“So are you going to tell me what we’re doing yet?” The clang of our soles echoed. We turned onto the second landing. The faint scent of marijuana lingered in the cramped stairwell.
“Again with the ‘we,’” I said coldly, and drew a hood over my ears to mask my dark hair. Near the exit a fire alarm blinked red to show that it was ready. Another taunt. This time the charged memory that resulted brought with it more—torn clothes, ugly tears, a girl too weak to stand. The reason I was here.
I scanned the numbers on the doors of Graves Hall’s second-floor dorms. Every step was purposeful. Efficient. Competent.
A girl squeaked down the hall toward us in shower shoes and a towel. My muscles tensed before she veered off into one of the rooms without sparing us a second glance.
Music trickled through a few of the shut doors and I could imagine the students who lived inside. A studious music major listening to classical. A stoner with his Bob Marley.
“What if Mick’s home?” Lena’s head was on a swivel. For someone else, her nervousness might be contagious. For me it was just incomprehensible.
“He won’t be.”
“How do you know?”
I cut my glance sharply over to Lena. “Because I know, okay?”
“But what about a roommate? He could have one of those.”
I stuffed my hands in my pockets and hunched my shoulders, wishing that I was alone. “That’s what you’re here for.”
“I thought you said you didn’t need me.” Her tone held a hint of triumph.
My finger rubbed the dull side of the unfamiliar blade stowed in my pocket. Now that my knife was hidden and buried in the mud, I’d had to snatch a smaller version with a curved, irregular blade that looked like it was used to peel the skin off things. “I don’t. But you’re here and this way’s easier.”
I located Room 255 three doors from the end of the hallway closest to the boys’ showers. It was an unremarkable door with no hint of the person that had lived inside. I knocked three times and waited. I knocked again and pressed my ear to the wood. When no sound came from the other side, I turned the handle and, to my surprise, it twisted easily underneath my grip. “That was simpler than I planned,” I said. Funny how safe these boys felt, how untouchable. But they weren’t safe now and I’d already proven that they weren’t untouchable.
They’d created a monster.
Beside me, Lena’s breath smelled like a Fruit Roll-Up. “Now what?”
I was already pushing open the door and poking my head inside. My fingers twitched, ready to get ahold of the last scrap of evidence. It was important that they didn’t have the pleasure of owning my misery. Instead my misery would become theirs.
“Watch for anyone coming this way. Three knocks for me to get out.” I stared hard at Lena to make sure she wasn’t wavering. “Got it?”
She nodded. Sweat and cologne hit me squarely in the nose as I sealed myself inside Mick’s dorm room. It was empty. I walked between two twin beds pushed against either side of the room. Sheets draped halfway off the mattress from the one on the left. Dirty boxers and T-shirts covered the foot of the other bed.
Two matching, standard-issue desks stood flush against the window. I studied the photographs taped to the wall beside one of them. I recognized the boy smiling out of them at once. It wasn’t Mick. Instead, it was the one I’d been calling California because of his chin-length hair and flip-flops.
I stared at the photographs feeling like I was staring into an alternate dimension. There California was smiling in each frame with a rail-thin girl whose hair was strawberry blond and nose was dotted with freckles. I recognized her from the walk back from the fraternity house.
I could see her kissing his cheek, legs straddling his waist in a piggyback ride, arms wrapped around each other. White-hot rage scalded my throat like coffee, burning and bitter. California had a girlfriend. And I’d bet a thousand dollars that she didn’t know what a pig he was.
No worries. I would show her.
Before moving over to Mick’s desk, I quickly rifled through California’s belongings until I found a worn paperback copy of Catcher in the Rye with a penciled inscription on the inside cover that read, Property of Jessup Franklin. I punched the name into the notes section of my phone and stuffed it back into my jeans pocket. Another one for my collection.