Neverworld Wake(74)

I jumped out of bed, threw off my pajamas, and slipped on the sexy lingerie I’d saved up for, the tight white jean shorts Jim liked, the white off-the-shoulder Gucci top borrowed from Whitley. I was going to sleep with him. It was a stupid decision, but it filled me with excitement, a concrete resolution I could hold on to like a towrope. I put on eyeliner and mascara, Whitley’s red MAC lipstick. I pulled my hair out of its usual ponytail so it fell down my back. I pulled on my Converse, threw two candles into my backpack, yanked the comforter off my bed.

Then I went running out to Vulcan Quarry.

By a stroke of luck, I was so distracted by my decision to sleep with Jim that I left my phone on the sink in the bathroom. Later, I would gather that the detectives, pinging the cell towers on the night Jim died, saw that mine hadn’t moved, providing me with an alibi. Yet if they had questioned me, I doubted they would have suspected I was lying. No one ever doubted anything I said.

And they should have.

When I arrived at the quarry it was 12:15. There was no sign of Jim. He hadn’t arrived yet. The night was cool, the sky clear, stars bright. We always met at the base of the Foreman’s Lookout and did the ascent on the ladder together. This time, I went first. I wanted to set everything up, to surprise him. I couldn’t wait to see him, to forget it all, to go back to how things were in the beginning. I was scared too—scared to be with him again, scared of the doubt in my head. As I climbed, I noticed that some of the nails holding the ladder’s wooden rungs were looser than usual. Others were actually missing, especially in the final few feet where you reached the hatch.

Halfway up the ladder I stopped, noticing not just that my hands were shaking, but that I had ripped my entire left shin without realizing it. It was bleeding, gruesome-looking. I looked like a skinned possum. I started climbing down again. I didn’t want Jim to see me like this. I was lopsided, overtired. I was ugly, unlike Vida Joshua. Vida Joshua was a siren. I should go back to my dorm. That was the right thing, the safe thing.

I was almost on the ground when I stopped again. I was being a coward, meek, living so pianissimo, as Jim used to tell me. Why was I always so afraid of things happening to me? I began to climb up again—Carpe noctem! Whitley was always shrieking with her head back. Seize the night. Why couldn’t I do it for once? When I reached the landing, I noticed that some of the nails holding the ladder’s wood rungs were rattling.

I lit the candles in the grimy room. I turned on the oil lamp on the old wood table where a hundred Darrow students had carved their initials. I spread out my comforter, undressed, and waited.

Soon I heard Jim. He was talking to himself, his words slurred.

I rolled to my feet, gathering the comforter around me. I crept to the landing, peering out.

He was halfway up the ladder. He was also drunk, swinging an arm out as he sang something. It was the lyrics to a new song in his musical, lyrics I had written.

“?‘In the dark there grows a tree. / A castle tower shelters thee. When will I stop, when will I see? / There is no poison but for me.’?”

Muttering, he began to climb again. I tiptoed back inside and reclined across the comforter. He’d be here within seconds. It was happening. The thought gave me a strange feeling of emptiness. I was making a mistake. It was obvious. I needed to stay away from Jim. I should be asleep in my room.

At that moment I heard a clanging noise. Jim was screaming.

I leapt to my feet. Three of the rungs by the landing had fallen away. Jim was barely holding on. He was straining to grab the next rung, but it was just out of reach. Gasping, he managed to swing his leg out so his foot rested on one of the crisscrossing beams supporting the tower legs.

“Bee?” He blinked up at me, sweat glinting on his forehead. “Oh, God, Bee. Thank God.” He held out his hand. “Pull me up.”

I froze. He began to shout, his face contorting.

“Beatrice! What’s the matter with you? Pull me up! Beatrice!”



* * *



—

What happened in those four seconds?

I’ll never know.

It was so fast. I saw Jim. Yet I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe.

I wished with all my heart I could say it was just panic, but it wasn’t. It was something else too. A little cave inside my heart. Somehow I knew if I pulled him up I’d never be free of him. Maybe Martha was right. Maybe it was about the lyrics he’d taken from me, albums I’d slid in front of him after he’d been sobbing that he was a hack, that he’d never be as accomplished as his father, that it was all over, his dreams were done. I’d gone into my closet and handed him my collection of dream soundtracks, eleven books of lyrics and drawings I’d worked on all my life for no reason except they were the one place I could be myself. Maybe it was how he had taken them, sniffing as if I’d only handed him a pen when he knew what they were to me, what they had meant, and started copying my rhymes into his notebook. Maybe it was the question that if he could so easily take my words, would he take everything else?

My hesitation lasted only a moment. I sprang to life, racing toward him, wedging my feet in the landing door so they were secure, lying on my stomach, reaching to him.

I was too late.

He fell. His head smashed a wooden beam, his hat flying off. He hit the ground with dull thud.

He lay still, five stories below me, a streak of blood across his cheek.