybe he would have found her in time.
Her arms were splayed out by her sides when he finally did find her, in the middle of her comforter, glassy eyes trained on the ceiling. Maybe it looked like she was making a snow angel, before he noticed all the blood.
Ella said she heard him scream, and that was what woke her, what made her jump out of bed and race down the hall. That scream was what ruined her life, because she had to see it too, the dead girl under the lights. Kevin had flipped them on by then. Flora had cut herself in the dark, in the glow of the stick-on stars on our ceiling. Maybe she was thinking about the person who would have to find her. In her final magnanimous act, she wanted to soften the blow.
She must have known Kevin would find her. Part of her still loved him. Maybe that was why she cut so deep, to be sure the last traces of that love would drain out of her.
The news called it the Wesleyan Suicide. To us, it was Dorm Doom. Flora stopped being a girl and started being a cautionary tale as soon as the media saw her pretty face.
“My daughter didn’t want to die,” Flora’s mother said in an interview, her voice wavering. “She was crying for help. And his message killed her.”
Flora’s parents demanded an investigation. Her father’s face, marbled like a steak, angry in a way Flora never was. They wanted Kevin put away for what he wrote. What I wrote.
Kevin denied ever sending the messages. He apparently never saw them until some unspecified after, sometime after he whipped out his phone to call 911. His reaction to what he must have seen haunted me. Maybe there was a moment where he thought he’d actually sent the texts.
“Someone must have stolen my phone,” he told the press. “It wasn’t me.”
It wasn’t me. Three words made famous by men.
I lived with knots in my neck, waiting for them to come for me. I didn’t even know who they were. The police, probably, barging into class, telling everybody to put their hands up. Reporters, maybe, wielding badges and microphones like deadly weapons. “It’s her!” they would shout, chasing me through the CFA, accusations sharp in their mouths.
The Girls Are All So Nice Here Page 21