Bingo, I thought. Cross was still alive.
In Latin class, Martha told me Conchita had gone to the infirmary before breakfast. She was not at lacrosse practice, and then she wasn’t there again the next day, either. During this time, Martha and I consulted each other frequently, or at least I consulted Martha. The first thing I’d done after leaving Conchita sitting outside on Sunday evening was call Martha from the pay phone in Broussard’s. (If I went to their dorm, of course, I risked running into Conchita.) It had been strange-the truth was, it had been exciting-to need to talk on the phone to someone who was also on campus.
“She’s definitely angry,” Martha told me on Monday, and when I said, “At both of us or at me?” Martha replied, “Mostly at you. She’s being irrational because she feels hurt, but she’ll get over it.” As usual, because she was Martha, this did not sound callous.
After Conchita missed a second practice, I went to the infirmary to find her, and the nurse said she’d returned to her dorm. Standing outside her door, I could hear music that I thought might be Dylan. I knocked, and Conchita called, “Come in.”
Clearly, she’d expected someone else-when she saw that it was me, she drew her lips together and furrowed her eyebrows, like a child making a mad face.
I gestured toward the stereo. “Good song.”
“What do you want?”
“I was worried about you.”
“Before or after you stole my best friend? But the real question is if you were using me to get to Martha all along or if you just took an opportunity when you saw it.”
“Conchita.” I didn’t mean to, but I actually smiled.
She glared at me.
“We’re not on a soap opera,” I said. “Stealing friends isn’t something that happens in real life.”
“How would you know? You didn’t have any friends before me.”
“That’s not true.” I thought of Sin-Jun. Then I thought of Heidi and Alexis, whom I hadn’t spoken to since the night of the dangling pillowcase; I was pretty sure they didn’t count.
“I overestimated you,” Conchita said. “I thought you were smart and neat. But really you’re shallow and conformist. You don’t have an identity, so you define yourself by who you spend time with, and you get nervous that you’re spending time with the wrong people. I feel sorry for Martha because I bet she has no idea what you’re like. If Aspeth Montgomery told you she wanted to be your roommate next year, you would drop Martha in a minute.”
Again, listening to Conchita’s analysis, I felt the sting of truth, and that old relief, a relief bordering on gratitude, that someone recognized me. Flawed as I was, someone recognized me.
“Why don’t you try to be a bigger person?” she said. More softly, she added, “We could still room together. I would forgive you.”
“Are you not going to accept my apology if I won’t room with you?”
“If all you want is for me to accept your apology, I will. There. I accepted it.”
“Will you come back to lacrosse?”
“Missing lacrosse has nothing to do with you. The pollen count has been really high.” She looked away from me. “I need to take a shower.”
I was out in the hall when I heard her door open again, and when I felt her hand against my back, simultaneously, I thought she was trying to hug me from behind-I even thought maybe she was embracing me sexually, maybe Conchita was in love with me-and I knew, I knew in the smallest and most certain part of my mind, that she was killing me.
I turned around.
“You’re dead.” Her voice was flat, not satisfied in any way. Looking back, I think she killed me not because doing so brought her pleasure but because not doing so-granting me an exemption when I had treated her as I had-would have pained her. Later, I tried to piece it together, but since I couldn’t talk to her, my sense of the situation was incomplete. What I came up with was that she had had Edmundo, and that when she’d learned he was my assassin, she’d killed him to protect me-she’d killed him before the weekend, when she would be away from campus and couldn’t be killed herself. She was colluding in my attempt to win, and then she stopped colluding. Or maybe it was more complicated than that, maybe she killed even more people to get to me and offer protection. At the time, it seemed important to figure out the links between us, the chronology of events, but it quickly stopped seeming important at all. I never got into Assassin again after freshman year, though people kept playing the whole time I was at Ault. I’m not sure when it was abolished, or maybe it’s still played, under a different name: Sticker Tag. Or, Elimination. This is the kind of thing you stop knowing when you’re gone from a place, but even before I was gone, I lost interest; I became one of the people who found the game ridiculous and annoying.
But then, at the time, in the hallway: I looked at Conchita’s face, scanning for evidence that she was joking, or would rescind my death. The possibility had to exist because it was so wrong, in my opinion, for her to have killed me. Assassin had nothing to do with the two of us. It had to do with Cross, and what kind of heart did Conchita have if she could remorselessly block the crush of another girl? Only if she liked the boy herself could there be justification; otherwise blocking someone else’s crush was always and absolutely wrong.
And I did see signs-in her eyes I saw them, and around her mouth-that she would reverse her decision, but only for one reason, only if I’d be her roommate, and in a way, Conchita was blameless because I don’t think she knew she would make this reversal, or if she did know, she knew I wouldn’t go along with it. That is to say, she wasn’t blackmailing me. Our friendship was over. Maybe it could have recovered if only she had had a reason to resent me without my having a reason to resent her back. I can imagine that such asymmetry might have created a fragile balance, requiring forgiveness from only one of us. But instead our resentment was mutually supportive, like a wall held up with equal force from opposite sides.
It seems to me now that I was greatly indebted to Conchita; though it wasn’t voluntary on her part, she gave me Martha. She literally created the circumstances that allowed me to get to know Martha, but Conchita also did something bigger and harder to quantify: She reminded me that I knew how to make friends. For this, I owed her a lot, but at the time, I believed that in killing me, she’d gotten her revenge; I believed I owed her nothing at all.
And there was something else that happened that strange week. It happened on Sunday night, before I told Conchita I was rooming with Martha, before she killed me and we said bad and unretractable things to each other: Conchita learned to ride a bike.
That evening, when I showed up behind the infirmary, Conchita was sitting cross-legged in the grass. I got off the bike, and she threw one leg over it. I gripped the carrier. “Okay,” I said. “Ready.” I began to jog as we moved forward.
She glanced over her shoulder. “Now my dad wants to meet you, too,” she said.
I pictured short, bald Ernie Maxwell-I still hadn’t seen a photo of him-and thought how strange it was to say my dad and to be referring to someone other people had heard of. “I’ll look forward to it,” I said. A lock of hair fell into my eyes and I lifted my hand and tucked it behind my ear. Conchita was suddenly farther away from me than she’d been before, and I realized with a jolt that I wasn’t holding on. She was riding the bike by herself, gliding forward with perfect balance. I continued to jog, trying to close the space between us, but without me weighing her down, she had picked up speed.
“Hey, Conchita,” I said. “Don’t freak out, but I’m not touching the bike. You’re riding it without my help.”
Immediately, she pulled the brakes and set her feet on the road.
“You were doing so well,” I said. “You should have kept going. I’ll start you over.” It occurred to me that it might not happen again, at least not right away. But that was okay. She’d made progress. Having ridden once, she would know what she was capable of.