by Andrea Bartz
“God, not anymore. But you remember her—Edie’s roommate in Calhoun. The one she was really close with.” He shrugged. “Although, come to think of it, they weren’t talking much by the time we broke up. But you know what Edie was like. Anyway, great running into you!” He gave me another cheerful handshake and jogged across the intersection, never looking back.
I stood there for a while, the wind rustling my hair and dress. Jenna. Sarah and Kevin had gossiped about her as they played Jenga in one of my Flip cam videos, but I couldn’t remember much else. I called Tessa from my watch during my long walk home. “I need your help with one more Edie-related thing,” I said. “I promise I’m not being obsessive. I just need you to look someone up for me. I feel like she’s probably in the case files somewhere, but I missed her. I’ll check on Facebook when I’m home, but her name is Jenna something.”
A BMW gunned through the red light just as I stepped off the curb; I jumped back, heart pounding.
“You said it’s Jenna?”
“Yeah, Jenna. She was one of Edie’s old roommates. I didn’t know her at all and Edie literally never mentioned her, but Greg said they were close.”
Tessa was quiet for a second, presumably taking notes. “Wait, you talked to Greg?”
“Yeah, I just happened to run into him on the street. Craziest thing. He was—”
I stopped talking as a new theory crashed through me: In the video, Sarah said that Jenna had been busted for selling drugs. Could that explain the Molly in Edie’s system that night?
Was Jenna still living in Calhoun when Edie died?
“Lindsay, you there?”
“Sorry, I’m here.” I motored around an old woman. “Can I call you again later? It’s kinda hard to hear.”
“Sure. I’m on it. I’m actually still at work, want me to come over?”
A curl of happiness that someone wanted to see me. Yet I hated the idea of making small talk while I should be at my computer, picking this final lock. “I think I’m just gonna order in. Kinda need a quiet night.”
“A White Lotus Thai kind of evening?”
“Pad See Ew know me too well,” I cracked, and she giggled appreciatively. We hung up and I headed home, hope billowing in me for the first time in weeks.
* * *
First I tried Greg’s Flickr; the account existed, but the password didn’t work. I emailed, texted, and called him from my watch, figuring a full-court press was my best bet here. Then I set to work finding Jenna.
An hour later, she was yet another digital ghost. I’d found her full name in an old email, but it was laughably generic—Jenna Smith—and I had no other identifying details to go on. Still, I sent it to Tessa and kept searching. The name returned thousands of hits, which I waded through with mounting annoyance: LinkedIn profiles and Instagram feeds and Twitter handles all devoid of real info and fitting neatly into my vague notions about this mystery woman—brunette, unremarkable, born sometime in the eighties. I couldn’t picture her clearly, and no one with the name seemed to fit into my Calhoun network, no common Facebook friends or LinkedIn connections. I shot off a few emails and messages to Jennas who sort of seemed to fit the profile, politely asking if they’d lived in Calhoun around 2009, but half the messages bounced right back.
I rewatched the video of Kevin and Sarah at the Levee. I wanted to smack myself for overlooking this: Here Sarah had offered up that Jenna had been busted for selling, but the drugs were Anthony’s, and the two of them were probably sleeping together—meaning Jenna might have been the mystery caller who had brought Anthony to the scene. I filled out a FOIL request for the drug arrest records from that month—the Jenga video had a date, June 6—but I knew my lack of specificity about the actual day and charges would likely result in a rejection, or at best, a slower-than-usual retrieval. I hit submit and groaned in frustration, grabbing a fistful of hair and tugging it against my scalp.
Was this her? Was she just on the other side of all of this, somehow aware that I’d been investigating and feeling endangered enough that she’d cracked open Edie’s email and sent me a vaguely threatening email? I answered my door to a dazed-looking man, holding out my bag of Thai food and looking winded from the climb. I thanked him and watched him slowly turn around, as if he’d been counting on more repartee.
Tessa finally called around nine, splintering my hope that she’d have more luck than I. “I can’t find a damn thing,” she reported. “There are a lot of Jenna Smiths, obviously, but I can’t find anything tying one to Calhoun or even Bushwick. We could try to track down the lease—Will says they aren’t confidential unless there’s a confidentiality clause, which I doubt—but we’d need the landlord to hand it over.”
“Well, he’s dead.”
“Shit, that’s right.” Tessa clicked her tongue.
“Ugh. And here I got so hopeful when I saw you were calling.” I was eating the last of my noodles. Tonight they tasted kind of lame. “Thanks for trying, though.”
There was a beat. “Well, I have other news,” she said. “My coworker helped me trace the IP address on that email.”
“The one from Edie?”
“Right, the one from her address. I’m not—Lindsay, I’m not sure how to say this.”
“What is it? Just tell me.”
“Well, that’s the thing, it’s not—”
“Who sent it?”
“Okay, I don’t…I’m not sure what this means, but the email…it came from you.”
Static fizzed in my ears, the volume high. My insides all jolted in closer to my spine.
“What?”
“The IP address is yours. It shows that the email—”
“Like from my building? Someone was nearby?”
“Not nearby—from you. The same…An IP address is like your fingerprint. It’s your coordinates on the internet. It identifies you by your specific computer, your laptop alone.”
The room twisted; I grabbed onto the table for support.
“So what are you saying?”
“Lindsay, I don’t know what else to tell you.”
“You’re saying I sent it?”
“You did send it.”
“You’re lying.” She wasn’t lying. I was the liar. I was the fucking crazy lunatic liar.
Her voice warning, rich with annoyance: “Linds.”
“You’re insane! I ask you to be on my fucking side for once, and instead you’re trying to manipulate me.” I was falling apart; I was a shack tearing to pieces in the wind. I was spinning so fast I didn’t have time to stop and ask if any of this made sense. “Admit it, Tessa.”
There was a silence, so long and sharp and quivering that the world zoomed in on itself until it was the size of the speaker on the underside of my watch.
“You know what, Lindsay, I’m done,” she said, and hung up.
Chapter 15
ALEX
The apartment kind of sucked.
The Craigslist ad made it sound like there’d be high ceilings and tons of artists and a steady stream of music and partying and pussy. But this was, like, pretty fucking gross. The bedroom was smaller than my college dorm room. The kitchen was shitty and looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in years. One of my new roommates had taken a kitten in off the street that was cute but kinda nasty, with matted hair and little bits of god-knows-what that caught in your fingers when you tried to pet it. She named it Animal. This was nothing like the house Lance and I had sublet over the summer in Philly.
But the part about people partying a lot, that was pretty true. My roommates seemed to have drugs tucked all over the place, so the good news was that they were constantly offering me something and the bad news was that they were all high pretty much all the time, lying around on the gross crusty sofa and staring at all my boxes with these freakity doll eyes. Kevin, the only roommate of the three wh
o seemed to actually care about making music, would sometimes sit at his drum kit and jam with me, and the other kids would get up and dance like jerky strung-out puppets on the rug in front of them.
But it’d only been five days, maybe things would change. It was in the hottest part of the summer and we’d all just dragged ourselves here from various boring corners of America—Syracuse, Santa Fe, Cincinnati, Atlanta—so maybe we were just exhausted and trying to get our hometowns out of our systems before we started doing what we were all here to do, which was obviously to make decent art in our respective fields. Show our parents up for rolling their eyes at our BFAs and nagging us all the damn time to get the minor in computer science, just as a backup, “you were always so good on the computer back home.” Well, Calhoun had once been home to the lead guitarist in The Sinks. So fuck you, Mom and Dad.
Except that Mom was coming to visit the next day and that was pretty sick. She’d look horrified and make a lot of disgusted noises, but then she’d know how to fit all my gear in my room, away from my weirdo roommates, and she’d probably drive me to IKEA to get a desk way less shitty than the one the dude before me left here, with its stash of expired condoms leaking and gross in the back of the second drawer. Sorry you couldn’t get laid, brother.
It was almost late afternoon and Kevin and I were just hanging around the apartment, trying to get his turntable to work and switching on more and more fans as we sweated our balls off. We hadn’t talked about it, but I could kinda tell Kevin hated the other two people in our apartment, too. They were shut up in their tiny rooms doing god knows what.
“So how do we find out what’s going on tonight?” I asked at one point. First Friday in the new home. Seemed critical.
“Shit just goes down,” he said, pulling a beer out of the fridge. Pretty sure it wasn’t his. “People just keep their doors open.”
Like the dorms. Okay. I’d liked the dorms enough. Hot girls wandering in and out of our room in search of vodka or pot or whatever. Just had to make sure the evidence was buried by the time Mom arrived at noon tomorrow.
Around eleven Kevin and I heard a booming dubstep bassline coming into our apartment from the left, so we ducked out in search of the source. It was three doors down with a bouncer out front collecting cover, but some girls in jorts arrived right when we did and grinned and giggled and did whatever it is girls do to gain free entry, and we kept our heads down and got waved in with the group, a Brojan Horse, if you will. Inside there was one of those stupid green light machines shooting beams like a sprinkler over a bunch of sweaty dancing people, and whiskey all over the kitchen with a short creepy guy watching over it and collecting five bucks a pour. Kevin spotted a ripped dude in nothing but sequined shorts and wandered off, and I leaned against the wall, waiting.
I saw a chick from the hallway pointing me out to her friend and I turned away, pretending to look for someone. They both moseyed over.
“Hey, did you sneak in with us without paying?” one shouted over the music. Her hotter, freckled friend stood behind her, smirking.
“Maybe,” I shouted back. “Are you going to tell on me?”
“Not unless you piss me off,” she yelled jokingly. Then, “What’s your name?”
“Alex. What’s yours?” I watched as her friend turned and left. The retreating girl had long, mermaidy red hair that swung as she walked, and I pictured myself running my fingers through it. This girl gave me her name, but I promptly forgot it.
“Wanna dance?” She put her hands on my wrists.
“Let’s get a drink,” I yelled back.
We took shots of off-brand whiskey, her grimacing and looking around for a chaser. She already seemed pretty drunk, like falsely confident; you know those people who pack all their ballsiness behind the safety of booze? When the creepy bar-guard wasn’t looking, I took another pull straight from the bottle. The girl giggled delightedly. She was wearing a crop top and neon-green shorts. She didn’t totally have the stomach for it, but she had a pretty nice ass and legs. Kind of a big nose and brown bangs scratching at her eyes, but cute. She asked if I wanted Molly, which was a form of X I’d heard of four hundred times that week and not at all in the twenty-two years before; she said it was clean, but I said no. I didn’t feel like bothering. The electronic music was already getting less annoying, anyway. She told me she knew where to get it if I changed my mind. We danced for a bit, her pulling me over by her friends. The redhead was gone.
The whiskey started to wear off and it was still early, so I said I had to piss and left the apartment in search of something new. A floor up, I found a bunch of people in a circle toking up. Someone had bongos, fucking stupid. I ignored their stares and moved on. The hallway hit a fork and I spotted people standing around outside a door with the shraaaaaw of electric guitars coming out of it, so I headed that way.
I stopped in front of two girls and glanced around like I was lost, then smiled at the one who’d noticed me.
“You looking for someone?” she asked me, cutting off her friend.
“Oh, just my roommate. I live here.”
“Here?” She gestured inside with her beer.
“No, just in the building.”
“Us, too!” She introduced herself. I said hello and tried to remember her name. It was something dumb like Dallas. Not Dallas but something like that. I suck at names.
“I’m Alex,” I told her. “Where’d those come from?” I grasped at the can, letting my fingers fall over hers.
“In here. There’s a band that kinda sucks, but no one’s watching the kitchen.” I followed them inside and took in the three guitarists on the makeshift stage, one bassist and two dudes both convinced they were the lead. One wasn’t bad, but they kept vying for solos. Embarrassing.
Dallas leaned against the counter with her back arched and asked me when I’d moved in and how I liked it and where I was from until her friend felt sufficiently left out of the conversation and made some pissy announcement that she was going home.
I was buzzed. Dallas had helped herself to another beer but seemed fine. I asked if she wanted to dance—there was another party down the hall with ridiculous house music. She grabbed my hand as I led her down a floor. I pulled my hand out and put it on her back, then just as we got to the door I slid it down for a quick squeeze of her ass. She looked surprised, then grinned.
I tried to convince the door guy that we’d already been inside, but he wouldn’t hear it and I hadn’t brought any money, so Dallas paid ten bucks for us to enter, which I felt pretty bad about. But she said she didn’t care and yanked me out to the dance floor and pretty soon pulled my face in to make out. I was having a great drunken time until I opened my eyes and saw the Molly girl from earlier giving me the stink eye from like ten feet away, so I put my mouth up to Dallas’s ear and asked if she wanted to get out of there.
“WHAT?” she shouted back.
I tried again, louder this time. She pulled my face in with her hand, closed my ear with her thumb, and purred into it, “Try it this way.” I heard perfectly through the vibrations and also instantly got hard. I slid my palm around her jaw, pressed my thumb against the little piece of cartilage over her ear, and asked one more time. Hot.
We were both sort of sloppy by the time we staggered into my place. We kissed inside the doorframe and she enthusiastically pushed her tits into my hands. When she looked around and I blinked a few times to figure out which identical bedroom door was mine, I could tell she was a little grossed out. Animal looked at her and actually let out a long yowl. I pulled her toward my room and kinda yanked us both inside, closing the door behind me.
Standing there, she pulled off my shirt, belt, and jeans, like, really fucking fast. In the same few minutes I only got as far as unbuttoning her top. I started climbing the stairs to my loft bed, thinking she would follow, when she froze and said, “I actually have a full-size bed, coo
l if we go there?” Which sounded kind of awesome, a bigger bed where we wouldn’t bonk our heads on the ceiling or die of heat as the night wore on. I kind of hated my room anyway. So I said sure and started to look around for my keys.
Which were, of course, nowhere to be found. I hadn’t grabbed them before because I was just wandering around the building, and anyway, when did my three roommates lock the door? Did anyone in this fucked-up building? Keys were for outside, I told myself drunkenly. And her door was only a few down from mine and everybody else was in bed. So fuck keys. And fuck clothes. If I waited too long, she might think better of the offer. I grabbed her waist and told her we should run, run, to her room.
We made it there without seeing anyone else and were both laughing, doubling over, by the time we got inside her apartment and closed the door behind us. She led me to her bedroom—floor level, big bed, natural light—and I congratulated myself for the good move of getting away from my own miserable space.
The next morning, half asleep, she wanted to cuddle and cuddle and cuddle, and thinking vaguely about morning sex, I made no move to leave. “I have to gooo,” I told her at ten thirty, but of course I was too comfortable-yet-hungover to fight it.
Ten forty-five. Eleven. At eleven twenty-five I finally stood up and asked to borrow some pants.
“For the twenty-foot walk of shame?” she teased, tossing me some plaid pajama bottoms.
I approached my door and tried the knob. Locked. So I knocked loudly, waited. Knocked again. Rang the buzzer. Leaned on the buzzer. And started to panic. Because my mom was on her fucking way.
I didn’t have my phone. Dallas had the super’s number in hers, so I tried calling, but he didn’t pick up and she warned me he didn’t work weekends. Or really ever. Dallas demonstrated that their door could be kicked open when it’s locked, so we tried it on mine. Of course it didn’t work and I got worried about breaking the door.
Panic. My mother was zipping off the highway by now, barreling down Flushing Avenue in Dad’s Subaru. I started coming up with crazy schemes. I could just hide out until a roommate came back, worry my mother sick. I could knock on neighbors’ doors, borrow some stranger’s clothes, tell my mom I got locked out trying to get the mail. Dallas’s suggestion was to just act like I had absolutely no idea what had happened the night before. I looked down at my way-too-small girl-size pants. “Uh, it’s pretty obvious what happened.”