AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Whitney: the most progressive school in America, according to theFiske Guide to Colleges. How we’d groaned, Laurel and I, whenever someone said, “Whitney—that’s the school for commies and lesbos, right?” Clem had loved it, would always say, “Damn straight.” And the truth was, Laurel and I had liked the school’s reputation, too, no matter how much we complained.
We’d made our choice, after all, had come here for a reason. For me, it had been an act of defiance, of self-naming, and so no matter how hard I rolled my eyes, inside I cherished what attending meant about me. The reputation was a shield, a suit of armor I was determined to grow into. We’d marched in the quad for equal pay, signed petitions, and watched ads from the fifties in our history of gender class, snickering at the women vacuuming in black and white, those poor, blind fools.
None of it had saved us.
Laurel had died a week before school started. That meant campus had been much quieter that day, and the next when her body was found. I was suddenly desperate to talk to the person who’d found her, to know exactly what they’d seen. But without help from the police, I had no idea where to start.
Up ahead on the left rose KPR, the three largest, newest dorms—at least when we went here. I counted as I passed: Kimball, Penfield…and Rothschild. Where we’d lived junior and senior years, at least on paper.
Rothschild’s redbrick walls, long, slender white columns, and tall windows were unchanged. If anything was different, it was me. Where once I’d coveted this place, looked at it with longing, now it looked painfully ordinary. Nowhere close to my Highland Park house, beautiful and begging on its knees.
I dragged my eyes away, knowing the Performing Arts Center came next. I turned right, sliding into the parking lot across the street, near Lynd House. The simple tug of my hand, leading me to the right place—more muscle memory than anything—filled me with a sudden swell of profound, almost desperate gratitude.
I parked and pulled my keys from the ignition. They hadn’t changed it, then. Hadn’t moved the buildings like chess pieces or torn down the places I remembered. Part of me had feared it, after eight years away: coming back to find campus unrecognizable. To find all that was left of my life with Laurel and Clem were the memories inside my head—such an unreliable place to store such precious things. But the campus I remembered was still here, which confirmed what happened had been real. No one could say otherwise. No one could take that away from me.
I gripped the steering wheel. And this time, I felt it when I started to cry.
Chapter Four
I met Laurel Hargrove twelve years ago, a few weeks after the start of freshman year. I’d lived on the other side of campus then, in McClellan, and classes had just started. Those classes brought temporary friends, girls who invited me to come with them to parties so they didn’t have to go alone. Some of the parties were in Sussman Woods, some in Pinehall, but the best were off campus, in the houses students shared by the half dozen, all crammed in, or else in ones their rich parents had bought them, letting them live alone like young millionaires.
That Saturday’s party had been at one of the crammed houses. When I arrived with a group of girls from art history, we were introduced to at least five guys who lived there, all of them varying degrees of Whitney-unkempt-intellectual, none of them interesting enough to make me want to break away. The party turned into a rager, and everyone I came with got too drunk on cheap beer. We sang to Arcade Fire, tripped over tables, broke bottles out on the back patio where the smokers held court. And at the end of the night, we all stumbled home, holding on to each other.
When I woke the next morning in my single dorm, mouth full of cotton, I’d groped for my phone, then tore through my room—twice—before admitting I’d left it at the party and would have to go back. Even at eighteen, I knew the last thing you wanted to do with a party was look it square in the face in the light of day.
A shirtless guy, hair past his shoulders, answered the door, shrugging when I asked if I could look around. He quickly slumped back upstairs, and I was on my own. The house was trashed but eerily quiet, like a battleground in the aftermath of combat, all the boys who lived there either outside or out cold. I’d just found my phone wedged into a couch cushion—miracle of miracles—when I heard it: a single, heartrending sob.
I froze. There it was again, the sound of pain raked with fear. Goose bumps crawled up my arms. The crying sounded like it was coming from underneath the floorboards. I crept through the house until I found a set of recessed stairs in the corner of the kitchen.
It was pitch-black wherever the stairs led. In Texas, we didn’t have many basements, so the mere presence of this subterranean layer struck me immediately as sinister.
I called softly into the darkness. “Hello?”
The sobbing stopped. It had definitely come from down there. And I couldn’t, god help me, leave without checking, even though I knew this was how girls died in horror movies. Against my better judgment, I climbed down the stairs, gripping an unfinished wooden rail I was sure would give me splinters.
I stepped off the staircase, eyes adjusting to the darkness. The moment my vision sharpened, I saw her.
She was so pale she practically glowed. Her hair was blond and stringy, falling past her shoulders. She wore nothing but a spaghetti-strap shirt, and her bottom half was naked. She crouched over a futon, trying to cover herself with her hands, her eyes huge and dilated. A sound came out, escaping her involuntarily, something between a sob and a hiccup.
I stopped midstep. “What happened?” Strange, I would think later, that I didn’t introduce myself, ask her name first, something humanizing. But some part of me recognized the scene—woman in danger—and my instincts kicked in:First, identify the threat.
She tried to take a deep breath, but it turned into a ragged noise in her throat. “He,” it sounded like. Her hands were still crossed over her lower half. I couldn’t tell the color of her eyes—they were too bloodshot, the foggy circles of mascara underneath too distracting.
“He? Who?”
“We came down here to do shots.” Her tone had turned pleading, like there was something she needed me to understand. “He said he could show me a trick where he lit his mouth on fire, but only with the amaretto. It was fine for a while, funny, but then I felt sick. And the ground…”
She squeezed her eyes shut. My heart beat fast enough to match her pulse, which I could see, jumping in her throat.
“It tilted. I lay down right here”—she looked at the futon—“and I think I fell asleep. The next thing I knew—” She stopped. The next thing was something she didn’t want to say.
I scanned the room. Just as messy as upstairs. A flat-screen TV and a video game console. And there, in the corner near a mini-fridge, a slip of light-blue skirt, tangled with panties. I snatched the pile and handed it to the girl. Her fingers curled around the fabric.
“I’ll turn around,” I said quickly. With my back to her, I could hear her moving, soft and slow, like she was still reorienting herself to her body.
Her voice was quiet. “I woke up, and he was on top of me. There was this second where I was confused. He was weighing me down, fumbling, and I didn’t understand. That’s why I didn’t move at first. I didn’t realize.”
I started to turn around, but she said, “Don’t. Please.”
