Pretty, Nasty, Lovely

by Rosalind Noonan

  “One of those,” she said, gesturing for him to sit. “Had I known, I would have locked my door.”

  Was that a joke? With her robotic delivery, he wasn’t sure. He took a seat.

  “So, Dr. Finnegan, did you bring me Lydia Drakos’s grade reports?”

  “I did not. Doesn’t Ms. Drakos have a right to privacy after death?”

  “Not if that death is under investigation. This is for her own good.”

  “It’s a little late for that,” he said.

  “I meant—”

  “I know, the cops have to verify that it was suicide, but are the circumstances suspicious? Do they suspect homicide?”

  “Not that I’ve heard. Her diaries were disjointed, and the girl hadn’t left the house for more than a week. There were signs of clinical depression, but that’s not for me to determine. The police won’t rule on the death until they have evidence and interviews in hand, and that includes Lydia’s grades and student profile.” Her hands seemed delicate next to the bulky sleeves of her sweater as she crossed her arms on the desk. “Did you know Lydia Drakos?”

  “Not well. We had a chat about grades. She was falling behind, late on two essays, and she’d gotten a C minus on the first paper.”

  “And we’re talking about a required Comp class. What was a senior doing in a core curriculum class?”

  “I have a few seniors in my classes. Some of them have failed it before. Others leave Comp until the end, especially the left-brain kids. The engineers and premed students. Did Lydia take Comp before?”

  “She did, in her freshman year. She withdrew with a D. But that’s the only blip on her record, until now. She has a D and a C in her other classes this term, and she had already dropped Astronomy. The term wasn’t going well for her.”

  “What kind of grades did she get in the past?” he asked.

  “That’s the thing.” She scrolled through a document; Lydia’s transcript, he assumed. “We’re looking at a senior with a three-point-one average. Aside from her D in Comp, Lydia was a solid B student, a sociology major, so writing a few essays in a Comp class should have been a breeze.” Cho removed her glasses and glanced up, contemplating Finn. “She was struggling, but it may not have had anything to do with academics. Clinical depression? Mental illness? Financial issues, or relationship issues? There are a multitude of stressors tugging on our students.”

  Cho’s voice was still monotone, but she was concerned—far more sympathetic than he had expected.

  “So you do realize the pressures these kids face,” he said.

  “Of course I do. It’s my job to understand what these students need and to advocate for them.”

  “Then why are you letting those quacks at the counseling center crush them?”

  The moment Finn said it, he knew he’d pushed too far too fast. The flicker of humanity left her eyes, replaced by a chilly veneer.

  “I mean,” he pressed on, “if you’re mandated to look out for our students, why is it that the university’s reputation is prioritized over the individual students who legitimately need help?”

  Something blazed in Cho’s eyes before she iced over again. “You can’t possibly understand my mandates, the protocol and safeguards I’m trying to put in place to save these students’ lives.”

  “Save them, or your job? Isn’t this more a matter of weeding out any kid who admits to suffering from depression, kids who experience bouts of hopelessness, as any thinking adult would? These kids go to the counseling center to work through anxiety, and leave the place strapped to a stretcher. You dismiss them from the university!” He delivered the last barb in the booming voice he saved for punctuating his lectures, often for entertainment value, but it didn’t affect Cho’s pert demeanor.

  “We cannot have suicidal students on this campus when every half mile there’s a bridge that offers them an easy out—a way to jump to their death before they have the time to think it through. It’s a fact that suicides are more frequent when the opportunity is there. The bridges are a built-in suicide venue on our campus. There’s nothing I can do about that, but the clinic, that I can control.”

  “By sending every student out on a stretcher, dumping them in the psych ward?”

  “Not every student. Don’t make me out to be the villain here, Dr. Finnegan. I’m not killing anyone. I’m saving lives.”

  “I beg to differ, Dean Cho. First, there’s the fate of the kids you badgered into signing medical withdrawals. Have you tracked their progress since they were dumped?”

  “We have no way of monitoring a student once they exit the university.”

  “Right. And then there are the hundreds of kids out there who need help but find that they’ve been cut off. Unless of course they want a vacation from classes. A permanent one. Which, for most of our high-achieving students, is a form of death.”

  “You have a dramatic flair, Dr. Finnegan. I see why you pursued language arts over science.”

  He recognized the thinly veiled insult. “Just because I’m passionate about the topic doesn’t diminish the underlying truth.”

  “That is your opinion, Dr. Finnegan, and I don’t have time for further discussion.” She rose from her desk, clearly indicating that the meeting was over. “Please e-mail me Lydia’s records this evening. I want to turn everything over to the police first thing in the morning so that they can close the case.”

  “Over and done, so that everyone can move on,” he said, rising slowly. He was a head taller than Cho, and yet she commanded the room. He’d read that she’d played college basketball, and he could imagine that. A wiry, fiery point guard could run circles around dead wood on the court.

  “Exactly.”

  He moved toward the door, then turned back, scratching his head. “Just saying? I’m not moving on.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I won’t let this matter drop. Our students deserve better.” He zipped his down vest halfway up and held out his arms. “Take a good look, Dean Cho. I’m going to be your worst nightmare.”

  CHAPTER 11

  I was glad to escape upstairs to the suite I shared with Angela, Isabel, and Defiance. Inside these walls, we could live without filters, share our feelings, and let comments fly. My suite mates were the very best part of Theta Pi; they were the sisters I imagined when I set my sights on Merriwether and Greek life, delaying my freshman year to work my buns off and save money for the extracurricular part of college life that was important to me.

  Say what you will about Greek life—the concept of buying friends, rewarding conformity, and creating an exclusive club. While those things may be true for some people, for me the attraction to joining a sorority was the need to be among sisters—friends who were of like mind, girls who laughed at the same jokes but celebrated the differences among us. I had found that with my friends in Theta Pi. There was a level of trust binding all the sisters together—sort of like a big extended family, where you might not know your Kentucky cousin well, but you enjoy her when you see her. Yes, some of the senior sisters on the Rose Council were pushy and demanding, but I understood that they had a job to do, and they needed our full cooperation to get it done.

  My father, a fan of rebels from Jack Kerouac to Jerry Garcia, had clearly voiced his disapproval of sorority life. Anything that smacked of conformity or institutionalism clashed with his self-imposed bohemian lifestyle. He’d even suggested that I was latching on to sorority life to replace the sister I’d lost. That had hurt, mostly because I’d realized he was right. I missed Delilah. “Are we having fun yet?” she used to say, usually sarcastically, but I took it to mean that good times were on the horizon. After Delilah was gone, I carried her mantra with me, pushed to the back corners of my mind for later. Delay gratification. Nothing was going to be fun while I was the daughter of a broke slacker musician. But someday . . . someday.

  I sorely missed my mom, too. She’d been the caretaker in our family, and as a kid I hadn’t realized that it was her job as a surgi
cal nurse that usually paid for rent and groceries. Her crazy twelve-hour shifts hadn’t stopped her from baking cookies or throwing us all in the car and driving to the coast on a summer day. It wasn’t until after she was gone that I realized how much I’d relied on her, how I’d taken for granted that my mom would always be there for me. My view of her had been so narrow; I had only seen her for the way she built my world. My mom, never Brenda Danelski.

  For a while after the accident, it had helped to have my brother around, but Joe was seven years older than me, and as I finished my freshman year of high school he graduated from college and headed up to Seattle to take a job with Boeing and move in with his girlfriend. I’d been the sole female and the only child at home for the past six years, and though I’d had friends, relationships had been severed every time we moved. It had been hard to hold on to them after we moved to Eugene at the start of senior year. That had been a rough year until I bonded with Jordan, a brilliant, adorable outcast like me, who ended up taking me to prom. He got me. “Are we having fun yet?” became our inside joke. His parents loved me. I think they thought I could persuade him to be straight. Jordy and I were still friends, but time and distance had pulled us apart.

  That left me with my father. Gary Danelski, known in the biz as G-Dan, was a jazz musician, semi-famous for one recording that had made him a name and some money when it crossed over to the pop charts. Now and then he got money in the mail for that song, but mostly he paid the bills with gigs at bars and festivals and outdoor fairs. After years of moving from town to town, living on egg-drop ramen noodles and waiting for cash gigs to buy groceries, it was clear I couldn’t count on Dad for fiscal stability, much less college. Long before I’d turned eighteen, I’d been on my own financial track. I geared up to be a nursing major, knowing it would guarantee me a job, and I took a gap year to earn money to supplement my scholarship funds. I held down two jobs that year, and my father treated me like a friendly boarder who occasionally left Chinese takeout in the fridge.

  Besides the anti-authority thing, my father hated the idea of throwing money into sorority membership and activities. “I’m paying for it myself,” I had told him when he’d objected to me pledging in freshman year. “I took a gap year and worked my butt off and saved every penny. Can you just leave it alone? Can’t you just let me be happy with this?”

  Dad just waved me off and muttered something about it being a different era. At least he hadn’t brought it up since then. He had even attended last year’s father-daughter dance, and, true to form, he’d been unimpressed by the wealth and fame that surrounded him. Dad had talked sports with Isabel’s father, a professional basketball star, and he’d gotten a gig out of Angela’s parents, who hired entertainers for corporate events in Silicon Valley where Angela’s mom was a dot-com genius. Sometimes, my dad could rise to the occasion. Was I embarrassed to have the only father with no sports coat and a scraggly ponytail halfway down his back? A little. But at least he’d made an effort. Since then my father let me do my own thing while he downscaled to a trailer and traveled around for gigs.

  It made me feel a little better that I wasn’t the only one who had a rocky relationship with my father. Defiance was always navigating ways to avoid her parents’ demand that she give up school and let them fix her up in an arranged marriage, as some Roma families still did. Isabel had a polite, distant relationship with her famous father, but she sensed the resentment from his new wife and her kids. Angela knew that her average grades would always make her seem like a failure to her overachieving parents. So nobody’s life was perfect.

  Now as I moved through the halls and stairways of Theta House, I realized that everything looked the same—the swell of carpeting over the stairs, the worn doorknobs and moldings touched by countless hands every day—but the house felt different. A veil of mourning had fallen over all of us, manifesting itself in the typical range from denial to rage. As one of the most pragmatic, level sisters of Theta Pi, I didn’t go in for ghost tales, but even I felt the residue of Lydia’s presence in these halls, as if her depression lingered in the air, the scent of disappointment and sorrow.

  Avoiding some sisters who were hugging in the hall and sobbing about Lydia, I stepped into the suite and closed the door behind me. “I’m glad that’s over,” I said, kicking my Ugg slippers into the entry closet.

  Angela was with her guy on the couch, and Isabel and Defiance sat on the window seat with the glass pane cracked open to suck away the smell of weed. With all kinds of digestive issues, Isabel had a medical marijuana card that allowed her to smoke, and fortunately for us, she was generous with her medicine. Personally, I preferred to drink my way to nirvana, but after a rough freshman year Isabel’s stomach wouldn’t allow her even a sip of alcohol.

  “What did Jan want?” Angela asked as she snuggled into the crook of Darnell’s arm. Even seated, he was about a head taller than her, but he was a gentle giant, laid-back when he wasn’t getting aggressive on the basketball court.

  “She said the police were looking for me.” I dropped into an upholstered chair. “Apparently, Lydia wrote about me in her journal, and they think I might know something about why she killed herself.”

  “Shit!” Defiance said, looking up at me through a cloud of vapor.

  “I know.” I gathered my hair back. “I didn’t do anything wrong, but the cops can be scary.”

  Isabel blew a breath toward the open window. “It’s so mean that the police have to come around when everyone is already feeling down. What do they want from you?”

  “They need to make sure that Lydia wasn’t murdered,” I said. “And if she killed herself, they’d like to know the reason why.” I didn’t think the police had a chance in hell of finding out why Lydia jumped from the bridge, but I understood why they had to try.

  “Does anyone ever know the reason why someone commits suicide?” Angela asked.

  Darnell stroked the braids on her shoulder. “That’s deep, babe.”

  “We know she was depressed.” Isabel sat cross-legged on the window seat, picking at the seam in her leggings. “But I never thought this would happen. What was her deal? Was it about a guy?”

  “Did she ever have a real boyfriend?” Angela asked. “Honestly, I thought maybe she didn’t like boys so much.”

  “You talked to her, Emma,” Isabel said. “Did she ever say anything?”

  “Lydia loved the notion of having a boyfriend. She was focused on guys. The way she always wanted events where you had to bring a date?”

  “Hold on here. Listen to the person who could see inside her heart.” Defiance insisted that she had the ability to read a person’s thoughts. I didn’t necessarily believe her, but she was definitely a good judge of character. She pulled her hands inside the cuffs of her sweater. “Lydia was always wanting a boy by her side, but she rarely got too close. Never more than two dates.”

  “Except for that boy from high school.” Angela snapped her fingers, trying to remember. “What was his name? Nick. Any person who talks that much about a guy clearly hasn’t hooked him.”

  “She talked a lot about Nick,” I said. “And sometimes she mentioned one other guy from last year.” I was hesitant to say his name, not sure how much Lydia’s connection to this dude was public knowledge.

  “That’s right.” Angela snapped her fingers. “The senator’s son. Graham Hayden.” Graham was well known on campus because of his father and his star status on the soccer team. “Lydia was all upset when they broke up last winter, but really? They were dating, like, ten minutes.”

  “She liked Graham, but I think Nick was the love of her life,” Isabel said wistfully.

  Defiance folded her arms. “Is there any such thing?” Her most recent boyfriend was a lacrosse player from Alpha Sigma Chi who had impressed us all by showering Defiance with flowers until we learned that he expected sexual favors for each and every long-stemmed rose. “So pedantic. It just gets tired,” Defiance had told us.

  “That’s b
ecause you haven’t fallen in love yet.” Isabel folded her legs into the lotus position and pressed her palms together in the center of her chest. “Be patient, little Defiance, and things will come together for you.”

  “Do you think anyone has told Nick?” I asked, recalling the stories Lydia had told of her parents’ disapproval of the young man who had worked in the gardens of their estate. Lydia’s parents had thought that a simple gardener was not an appropriate match for their daughter, and so she’d had to sneak around to see him.

  “Good question,” Angela said. “He might still think she’s alive. Like maybe he’s waiting for her to answer his texts and he thinks she’s pissed at him.”

  “That would be so sad!” Isabel’s lower lip jutted out in a pout.

  Although Isabel tended toward the dramatic, this was a tragic possibility. “And what was Mrs. J saying about Lydia’s parents driving out?” I said. “They’re on the other side of the effing planet.”

  “That would be quite a drive from Greece,” Defiance agreed as she tapped her phone. “Coming by duck boat.”

  “That was old Jan getting choked up,” Angela said. “Sometimes she gets the details wrong, even when she’s not rattled.”

  “Look at that. We’ve made it to Snapchat.” Defiance lifted her phone up to reveal a photo of the Theta Pi sign in front of our house, with a sad face emoji and the caption “Feeling Sad. RIP Lydia Drakos.”

  “They’re building a memorial out front?” I rolled out of the chair and went to the window.

  A small crowd was forming, congregating around the sign. “They’re turning the sign into a memorial,” I said.

  We huddled at the window, curtains behind our heads to block out the glare. On the lawn below, students were gathering, some stacking floral bouquets, others sitting at the base of the lawn with lit candles. Someone had strung white Christmas lights over the Theta Pi sign in front of the house, and the lights twinkled over a spreading mass of flowers, candles, and posters heaped near the sign.