In my dorm room, I listened to Jim’s message over and over again, staring out the window at the empty lawn. I was so alone. I loved him. Yet I hated him. I hated how he could make me feel so alive, then invisible, as if he were a magician and I was the rabbit in his hat. I was desperate to see him, forgive him, to banish him from my thoughts. I wished he’d never seen anything rare in me. The prospect of being without him was too painful to imagine.
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.
The next minute was a dream. The realization of what had just happened got bulldozed dumbly around my disintegrating mind.
Jim’s dead. Jim’s dead. This isn’t happening.
Madly I ran around the Foreman’s Lookout, shivering, crying, blowing out candles, stuffing the comforter into my bag. I yanked on my clothes. I scrambled down the ladder four rungs at a time, barely making it around the gaping hole, threw myself into the grass.
I rolled to my feet, staring down at Jim.
Blood was oozing across the side of his face. His eyes were closed. He was dead. I was certain. I had to call the police. Yet, groping around in my backpack for my phone, I couldn’t find it. Had I left it in the Lookout? Looking up, I realized I’d accidentally left the oil lamp burning. It was then that I saw headlights igniting the grass like wildfire. A car. It appeared, bouncing along the rutted road, a loose hubcap, radio blaring.
It was Mr. Joshua’s beat-up red Nissan, the For Sale sign taped to the back window.
Vida Joshua. That was who I thought it was. What was she doing here? Had Jim meant to text her to meet him here, not me?
The question sent me retreating into the dark, sprinting back through the grass. I needed to go home. I needed my mom. I found the opening in the fence and struggled through.
Vida was going to find Jim and call an ambulance.
He would be fine. Everything was fine.
I don’t remember sprinting back through the woods and across campus. The next thing I knew I was barreling up the steps to the fourth floor of my dorm, racing down the hall. That must have been when Martha saw me. She lived on my floor, studied in the corner common room. I hurried to my room and locked the door, stripping naked. Everyone says I’m the good one, the kind one, so that means I am, doesn’t it? It means I always do the right thing.
I folded the La Perla underwear back into the tissue paper at the back of my drawer, returned Whitley’s top to my closet. I found my phone where I’d left it on the bathroom sink. It was 1:02 a.m. No messages. My hands trembling, I managed to wipe the lipstick off, splash my face with cold water, yank the grass and leaves out of my hair.
The realization of what I was doing hit me like a slap in the face. What was I doing, not calling the police? I had to go to Jim. My love. I began to dial 911, but the conversation I was about to have with the dispatcher made me stop.
My boyfriend is lying dead in Vulcan Quarry. He fell. Please send an ambulance.