Page 29

Sitting up, I rub my dry eyes, swallow against a cottony throat. Had I really asked Marcella if I was ugly?

Her purr comes back to me: You’re lovely. A dream.

Heat nettles below my sternum and I groan, dropping my face into my hands. God save me if I ask for validation from her again. I don’t even think I want it. Do I?

Mashing my fingers into my eyes, I scuttle from bed and into my bathroom to splash my face with water. There is a slew of departmental meetings I need to prepare for, and I need to get to my weekend seminar besides.

I go to check my phone for a text from Laurel, but halfway to my messages my heart skips an awful, lurching beat. She’s gone. She’s dead and there’s nothing I can do about it, save find who did it and try to bring them to some kind of justice.

My stomach riots inside of me and I make it to the toilet just in time to throw up sticky pink bile.

I haven’t done this since undergrad, I don’t think. Eating so little for dinner and then quaffing most of a bottle of wine. There was a time it was the goal, even. Starving myself small, becoming easy and pliant and everything anyone wanted. I grasped that tiny shred of control and let them have the rest. It was easier to genuflect with an empty stomach: easier to fold in two, let the Host be my dinner. Let the Chalice be my water.

I can still hear them praising me. Touched, autistic as fuck, but good. No friends, but good. Good as long as I bent the knee. Good until I brought a woman home, introduced her as my girlfriend. And then good meant so very, very little. So I fled from Nashville and came here, because my parents wouldn’t come to the Northeast even if they were under ransom.

Christ, I haven’t thought about this in so long, it feels like uncovering my own grave. I wipe my mouth on a square of toilet paper, knock back some Advil, and get dressed.

Black back-seamed tights, knee-length tweed skirt. Hair twisted into something like a chignon? I’m messy, I know it: my cheeks littered with pieces of dried mascara, my eyes swollen from crying.

I’m too tired, too mortified, to care, as I knot an ascot at my throat. Impossibly, I go through the motions of my morning, my muscles vaguely aching from the wine, my headache knotting hard at the top of my spine. Memories shirred like cobwebs, spun too low, until I have to duck my head to avoid becoming tangled.

I’m here, so far away, now.

I gather my work, tuck my laptop into my bag, and slip on my penny loafers, coins winking from inside the slit leather.

For good luck, I placed them there on the first day of the school year. But since September, everything’s gone to hell in a handbasket.

How do I continue on knowing Laurel is dead? Not just dead—mutilated? The moment we found her comes back to me in ugly snatches: her snapped bones, her eyes already devoured by maggots, that tacky pool of blood.

Shit, blood. My clothes. I need to get rid of them, don’t I?

Ready as I’ll ever be, I grab my shoulder bag and a triple-layered black trash bag containing yesterday’s outfit. I— No one will suspect me, will they? No one will follow me.

Didn’t Marcella say I put a target on my back by asking about Laurel’s disappearance? My breath catches in my throat, tears pricking my eyes. Last night, drunk, I agreed to so many things out of anger. But now, I’m just terrified.

I lock my door. Check it twice after, hand rattling on the brass knob. There’s a dumpster in Crowell Quad, just a single path down from here. They wouldn’t think to check there, even if they did suspect me. Right?

I hurry down the stairs, heart in my throat, past the quiet undergrad hall, and out into the biting air of December. The sky shimmers with a fine mist as I tap over the bluestone paths, looking over my shoulder every few steps. But it’s silent as a grave out here.

Why wouldn’t it be?

I repeat my new mantra: No one suspects me. I’m simply throwing away my trash. I need to hold it together or someone will see something is wrong, and I don’t think I could bear questions. I’m not Marcella, made of steel. I’m glass, easy to shatter.

I bite my lip bloody as I enter Crowell Quad, then pull the screeching dumpster top open. The sound makes me wince, so animal and pained.

I’m projecting. I know I am, my heart beating hard, my skin riddled with goose bumps. I throw my bloody clothing away and pull the dumpster closed again.

There’s the soft sound of sneakered feet on the interior quad walls and I spin. But it’s just a student in running clothes, out for an early morning jog. She pants as she runs past me, wrapped in black spandex, her eyes glazed and lost.

I wait until she leaves the interior quad, until she runs back toward Eden, before I finally move.

Life continues at Preston.

And yet, for me, it’s come to a bitter, screeching standstill. It’s hard not to draw comparisons to my childhood: I’m yet again gathering secrets behind my teeth until my jaw aches. Retribution will be swift. Difference is, I would go to jail now. Back then, I simply lost my parents in every way that mattered.

Breathing hard, I close my eyes, running the tip of my tongue over the stinging split skin of my lip. I’m too much in the past today, and if anything’s going to save me, it’s going to be viciously clinging to the present.

Gathering my bag back onto my shoulder, I walk unsteadily out into the main quad again, my penny loafers slipping. I see the blue-and-red flashing lights only an instant before I start running toward the Classics department.