We both stopped mid-bitch and looked at her, then at each other. Then we each marched off for our separate rooms. Our doors slammed in unison. I pressed myself against the wall, my heart doing the dance of shame I knew so well. I could smell the whiskey and cigarette smoke on her breath the night she kissed me.
My anger at her in the library had me thinking about all of these things. Suddenly I couldn’t stand to be near her another second. I hated that smug look she had on her face, as though she had discovered things about me, as though she knew me. Which she didn’t. Not at all.
I slammed my book shut so hard that a girl from the next table looked over at us. I started stuffing things into my bag-my iPad, my journal, my textbooks. I clutched my little pen case covered with smiling matryoshka dolls. The nesting doll, a self inside a self inside a self, my own personal symbolism.
“Really?” she said, pulling an annoyed grimace. But I could see she felt bad. She knew she’d pushed me too far. In fact, she’d been pushing and pushing and pushing me all year in little ways like this. And I was finished with it. I slung my bag over my shoulder and walked out.
“Grow up,” she called after me, causing everybody in the library to look at her ( just like she liked it). But I was already walking out the door.
Around 2 A.M., there was a soft knock at my door. It roused me immediately from sleep, but I lay there for a minute listening. My first thought was that it was Beck, come to apologize. But no, that was impossible. Beck was not hardwired to apologize. She clung to her own rightness. Anyway, maybe I was the one who needed to apologize to her. And I wasn’t hardwired for that any more than she.
Another knock, then: “It’s me, Ainsley.”
I got up and walked over to the door, which I had locked upon returning home, and opened it. She stood there shivering in an oversize sweatshirt and leggings, her hair a tumble of curls pulled up high on her head.
“Beck didn’t come home.”
“So,” I said. I moved past her and sat on the plush couch in the common room. She followed and sat beside me. I handed her the blanket that hung over the arm, and she wrapped it around herself. The old dormitory buildings, built from stone, were freezing in the winter, almost impossible to heat adequately, as though the walls soaked up all the warmth and kept it for themselves. We all walked around in robes and big slippers, wrapped in blankets in the cooler months.
“So,” said Ainsley, “she should be home by now. The library closed at midnight. Weren’t you there with her?”
“I was,” I said. “But I left first.”
“Oh,” she said.
“What’s the big deal?” I asked. “She could be in someone’s room somewhere. You know Beck.”
She stared off out the window, where the wind was tossing the branches of the tall, bare oak.
“You know,” she said.
Her hazel eyes were growing wide. I knew what she was thinking about. Two years ago when we were sophomores, a girl, a friend of ours, disappeared from the campus. Elizabeth Barnett left a party we’d all been attending, but none of us had seen her leave. She’d had a fight with her boyfriend and left in tears, according to someone who’d seen her and let her stumble off into the night drunk and hysterical.
Before her disappearance, we had all thought of the campus as an idyll of safety. Nothing bad had ever happened here, and it seemed as if nothing ever could. With its rolling grounds and close-knit buildings, its well-lit paths and roaming security guards, we strolled about at all hours, in all conditions, without a worry in our heads. Some people said the woods were haunted, but we all knew that was just a ghost story we told ourselves, something that was cool and entertaining rather than frightening.
It was days of pandemonium, the campus crawling with police, Elizabeth’s parents running a command center from the gym. All of us stunned and crying, huddling, participating in searches through those haunted woods, gathering together at night to comfort each other. Theories and rumors abounded, and accusations were thick in the air. Elizabeth’s boyfriend was questioned, but not arrested. It was revealed that Elizabeth’s swim coach had been fired from his previous university job for having an inappropriate relationship with one of his students. He was suspended, questioned seriously by police, and by day four he was considered the prime suspect.
On day seven, Elizabeth’s body was found. She’d fallen down a flight of concrete stairs, one of those staircases on the outside of a building that led down into a cellar. It was a building on the far side of campus that was used for storage-desks, file cabinets, computers-with a workshop in the basement where the janitorial staff made repairs. What had she been doing there, far from any place she would need to be? She’d have had to walk a long winding path through the woods, away from the main campus buildings. We all knew she wouldn’t have done that without a reason.
She’d broken her neck in the fall. It was unclear how long she’d lived while she lay there, how much she had suffered. The incident was suspicious, but there was no physical evidence to link anyone else to the scene. We were all shattered in ways big and small, and a pall was cast over the rest of our year. It was a small college, and Elizabeth was missed. And we were all afraid. Had it been an accident or foul play? No one was ever sure.
I could see it all on Ainsley’s face; she’d taken it hard. And last year, we’d started calling her “Captain Safety.” She was always reminding us to not walk home alone, to call if we were going to be very late or spend the night away from the room. And last year, we’d been good about it. But memories fade, and that fear we all felt grew dull and distant. We all wanted to believe that we were safe, and so we let ourselves feel that way again.
“I thought we weren’t going to let each other walk home alone,” she said. She wasn’t one to be sullen or accusatory. She just sounded disappointed in me.
“I know,” I said. “But…”
I didn’t want to tell her that Beck and I had had a fight. I just didn’t want to get into it with her. “I wasn’t feeling well,” I said instead. “And she wanted to stay and study.”
“What’s wrong?” she asked. She reached out a hand and put it to my forehead. Beck and I were selfish and lazy. Ainsley was the nurturer, the mother among us. We counted on that from her, took her for granted at times. But we loved her for it, too. “You feel warm.”
But it was just that her hands were icy cold. “I don’t know,” I said. “I was just feeling super tired.”
Ainsley nodded slowly and looked back toward the door, as if she expected Beck to come charging through. Beck always entered the room like a gladiator, swinging the door open and tossing her bag to the floor, announcing that she was Exhausted! or Starving! or Pissed off ! about whatever.
“She’ll be home by breakfast at the latest, I’m sure. Get some rest,” I told Ainsley. And she nodded uncertainly, shuffled off to her bedroom.
But the next morning when I left for class, I peeked into Beck’s room and her bed hadn’t been slept in. I felt a rush of guilt and regret, but I quickly quashed it. Beck had picked a fight, and I was only guilty of rising to the bait.
Over our afternoon chess game, I caught Luke staring at me. When I looked up at him, he didn’t avert his eyes.
“You’re getting better,” he said.
I was getting better-because I’d been studying chess on the Internet. The kid was destroying me day after day. And even though I bore it with a smile, it was grating on me-and not a little. He was eleven. But he was confident, crafty, always five moves ahead. He was aggressive, backed me into corners. Even when I came armed with strategies, he seemed to know what I was going to do before I did it, made the most stunning evasive maneuvers. I mean, he wasn’t just beating me. Game after game, I never even had a chance.