The Last Housewife (8)
Today there were students everywhere: crossing the lawns, jogging down the side of the road, trickling in and out of Davis. It hadn’t occurred to me they’d be back already, but of course—it was nearly Labor Day. If I remembered right, school would’ve started about a week ago. They’d had a death on campus before fall semester even began, but you couldn’t tell by the way the students buzzed around, calling to each other and laughing.
They hadn’t changed much since my time. Kids with brightly dyed hair, septum piercings, undercuts and side shaves; others with long, scraggly hair, defiant acne, thrift-store clothing. The campus was a sea of black, rainbow-flag shirts the lone exception.
Whitney: the most progressive school in America, according to the Fiske Guide to Colleges. How we’d groaned, Laurel and I, whenever someone said, “Whitney—that’s the school for commies and lesbos, right?” Clem had loved it, would always say, “Damn straight.” And the truth was, Laurel and I had liked the school’s reputation, too, no matter how much we complained.
We’d made our choice, after all, had come here for a reason. For me, it had been an act of defiance, of self-naming, and so no matter how hard I rolled my eyes, inside I cherished what attending meant about me. The reputation was a shield, a suit of armor I was determined to grow into. We’d marched in the quad for equal pay, signed petitions, and watched ads from the fifties in our history of gender class, snickering at the women vacuuming in black and white, those poor, blind fools.
None of it had saved us.
Laurel had died a week before school started. That meant campus had been much quieter that day, and the next when her body was found. I was suddenly desperate to talk to the person who’d found her, to know exactly what they’d seen. But without help from the police, I had no idea where to start.
Up ahead on the left rose KPR, the three largest, newest dorms—at least when we went here. I counted as I passed: Kimball, Penfield…and Rothschild. Where we’d lived junior and senior years, at least on paper.
Rothschild’s redbrick walls, long, slender white columns, and tall windows were unchanged. If anything was different, it was me. Where once I’d coveted this place, looked at it with longing, now it looked painfully ordinary. Nowhere close to my Highland Park house, beautiful and begging on its knees.
I dragged my eyes away, knowing the Performing Arts Center came next. I turned right, sliding into the parking lot across the street, near Lynd House. The simple tug of my hand, leading me to the right place—more muscle memory than anything—filled me with a sudden swell of profound, almost desperate gratitude.
I parked and pulled my keys from the ignition. They hadn’t changed it, then. Hadn’t moved the buildings like chess pieces or torn down the places I remembered. Part of me had feared it, after eight years away: coming back to find campus unrecognizable. To find all that was left of my life with Laurel and Clem were the memories inside my head—such an unreliable place to store such precious things. But the campus I remembered was still here, which confirmed what happened had been real. No one could say otherwise. No one could take that away from me.
I gripped the steering wheel. And this time, I felt it when I started to cry.
Chapter Four
I met Laurel Hargrove twelve years ago, a few weeks after the start of freshman year. I’d lived on the other side of campus then, in McClellan, and classes had just started. Those classes brought temporary friends, girls who invited me to come with them to parties so they didn’t have to go alone. Some of the parties were in Sussman Woods, some in Pinehall, but the best were off campus, in the houses students shared by the half dozen, all crammed in, or else in ones their rich parents had bought them, letting them live alone like young millionaires.
That Saturday’s party had been at one of the crammed houses. When I arrived with a group of girls from art history, we were introduced to at least five guys who lived there, all of them varying degrees of Whitney-unkempt-intellectual, none of them interesting enough to make me want to break away. The party turned into a rager, and everyone I came with got too drunk on cheap beer. We sang to Arcade Fire, tripped over tables, broke bottles out on the back patio where the smokers held court. And at the end of the night, we all stumbled home, holding on to each other.
When I woke the next morning in my single dorm, mouth full of cotton, I’d groped for my phone, then tore through my room—twice—before admitting I’d left it at the party and would have to go back. Even at eighteen, I knew the last thing you wanted to do with a party was look it square in the face in the light of day.
A shirtless guy, hair past his shoulders, answered the door, shrugging when I asked if I could look around. He quickly slumped back upstairs, and I was on my own. The house was trashed but eerily quiet, like a battleground in the aftermath of combat, all the boys who lived there either outside or out cold. I’d just found my phone wedged into a couch cushion—miracle of miracles—when I heard it: a single, heartrending sob.
I froze. There it was again, the sound of pain raked with fear. Goose bumps crawled up my arms. The crying sounded like it was coming from underneath the floorboards. I crept through the house until I found a set of recessed stairs in the corner of the kitchen.
It was pitch-black wherever the stairs led. In Texas, we didn’t have many basements, so the mere presence of this subterranean layer struck me immediately as sinister.