by Rae Meadows
When you get upstairs where your room is, kids are hanging out in the hall, in doorways, in groups and pairs.
“Hey, what’s up, guys?” you say with gusto, putting your hand up for high fives.
You see them calculate who you are: the outgoing fun guy, the party man. Soon you’ll be the rich kid whose stuff is nicer than everyone else’s. So far, so good, you think. I can do this.
“Hey, man,” you say to a preppy kid in a Milton Lacrosse shirt. “Charles Raggatt.”
You put out your hand. He shakes it with a little laugh.
“Hey. Josh Peterson.”
As you turn away, you see him exchange a look with a lanky, blond swimmer type. You know in your gut that the look is about you, that they are not fooled. Already they have figured you out. It’s not possible, you think. It can’t be. You shove the thought down and decide you will do anything in your power to win them over.
After you have brought everything in from your car—no one offers to help—you go about setting up your TV and stereo, pretending to be cool about it, but testing the volume too loudly so people will notice. Your roommate, John Kim, seems pretty nice, if a little reserved and unimpressed by all your gear. Maybe you’ll be friends, but he’s not quite what you’d envisioned.
You step out into the hall and announce, “Party Saturday night. Room 24. The keg is going to flow.”
A couple girls cheer but then go back to their conversation.
“Dude, do you have a car?” Josh Peterson asks.
“Yep,” you say.
“Think you could help us out tomorrow? We have to get a broken pool table to the dump.”
Josh, it turns out, is already an SAE, the best fraternity on campus. He came early to rush. You didn’t know anything about it.
“Totally. Just grab me whenever,” you say, thinking this may be your ticket in.
“All right,” he says.
You go back in your room and sit on your bare mattress, overwhelmed, unsure of what to do. Your roommate plays Tetris on his computer. Your head feels like an overloaded circuit board. You feel dislocated from your body.
“I’m going to go grab some food,” you say to the back of his head. “Want anything?”
“No, thanks,” he says, tapping the keys to steer his piece on–screen. “Damn,” he says when the game ends, and turns to you as you pretend to look for your keys. “I’ll probably go to bed soon, if that’s okay with you?”
“Yeah, totally. Sorry I got here so late. I’ll unpack tomorrow.”
You spread your sheets haphazardly on your bed and step over stereo components to get to the door.
“Oh, Charles,” he says, “some of us are going out tomorrow for pizza. If you want to come?”
“Yeah, okay,” you say, thankful to be included for once, and yet so confused about who you’re supposed to be.
The hall crowd has thinned.
“Hey, anyone want anything? I’m making a food run,” you say.
Shaking of heads and “no, thanks” and you go out alone, willing yourself not to start running to try to ditch your skin, to tear it off and leave it in a heap in the dirt.
###
You go to your classes but you barely do the work. You’re too busy planning nightly happy hour in your room, stocking it with mixers and snacks, bottles of booze. (You’re never even asked for your ID on account of your size and your gold card.) The best part is, everyone comes by. People from the dorm and people you’ve never seen before. They slap you on the back and yell “Raggatt” in salute and you can barely believe it. You finally have a glimpse of the glow of popularity that has always eluded you. So what if they come for the free drinks? You’ll take it. You’re pretty sure you’re becoming “that guy” and that’s what matters. Girls even treat you differently now. They talk to you and let you drive them places. Amy with the strawberry hair laughs at your jokes even if she isn’t interested in going out with you.
And the SAEs, they like you. You drive them places and buy kegs for them and hang out. When you’re drunk you dance to make them laugh. You buy them a foosball table and a pinball machine. They tell you that you are their mascot.
When the year goes on and people stop coming by and you stop getting invited places and the SAEs stop calling except when they need something and even John Kim stops living in your room when he gets a girlfriend, you think that you cannot stop or you will die. Drink more. Buy more. Eat more. Be used more. You patch the fissures and holes with anything you can find. You take sleeping pills to lose yourself for fifteen hours at a time. You find refuge at the donut shop with the nice woman who treats you like you’re human. You watch porn instead of going to class. You drive into New York City looking for prostitutes but you can’t even figure out where to go. When you do find a drugged-out woman on Eleventh Avenue she demands you give her $200 and then walks away when you hand over your cash. You sit in your car and eat KFC and cry and think about how it all went so very wrong. Again.
And then you see her and you can’t believe you’ve been at school for weeks and not seen her before. Dark eyes, light hair, a lopsided smile, an electricity about her that sends a zing down to your toes, and even as you know that she could not possibly ever like you, her existence is a reason to keep it all together.
You put your faith in Sarah Shafer.
CHAPTER 25
Grace calls Brian from the station, blaming her afternoon disappearance on a forgotten series of doctors’ appointments, and he has her meet him at an East Village dive down the street from the one where she humiliated herself last time. She just wants to feel dulled, blotted out, and at the moment she doesn’t even care that Brian will be sitting next to her.
She orders two vodka tonics and then asks Brian, who is getting situated and finally hooks his boot heels on the rung of the stool, what he wants. He laughs, thinking she’s joking.
“Oh. I guess I’ll have a bourbon then,” he says, quickly covering his shock at her double drink order.
The bartender wears eyeliner and black nail polish, and he mouths along to the music as he pours the drinks.
“To your return,” Brian says, trying to sound casual.
He lifts his glass in her direction.
She breathes in the warm, sweet oak scent of his bourbon, with all its memory-soaked associations, then downs her first drink in four long gulps.
A couple of weeks after Callie’s funeral, Grace’s mother went to Chicago to stay with her own mother. One night Grace awoke to voices, loud whispers, and stifled laughs coming from downstairs. Her first panicked thought was that it was burglars, so she crept to her parents’ bedroom. The bed was empty. From the banister she peered down, like she and Callie had done during parties, and saw a sliver of light coming from the study.
“Shhhh. You must be very, very quiet,” her dad said in an Elmer Fudd voice.
A woman snorted. The smell of cigarettes sneaked out from under the door. Someone knocked into a lamp.
Grace made her way downstairs and slid along the wall to the living room and to the bar. There were two glasses, one with red lipstick—what her mother would have called a floozy shade—and a quarter-bottle of Maker’s Mark. And then she found a red silk scarf on the floor and she knew it was some kind of sign meant for her. She knew it was her fault, that without Callie, her parents’ tie to each other was unraveling, that this woman was here because of what Grace had done. It was all part of her punishment. She put the bottle to her nose, breathing it so deep her eyes watered. And then she drank. But the burning fury in her throat made her gag and spit it out onto her posy-print nightgown.
Brian tilts his head in a question and a look passes over his face, a quick tightening of his eyes.
“You should know I’m really pretty dull,” Grace says, in the depths of her second drink.
“What?” he asks.
“Nothing,” she says.
“I see you forgot to wind your watch again,” he says pointing to her wrist.
&nbs
p; “I guess I don’t ever care enough what time it is,” she says.
He smiles.
“You’re really not like other people, Grace.”
She laughs.
“I missed you,” he says to his lap.
Grace sits up quickly, spilling her purse. She bends down for its contents on the floor, hiding for a moment behind her hair as she stuffs her wallet and keys back inside.
“I mean I missed having you around. At the office. That place,” he shakes his head with wide eyes. “It’s kind of the nut house.”
She wants to slither to the floor and snake her way out.
“Yeah,” she says. “Well.”
“So,” he says. “How are you?”
She laughs.
“I’m okay. You?”
Grace tunes out while he talks about work. Instead she thinks of Charles, his hope depleted, then refilled, again and again. She sees him waiting for Sarah outside her yoga class, checking himself in the mirror, chewing mints, practicing what he’d say to her when she got back in the car.
Brian has asked her something that she has missed. His brow scrunches.
“What?” she asks.
“You don’t think I’m like that, do you?” he asks.
“No, of course not,” Grace says, ordering another round. She feels like she is watching from three feet away. “Sorry,” she says, touching his arm, “I’ve just had a lot on my mind. My dad getting sick and all that.”
He presses his lips together and nods, then takes her cold hand and interlaces his fingers with hers.
“Oh,” she says, and smiles despite herself.
They drink and drink—or at least Grace does—and then she slurs, “Let’s go to your place,” because she can’t stand the uncomfortable waters he is trying to navigate in telling her he likes her, because sleeping with him would be easier than talking.
Brian looks a little frightened by the whole thing but his libido gets the best of him and he leads her blundering down Avenue C. Inside the building, he says it’s just four flights up and she collapses on the dirty bottom step.
“Do you want me to carry you?” he asks.
“God, no,” she says, rolling over and crawling up on all fours.
Brian looks stricken.
“Grace,” he says, once inside the apartment. He pushes her shoulders back against the door. “Look at me.”
His face is lit from the streetlight through the window.
“This is serious for me,” he says, his bourbon breath a powerful elixir. She halfheartedly bats his arm away but he grips her harder. “I want to get to know you,” he says insistently. “What’s going on in there?”
She feels the salty burn of tears just under the surface and she fears if she lets them begin, they won’t stop, and they will drench her, then flood the apartment, then wash out the whole city.
“Hey,” she manages to say. “It’s just me.”
And she kisses him, aiming for his mouth but getting only part of a lip. There is awkward fumbling with buttons and zippers in the dark. She goes at it feverishly —anything to avoid words. She loses herself to his body and his warmth.
When Grace wakes up, disoriented and still slightly drunk, there is Brian, lying next to her in a fetal position, her watch around his wrist. His sheets smell like baby shampoo.
She finds the rest of her clothes and slips out into the hall to dress.
The predawn night is warm and quiet and, as she passes the park, the birds’ manic chittering announces the coming of day. There is only the occasional car, certainly no cabs, so she walks toward home, unafraid of who might be lurking about. She is invisible.
###
Brian calls five times and leaves two messages. Grace lies in bed and hides, and from her window watches dark-skinned nannies push white babies up the sidewalk. The super and his wife sit on the front stoop and chatter on all through the day, a lulling Spanish backdrop. It is summer and the city has a fullness to it, swollen with heat and moisture, and ripe with rot. Her ineffectual air conditioner rattles on. After getting the mail, she is back inside her room with a throbbing head that feels like it’s threatening to burst.
###
“I’m so glad you’re there,” Charles says.
“How have you been the past few days?” Grace asks.
She is wary of him now, tired of not knowing enough.
“I’ve been better. I mean, not that I’ve been feeling better but I’ve had better days than these. Sorry,” he says. “They’ve found me competent to stand trial. But my lawyer is sticking to his strategy. He calls it mental duress.”
“Sometimes I think you want to go to jail forever,” she says flatly.
“I know, it’s just—”
“I know about the drugs,” she says.
“What?” he asks.
“I know Sarah had a cocaine problem.”
“Who told you that? It’s not true.”
“It doesn’t matter who told me. It is true.”
He doesn’t answer and she waits.
“You can’t tell anybody that.”
“It’s the truth, right?”
“She had some trouble. But she’s gone now. It doesn’t matter.” His voice falters.
“Tell me about the money, then,” she says.
“Oh,” he groans.
“Why did you give her money?”
“There’s a saying I found in the quotation book. ‘Dripping water hollows a stone.’”
“Goddamnit, Charles,” she says.
He is quiet. She sets her jaw and twists a section of her hair.
“No one was supposed to know about it. I was so happy to help her the first time she asked,” he says. “She said she was running short for the month and needed to buy some books. I gave her $100. I said that she didn’t have to pay me back. I got a big allowance so it wasn’t that big a deal.”
“And then she asked you for more?”
“It started happening pretty regularly.”
“Didn’t you feel like she was using you?”
“Whenever I would feel insecure about it, there she would be, this beautiful person sitting on my couch. I told her about how I had always been a loser and she would tell me it wasn’t true. She told me I was generous and fun and smart.” A sad and disillusioned laugh leaks out. “When I was with her, I believed her.”
“I’m sorry,” Grace says.
“We didn’t hang out together at parties or anything but that was okay. I didn’t care that she dated around. It took me a while to figure out the money was going for drugs. I don’t think anyone really knew the extent of it. But even when I knew, I couldn’t say no. I wanted to help but she didn’t want to hear it from me.”
He sighs heavily.
“I miss her laugh,” he says. “She had a kind of tomboy laugh that you knew wasn’t fake. I feel bad that I told you about that money stuff. It’s not fair to talk about now.”
“I need to know these things.”
He doesn’t respond, the silence extending.
“Do know what a rock polisher is?” she asks finally.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“You must be too young. It was a fad in the seventies. It was this little machine where you dropped in a regular stone and, after a crazy racket, it would come out a smooth and shiny nugget.”
“That’s kind of cool,” he says. “I probably would have liked something like that when I was young.”
“My dad gave me one for my tenth birthday. I was so excited, not just to have it but because it was something we could do together,” she says. “But of course it was never the right time. And then one night when I got home from my tennis lesson, I heard the telltale grinding sound from the basement. I walked down the stairs and there they were, my dad and Callie, amazing themselves with their creations.”
“That sucks,” he says. “What did you do?”
“Nothing. His back was to me so he didn’t know I was there. But she did. She glanced
at me with a smug smile and then went back to the project at hand.”
Grace remembers the anger, cold and inward. When she imagines herself she sees only dark hair and a blurry face. But she can always conjure up Callie.
———
Nassau County prosecutors will seek the death penalty for Charles Raggatt, the wealthy Emeryville College student charged with killing classmate Sarah Shafer, a well-liked communications major.
Prosecutors believe Raggatt—who threw lavish parties—drugged Shafer, then lured her to a motel room where he held her against her will and made sexual advances, which she rebuffed. He then stabbed her in a rage. After the killing, he wrapped the body in plastic bags and kept it in his car before burying it in a shallow grave behind his rented beach condo.
“This was a vicious, brutal, premeditated murder. A horrendous homicide,” said John Cavanaugh, who heads the District Attorney’s Major Offense Bureau.
———
CHAPTER 26
By midafternoon, Grace has hives dotted across her shoulders, chest, and neck—insistent and itchy welts that she has scratched raw.
It’s so hot it’s quiet outside, the sounds absorbed by the shimmering asphalt and wilting trees, the air thick and hazy. Strollered children have damp faces, their hairlines moist. The roasting sidewalk makes Grace’s flip-flops stick and she can’t open her eyes all the way, like she has stepped into a familiar anxiety dream. She gives in to the languid steaminess, moving slowly, trancelike, downhill past the rotting vomit smell of the garbage bins outside of McDonald’s and the crisp, taunting air-conditioned breaths from open shop doors.
