“It’s just,” Tina continued, “I’m studying this stuff, you know? Why people are the way they are and how I can help them, and it’s like I’ve seen the light, or I’m seeing it, at least, and it’s helped me so much, and I want to help everyone around me too.”
Allen came into the room then, carrying a place mat, napkin, fork, and knife. He went about setting a place for Tina at the head of the table. “She doesn’t need a fork and knife for a sandwich,” I snapped at him. I knew he knew she didn’t, that he was only doting on her, and I wanted him to feel as stupid as I did for thinking Tina was here for any reason other than to psychoanalyze my mind. I walked over and collected the silverware, and that’s when I realized—he had set down the crude portrait he’d drawn of me as the place mat.
“You are in big trouble,” I hissed.
“I couldn’t find the place mats!” Allen cried. He sounded sincere, but I was too mortified to give him the benefit of the doubt. “Here, I’ll turn it over if it bothers you so—”
I snatched the drawing off the table and tore it to shreds, right in front of Allen’s veined, anemic face. He screamed like I used to, right before the nurse stuck the rubber bite block between my lips. “I hate you!” he cried. “I hate you so much!”
“Good!” I shouted.
Allen started to sob. “I’m telling my dad! He hates you too! Everyone hates you! Grandpop hated you!”
I raised my hand and experienced the almost erotic pleasure of Allen cowering. But before I could deliver the blow, Tina grabbed my wrist, the pads of her fingers pressed into the flare of my pulse. I hadn’t even heard her come up alongside me, and a strange, thrilling second passed, one in which I allowed her to restrain me.
“You’re better than they are,” she said into my ear. I had no idea who they were, but somehow I knew she was right.
Allen turned to her, tears running down his face and snot puddled in the bow of his lip, and he spit on her. He spit on her. Tina looked down at the glob of saliva on her soft cashmere sweater, then back at me, aghast. What the hell are you doing here? I swore her expression said.
“I don’t know what’s gotten into you,” I growled at Allen, seizing him by the back of the neck and forcing him up the stairs. “You are going to take a time-out until you calm down.”
Allen was inconsolable, wailing that he hated me, he hated Tina, he was going to tell, and I would be sorry. I shoved him in my bedroom and slammed the door. When I came back downstairs, the scraps of Allen’s drawing had been thrown in the trash, and Tina had left without me.
PAMELA
Tallahassee, 1978
Day 8
Two days after Denise’s funeral, a few of the Turq House guys came over to clean up the blood. One of the officers recommended a solution of two parts bleach, one part water, with a wink, as though he were letting us in on the secret ingredient in an old family recipe.
The room that Eileen and Jill shared was a nightmare. I never got over it. How the girls in the bloodiest room were the ones who survived.
There wasn’t much to do in Denise’s room, though I spent the longest in there, hiding anything that might embarrass her in front of all the cute shaggy-haired boys who would have jumped at the chance to take her out, open the car door for her, buy her dinner, go home and tell their friends—I kissed Denise Patrick Andora. Guys included her middle name when they talked about her, like she was the serial killer.
The tube of hair lightener that she used on Abbott and Costello—right sideburn was Abbott, left Costello, and don’t you dare mix them up—went in a drawer, along with the pair of pantyhose that had seen better days, left to dry on the inside knob of the door. The photographs of friends and prints of surrealist masterpieces I left hanging above her bed, but I took down the astral page she’d torn out of that month’s Cosmopolitan, from the comprehensive booklet the editors put together every January to help readers plan “the best year of their lives.” I removed the tack and sat cross-legged on Denise’s bed to read her horoscope. In June, Denise was supposed to reorganize office procedures, slipping into her boss’s shoes as if they belonged to her (which soon they would). According to her planetary prophecy, she would find herself in Lisbon or Madrid come September. Her most dynamic day of the year was still ten months away. I began to vibrate, inwardly, a buzzing under my skin that I can only describe as the instinct to kill. There was something about Denise’s excitement for a future she would never get to experience that made me murderous with grief. I couldn’t stand the idea of anyone coming into her room and pitying her, or, worse, judging her for having the audacity to make plans when she should have known God would laugh. That was a real thing people said down here, but fuck God for laughing and fuck Cosmopolitan too. I was a Virgo, and nowhere in my horoscope did it foretell any of this.
The last thing I did for Denise: I got down on the floor and I put my nose to the carpet where the hair mist bottle had been cast aside. The officers had long since removed it, put it in a box with all the other evidence, but I wanted to make sure it hadn’t left a stain, that innermost private smell. There was a lot that others would expect of me over the next year and a half of my life, but this was the only thing I knew Denise would ask if she had the chance: to do what little I could to allow her to hold her head high, even in death.
There was no stain and no smell, but I cracked the window anyway, and then I went outside and jogged three and a half blocks in the cold drizzle to the iron university gate, where I pulled up some of the purple cornflowers planted at the base of the brick pier. Sophomore spring, a Seminole flute player performed on Landis Green, telling sunbathers that at one time, this land was nothing but a field of purple cornflowers, which the Muscogee relied on to pack the wounds of their warriors.
Back at The House, I arranged the flowers in a water glass and placed it on the windowsill. I practiced walking in, taking exaggerated inhales at the moment I crossed the threshold, checking to make sure the hallway didn’t smell any different than the room. When all I could detect was the damp mulch of the flower beds and my own hair spray, some chemical activated by the rain, I told the boys to come upstairs.
* * *
Bernadette accompanied me to the hardware store for new combination locks, to the Northwood department store for new linens, and finally to Hartford Appliances for new mattresses, carpet swatches, and a used air-conditioning unit if they had one. It was going to take some cajoling to get anyone to move into Jill and Eileen’s room, potentially for years to come. I had the next generation of The House to think about, my successors, their chapters. I was under enormous pressure to set them up for success, and rooms with their own personal air-conditioning unit were currency back then, especially in the Panhandle, where October may as well have been July.
“Here’s one for only sixty-five dollars,” Bernadette said, turning over a price ticket with a red slash-through line.
I crossed the warehouse floor to examine the unit. It was a GE Slumberline with wood paneling. It should have cost a lot more. “Does it worry you that it’s on sale at that price?” I ran a finger through a grate, inspecting it for grime. “Something’s got to be wrong with it.”
“The next cheapest one is ninety-five dollars,” Bernadette said.
I grimaced. We’d nearly drained the semester budget that morning, though I had assurances that it would be replenished imminently. Brian’s dad had received the compensation claim form and was fast-tracking it through the approval process. Still, I felt an acute sense of anxiety every time I handed over the Panhellenic credit card, like I was a corrupt politician misappropriating community funds.