“Can I help you?” she asked.
Veronica stepped forward. “We knew someone who used to live in this room. We were just hoping to get a look inside. . . .”
Jessica/Rachel stared at us before shaking her head. “How did you get in here? I’m calling security.” She stepped inside the room, opening the door enough for me to glance inside to see the two narrow bunk beds with matching colorful quilts on either side of the tiny space before the door slammed in our faces.
“Let’s go,” Veronica said, tugging on my arm as we walked quickly back down the hallway to the elevators. She paused in front of a door and twisted the knob. “It’s locked. But this is where they found her. Do you sense anything?”
I closed my eyes but heard nothing. I shook my head. “Sorry.”
When the elevator door opened downstairs, we hurried across the lobby toward the exit, looking over our shoulders for campus security. As we reached the safety of the walkway outside, Veronica asked, “Was Adrienne there?”
“Oh, yeah. She was definitely there. I could smell her perfume. I finally remembered the name of that song I kept hearing, and now I can’t get it out of my head. It’s one of those earworm songs that, once you hear it, replays over and over so you can’t forget it no matter how much you want to. It’s an old one—early eighties, I think. My freshman-year roommate was obsessed with eighties music and especially that one song and would play it over and over.”
“What was the song?”
“?‘O Superman.’?”
She stopped suddenly, her face noticeably paler. “By Laurie Anderson?”
“You’ve heard of it? How?”
“That was the CD that was in Adrienne’s Discman when they found her. We could never figure out why, though. She absolutely hated that song.”
“That’s strange,” I said.
“That she hated the song?”
“No—everybody hates that song. I meant that it’s strange that not only was it in her Discman, but she would use that song to lure me upstairs to her dorm room. It must mean something.”
We rejoined the rest of the group, my heart doing its usual flip as I spotted Jack, then immediately falling when I remembered that nothing was settled between us, and he would not be returning home with me.
He walked us to the Farrells’ SUV and waited for Nola to get in. I held back, having no rehearsed words but needing to say something. “Jack . . .”
He looked at me with those eyes and it was all I could do not to throw my arms around him. I realized I was leaning toward him because he gently pressed his hands against my shoulders to steady me. “Yes, Mellie?”
“You left a shelf full of sweatpants and sweatshirts in the closet. So I unfolded everything, made it messy, and tore off the shelf label I made.”
His lips quirked, and I saw a hint of the old sparkle in his eyes. “Well, that’s progress. Congratulations.” He leaned past me to say good-bye to the other occupants of the van, then stepped back. “Good-bye, Mellie,” he said with a brief smile before turning around and walking away. I’d begun to hate those words.
I climbed into the SUV and sat down, aware of something behind my back as I buckled my seat belt. I reached behind me and pulled out a red heart-shaped pillow. I didn’t need to examine it to know it was Adrienne’s with the small careful stitches and ruffled edge. I’d found it in the box of Adrienne’s belongings in Veronica’s attic. The pillow had the odd habit of showing up unexpectedly, regardless of where it had last been placed. I looked up to find Veronica watching, but thankfully Michael was focused on pulling the SUV out onto the street. She raised her eyebrows in question.
“Later,” I mouthed, then placed the pillow in my handbag.
I stared out the window the remainder of the short ride home, with something Veronica had said while we were at the dorm echoing inside my head. I can’t let her down again.
I’d have to ask her what she meant. After I got home and locked myself in the bathroom, where I could cry without Nola hearing me. And after I started a new spreadsheet, one to help me navigate a problem for which I didn’t have a clue where to start.
CHAPTER 3
I sat at the kitchen table with my laptop open to a new blank spreadsheet under the header MELANIE V. 107. One hundred seven was only a guess—the real number was probably much higher—but admitting that my false starts at becoming a better version of myself had reached at least three digits was as far as I was prepared to go right now.
The days of the week sat at the top of each column, but only one row description had been filled in. Get dressed. The number one had been typed under Thursday, today. The curser had been blinking to the left of the second row now for almost thirty minutes.
I took another sip of coffee and winced. Mrs. Houlihan and her superior coffee-making skills would return on Monday. I put down my mug and reluctantly raised my hands before forcing them to type Exercise. Jayne had been calling me daily to start running with her again, but despite how I currently felt, I didn’t hate myself enough to drag myself out of bed before dawn, throw on something that wouldn’t keep me warm enough, and then run.
But it was supposed to be good for me. And it was something I could do with my sister. And it got me outside of the house so I wouldn’t focus on how empty it was. All things the new Mellie needed to embrace to become a better version of herself. Except I imagined I could get the same benefits having a conversation with Jayne over coffee and doughnuts.