Rooms(14)

Splooge. Derrick had led the chant, and everybody had picked up on it. Splooge. Splooge. Splooge.

He hadn’t even buckled his belt before fleeing. As he walked back to campus, the snow stinging his cheeks like new tears, he’d known that he was finished at Andover.

Sometimes he fantasized about killing Derrick, instead of himself. But he knew he’d never have the guts for it.

There was a footstep outside, in the hall. Before Trenton had time to put away the gun, Minna pushed open the door, carrying yet another box.

“Oh,” she said. “Did you decide to help after all?”

Trenton had successfully avoided helping for most of the morning, claiming that his leg was acting up. He was pretty sure Minna knew he was faking, but she wouldn’t say anything; besides, she had no right, after what she had done.

That was life, Trenton thought: people knew your secrets, but if you had shit on them, too, they couldn’t rat you out. So everything evened out, piled under one huge shit sandwich.

Minna dropped the box, which was empty, and nudged it with a foot to turn it right side up. “You found Dad’s dirty little secret, I see. One of them, anyway.”

Now that she had acknowledged the gun, he felt he could safely return it to the drawer. He was relieved when it was out of his hands, and he opened a few drawers casually, so Minna might think he’d just been rooting around in the study, idly curious, when he’d happened on the gun. “I was just looking at it,” he said.

“You weren’t planning on shooting anyone?” she said.

“Not today,” Trenton said. He wasn’t sure if he was making a joke or not.

“I might shoot Mom,” Minna said matter-of-factly. Some of her hair had fallen out of her ponytail and she brushed it back with a wrist. “We haven’t even made a dent in this room, have we?”

In one of the lower desk drawers, Trenton found a half-dozen cards, stuffed haphazardly on top of some ink cartridges. He opened one and jerked back in his chair. “Ew.”

“Ew what?”

“Hair.” He held up a small brown curl, held together by a faded blue elastic. There was no signature on the card. No message, either. Just the words that had been printed: Thinking of you.

Minna stood up quickly, snatched the card and the lock of hair from him, and tossed it back in the drawer. “Don’t touch Dad’s stuff,” she said.

“I thought I was supposed to be helping,” he said.

“Well, you’re not.” She slammed the drawer closed with a shin. She stood for a minute, massaging her temples, and Trenton thought viciously that she would probably look just like his mom in a few years.

“I’m getting old,” she said, as if she knew what he’d been thinking. Then Trenton felt guilty.

“You’re twenty-seven.”

“Twenty-eight next month.” She moved another box—this one full of books—from the chair opposite the desk onto the floor and sat down with a small groan and closed her eyes. She said, “Someone died in here, you know.”

Trenton felt the tiniest flicker of interest. “What do you mean?”

“Someone was shot. In here. Years ago, before Dad bought the house. There were brains splattered all over the wall.” She opened her eyes. “I remember Mom and Dad talking about it when we first moved in.”

It was the first interesting thing Trenton had ever heard about the house. “How come you didn’t tell me before?”

Minna shrugged. “You were so little. And then I must have forgot.”

Trenton turned this piece of information over in his mind and found that it gave him a little bit of pleasure. “Like . . . a murder?” That word, too, was pleasurable: a distraction, a temporary lifting away from the everyday. Like being just a little drunk.

“I don’t know the whole story,” Minna said. She seemed to lose interest in the conversation. She started picking out dirt from underneath her nails.

In the quiet, Trenton heard it again. A voice. Not quite a voice, though. More like a shape: a solidity and pattern to the normal creakings and stirrings of the house. It was the way he’d felt as a kid listening to the wind through the trees, thinking he could make sense out of it. But this wasn’t just his imagination.

There were words there, he was sure of it.

“Do you . . . do you hear that?” he ventured to Minna.

“Hear what?” Minna looked up. “Did Amy shout?”

Trenton shook his head.

Minna tilted her head, listening. She shrugged again. “Nada.”

Trenton swallowed. His throat felt dry. Maybe something had gone haywire in his head after the accident. Like a popped fuse or something. Because directly after Minna had spoken, he heard the word, uttered clearly in the silence.

The word was: Idiot.





ALICE

How do ghosts see?

We didn’t always; it had to be relearned.

Dying is a matter of being reborn. In the beginning there was darkness and confusion. We learned gropingly. We felt our way into this new body, the way that infants do. Images began to emerge. The light began to creep in.

Now I see better than I did when I was alive. I never liked to wear my glasses, and by the time I was thirty, I couldn’t see from one side of the parlor to the other without squinting.