Frenzy

by V. J. Chambers

  “She told me to take very good care of them,” said Jonah. “She said they were very special.” Suddenly, his face crumpled. “Oh my god, I can’t believe she’s gone.”

  Ooh. Was he, like, crying?

  Yes. He was.

  He set down the vase and came for me, wrapping his arms around me, burying his head on my shoulder. “I can’t believe someone would have hurt her. She was so full of life and fun. She didn’t deserve that.”

  Awkwardly, I patted him on the back. “No. She didn’t deserve it.”

  * * *

  “Well,” I said, “I guess that eliminates the theater department.” Levi and I were walking away from Jonah’s dorm. My shirt was still wet from his tears.

  “You don’t know that,” said Levi. “Jonah could be lying.”

  “The way he was crying? I think that was real.”

  Levi shrugged. “He’s an actor, remember? You couldn’t even tell that he was gay.”

  I made a face. “Oh, who can tell anyone’s sexual orientation when they’re speaking that Old English stuff?”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “Excuse me?” said Raven Garwood, glaring at me.

  I’d found her in the library. She looked like she was studying, and she didn’t seem particularly happy that I’d bothered her.

  I was alone. Levi had ditched me to go to class.

  I figured he must really hate asking people questions if he’d rather go to class. Anyway, I didn’t need him. I could do this on my own.

  “Um, you’re Raven Garwood, right?” I said.

  “So?”

  “You just got into the creative writing class that has the visiting professor, right?”

  “Yeah. Why are you asking me this?”

  “Um, I just wanted to know a little bit about the class. How’d you get in? I thought that you had to be in it both semesters—fall and spring.”

  “I got in because someone died,” said Raven. “That’s how competitive it is. So, you might as well give up on it, all right? Now, if you don’t mind, I have stuff that I need to be working on.”

  “Someone died?” I pretended to be surprised. “Who?”

  Raven chewed on her lip. “Some girl named Cori. I didn’t know her very well. Didn’t you hear about it? They fished her body out of the river.”

  I nodded slowly. “Oh, yeah, maybe I did hear something about that.” Hmm. Not great. She barely seemed to remember Cori. Of course, maybe she was only saying that to hide the fact that she’d actually murdered her.

  But why would she do that? She didn’t even know why I was asking these questions.

  “Well, she got the last spot in the class.”

  “You must have been pissed off when you found out that she got in the class, and you didn’t. I mean, wasn’t that girl a freshman?”

  “Aren’t you a freshman?”

  Was it that obvious? How could she tell? “I’m only saying it must have rankled, that’s all.”

  Raven considered. “Yeah. I guess. A little. Especially because I found some of her work online, and it was horrible.”

  “She had work online?”

  “Yeah, she had this website she must have made when she was in high school. It had all her short stories and plays on there. Plus a bunch of poetry. She wrote really weird things. Disturbing stuff. And it was all in this weird, stilted voice. I have no idea why they accepted her into the program.”

  “So, you were kind of pissed, if you took the time to look her up on the internet.”

  Raven shrugged. “Yeah. I kind of hated her.”

  “Wow,” I said. “And now she’s dead.”

  Raven shot me an annoyed glance. “What are you trying to say?”

  “Just that, you know, a person you hated is dead, and—”

  “Don’t be stupid,” said Raven. “I didn’t kill her or anything. I went home early for break because I got a bad case of mono. I’m just now making up all my exams. Whenever Cori was getting dumped in the river, I was in the emergency room back home.”

  Oh. Well, there went that theory. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply—”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “You know, if I were writing a story about this, I’d totally consider me a suspect.”

  I laughed a little. “Oh, I’m not trying to figure out who killed her or anything.”

  “She was murdered, you know.” Raven leaned forward. “Someone killed her. And I heard that she had a really weird relationship with the professor of the course.”

  “The visiting professor?”

  Raven nodded. “Yeah. Adam Townsend. You ever hear of him?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, he writes really weird stuff. They call it literary, but I just call it soap opera with lots of metaphors and no clear ending.”

  “Weird.”

  “He had this one book about these twin brothers who switch places, and they both have this thing with a woman. Then the woman gets pregnant, but there’s no way to tell who’s the dad, because they’re identical twins, and they share the same DNA. Then one of the twins kills the other one and cuts his body up in pieces and throws it in the ocean, and—” Her face went white. “Oh my god. You don’t think that maybe he…”

  Okay, I had to talk to this professor guy. “He and Cori had a strange relationship?”

  “I heard that she sold him drugs,” she said.

  Well, that was a possibility.

  “Anyway,” she said. “Considering the weird shit that Cori wrote, they probably got along really well. But I think he’s married. Maybe he and Cori were having an affair, and she threatened to tell his wife, and then he killed her.”

  “Does he seem like someone who’s capable of murder?”

  “I don’t know. How can you tell that?”

  I didn’t know either.

  She sighed. “You know what? I’m being overly imaginative. I’m sure Adam didn’t hurt anyone. He seems like a really nice guy. Besides, maybe Cori killed herself. Half her stories ended in suicide anyway.”

  Really? “Do you, um, happen to remember the address of her website? Where you found the stuff she wrote?”

  “I googled her name. It popped right up.”

  * * *

  I was curled up on my bed in my dorm room with Cori’s website open on my laptop. I’d finished my homework earlier that evening. I’d managed to make it to all my classes this afternoon, even while I’d been interviewing suspects.

  Of course, I had to admit that I hadn’t gotten anywhere.

  I’d checked up on Raven’s alibi, and sure enough, she’d been a patient at Mercy General Hospital right around the time that Cori had died. So, at least I’d eliminated her.

  I didn’t really think that either Kelly or Jonah were viable suspects.

  That left Wyatt, Jill, Parker, and the mysterious professor Adam Townsend.

  But, of those, only Adam Townsend seemed promising, and I hadn’t even met him yet. I had spent a little time googling him. He’d written two books. Neither of them seemed to be selling particularly well. He was probably teaching because he needed to make ends meet. His wife’s name was Natalie. They also had a pet goldfish named Alfie. I’d discovered this from his bio on Amazon.

  In his picture, he looked studious and handsome.

  Had he killed Cori?

  I couldn’t be sure.

  I did, however, look up when his office hours were, and I planned to pay him a visit the next day. Levi could come with me if he wasn’t completely sick of interviewing people.

  But right then, I wasn’t focusing on Adam Townsend. Instead, I was reading Cori’s plays.

  It was pretty strange. Raven had been right about that. Very offensive and out there.

  One play was about a girl who put herself in date rape situations so that she could blackmail men. She was putting herself through college that way. She set the guys up and then taunted them with evidence, saying she would ruin their lives. One by one, all the guys pai
d up.

  At the end of the play, the girl killed herself by taking an overdose of the rape drug pills that she used to set up the guys.

  One play was about incest. A girl developed a big crush on her uncle, and she set about trying to seduce him. The uncle didn’t want to do it, because it was wrong, but it was obvious that he was attracted to her too. He began to waver as she kept trying to seduce him. Finally, she managed to do it.

  They went to sleep together.

  The lights went out and there was the sound of a gunshot.

  When the lights came back on, the uncle had shot himself in the head.

  That was the end of the play.

  Another play was called Spartacus is Dead.

  It was clearly drug influenced. It had no plot and it meandered around with all kinds of weird things happening in it. The main character was a girl named Melissa, who was a drug dealer. When she was fucked up on drugs, Melissa thought she was a drug god named Spartacus.

  Spartacus had godlike power and could make different characters fall in love with each other or hate each other.

  Spartacus could also sleep with any guy that she wanted.

  But then these two characters named Wormwood and Titivullus, which were drug demons or something, infiltrated Spartacus’ brain and convinced her that she was a horrible person who needed to die.

  Melissa/Spartacus slit her wrists and died.

  The last scene of the play was delivered by a character named Alice, who told the audience that they needed to “create their own drug world,” and that deep down, we were all drug gods. Then she said, “One pill makes you taller.”

  And the lights cut out, and a chorus of people all yelled, “Go ask Alice!”

  Spartacus is Dead was really weird, but it was also my favorite of the bunch. There was something lighter about it. Not that it was actually light, since it ended with suicide too.

  The only play that didn’t end in suicide was an odd, absurdist piece about four characters in a room. The characters argued about whether or not a phone was actually a mushroom or not.

  At one point someone tried to eat the phone, with very little success.

  On the last page, a character named Regan was introduced. Regan shot all of the characters and then had sex with their dead bodies.

  It was incredibly gross.

  That one made me feel sort of icky all over.

  There were some poems on the website too. Some of them didn’t make any sense.

  Others were incredibly bad.

  There was one called “Boys, Depression, Suicide, and Sex.” It went like this:

  All the cocks and robbers

  Steal virginity and hearts

  And I’m sick of my confusion

  I’m sick of everything they are

  I don’t want to play these games

  Just let me, for once, be free

  Get me out of my body

  Get me out of my head

  I don’t want to die

  Anymore

  I just want to live

  Without him

  Without them

  Without them all

  It didn’t make it sound like Cori wanted to commit suicide right when she wrote it, but it made it sound like she had wanted to in the past. And if someone wanted to commit suicide, did that feeling really go away? Was there a chance she’d killed herself?

  Tied herself to a bunch of bricks and dove into the river? Waited for herself to sink? To drown?

  I didn’t know.

  Because there were also poems like the one called “Cigarette Smoke.”

  It curls from the ashtray

  Gray fingers reaching

  It moves; it is alive

  Climbing to the ceiling

  To mix with its kind

  So the tiny room gets hazy

  Blurred and unreal

  In the corner, someone coughs

  Does beauty always kill?

  Do I dare to keep living?

  Wouldn’t it be easier to stop?

  That sounded suicidal to me. Very suicidal.

  I kept reading the poems, even when they were laughably bad, because I realized that I was very intrigued by Cori. I didn’t know what to think about her. I hadn’t known her, but when I read the things she wrote, it was like I got a little window into her brain.

  I didn’t think that Cori and I would have been the best of friends if I’d known her before she died. She was a little bit too out there for me. But I thought that if I’d known her, I’d have found her just as interesting and alluring as everyone seemed to have found her.

  I wanted to know what kind of girl could deal drugs and find time to star in a Shakespeare play. I wanted to know what kind of girl could have good enough grades to be in the honors program, but then also write plays about having sex with dead bodies. I wanted to know what kind of girl slept with tons of guys but then wrote poems about how she wished she was without all of them.

  Who was Cori Donovan?

  What had happened to her?

  Why was she dead?

  Was I ever going to figure that out?

  I fell asleep with my laptop balanced on my chest, propped up in my bed, reading poetry by Cori Donovan. And wondering everything about her.

  * * *

  Levi inspected the scrambled eggs on his tray. “They look like eggs.”

  “They’re eggs,” I said.

  “You sure?” he said. “Because I hear it’s easy to make things that look like eggs but only contain plant protein.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “You’re the one who agreed to come here.” We were in the dining hall. I’d called him that morning to ask if he wanted to meet up later. He’d suggested that we have breakfast together.

  “Did I really agree?”

  “I said that I was going to the dining hall, and you said, ‘Cool, I’ll meet you there.’”

  “Really?” He shook his head. “This is what comes of having conversations before I have coffee.”

  I laughed. “We don’t have to stay.”

  “I already paid seven dollars and fifty cents for this breakfast. I’m staying. I’m getting my money’s worth.” He opened a packet of ketchup and began squirting it all over his eggs.

  I was eating a bagel and some fruit. I sawed at it with my knife. Would it kill the dining hall to get pre-cut bagels? I could never cut bagels in half properly. The top would always be way bigger than the bottom. “So, do you think it’s possible that Cori committed suicide?”

  Levi raised an eyebrow. “Suicide? Seriously?”

  I started to respond, but before I could say anything, I was interrupted as a guy stopped by our table.

  “Levi, my man,” he said.

  Levi looked up at him. “Hey, hey. Shawn, what’s up?”

  “What are you doing in the dining hall, dude?”

  “Oh, you know. I made this decision before I was really awake.” Levi gave him a sly, stoner grin. It was strange. Two minutes before, Levi had been focused and alert. But now, his eyes were half-lidded, and he looked like he’d smoked a huge bong. He seemed to turn his level of fucked-up-ness on and off, as if he was flipping a light switch.

  The guy lowered his voice conspiratorially. “You, uh, you got anything on you right now?”

  Levi shook his head. “Not here, man. Too many eyes.” He raised his eyebrows meaningfully.

  The guy nodded. “Right, right.” He looked around, as if he could spy the people who might be watching. “Catch you later, then?”

  “Definitely.” Levi offered him his fist.

  The guy bumped it with his own and then sauntered off into the dining room.

  Levi shoveled a bite of hash browns into his mouth and chewed. “So, what were you saying?”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “You don’t even smoke weed, do you?”

  He set down his fork. “Why are you saying that?”

  “It’s all an act. You pretend like you’re this big druggie, but you’re only doing it f
or solidarity with your customer base.”

  He scratched the back of his neck. “You want to announce that to the entire cafeteria?”

  “Dining hall,” I said. “In college, it’s a dining hall. In high school, it’s a cafeteria.”

  “Whatever.” He picked up his fork again and began to poke at his eggs. His voice was quieter. “It’s not like I don’t ever do anything at all. It’s only that when you’re really high all the time, it’s hard to be motivated. So, I try not to do it when I’m working. That’s all. Just being responsible.”

  I started spreading cream cheese on half of my bagel. “You’re completely different than I thought you were.”

  “Am I?” Levi seemed really interested in his breakfast.

  “Yeah,” I said, thinking about it. “I thought you were kind of stupid when I first met you, but you’re focused and determined and—”

  “I don’t think it could be suicide.”

  I gestured at him with my bagel. “You don’t take compliments well either.”

  He glared at me. “Sure I do.”

  “No, you don’t. Anytime anyone says you’re attractive, you get all weird, and then when I just said—”

  “You said you thought I was stupid,” he said. “That’s the worst lead-in to a compliment ever.”

  “No, but I meant that now that I know you—”

  “Let’s talk about Cori, okay?”

  I took a bite of my bagel. “Okay.”

  “No way is it suicide.”

  “It’s only that I read these plays that she wrote, and almost all of them ended in suicide. And she wrote really depressing poems too.”

  “She couldn’t have tied herself up the way that she did and thrown herself in.”

  “Why not?”

  “Besides, there was a contusion on the back of her head. Someone hit her and then tied her up and tossed her. They probably thought she was already dead.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I don’t know. I think it was in the paper or something.” He opened another ketchup packet and began dousing his eggs. “But, you know, I’ve been thinking, and I don’t think it makes much sense that the killer has her money.”

  “Well, I knew that was a long shot,” I said.

  “Isn’t that what we should be trying to figure out, though? Where Cori’s money went? How much time do you have left before Professor X comes calling?”