Ghosts of Harvard

by Francesca Serritella

  “Eric did not die to spite you. He didn’t die for some stupid undergraduate award. You have no idea what he was going through, but it definitely wasn’t about you.”

  “Oh, but it was. So just as he took that from me, I decided to take things from him. First I took his fantasy girl adviser, his ‘Mika.’ Then I took his sister. And now I’m going to take his prize.”

  Cady felt physically sick that she had been with this vile person. “The Bauer won’t make a difference. You’ll always be second place. You were nobody’s first choice, not mine, not even Mikaela’s.”

  Pain flickered across his eyes. “Eric never had Mikaela. He wanted her, but I was the first. I won her.”

  “You wish!” Cady stood up to get in his face. “You think you won her? She’s manipulating you, using sex to distract you from seeing what she’s really doing with her research, you’re just too stupid to know it. Eric figured it out—sick as he was, he was too smart for her. He figured it out, and that’s why he quit, he left her. And she lost it! That’s why she was arguing with Eric, in his room, the night he died.”

  Nikos sniffed and smoothed out his jacket lapels. “Impossible. The night he died was the first night she and I spent together.”

  “You’re lying.” She put her hand in her pocket, closing her fist protectively around the flash drive. “That’s what you do. You’re a liar. You never cared about Eric, and you never cared about me.”

  “Not true. You were both very precious to me, in different ways. I do like you, Cadence, even better than your brother. You’re a lovely girl, and you were a very pleasurable means to an end.”

  Cady shook her head, backing away from him. “I trusted you, and you deceived me.”

  “I didn’t think you’d fall so easy. That’s why I employed Ted to help my recruitment efforts that night at the Phoenix.”

  That knocked the wind out of her.

  “Don’t be cross, you were in no danger. Ted’s a gifted actor, he and I had choreographed the whole thing. Except for the part when I punched him, that was improv. He was pissed, but I had to make it believable. You made a winsome damsel. And face it, you wanted to believe me.”

  She felt lightheaded. She could barely think to speak. “You, you’re …”

  “Disgusting? Morally bankrupt? Criminally good-looking? Say whatever you want about me. You’re the sister of a psychotic ex-student who is almost as psychotic herself. Whatever possible threat you might’ve posed to me before, you eliminated today when you emailed me an apology for falsely accusing me of having unprotected sex with you during your fake trip to UHS. I have proof you’re lying and delusional, in your own hand.”

  She felt nauseated with the knowledge that she had played into his every trap. She began to stagger backward.

  Nikos kept advancing on her. “And while we’re confessing, I might as well get everything off my chest. Do you remember when you asked me if I believed in fate?”

  Cady wouldn’t look at him, she refused to give him the satisfaction of meeting his eyes.

  “You were in one of your dreamy moods, so I told you I did, that I thought the ghost of your brother had ‘led me to you.’ Another lie, I’m afraid. God knows that if ghosts were real, your brother would rise from the ground and punch me in the face.”

  Cady’s right hook connected with his aristocratic nose in a crunch.

  58

  Cady stormed across the Old Yard, furious but invigorated, despite the throbbing knuckles on her right hand. Nikos. All this time! As Cady’s mind replayed his words, his swaggering satisfaction—satisfaction she had given him—she wanted to shake off her skin just thinking about it. It especially bothered here where Nikos was right; she had wanted to believe him. She had wanted to feel close to Eric, and Nikos’s story about their friendship, the version of Eric that was healthy, social, best friends with this cool guy, played into everything she’d wanted to believe about her brother. Namely that he wasn’t so vulnerable, that she hadn’t abandoned him when he needed her most. But Eric didn’t have any real friends, not at the end. And now Cady realized that neither did she.

  But none of that mattered now that she knew what she did about Prokop. She had come to Harvard to connect with Eric and to understand why he died, in part to redeem him, and a larger part to redeem herself; and now she would. Prokop was the villain here. She had manipulated Eric, used him, betrayed him, and ultimately killed him. Eric had wanted to bring her to justice, but he died before he got the chance. Now Cady would finish the job. All she had to do was gather up all the parts of her case against Prokop: the photos, the drop canister with Eric’s letter and flash drive, and his research notebook and go straight to the police. But first she wanted to check Lee’s photos. It would take only a minute, and her dorm room was on the way to the hotel.

  Cady jogged up the stairs of Weld two by two. She pushed her key into her dorm room lock, fumbling with her swollen fingers. She cursed and jammed it in again, finally bursting inside.

  Ranjoo looked up from her seat on the futon, lit by glowing screen of her laptop.

  “Hey, are you okay? Where have you been? We were worried.”

  Cady remembered she had left her own laptop in her mother’s hotel room. “I need to use your computer.”

  “Now? What do you need it for?”

  Cady sat down next to Ranjoo and took it right off her lap. “I’ll be quick.” She got to work minimizing the open windows and pulled the flash drive from her pocket.

  “Uh, oh-kay.” Ranjoo looked sideways at her. “I’m sorry if I pissed you off yesterday, I probably could’ve handled everything better.”

  Cady had plugged the drive into the USB and was trying to figure out where the files were. “Yeah, fine.” She found that the contents of the drive were held in a single unnamed folder, and within that, several more folders labeled by location and date. She stopped, letting the cursor hover over the last one, marked “Leverett 3.26.” March twenty-sixth last year, the day Eric died.

  “But you’re not making it easy to believe you’re fine. Like right now, you’re acting fucking weird.” Ranjoo leaned over to peer at her computer screen. “What are you looking at, pictures of Leverett House?”

  “Please, shut up!” Cady shouted, startling them both.

  Ranjoo snorted and got up. She went in their bedroom and slammed the door. But Cady no longer cared about their fragile friendship; all that mattered were these photos. With a deep breath, she double-clicked the folder and reached a series of .jpeg files with only numbers for titles. She opened the first one.

  As soon as the file opened onscreen, she had to shut her eyes to spare her heart. Although Lee was right that the image was low-quality, even the pixelated contours of her brother’s face, his eyes, his chin, rocked Cady to the core. Seeing him alive, knowing these were his last moments, made the dark and shoddy image like looking at the midday sun, too bright to bear. But she urged herself to be strong. People had to identify the bodies of their loved ones, they endured such things to make sure justice was done, and this was no different.

  She refocused on the picture. In it, only Eric faced the camera. He was embracing Prokop, whose back was to the camera, with his chin resting on her shoulder. Eric was a great hugger, his bear hugs used to lift Cady off her feet, and she would never feel one again. Looking at the photo, envy was all that kept her grief in check; she was jealous that his last tenderness was wasted on this evil woman. She wondered what lie Prokop had told Eric for him to let her in and greet her with forgiveness. Maybe she told him she was going to turn herself in. And in his kindness, he trusted her and let her in one last time. Cady’s hand shook as she clicked on the next file.

  The second image overlapped the previous one, like a playing card. This image showed Eric and Mikaela facing each other in profile. Although they weren’t standing very close together, the intimacy was apparent; she was touching hi
s forehead, perhaps brushing away his hair. But again, the vertical edge of the windowpane blocked Prokop’s facial features from view. Only her arm and shoulder-length blond hair were visible.

  In the next several images, Prokop was largely out of the frame; she was seated on the edge of his bed, only her legs visible. In clicking through the series, however, Cady could tell Eric was angry; it was like stop-motion animation, with him traveling from side to side of the frame, pacing, gesticulating. Finally, Prokop reappeared, only again with her back to the camera. Although it did look like she was advancing on him, reaching for him, with Eric pushing her away.

  There was one unopened image left, one last card to be dealt. Cady brought the cursor to the final .jpeg and found herself hesitating. She wanted to see something that would damn Prokop irrevocably, but when she considered what that might be, she didn’t like it. No matter how clearly her mind spoke the words, her heart didn’t like the sound, sharp, tinny, and true:

  Cady wanted to see Eric pushed.

  Not only because it would indict Prokop and vindicate Eric, but because it would exonerate her.

  Cady opened it and her jaw dropped. What she saw was worse than she could have imagined. Eric wasn’t pushed; his blurry, dark form appeared half out of the window without interference. It was the face behind him that caused her horror. The woman was also blurred in motion, not to push him, but to stop him. Cady knew because the face was one of anguish, not anger, there was no doubt of that in her mind.

  The woman’s identity was pixelated beyond recognition to anyone except her own daughter.

  59

  Her own mother.

  Cady crossed Mass Ave against the light and barely flinched when a driver leaned on his horn. Expecting to see Mikaela Prokop in the photos, Cady had failed to recognize her mother at first, but the truth was evident in every picture. Her height was too short to be Prokop in the first one. And that gesture—pushing away his hair—how many times had Cady felt those very same fingertips on her forehead? And yet it was unthinkable. The only thought more appalling than her brother taking his own life was her mother watching him do it.

  She passed the T station. She longed for one of Robert’s trains to nowhere, but time was inescapable, and she had stepped into a moment of irreversible knowledge. In doing so, she had made permanent the most perverse alternate reality possible.

  There was no chance for redemption now, for any of them. Cady wouldn’t avenge her brother by nailing Prokop, the scribblings of a paranoid student wouldn’t be enough to convict her, and Cady had destroyed her own credibility with her reckless behavior. Prokop didn’t kill Eric, but she had used him, preyed on him in his weakest moments, and she was going to get away with it—Cady had found a way to fail her brother even in death.

  Was Cady the last to know? Were both her parents keeping this secret from her, letting her drown in her guilt alone? Or had her mother kept this even from her father? There was a sick, cosmic justice that, in her father’s hiring Lee, he had inadvertently paid the girl to capture the worst moment of their lives on film. She didn’t recognize these people anymore, not even herself.

  But the part that ripped her heart out was that for one day, Cady had allowed herself to believe that Eric hadn’t wanted to leave them, that he had been someone else’s victim. It didn’t make not having her brother any easier, but that grief had something soft to hold on to. This was the truth stripped bare. Eric wasn’t murdered. He had killed himself, and in front of their mother.

  Cady passed by the street that led to her mother’s hotel without stopping. She was done hunting for answers now that there were no right ones left. She broke into a run, although she could hardly feel her legs. She floated above her body and watched her mindless form race down the river like she had the other day, only now the storm raged inside her, and there was no shelter up ahead. No place or person left to put her trust in; even her own heart, her mind, her gut had led her astray.

  She stopped when she reached the foot of Leverett Towers. Eric’s old dorm was one of the few high-rises on campus, and with almost every window lit, it looked busy as a hive. It was full of students, talking, studying, having sex, living their lives, oblivious that someone had once lived in a room just like theirs in pure torment. That was how fickle time worked. For some, it was made of minutes strung like pearls, straight and even, moving ever onward. For others, like Cady, time was a rope with the past and present twisted together, doubled back, and looped around her neck.

  As one student exited the front door of the nearer tower, Cady slipped inside after him. She headed to the elevator, but when the steel doors opened, three students burst out, boisterous and laughing. Cady backed out of their way. In an eleven-floor tower with however many rooms, she would never have the elevator to herself. She took a hard left to the stairs.

  The stairwell was empty, constructed entirely of unpainted concrete, lit on each floor landing by a single caged fluorescent bulb. As she climbed up the stairs, she ticked off everything she had gotten wrong:

  Nikos had tricked her. Prokop had eluded her. Her mother had lied to her.

  She thought of the selfless young mother who gave the last piece of her heart for her son. The brilliant young man who dreamed of advancing science but instead unleashed a scourge on mankind. The boy she loved whose safe haven turned out to be the eye of the storm.

  Cady had tears for all of them, Bilhah, Robert, Whit, and Eric—it was always about Eric—for all the injustice they had suffered, the unfair hands they’d been dealt, the shortcomings of family and school and society and nation, for all their bright potential lost.

  Every flight was split into two sections winding around each other without a single window. The strain, the exhaustion, the sense of futile circling—for once her body was in accordance with her mind. Her muscles trembled, her sweater clung to her back, her breathing came short and raspy, but Cady did not slow down. The ache in her legs brought the satisfaction of self-punishment. She pulled herself up with her arm, her clammy palm squeaking on the pipe railing. Each step brought its own bitter truth. They had a rhythm like a drumbeat.

  She was disloyal.

  She was deceived.

  She was weak.

  She was wrong.

  She was bereft.

  She was alone.

  She was done.

  Standing at the very top floor, Cady’s heart pounded, yet a calm came over her. She faced a metal door with a sign reading

  roof access is prohibited.

  caution

  do not open alarm will sound.

  Caution had its chance. Cady kicked open the door.

  60

  Deaf to the wailing alarm behind her, Cady walked out onto the roof as if she were sleepwalking. At the edge was a foot-high ledge before a twelve-story drop. She walked up to it as if it were a sidewalk curb. The view of the Charles River spread before her, black as an oil slick. Tears blurred her vision, smearing the lights across the river so that the buildings looked on fire. She wished they were. If the bridge sank into the black water and the stars fell from the sky like bombs, then the world would be honest. Then the world would keep its promises.

  Eric had promise, and the world couldn’t keep him. For all the voices that had haunted her, his was the only one she couldn’t reach. He was the only one who could understand her and explain everything, and he was gone, locked away in some inaccessible past. She wanted him to tell her not to do it, or that he’d be there waiting for her when she did. She wanted to feel close to him again.

  But time was two-faced. Minutes that ticked by like any other were the moments that changed a life forever, yet revealed themselves too late. And what she knew now trapped her in an unbearable present, with no way to go back or forward. Only down.

  Her brother could not face his future and Cady could not escape the past, but both directions had led to the same point—
here. She had longed to know why he had done it. She had thought the answer would cure her. But now that she knew the truth, she stood lonelier than ever.

  She had always wondered if suicide was reckless and impulsive or reasoned and premeditated. Now she knew. It was both. Recklessness in slow motion.

  Cady stepped up onto the ledge, balancing on the balls of her feet with her toes in the air. Her legs still felt like jelly from the stairs, but she commanded them to straighten and stood tall. The wind rushed by her; its cold hand felt like a caress.

  Until she glanced downward, and her breath caught. Cady was back in that moment ten years ago, a little girl on the roof of Jeremy’s garage, the first time she had blindly followed Eric to a precipice that was too high, only this time he wasn’t there to catch her. Now she heard a voice in her head tell her, No, get down, but it wasn’t the ghosts’, and it wasn’t her brother’s, it was her own. She didn’t want to die.

  Suicide wouldn’t be her escape, and it didn’t have to be her destiny. Unlike Robert, Bilhah, Whit, and Eric, she still had a choice in how her story ends.

  She turned to step off the ledge just in time to see Mikaela Prokop lunge to push her.

  61

  Cady tried to block the push, but Prokop collided with her, and the momentum sent both women hurtling down, their arms locked in a hostile embrace. Prokop hit the roof but Cady’s lower body slipped off the building’s edge, and she clawed to hold fast to her attacker, now her grappling hook. Cady screamed for help, but the still blaring alarm drowned out her voice. Prokop groaned and thrashed like an alligator to wrench herself free, but Cady clutched her upper arms even tighter as her legs dangled eleven stories in the air. Their heads were only inches apart, Cady looked in terror for mercy in the woman’s eyes.