I went into room twelve on the right side of the hall and hollered for the girls in there to call the police. When they asked why, I had to stop and think for a moment. I do not remember saying this, but the author of one of the more ethical true-crime books wrote that I did. “Jill Hoffman has been slightly mutilated,” I was alleged to have said, calmly, and then I walked at an unhurried pace to the bathroom, got a bucket from under the sink, and went into Jill’s room, thinking I was going in there to scrub a stain out of the carpet.
Jill’s room was wet, her sheets submerged in a dark, oily spill, the yellow curtains splashed with so much blood they strained on their hooks, heavier than they’d been seventeen minutes ago. Her roommate, Eileen, was sitting up in her bed, holding her mangled face in her hands and moaning mama in her low country twang. Eileen was a loyal listener of Pastor Charles Swindoll’s radio show, and though I was not at all religious, she’d gotten me hooked too. He was always saying that life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you react to it.
I shoved the bucket under Eileen’s jaw and pried her hands away from her face. Blood and saliva hailed the metal base, indeed sounding so much thicker than water.
“Take this,” I said to a junior who had followed me into the room. She turned her face away, gagging, but she held that bucket for Eileen until the ambulance arrived. “Don’t let her cover her face or she’ll choke.”
I went left out of Jill and Eileen’s room, toward my own. It was just like taking rounds at chapter on Monday evenings. The count started at the front.
Most of the girls were startled awake as I barged through their doors and hit the lights, raising the backs of their hands to their eyes, tonguing sleep crust from the corners of their mouths. Though their faces were scrunched up irritably, they were at least in one piece. Insanely, I started to wonder if Jill and Eileen had gotten into a fight with each other, if things had perhaps gotten out of hand. But then I got to room eight. A girl named Roberta Shepherd lived in room eight. Her roommate was away on a ski vacation that weekend, and unlike the others, Robbie did not moan and groan when I told her to wake up and turn on her light.
“Robbie,” I repeated in the schoolmarm voice they all mocked me for behind my back. “I’m sorry, but you have to wake up.” I was stepping into the room, my adrenaline performing the function of courage. But it turned out there wasn’t a need to be brave. Robbie was asleep with the covers pulled up under her chin. I walked in and touched her shoulder and told her that Jill and Eileen had been in an accident and the police would be here any moment.
When she still refused to respond, I rolled her onto her back, and that’s when I saw the thin scribble of red on the pillow. Nosebleed. I patted her on the shoulder assuredly, telling her I used to get them when I was upset too.
Out of nowhere there was a man in a uniform by my side, bellowing and blustering at me. The medic! Get the medic! I went out into the hallway, feeling at first wounded and then incensed. Who was he to yell at me in my own house?
The hallway seemed to have morphed in the brief time I’d spent in Robbie’s room, into a crawl space of surrealism, crackling with the radios of pipsqueak campus officers not much older than we were. Girls wandered the halls wearing winter coats over their nightgowns. Someone said with total confidence that the Iranians had bombed us.
“There’s a weird smell coming from Denise’s room,” reported Bernadette, our Miss Florida and, as treasurer, my second in command. Together we went around the curve in the hallway, sidestepping two slack-mouthed and useless officers. I wondered if maybe Denise had forgotten to wrap up her paint palette before going out for the evening. Sometimes she did that, and it emitted an odor like a gas leak.
Denise was someone who hated to be told what to do. She was bullheaded and talented and conceited and sensitive. Our friendship had not survived the role I had stepped into willingly, one where it was my mandate to make sure everyone followed the rules, no matter how pointless and archaic Denise thought they were. But still I loved her. Still I wanted her to have the big, swaggering life she was destined to have, though I had come to accept it would likely not involve me.
The moment I walked into her room, I knew. I knew. I’d only lost her sooner than I’d readied for. Denise was sleeping on her side with the covers pulled up over her shoulder. It had to be close to eighty degrees in the room, and the air was sick with a fetid bathroom smell.
Bernadette was physically restraining me, telling me to wait for the medic, but I wriggled free from her grasp. “She’s a sound sleeper,” I insisted in a strangled, furious voice. Whatever Bernadette was implying, whatever she was thinking—she was mistaken.
“I’ll be right back,” Bernadette said, and then she banged her elbow painfully on the doorframe as she turned to run down the hall.
As though she had been waiting for us to be alone, Denise’s hand shot straight up into the air, a stiff-armed salute. “Denise!” My laugh sounded deranged, even to my own ears. “You have to get dressed,” I told her. “It’s a Code Bra. There are policemen everywhere.”
I went over to her, and though I continued the ruse that she was only dreaming, I understood enough to cradle her in my arms. Her dark hair was studded with bits of bark, but unlike Jill’s and Eileen’s, it was dry and soft as I stroked it and told her again that she needed to dress. There was not a scratch on her face. It would have mattered to Denise that she left this earth unscathed.
I pushed the covers off her—she had to be hot—and found that although she still wore her favorite nightgown, her underwear was balled up on the floor, next to an overturned Clairol hair mist bottle. I did not understand how this was at all possible, but the nozzle top was gummed over with a dark substance and a clot of wiry dark hair, the kind of hair that gets stuck in your razor when you shave before going to the beach.
I felt a hand on my shoulder, nudging me out of the way, and that man was by my side again, the one who’d yelled at me. He dragged Denise out of the bed and onto the floor. I told him her name and that she had an allergy to latex. She had to be careful what paints she stored in the room because of it.
“That’s good to know,” he said, and I forgave him then, because he was so gentle with Denise as he pinched her nose and lowered his face over hers. She had fallen back asleep, but when she woke again, I would tell her that the man who’d saved her was handsome and not wearing a wedding ring. Was a medic the same thing as a doctor? Denise was the type to wind up with a doctor. Maybe this would be the story of how she met her husband, and someday soon I’d be telling it at her wedding.
January 15, 1978
3:39 a.m.
The police officer upstairs told us to go downstairs, and the police officer downstairs told us to go back upstairs. We encountered a different officer on the second floor, and this one told us in an exasperated voice that he really needed us to stay in one place and not disturb anything, and so I was the one to make the call. We’d sequester ourselves in my presidential palace.
My room had double floor-to-ceiling windows, directly above the white railing with the bronze Greek lettering. With the drapes buckled, the windows looked out over the white-bricked walkway where Denise had drawn our swirly Greek script in industrial chalk at the start of the semester.
Someone tugged on the drapery wand, and blue and red fulminated the room. “Another ambulance is here,” she really didn’t need to announce.
A few of the girls went over to the window to see for themselves. There must have been about thirty of us crammed in that room, and the smell—of night cream and beer breath—remains embedded in some primordial olfactory nerve of mine.
“Three ambulances.”
“Seven cop cars.”
“I count six.”
“Six. I feel so much better now.”