People Like Us

by Dana Mele

I set my phone to silent and study straight through dinner. My phone lights up repeatedly and I clock in thirty-seven missed calls and texts from Maddy, Spencer, Brie, and Nola—a new record. Spencer wins with a string of fifteen spanning from six to six thirty, mostly asking where I am; Maddy close behind with seven calls and three texts telling me to call her STAT. By seven forty-five, my stomach feels like it’s digesting itself. There’s a knock at my door, and when I open it, Nola sashays in as if last night had never happened. She kicks aside a mound of clothes, places a box of French pastries on my bed, and opens her laptop.

  “The timer waits for no one.”

  I linger by the door, unsure what to say. Last night was horrible. I don’t know how she can even face me after I failed to stand up for her. On top of that, my room is a total mess. I’ve skipped laundry day for two weeks and have been recycling everything but underwear. Even socks.

  She looks me up and down. “Get it together, Donovan. It’s game time.” She kicks off her shoes and removes her coat and hat and begins untangling knots in her damp hair. She wears a pair of leggings and an off-the-shoulder T-shirt with a graphic of a creepy alien in a blazer brandishing a machete over a frightened ingenue’s head. ASTROZOMBIES! IN DELUXE COLOR! is printed at the top.

  “Cute shirt,” I say, trying to sound sincere. Maybe not successfully.

  She eyes my dress, a Gucci zip-up with ruffle details and navy and red trim. “Nice dress. Did you sew it together from a pile of old school uniforms?”

  I blush. Tricia had rejected the gift from her parents because it resembled our uniform too much. I don’t think they look anything alike, and it’s a drop-dead dress. But then, I don’t get many opportunities to own dresses like this, and I don’t turn them down.

  “Sorry,” Nola says, sighing. “I’m just in a bad mood. It looks good on you. You look like my sister. And she’s perfect.” She smiles with overtly false enthusiasm.

  “I had one of those.” I absently pick up a picture of my family from my desk and slide it behind my back.

  “A flawless sister?”

  “Sibling. A brother.” I turn the picture facedown, not wanting to get into the had part. “He was the baby who slept through the night and potty trained himself while he was still crawling. According to my parents, I screamed through the night, wet the bed, needed braces, and got into schoolyard fights. You know. He was the easy one.”

  Nola groans and kicks a pillow. “Why does easy equal good? Everything worth doing is hard. Like, I really struggled out there on the soccer field.”

  I purse my lips. “Maybe that one isn’t worth it.”

  She blinks. “We have a deal.”

  “We have so much else going on. You’re a dancer, right?”

  She curls her legs up under her and casts her eyes down. “Bianca was a dancer. I do theater. I don’t even know why I’m trying.”

  “Bianca’s your sister?”

  She nods. “Unfortunately.”

  I notice her lower lip trembling and sit down next to her. “Granted, I haven’t seen you perform onstage, but you are a dancer. You don’t walk to class, you ballet to class. You plié without realizing it. It’s obvious how much time you spend practicing.”

  She laughs, but shakes her head. “It’s not enough. My parents need me to be Bianca.”

  That strikes a nerve. I haven’t been able to shake the feeling since Todd died that the only way to make things right is to fill every gap his death left, to accomplish everything he would have accomplished. To meet every expectation my parents had of him. In essence, to become him. “Believe me. I know the feeling.”

  She squeezes my hand tentatively and for a moment there’s an awkward silence. Then she sighs and pulls my laptop over and places it half on her lap and half on mine.

  “The timer waits for no one,” I echo.

  She unlocks the password to the revenge blog and the oven opens, bringing up the dessert recipe for Madd Tea Party. There’s a nauseous tilting feeling in my stomach. That means the main course is either me or Brie, and one of us is not on the list. Whoever is left is going to be a top suspect. I scan Maddy’s poem, feeling slightly dizzy.

  Madd Tea Party

  Girl in teacup, shoulder deep

  Pour the water, start to steep

  There’s nothing wrong with feeling sad

  Or going just a little mad

  So pop a pill or maybe twenty

  There’s room in hell for you, dear, plenty.

  I turn to Nola in a panic. “This is bad.”

  She frowns. “Is it telling us to commit suicide?”

  I shake my head. “The clue is about Maddy, not us. What if it’s a threat? The killer made Jessica’s death look like a suicide, too. Pills, water.”

  Nola stands shakily. “Jessica was wrists and water. But this would mean—”

  “That Jessica didn’t write the blog. The killer did.” I grab my phone and coat, dialing as I head out the door. “We need to find Maddy.”

  My head spins as we race down the stairs. There’s another fear I didn’t mention to Nola. The fear that it might be real. My last conversation with Maddy rushes back to me. I thought she was trying to be there for me, but what if she was asking me to be there for her? She asked me to call her. She told me she felt shut out, completely alone even when she was surrounded by people. Why didn’t I reach out to her after that conversation we had? I should have known after Megan. After Mom. I should be an expert. But I made so many mistakes in the aftermath of Todd’s death, it became my policy to shut up. When my mother overdosed on the sedatives that were supposed to help her navigate the depths of her grief, Dad said mental health is private. No one is supposed to know anything about anyone else’s pain.

  Mom spent three months in a hospital in New Jersey. Dad and Aunt Tracy and I drove four hours every weekend to visit her, during which I would listen to music and pretend to sleep and Dad and Aunt Tracy would talk about her wedding plans. At the hospital, we would talk at Mom about all kinds of stupid things she didn’t care about. She would never look up at us, and she would never say anything back. Until the Christmas morning when Aunt Tracy’s fiancé showed up drunk and called her a whore, and Mom suddenly stood from her chair by the window and broke his nose with one clean swing.

  Everything shattered back to normal after that. The doctors could see that she wasn’t a danger to herself or others. Just that asshole if he came near Aunt Tracy again. It’s funny how violence to protect a loved one’s honor is so deeply ingrained in our culture, how accepted it is. Also ironic, considering why Mom was in the hospital in the first place. She was suddenly eager to hear about all the soccer games she missed. And school and every stupid detail of my life that even I didn’t particularly care about. And then my parents hatched the perfect solution to all of our problems: sending me away to boarding school.

  Outside, the temperature has dropped even further, and light, feathery flakes fall as we hurry along the winding path across the green toward the lake. The seven missed calls from Maddy this afternoon are making me feel sick. I continue trying to reach her as I sign into Henderson and shuffle up the stairs, scraping the icy moisture off my shoes on the carpet as I go. Maddy’s room is on the third floor, and since she’s a junior, she has a roommate, Harriet Nash.

  I pause outside their room and rap my knuckles on the door. There’s only silence from within.

  Nola tries again as I dial Maddy’s number and hold the phone to my ear. Faintly, as if muffled by sheets or piles of clothing, I hear her ringtone coming from inside the room. An odd feeling creeps over me. Maddy’s ringtone is very distinctive. The pulsing beat and bouncy synth sound distorted and far away.

  I pound on the door, louder. “Maddy!”

  She doesn’t answer, and the call goes to voice mail. I dial again, and the creepy muffled sound starts up again. The hairs stand up on th
e back of my neck.

  Nola places her hand lightly on the door with a puzzled expression. “She’s not home, Kay. It doesn’t mean anything.” She doesn’t sound convinced.

  I try the door one more time and then punch it, frustrated.

  “Excuse me?”

  I turn around. Kelli Reyes, a sophomore who almost made the team, peeks her head out from her room. She has a retainer protruding from her mouth and a matte layer of green skin cream spread evenly over her face. Her eyes seem to pop out from the ghoulish mask, and my heart gallops in my chest at the sight. “Jesus, Kelli.”

  “Are you looking for Harriet or Maddy? Harriet is visiting her family for the weekend.” She looks me up and down and I can tell she was in the library last night.

  “Maddy,” I say. “Sorry for banging so loudly.”

  “Oh no!” she says, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “Not at all. I was just studying for my Latin midterm. Bang away.”

  “If you see her, can you ask her to call me right away?”

  Kelli points down the hall. “She’s in the private bath.”

  I follow Kelli’s gaze. Every dorm has one group bathroom with six shower stalls on each floor, plus one private bath with a tub. Every weekend or holiday in particular there’s a scramble for the private bath. We’re allowed such indulgences as scrubs, salts, bubbles, oils, and creams as long as we then clean the entire bathroom. It’s not a bad deal. With a couple of battery-operated candles and the right music, you can practically create a mini spa retreat. I thank Kelli and head down the hallway, wondering if Kelli fought Maddy for private bath privileges. It looks like Kelli was going for a DIY spa, too.

  When I get to the door, I notice a halo of soapy water bleeding out from around the bottom of the door. Soft music is playing inside, the kind they play in spas, soothing harp music with water trickling in the background. Or is that a faucet running? I look down at my sneakers sinking into the soaked carpet and a flicker of dread sparks deep within me.

  “Girl in teacup,” Nola whispers.

  I nod. A teacup is an awful lot like a porcelain bathtub. I knock softly on the door. “Maddy?”

  There’s no reply.

  I knock louder. “Maddy?”

  My heart slams. Panic is rising in me like a flood. I try to visualize my walls of ice but they are fractured with a thousand spidery cracks as the room fills up with water. I run through the hallway, down the stairs, jumping the last four of each flight, shouting for help. The world begins to tilt when I reach the bottom floor and arrive at the apartment of Mrs. Bream, the housemother. I tear the skeleton key from her hand and make it back up to the top floor before she does, before she calls 911, before the RA has even poked her head out of her room.

  Nola stands aside helplessly as I fail three times to turn the key in the lock, and then she closes her hand around mine and we open it together. She gasps and falls back as I finally wrench the bathroom door open.

  The first thing I see is the slightly fogged, oval-shaped mirror hanging over the sink, which Maddy had lined with various oils and lotions. On the misty surface is a message written in lipstick, in large capital letters, bold, as if the tube had been pressed hard and carefully run several times along each line. It reads:

  NOTORIOUS

  RE

  BOUND

  GIRL

  I tear my eyes away to the source of the flood, and silence cuts off my access to sound and speech and movement. My ears, my tongue, my fingers feel numb.

  The tub is overflowing, spilling cascades of water over the gleaming white-tiled floor. Maddy’s golden hair floats like a halo above her at the surface of the tub. The rest of her fully clothed body is folded below.

  14

  That bumps my dead-body count to four. Is there some rule of three? Because when I saw Todd’s body, there was that soft little click, that flicking-on of the switch in the previously unilluminated section of the Kay Donovan complex. The part that knows the depths of my mother’s despair. The part that allows me to do the things I do, because no one can stop me, and nothing really, actually, eventually matters. When I saw Jessica’s body, a tiny, urgent anxiety began to flare up in my chest, a feeling that, until routine resumed, control of my life would not be restored. When I saw Hunter’s poor little pile of bones and fur, raw fear spiked through me, terror that I would be held accountable. Not just for his death, but for all death, for the fact that death and the aftermath of death exist. For Dr. Klein’s sloping posture and ugly little blouse-and-slacks ensembles, for Mom’s lingering pill dependency, for the fact that I will never ever be able to quit soccer or my family would disintegrate into a horror of screaming, twisting madness.

  That was when I had a body count of three.

  When I see sweet Maddy’s head suspended below the overflowing, rushing water, angelic in the eerie harp music—Maddy, who never had an original mean thought, who only followed me and Tai and Tricia—I crumble onto the thin layer of water on the tile and sob. I press my face against the floor and scream into it, slamming my palms against the tile until I feel a set of arms hook under my shoulders.

  Nola hauls me to my feet and drags me into the hallway, past where Mrs. Bream is performing CPR on Maddy’s limp, pale body. Why didn’t the EMTs perform CPR on Jessica? How were they so sure? The thoughts are wild and disjointed, too fast and fragmented for me to vocalize. Nola attempts to get me into the common room, but I wrestle myself out of her grasp and stumble down the stairway. I need Brie, but Brie is gone. I make it to the front door when a pair of paramedics rush through, pushing me back into the lobby, and two police officers trail close behind, followed by Detective Morgan. I try to push past her, but she grabs my arm.

  “Since you’re in a hurry,” she says, guiding me into the first-floor common room.

  I sit on a wooden chair across from her, blank and broken. If she asked me to confess right now, I might. I have no fight left in me. I would say anything to go home and crawl into bed. To just disappear.

  “What happened?” Her voice is a little softer than usual, and it catches me off guard.

  “Maddy is dead.”

  “Maddy was one of your friends? One of the girls who found Jessica.”

  I nod.

  “Okay.” She writes it down. “How do you know?”

  “I saw her.”

  “You didn’t make the call.”

  “No. I ran.”

  “Okay. Calm down.”

  I didn’t realize it, but I’m shivering my words out, and I take a couple of deep breaths. “I found her in a bathtub with her head underwater and the floor was flooded. The water had been running a very long time. She was definitely dead.”

  “Okay.” She writes more. “Anything else you want to tell me?”

  My face crumbles. “She told me to call her and I didn’t. And I ignored her calls. And I keep letting people die, and I keep letting people die.”

  Her mouth drops open. “Kay, I’m going to call your parents and have them come down to the station.”

  “No.” I shake my head. “That’s not what I meant.”

  She looks at me sharply. “You better explain what the hell you meant.”

  I don’t stop crying. “She asked me to call her and I didn’t do it.” I press my fists into my face and suck in a gulp of air. “Before I moved here, my best friend committed suicide. Because I abandoned her.”

  “Kay. No one is out to get you. I have a job. A girl was murdered. Maybe two. You need to tell us everything you know. Or I can’t help you. You say things like you keep letting people die, and all of a sudden, I may have probable cause.” She shifts in her seat, moves closer. “Now, I can’t question you as a suspect without your parents.”

  “No. You can’t call them.”

  She holds her hands up. “I wouldn’t have to if I had a better suspect. I want to believe there
is one. So I’m giving you another chance. What can you tell me?”

  The tears streaming down my face make it almost impossible to see. A better suspect. “Greg and Jessica had a huge fight the night she died,” I finally whisper. “About their breakup.”

  She looks disappointed. “We already know that. I need something new.”

  Then something rushes back to me from our first conversation. “He told me she was afraid of blades.”

  “Okay.” She notes this down, yawning.

  “No. The night after Jessica was found. Before he was questioned. None of the newspapers mentioned how she died, but he told me there was no way she committed suicide because she was afraid of blades. How did he know she was cut?”

  She gives me a twisted smile. “You’re a toughie. I’ve seen your record. I know why you did it. Kids lie. You even thought you were doing the right thing. I hope you learned that you didn’t protect anyone. Who knows? If your brother had been in jail, maybe he wouldn’t have ended up dead.”

  The words dissolve on my tongue. She shouldn’t have access to my brother’s case.

  “I know, I’m a cold-hearted bitch. There are worse things to be. I see right through you, Katie. I know you. My partner worked on Todd’s case. But I’ll follow through on your lead. We help each other out; we’re cool.” She pauses at the door. “Although, how could you know she was cut by a blade?”

  I look up at her. “I was at the crime scene.”

  “But the murder weapon wasn’t visible. All kinds of objects can inflict wounds like the ones you saw. Scrap metal, sharp edge of hard plastic, broken bottle.” She watches me, but I don’t have the energy to respond. Not now. She shakes her head briskly. “Anyway. I’m sorry for your loss. Losses.”

  * * *

  • • •

  I FEEL SECTIONS of my hair crunch almost instantly when I step outside, and my clothes are like pure ice on my skin. I run against a wall of cold to Brie’s dorm, bypass the front desk, and throw my entire body against her door before I remember that she’s still away for the long weekend. I bang my fists against it anyway, irrationally, before kicking it with all of my might. Then I pull my phone out of my only pocket that wasn’t drenched from my collapse on the bathroom floor, but I can’t text her. My body is still convulsing too hard from the cold, and I can’t hold my fingers steady. I grab the marker attached to the dry-erase board with a silky green ribbon, and with childlike handwriting, I scrawl the dark message pulsing in the pit of my heart: You might as well be dead, too, Brie. <3 K