Dark Rooms (2 page)

“What's that for?” I asked, hurt.

“You're already in college, Grace. Have been since forever.”

Not since forever. Since mid-December. I'd applied early decision to Williams. Nica, a junior, would apply to colleges next year. “So?”

“So you have no excuse for being well-rested anymore. Maddie invited you to the party, too, you know.”

Trying to act casual, as if my interest was low, “Maddie said that? She said I was invited?”

“She implied it. Same thing.”

It wasn't. Not remotely. I flattened the corners of my mouth to show Nica I wasn't fooled, but otherwise let it go. Then I said, “If you're not going to the party with Maddie, where are you going?”

“Out.”

“Hot date?”

She smirked.

“Guess you and Jamie are giving it another shot, huh?” Jamie was Jamie Amory, Nica's boyfriend of two years, her ex-boyfriend of two months.

I tried not to look relieved when she said, irritated, “How many times do I have to tell you? Jamie and I are over.”

“So it's a mystery man.”

That smirk again.

“Not that much of a mystery. I know he likes to brand his girls.”

It was a shot in the dark, but it hit. Nica's jaw dropped. “How?”

“X-ray vision,” I said. And when she just looked at me, “I was brushing my teeth this morning. You came out of the shower in a towel. You reached up to open the medicine cabinet. I saw your armpit.” The tattoo inside her armpit, specifically. An arrow, bloody-tipped.

Groaning, she said, “I'm going to have to throw out every bathing suit, tank top, and sleeveless dress I own now, aren't I?”

“Or stop shaving under your arms.”

“Gross.”

I wanted to ask her who the guy was, but I didn't want her to tell me only because I'd asked. I looked at her. She was staring off into the distance, worrying a shred of dry skin on her lip with her front tooth, like she was making up her mind about something. There was a shard of gold in her left iris, which, in certain lights and at certain angles, turned the eye from dark hazel to pure green. That was happening now.

Finally, her gaze came back to me. “I probably won't be in till late tonight. Can you cover for me with Mom and Dad? Tell them I'm staying over at Maddie's?”

“That depends. Will you answer my questions when you get home?”

She held up her hand, three fingers raised: Scout's honor.

I pretended to think it over. “Fine,” I said, with a sigh.

She nodded her thanks, then opened the side pocket of her racket bag, pulled out her cigarettes, her zebra-striped Bic.

“Come on, Nica, we're still at school,” I said, peering around anxiously as she lit up.

She exhaled. “Relax. We're alone. Want one?”

I made a scoffing noise, a show of waving away her minuscule smoke cloud. “Those things are going to kill you, you know.”

She considered what I'd said, then shrugged. “Like I want to live forever.”

She started laughing. And a second later, to my surprise, I did, too.

I woke up the next morning from a bad dream I couldn't remember—there and gone, too fast to be pinned down—drenched in sweat, heart
pounding. Immediately I was struck by the conviction that something was wrong.

Nica.

I threw off my blanket and ran across the hall, opening her door without knocking. The room was in its usual state of full-scale squalor: unclosed drawers, unclean laundry, undusted surfaces, uncapped pens, lip-gloss tubes, soda and nail-polish bottles. The comforter was pulled down on the bed, and I could see the ghost of Nica's body imprinted on the sheets, the pillows flat and dented. The fleece I'd borrowed from her earlier in the week, returned yesterday, though, was still at the foot, neatly folded, label facing up, which meant she'd slept someplace else. Looking at it, I told myself what I was feeling was anger. If she got caught by Mom and Dad, she'd not only get herself in trouble, she'd get me in it, too, since I'd lied to cover for her.

I stood there for a minute, absently rotating my shoulder, limber after a night's rest and pain-free, trying to think what to do next. My cell vibrated in my pocket. I whipped it out, hoping it was her. It wasn't. Just the weather update I had sent to my phone hourly on game days. No missed calls either, so I called her. Voice mail picked up. At the beep I said, “Thanks a lot, Nica,” in a tone that was angrier than I felt, the anger from before, if anger was ever really what it was, having already dissipated, replaced by unease. But why, I wondered, unease? There wasn't anything weird or out of character about Nica spending the night in a bed that wasn't hers. She sneaked out all the time. Maybe then it wasn't her I was uneasy about. Maybe I was uneasy because I was supposed to play an important match in a couple hours. Telling myself that must have been it—prematch jitters—I slipped a sweater on over my pajamas, headed downstairs.

The house was quiet, and my footfalls seemed to echo on the stairs. I could hear an appliance in the kitchen—the microwave, bleating plaintively because someone stuck something in it, forgot to take
the something out. And then another sound—a tapping, faint. Not Dad. He'd be at Chandler, supervising morning detention. Not Mom, either. She'd be in her darkroom, working. Had already been there for hours, no doubt. Besides, this wasn't her kind of noise. Too furtive, too cautious. There it was again. I stood, rigid, ears aching with the effort of listening. And then, suddenly, I realized: Nica, trying to attract my attention without attracting Mom's. She wanted me to let her in. I flew down the last step and into the kitchen.

It was empty, no one behind the back door. On the other side of the window above the sink, though, was a slender rhododendron branch, knocking against the pane with the breeze. I stared at it, trying to remember if I'd seen Nica take her keys with her yesterday, until the microwave sounded again, and I reached for its handle. Sitting on the rotating glass tray was the bowl of Grape-Nuts and soy milk Mom ate most mornings. I started for the darkroom, about to duck my head in, tell her breakfast was ready. Then, anticipating the way her face would go hard and flat, the snap of her voice, if I interrupted her, broke her concentration, I stopped. I turned instead to the back door, thinking Nica might be outside, waiting until Mom went upstairs to shower.

But the backyard was as empty as the kitchen, not a soul. It was a beautiful morning, though, the sky a deep blue streaked with wispy white, the sun a rich, buttery yellow. I stood there, the rays gently pressing down on my skin, seeping into it, warming it, and breathed in the daffodil-scented air. Through an open window, the sounds of the Wheelers, our next-door neighbors, eating breakfast floated lazily toward me: the murmur of their voices, Mrs. Wheeler, pregnant, asking Mr. Wheeler to bring her her calcium supplements and a glass of orange juice; the soft scrape of a chair leg against tile; the suctiony pop of a refrigerator door; and then the jounce and slosh of a juice carton being shaken. I could hear the delicate wing beats of the sparrows,
fighting for space on the perch of the bird feeder dangling from the yard's lone tree. Somewhere far away, a car engine revved to life, and, beyond that, the dim drone of a lawn mower.

I started walking through the grass, its sweet-smelling wetness sticking to my ankles and feet, over to the fence at the far edge of the property. Our house was owned by the school, and though not quite on campus, very close to it, separated only by a graveyard and a line of trees. When the trees weren't full, you could see clear across the graveyard to Endicott House, Jamie's dorm. They were full now, though, so the view was obscured.

I slid between two posts and entered the tiny woods. As soon as I did, the sunlight and warmth and snatches of family dialogue fell behind me. Inside, everything was green and black and cool and dank, dark with the stench of dampness and shadow, of ferns and fungus. The scrub pines surrounding me had branches growing every which way, tangling together in a sooty snarl that blocked out the sky. Their bark looked mean, rotten, and when I touched it, it crumbled under my fingertips, dry as a scab. Something caught in my throat and I shivered. Wiping my hands on my pajama bottoms, I quickly began walking the thousand or so feet to the other side.

When I reached it, was standing at the edge of the graveyard, I made a scan of the horizon for Nica's fast-moving form. Many a dawn would she slip out of Endicott in one of Jamie's sweatshirts, the drawn hood concealing her hair and most of her face. Cutting through the rows of tombstones and markers, she'd steal in our back door, undetected, except by me, watching from my bedroom window. She and Jamie weren't a couple anymore, but there was a better-than-even chance that the new guy, with whom she'd obviously spent the night, was also in Endicott. That or Minot, the other guys' dorm.

I didn't see Nica as I was hoping to, though. Instead, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a flash of movement or color. Only, when I turned around, no one was there. Suddenly I noticed how quiet everything
had become. Motionless, too, the leaves and trees perfectly still, not so much as a whisper of a breeze on the air. I closed my eyes. My ears filled with the beating of my heart, the in-outs of my breaths, the contraction of my throat muscles—sounds, I realized, that were always there but hidden, tucked away under every other sound—each shift, throb, flutter magnified, made significant, by the deep silence around me. And then a branch snapped and my eyes flew open. Pulling the old cardigan tight around my chest, I turned, started back to the fence.

That's when I heard the police siren in the distance. It ripped into the morning, tearing it in two. For a moment I froze, transfixed. Then I began to run, but heavily, the way you do in nightmares, my limbs clumsy and strange, my feet sinking into the spongy earth, catching there, everything ground down and in slow-motion, and all at once I understood that I
was
in a nightmare, last night's, the one I couldn't remember but now, suddenly, in flashes, could. Still, I hauled my body along, through the trees, over the fence, toward what I knew—knew because it was there, all of it, in that piercing mechanical wail, knew because it was prophesied in my dream, as elusive as a scent, a shadow, a ghost, knew because it was written in the very blood flowing through my veins—would be as bad as it gets.

As I reached the sidewalk in front of my house, I spotted the cruiser with the siren. It was whipping around the corner of Upham, wide into the right lane of Fiske, rear tire bouncing off the median strip. An unmarked sedan followed seconds later. No swirling cherry lights, but I could tell it was a cop car nonetheless. No mistaking it for anything else. And watching the two vehicles cut sharp rights onto Schofield, the street the graveyard entrance was on, I felt my legs buckling, collapsing beneath me. I dropped first to my knees, then to all fours, the shock of certainty hitting me: Nica was dead.

My sister was dead.

Nica's body had been found by Graydon Tullis, a sophomore in Endicott House who'd snuck into the graveyard with a couple of guys from food services to get high before morning detention, the very session my dad was overseeing. Afterward, the food services guys had headed down campus to start their shifts at Stokes Dining Hall, and Graydon had headed east to main campus. He was applying Visine as he walked, chin tilted back, lower lid thumbed down, when he tripped on something, went sprawling into a face-plant. He turned around to investigate, thinking it was a tree root, or one of those baby tombstones your eye can sometimes skip over.

But it wasn't.

It was a pair of feet in frayed-lace Converse. Slowly Graydon's gaze traveled upward, all the while the old camp song “Dem Bones”—
with the toe bone connected to the foot bone, and the foot bone connected to the ankle bone, and the ankle bone connected to the leg bone . . .
—running through his mind. (A dazed-sounding, pouchy-eyed Graydon told me
all this a couple weeks later. Not that I asked. He cornered me as I was ducking out of Stokes, apple in hand, looking for a deserted classroom to eat it in.) And then his gaze arrived at the hipbone connected to the backbone. His first thought was how teeny-tiny the hole was and yet the crazy amount of blood that had leaked from it. His second thought was how the other colors that came out of the body—the greenish beige of snot, the watered-down yellow of pee, the milky off-white of semen—were dull, muted, earth tones. Blood, though, was so vivid. So vivid it looked fake! Like the stuff you squeezed out of a tube on Halloween.

His gaze kept going, up and up and up—
with the backbone connected to the shoulder bone, and the shoulder bone connected to the neck bone, and the neck connected to the head bone
. . . —at last reaching the face. The moment he realized who it belonged to was the same moment he realized he could smell the blood as well as see it. All of a sudden, a wave of nausea washed over him, made him vomit (a weak, indefinite brown) where he knelt.

Stumblingly, he ran to my house. He was hysterical, babbling and breathless, but Mom understood him well enough to let him lead her by the hand to the graveyard. She was the one who called 911.

An ambulance arrived only minutes after the police cars. But it was too late. Nica was already gone, a bullet from a .22 lodged deep in her left kidney. Time of death was established at between 6:45 and 7:30
A.M.
, though she'd likely been shot earlier. The knowledge that it took a while for her to bleed out—hours, possibly—was almost more than I could bear, and I knew if I thought about it, really thought about it, I couldn't. So I didn't think about it. Wouldn't let myself.

It was surprisingly easy not to listen once I set my mind to it. When the details of the murder were told to me, I just sort of let them wash over my brain and out my ears. Which is why I'm not exactly clear
on how the police deduced that whoever killed Nica probably wasn't a stranger to her. But deduce it they did. And when it was discovered that I was the last known person to have seen her alive, they were very eager to talk to me.