You Owe Me a Murder(21)

“You heard Kim tell him to fuck off,” Kendra spat.

I winced. Everyone around Kendra and me had backed up a step as if we might explode. I scrambled to say something other than the truth. “He accused me of cheating on the scavenger hunt yesterday. He was mad that he didn’t win.”

“The guy could be a real asshole,” Jamal added. Jazmin punched him hard in the shoulder. Jamal rubbed it, looking confused. “What? He could.”

“There’s no reason to speak badly about the dead,” Sophie chided him, but at the same time patting his arm tenderly. “Everyone’s upset, but we’re supposed to be a team. Let’s not say anything we’ll regret when we don’t even know what happened.”

“Kim knows,” Kendra said. “You were the person closest to him when it happened. You must have seen something.”

I shook my head, feeling the panic return. “I didn’t see anything!”

Alex took a step closer to me and I had to fight the urge to fall into him, to let him physically support me. “I was right there and I didn’t see what happened either,” Alex said. “It was packed on the platform and things happened fast.”

“What do we do now?” Jazmin asked.

Jamal shrugged.

“Tasha will be back down in a bit,” Sophie said. “Until then we should stay put.”

“Screw that.” Kendra stood. “I need to get out of here.” She stomped out of the room, shooting daggers at me as she passed. She clearly thought I was somehow to blame. I drew back, like a turtle into its shell, and Alex placed a steadying hand on the small of my back.

I should have stayed there with Connor. With his body. I’d just run away like the others. Even though I’d been mad, he deserved better than that. He shouldn’t have been left alone. I should have stayed so that people would have seen him as a person, not just a mess to be cleaned up. I owed him that for how I used to feel.

“Don’t let Kendra get to you. She’s just freaked out,” Alex said.

“Dude, we’re all freaked out,” Jamal said.

Sophie tugged her shirt into place. “Okay, who wants some more tea?”

I could see her trying to force a sense of normality back onto our lives, to roughly stitch together who we had all been this morning to the raggedy torn edge of who we were now. I appreciated that she was trying to make things right, but I wasn’t sure they ever could be again.





Nine


August 19


12 Days Remaining


The following morning, our group met in the cafeteria, but no one was remotely interested in eating breakfast. Jazmin picked at some toast. Jamal and Alex had taken food, but their scrambled eggs were turning into rubbery blobs, the baked tomato bleeding red watery liquid on their plates. I kept checking the door, but Miriam still hadn’t come down. Other students would glance over at our table and then look away. No one wanted to sit near us. It was as if our tragedy might be contagious and they wanted to give us a big berth—?but not so much space that they wouldn’t be a part of the drama. I wanted to hurl my silverware at them to make them stop staring. What had happened to us wasn’t entertainment.

I closed my eyes and when I opened them I saw Connor. He sat alone at a table in the back. I blinked, but he was still there, watching our group. I wanted to point him out to the others, but I was paralyzed. It had all been a horrible mistake. He was okay. There would be some explanation of what had happened.

Except there was none. I’d seen his body. I couldn’t stop seeing it. This wasn’t real. But Connor was looking at me, his mouth in a grim tight line. His expression was one I knew all too well—?disappointed and exasperated. He’d worn it when he told me that I needed to stop following him around. When I begged him to give us, to give me, another chance, even though I knew he wouldn’t. It was the same look he’d had yesterday when he accused me of using Alex to make him jealous. He looked disgusted with me.

A thick rivulet of dark blood started to run from his hairline down the side of his face. It was a rich red. Then another, and another. I blinked and he was gone.

A night of almost no sleep was getting to me. I felt less connected to reality. At one point last night I’d woken up to realize I was standing in front of the sink in the community bathroom and didn’t even know how long I’d been there.

I pinched the bridge of my nose. The smell of bacon repulsed me.

“How’s Miriam doing?” Jamal asked.

Jazmin shrugged. “The residence arranged for a doctor to come last night. She gave Miriam something to put her out.”

“I saw Tasha around midnight, just sitting in the lobby. She had to talk to Connor’s parents and tell them what happened.” Jamal pushed his eggs around on his plate.

“Are they coming here?”

Jamal put his fork back down. “I dunno. There’s no real reason for his parents to show up. It’s not like he’s missing or anything. I would guess the police will ship . . .”—?his Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat—?“the body back.”

Everyone’s voice was hushed, as if we were in a church. I closed my eyes, willing the image of Connor out of my head. It kept popping up like a horror show jack-in-the-box. All night I’d start to fall asleep and then would jolt awake thinking of him, picturing his skewed eye looking up at me.