The Dead Student (19 page)

He felt a momentary twinge of anger.

Everyone is happy when you are normal.

Everyone hates you when you are not.

Really, they fear you, when it is you that has everything to fear. People don’t understand: As you lose your mind, you can also lose your hope.

He took a deep breath. Memory blended with sadness, which re-formed into rage, and he gripped the edge of the desk, steadying himself. He knew that when he allowed the past to intrude on what he was planning—even when it was the past that had created the need—it muddied things.

No one ever came to visit me in the hospital. It was like I was contagious.

No friends.

No family.

No one.

My madness belonged solely to me.

There were no pictures from those hospital months, and none taken after he was released. Then he flipped the pages to the picture he knew was the last in the album, but the most important. It had been taken in the quadrangle outside the building that housed the medical school’s Department of Psychiatry. Five smiling faces. Everyone wearing the same uniform: white lab coat and dark slacks or jeans. They had linked arms around each other.

He was in the center of the photo.

Were they already planning to ruin my career?

Did they know what they were doing to my future?

Where was understanding? Sympathy?

His hair was unkempt, tangled, a long mess, his look furtive behind the smile. He could see how little sleep he’d had, how many meals he’d skipped. He could see how stress was pulling him across hot coals and plunging him into freezing waters. His shoulders slumped. His chest was sunken. He looked slight, weak—almost as if he’d been beaten up or lost a fight. Madness could do that, just as effectively as cancer or heart disease.

Why did I smile?

He stared at the look on his face. He could see hurt and uncertainty behind his eyes.

This pain was truth.

Their embrace, friendly looks, wide, happy smiles, and camaraderie—those were all lies.

Student #5 removed the photo from the glassine sheaf that held it. He reached out and seized a red marker from his desktop. Holding the marker in his hand like a knife, he rapidly drew an X through each face—including his own.

He stared at the defaced snapshot, then walked swiftly into the kitchen. He found a box of wooden matches in a drawer and went to the sink and
struck a light. He let the flame curl over the edge of the picture, holding it sideways, bending it so that the flame would envelop the image before he dropped it into the stainless steel basin. He watched the photo crinkle, blacken, and melt.
Now, all the people in that picture are dead,
he thought.

Killing is making me normal.

Then he waved his hands above the sink.

He didn’t want the smoke to set off an alarm.

15

Unsettling dreams and night sweats filled Andy Candy’s sleep.

Her waking hours—the ones spent apart from Moth—were riven with doubts. She was suddenly immersed in doing things that might be very wrong, and might be very right; it was hard for her to tell. Complicating matters for her was a residual fury that would overcome her at odd moments, when least expected, during which she would find herself picturing what had happened, trying to ascertain the exact moment when she could have changed everything.

There were times when she thought:

I died that night.

The music had been loud. Brutally loud.

Unrecognizable tunes. Incomprehensible rap lyrics that were about pimps, whores, and guns. Bass heavy, hard-driving, throbbing. Ear-splitting. So loud she had to shout to be heard even an inch or two away and her throat had become raw almost instantly. The frat house had been jam-packed. Even moving a few feet one way or the other had been difficult. The heat had been overwhelming. Sweat, slurred words, gyrating bodies,
lights that flickered on and off, red lamps that glowed. Plastic glasses filled with beer or wine being passed overhead. The air was thick with cigarette and marijuana smoke, which mingled with body odors. Occasional shouts, roars of laughter like waves, even screams that might have been joy and might have been panic blended with the relentless music. Hard liquor was swigged from dozens of bottles, shared right and left, guzzled like water.

Not knowing where her date was, she’d fought her way to a side room, hoping to find a little space amidst the press of bodies so she could breathe, all the time telling herself,
Get out of here now because the cops will surely be here soon,
but not listening to her own good advice. The side room was also packed, but the students were jammed back against the walls, creating a small empty space in the center—like a gladiatorial arena. She’d craned her neck to see what everyone was looking at, and as she did this, she heard a wild and unrestrained moan, which was absorbed by cheers, like at a sporting contest.

In the center, a completely naked, heavily muscled boy was sitting on a steel folding chair. His legs were spread wide. She remembered he had a tattoo on one arm—the clichéd Tribal Armband favored by the kids lacking imagination, or else too stoned or too drunk to consider something original when they stumbled into the tattoo artist’s parlor. She had stared at the tattoo for a moment, before focusing on the boy’s erect organ. It was impressive, and he held it like a sword.

In front of him was a naked girl.

She was dancing, twisting her body provocatively, inches away from the boy who’d moaned.

Andy Candy hadn’t recognized her.

As muscular as the boy was, the girl—no more than nineteen or twenty—was statuesque. Flat stomach, large breasts, long legs, and a great mane of dark hair that she shook in time to some inner rhythm. She waved a bottle of Scotch in one hand, poured some of the booze down her chest, licked it from her fingers, then thrust her hips forward as if asking everyone watching to admire her sex, her shaved pubic region. The crowd
cheered as she filled her mouth with liquor, then dropped to her knees in front of the boy—gracefully, Andy Candy had thought then, maybe even athletically. She lowered her mouth, letting Scotch dribble from her lips, then pulled back, teasing. The boy had moaned again, straining with his erection toward her. The girl, playing to the crowd, pointed to the erection, then to her lips, as if asking a question. A cheer went up. Cries of
Yes!
and
Do it!
thickened the air. Another frat member circled around the couple, handheld video camera in his hand, getting a close-up as she waved to the crowd like a politician acknowledging a cheering mob, then pitched forward and seemed to swallow the boy whole. This went on for a few seconds, her head moving up and down rhythmically as she fellated him, before she leapt up. She faced the crowd—about two-thirds boys, but a number of young women, too—and bowed. A performance artist. With a flourish, cupping her arms behind her head to display her coordination and strength, she abruptly turned around, and slowly lowered herself onto him.

Her face broke into a smile, and she issued a long
Ohhhhh
.

The young woman had turned to the frat boy with the camera and made a kissing shape with her lips. She was making love more to the crowd and camera than to the muscled boy behind her.

Each thrust, each gyration, raised another wild cheer. People started to clap in time to each up-and-down movement.

Andy Candy had turned away from the show before completion. She wasn’t a prude—she’d been to enough out-of-control parties in her college years, and she’d seen sexual spectacles before—but this night there was something in the sweaty abandon she’d seen that unsettled her. Perhaps it was the idea that what should have been intimate and private was being displayed so theatrically. She had wondered if the straining erection and the shaved sex even knew each other’s names.

When she turned away, she’d caught sight of the boy who’d ostensibly invited her to the party. He fought his way toward her, glanced over her shoulder, and caught a glimpse of the action in the side room.

“Whoa,” he’d exclaimed. “That’s intense.” His face broke into a grin.

He was a nice enough fellow, she thought, seemed polite, attentive. Sensitive, even. He’d shared his notes on Dickens with her after she’d missed the class on
Great Expectations
with a touch of stomach flu. He came from an expensive suburb. His father was a button-down corporate lawyer and divorced from his free-spirit mother, who now lived with her new family on an avocado farm in California. He’d taken her to dinner once, not a pizza place, but a Chinese restaurant where they’d sat and enjoyed
moo shu
and talked about a writing course they planned to take in the last semester of their senior year. He said he liked poetry. He’d given her a small kiss when he’d dropped her off, and asked her if she might want to go to a party that weekend. Little details—all seemingly benign, and none of which really amounted to who someone was.

“I want to leave,” she’d said.

“Yeah. No problem. We’ll get out of here. Things might be getting out of hand. But you look like you can use a bit of something strong first.”

She’d nodded.

Was that where she went wrong? No. It was going to the party in the first place.

“Here, take mine. I’ll get another. It’s too hard to fight your way to the bar.”

Mine. That’s what he’d said. But it wasn’t his. It was always for me and me alone.

He’d handed her a large plastic cup filled with ice and ginger ale mixed liberally with cheap Scotch. The same brand probably that the naked girl was drinking.

I hate the taste of Scotch. Why did I take it? Trust.

She’d ignored the first rule of college parties:
Never drink anything that you haven’t seen opened and poured.

She didn’t connect the slightly chalky taste with anything suspicious, and certainly not the GHB that liberally laced the drink.

She had gulped it down.

Thirsty. I shouldn’t have been so thirsty. If I’d only taken a modest little sip, then handed it back.

The date had smiled.

Rapist. What does a rapist look like? Why don’t they wear a special shirt or have a special mark? A scarlet R, maybe. Maybe they should sport a scar or a tattoo—something so I could have known what was going to happen to me after I passed out.

“Okay,” he said. “Well fortified. You look a bit pale. Come on—I put your coat upstairs in my room. Let’s get it and get the hell out of here, maybe go get a cup of coffee someplace.”

No coffee. There was never going to be any coffee.

It took a few minutes to work their way through the throngs, and she was already dizzy by the time they reached the stairs. The music seemed to have gotten louder, all guitars and shrieks and drums pounding out a violent backbeat.

“Hey, you okay?” the nice-guy date asked midway up the stairs.

Solicitous but not surprised. That should have told her something.

“A little woozy,” she said. “Feel a little weird. Must be the heat going to my head.”

She’d slurred her words, but she wasn’t drunk. She remembered that detail afterward.

She’d steadied herself with the handrail.

“You need some fresh air,” he said. “Here, let me help you.”

Nice. Polite. Gentlemanly. Thoughtful.
He said he liked poetry.
He took her arm to help her, except they were heading upstairs, not outside.

She knew she needed the air.

She didn’t get any. Not for some time.

I should have turned him in. Called campus security. Filed a complaint. Gone to the police. Hired a lawyer.

Why didn’t you?

I don’t know. I was lost. I was confused. I didn’t know what happened to me.

And so, you let him off the hook.

Yes. I guess so.

This, too, she remembered: nausea overcoming her in the morning. Violent, dizzying, gut-wrenching nausea. And then again—the same sickness repeated, slightly more than a month later.

And one additional memory: the nurse at the clinic kept calling her
dear
as she helped her up and fitted her onto the examination table. The instruments were stainless steel, but glistened so brightly she imagined she might have to shade her eyes. They had knocked her out with anesthetics, and told her she wouldn’t feel any pain.

Physical pain, that is.

The other kind was constant.

The guilt made her cry. Less as the days went by, but she could still feel her eyes filling at what she imagined were random moments. Right and wrong blended within her into an unmanageable tension, and even if it was dissipating, it was slow to leave her. She told herself that there had to be a faster way out of the spider’s web of emotions that trapped her.

Yes,
Andy Candy thought,
maybe I should go back to school and kill the frat boy. Moth will help me, after we kill whomever it is he wants to kill.

That would make things even for everyone.

Moth was waiting for her outside his apartment. He looked hesitant, as if he was trying to make up his mind about something.

She pulled to the curb but Moth didn’t immediately get into the car. Instead he leaned down, and she lowered the window. A blast of hot air penetrated the car interior.