People Like Us(45)

I pause outside their room and rap my knuckles on the door. There’s only silence from within.

Nola tries again as I dial Maddy’s number and hold the phone to my ear. Faintly, as if muffled by sheets or piles of clothing, I hear her ringtone coming from inside the room. An odd feeling creeps over me. Maddy’s ringtone is very distinctive. The pulsing beat and bouncy synth sound distorted and far away.

I pound on the door, louder. “Maddy!”

She doesn’t answer, and the call goes to voice mail. I dial again, and the creepy muffled sound starts up again. The hairs stand up on the back of my neck.

Nola places her hand lightly on the door with a puzzled expression. “She’s not home, Kay. It doesn’t mean anything.” She doesn’t sound convinced.

I try the door one more time and then punch it, frustrated.

“Excuse me?”

I turn around. Kelli Reyes, a sophomore who almost made the team, peeks her head out from her room. She has a retainer protruding from her mouth and a matte layer of green skin cream spread evenly over her face. Her eyes seem to pop out from the ghoulish mask, and my heart gallops in my chest at the sight. “Jesus, Kelli.”

“Are you looking for Harriet or Maddy? Harriet is visiting her family for the weekend.” She looks me up and down and I can tell she was in the library last night.

“Maddy,” I say. “Sorry for banging so loudly.”

“Oh no!” she says, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “Not at all. I was just studying for my Latin midterm. Bang away.”

“If you see her, can you ask her to call me right away?”

Kelli points down the hall. “She’s in the private bath.”

I follow Kelli’s gaze. Every dorm has one group bathroom with six shower stalls on each floor, plus one private bath with a tub. Every weekend or holiday in particular there’s a scramble for the private bath. We’re allowed such indulgences as scrubs, salts, bubbles, oils, and creams as long as we then clean the entire bathroom. It’s not a bad deal. With a couple of battery-operated candles and the right music, you can practically create a mini spa retreat. I thank Kelli and head down the hallway, wondering if Kelli fought Maddy for private bath privileges. It looks like Kelli was going for a DIY spa, too.

When I get to the door, I notice a halo of soapy water bleeding out from around the bottom of the door. Soft music is playing inside, the kind they play in spas, soothing harp music with water trickling in the background. Or is that a faucet running? I look down at my sneakers sinking into the soaked carpet and a flicker of dread sparks deep within me.

“Girl in teacup,” Nola whispers.

I nod. A teacup is an awful lot like a porcelain bathtub. I knock softly on the door. “Maddy?”

There’s no reply.

I knock louder. “Maddy?”

My heart slams. Panic is rising in me like a flood. I try to visualize my walls of ice but they are fractured with a thousand spidery cracks as the room fills up with water. I run through the hallway, down the stairs, jumping the last four of each flight, shouting for help. The world begins to tilt when I reach the bottom floor and arrive at the apartment of Mrs. Bream, the housemother. I tear the skeleton key from her hand and make it back up to the top floor before she does, before she calls 911, before the RA has even poked her head out of her room.

Nola stands aside helplessly as I fail three times to turn the key in the lock, and then she closes her hand around mine and we open it together. She gasps and falls back as I finally wrench the bathroom door open.

The first thing I see is the slightly fogged, oval-shaped mirror hanging over the sink, which Maddy had lined with various oils and lotions. On the misty surface is a message written in lipstick, in large capital letters, bold, as if the tube had been pressed hard and carefully run several times along each line. It reads:

NOTORIOUS

RE

BOUND

GIRL

I tear my eyes away to the source of the flood, and silence cuts off my access to sound and speech and movement. My ears, my tongue, my fingers feel numb.

The tub is overflowing, spilling cascades of water over the gleaming white-tiled floor. Maddy’s golden hair floats like a halo above her at the surface of the tub. The rest of her fully clothed body is folded below.





14


That bumps my dead-body count to four. Is there some rule of three? Because when I saw Todd’s body, there was that soft little click, that flicking-on of the switch in the previously unilluminated section of the Kay Donovan complex. The part that knows the depths of my mother’s despair. The part that allows me to do the things I do, because no one can stop me, and nothing really, actually, eventually matters. When I saw Jessica’s body, a tiny, urgent anxiety began to flare up in my chest, a feeling that, until routine resumed, control of my life would not be restored. When I saw Hunter’s poor little pile of bones and fur, raw fear spiked through me, terror that I would be held accountable. Not just for his death, but for all death, for the fact that death and the aftermath of death exist. For Dr. Klein’s sloping posture and ugly little blouse-and-slacks ensembles, for Mom’s lingering pill dependency, for the fact that I will never ever be able to quit soccer or my family would disintegrate into a horror of screaming, twisting madness.

That was when I had a body count of three.

When I see sweet Maddy’s head suspended below the overflowing, rushing water, angelic in the eerie harp music—Maddy, who never had an original mean thought, who only followed me and Tai and Tricia—I crumble onto the thin layer of water on the tile and sob. I press my face against the floor and scream into it, slamming my palms against the tile until I feel a set of arms hook under my shoulders.