•
For at least ten minutes most evenings I’d taken to waiting outside a phone box on King’s Parade while Miranda tried to call her brother. I watched her stiffen expectantly and then slump, and it made me dislike her brother. There was no way that he was so busy that he couldn’t answer the phone just one of the times that she called. There was no way he couldn’t find five minutes to e-mail her or something. When Miranda came out of the phone box I’d get her a hot chocolate in the yellow-tinged gloom of a vaulted underground café on Market Square. She’d make excuses for him.
I said, “I think he is probably just self-absorbed.”
She kicked me in the shin. It’s no joke being kicked in the shin by a chick wearing stilettos. I was in pain.
Miranda found out about a rock ’n’ roll dance night at Fisher Hall, and she fetched a flared skirt with a poodle embroidered on it from her wardrobe. The skirt was pink, and she tied a pastel-pink scarf around her neck in a jaunty bow. I think that was the only time I saw her wearing a colour other than black. I couldn’t find anything similar, so I settled for wearing a crinoline under a strapless polka-dot dress that already had a big skirt. She tied pink ribbons to the ends of my plaits. I left my room with her kisses tingling on my shoulder blades.
When we got to Fisher Hall, I found out that Miranda could jive. She grabbed my hand and shimmied in circles, flicking her heels and flapping her hands as if the music the Elchords were making was mowing her down. She said she had learnt the style from a videotape. I just shuffled and two-stepped and let her use me as a prop. I couldn’t get five minutes’ rest, either — the other dancers stayed away. They cast admiring glances but stuck with their partners.
At the end of the dance Miranda was so exhausted that she lay flat on the floor by the emptied drinks table, unable to move even to minimise the effort of the people who laughed nervously and stepped over her. I made her drink lemonade through a straw, and got her back to her room on a sugar rush, singing too lay too lay peppermint stick. I wanted to say something to her, something like “Hey I like you,” or “You’re so so pretty. You’re actually gorgeous.” She had a black sash tied around her head; it drove stray strands of hair behind her ears and suddenly even her ears were beautiful.
“Why don’t you take a picture,” she said, flapping her hand at me. “It’ll last longer.”
I climbed onto her bed and tucked myself around her, my knees against the backs of her knees, my stomach against her back. We were both trembling.
“Nice ears,” I said.
Our bodies struck like matches; she changed form under my hands, I went slowly, slowly,
(only do as much as we both want)
her nipples hard under my lips, her stomach downy with the fuzz that kept it warm, the soft hollows of her inner thighs. She said, “Please stop.”
I flopped down beside her, turning her face towards me, stroking her hair. Her hair felt endless in the dark. “Are you okay?”
“Yes.” Then, surprisingly, she asked me if I was okay.
“Not really, not if I’ve upset you. Did it feel weird?”
“No. Well, a little, perhaps. It was… I don’t know. Too much, probably. I’ve never… not even with a boy.”
I know I said something, but whatever I said made no sense. She was so worried that there was no way for me to assure her that I was no marauder out to feast on the shattered remains of her hymen or something. My fingers snagged in her hair and her head jerked on the pillow. She got up and got dressed and I did too, trying to think of a way to stop this becoming a crisis.
I caught up with her at the college gate. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
We both smiled, embarrassed, not at each other, in different directions. “What are you sorry for?” we said.
I felt every vein in me move closer to the surface of my skin, all veins plucked in one direction as if I was a stringed instrument.
She opened the college gate with her key and stepped out onto the street. I followed her; she hadn’t said that I couldn’t. It was full moon. No one was out, and it was so cold that our breath stained the air around our heads. Birds chirped. I don’t know what kind of bird chirps at night. We walked towards the mill pond.
“My mental health is questionable anyway,” she said, not looking at me. She told me she’d been in a clinic for just over five months because she’d had a breakdown and forgotten who she was. I sat down on a low wall; the river was at my back. She sat down too.
“What, the breakdown came just all of a sudden?”
“No. There was this one night when something went wrong. Some kind of splinter swerved in my brain or something.”
“What happened on splinter night?” I asked.
“Splinter night?”
“The night everything went wrong.”
She paused. “I can’t remember.”
“Can’t you?”
She took a deep breath and rested her chin on her hand. “I have a theory,” she said. I nodded at her to continue and she said, “There’s this fireplace downstairs. I think I went down there for some reason. To hide, maybe. I thought it was all my fault my mother died. And I hit my head on the marble. My brain bled. I died.”
She watched me.
“Right,” I said. “I don’t think that’s possible.”
“Why don’t you think it’s possible?” she asked. “Because everyone can see me?”
“It’s not that. It’s just that it seems to me that the dead only return for love or for revenge. Who did you come back for?”
Neither of us smiled. I felt light-headed. I couldn’t believe that we were discussing this.
“Love or revenge,” she sighed. “Neither.”
“Miranda,” I said. “You’re not dead. Okay?”
“Ore,” she said. “I’m not alive.”
I had found the bottle of purple water that Tijana had given me; I ran my thumb over its lid in my pocket.
“Let’s suppose that what I say is true,” she said. “Just as a thought experiment. Let’s say I’m not alive anymore. What would be helping me to maintain the appearance of life? That’s the baffling thing.”
“That rouge of yours,” I said, giving in. I touched the dip between her collarbones, it was like touching thin paper as breath shifted through it.
“You should run,” she said, mournfully.
“No, you should,” I said. I pulled the bottle out of my pocket and shook it.
“What is that,” she said. Her pupils were huge satin cavities. There was no curiosity in them.
“Run,” I said, and threw some water at her. It didn’t touch her, but she blenched, turned and ran away between the trees.
I followed her. For someone with so little energy, she ran fast. She was really and truly running from me. She crossed the mill pond bridge, sprang right and headed back towards college. I tossed the exorcism water into a bin a second before I caught up with her and grabbed her arm. She slowed down immediately. She was crying angry tears.