by Megan Abbott
—Marie Curie
NOW
“What did he do? What did he do?”
Everything is wet.
The chloroform is gone from the air now but seems instead to all be inside me, like droopy flowers going to rot in my mouth, my head.
“What did he do?” I hear my voice saying over and over. “What did he do?”
But it isn’t my voice. It’s Diane’s. And suddenly, Diane is there, kneeling beside me, her face a pale smudge. She’s waiting for me to say something.
It all comes drifting back, like a briny tide. I said a lot of things the other night. Some things about Diane…That girl, she looks so innocent, but don’t believe it. She is a killer. She killed in cold blood.
“I didn’t mean,” I say, words coming in dreamy pieces, “…to do it.
“I tried…to stop it.”
“I know,” she says, her face coming into focus now. Her eyes saucer-wide, like a picture of a girl. “You had to. You had to do it.”
“Yes, yes,” I say, voice dragging. “I didn’t think you’d understand.”
She looks at me. “I’m going to help you,” she says very formally, her chin shaking slightly.
“Help me,” I say, but it’s really a question. That’s when my head turns to one side, all the pieces inside it seeming to slide in one direction.
That’s when I see him. Alex. Three, four feet from me, sprawled on the floor.
Everything comes back, the lush fountain from Alex’s throat, the sharp smell, the glub-glub like the bubbler on my fish tank when I was a kid, the way he turned on his heel before he fell, like a vaudevillian doing a pratfall.
You never think anyone will die in front of you. You never think how it will feel.
“I heard you,” she says, and her face is so tight, her mouth stretched like a piece of red string. “I heard you fighting. You had to do it.”
“Oh, no,” I say, wriggling, trying to lift my body. “You don’t understand.”
“I do understand. Take it easy.”
“It was an accident,” I say, up on my elbows now, my head feeling like a bowling ball plugged with sand. I look over at Alex again, the way his hands rest on his chest, his wrists bent. The blood is everywhere, a hot-penny smell.
“Are they coming?” I say, my voice speeding up, catching up now. “Did you call 911?”
“No,” she says, and I don’t know why she isn’t moving. Why she’s just kneeling there. Looking at me. “Don’t worry. I didn’t call. It’s going to be okay.”
I look at her, not believing her, not really able to line my thoughts up properly or be sure I’m hearing right.
“My phone is in my purse,” I say, on my knees now, my sneakers sliding, my ankles streaked red. “Where is it? You have a phone. Call them. The people who come.”
The lights pinching my eyes, I spot the phone on the wall by the door, the old one with the blue light no one uses anymore.
“Stop,” Diane says. “It’s okay. I’ll help you.”
“Help me? What—”
I’m standing, but my legs won’t do what they’re supposed to. I reach out for the wall.
That’s when I see Alex’s face. I try not to see his throat, so I end up looking at his face. His eyes cloudy, a scrim pulled across.
I’m looking at Alex’s eyes and the tilt of his jaw. I’m looking at what’s happened and how I couldn’t stop it.
I scramble to the emergency phone, its blue light, Diane fast behind me.
“No.” Diane slaps her hand over mine, pushes it against the wall. “You’re not thinking. Your head’s full of chloroform.”
But it feels like the opposite. That I’m wakening to it, to how monstrous this all is, the body straggled scarecrow-like, and death is so cruel.
“Look at you,” she says. “What do you think the police will decide the minute they see you?”
My eyes glide down to my shirt, my jeans heavy with blood.
“It was an accident,” I say once more, my tongue thick in my mouth.
She looks at me and I can hear myself breathing.
“I told you to call 911,” I say, my voice jangly now. I think of the squeaking sounds, the soft hillock of Alex’s Adam’s apple. I remember the ABCs they teach you in CPR. Airway, breathing, circulation.
“We can’t do that,” she says. “I can’t let you do that to yourself.”
It’s only then that I realize it. “You don’t believe me.”
She pauses. “I heard you two fighting about something. I heard shouting.”
The feeling, the way she’s looking at me, is unbearable.
“No, no, no,” I say. “We weren’t…it was just an argument. It wasn’t anything.”
She doesn’t believe me. I can see it.
So the words just come, my mouth loose and hapless.
“We were arguing, but it was an accident. He was threatening to…he…” Then it’s as if a shudder of something rises inside me, my hand grabbing for the lab bench, clawing at its edge. “Diane, he was going to ruin everything.”
She doesn’t say anything, but there’s a dawning on her face.
“I told him,” I say. “I told him everything.”
“About my dad,” she whispers.
I look at her and nod.
Both our hands jostle for the phone, Diane grabbing it from me, clawing at me.
“Don’t you get it?” she says, voice husky and strained, a new urgency. “He knew something that we both wanted no one else to know. Now he’s dead and we’re the ones in this room with the body. How does that look?”
“What does that matter? We didn’t do anything, we—”
She looks at me. “If he told, it matters a lot.”
I don’t say anything. I’m thinking of Alex: It’s under control. I got this. That look on his face, his mouth opening as if he’s about to say something but then stopping.
Could he have told someone already? I can’t be sure.
“He didn’t,” I say anyway. Then, scrambling, remembering, “I asked him if he’d talked to Dr. Severin. He said no.”
She pauses. “If he told her, we’d know already,” she decides. “Dr. Severin doesn’t wait. She acts.”
I nod wearily, trying to stay upright. Trying to catch my breath.
“But we don’t know who else he might have told,” she says. Then adds, “What if he told his girlfriend?”
I look at her. “His girlfriend? He doesn’t have a girlfriend.”
She looks at me and now she says nothing.
There doesn’t seem to be any other way. In my chloroform-draped, panic-thick state, I can’t think of any other way.
We walk back around the corner, wet step by wet step, away from the sight, the smack of the chloroform, the everything still hovering in the air, and I have to see it all again. See what it looks like from the outside. The blood trail like a wreath, the way he spun before he fell. The red treads from my sneakers fanning through the sludge of blood. The bench, my palm print seared on it. And who knows what hand or fingerprints might be down there? My eyes scattering to all the other places I stood, where my hands and fingertips rested.
I look at everything but him, the dark clump in the center of the room.
“We don’t clean up the blood,” Diane says, pulling on blue lab gloves and handing me a pair. “We only get rid of your prints.”
“How do we…”
“Whoever finds him will assume it was an accident. They’ll run over and contaminate everything anyway.”
“It was an accident, Diane,” I say yet again, so many times it no longer feels real or true.
“Put on those gloves,” she says, looking at me. “And take off your shoes.”
Later I’ll wonder why I didn’t stop her, stop everything. But there was some voice in my head, a low throb that said, But it is your fault, really, Kit. But Kit, you are guilty. You are.
Wasn’t I?
I’ve cleaned up many spills in the lab, but I’ve
never done something like this. In our gloves, goggles, and coats, we move quickly. Wearing only socks and shoe covers, I can hear myself breathing and the sound is strangely soothing. Spraying and wiping, we go through a box of Kimwipes, attacking with great precision the mad scatter of my shoe prints, partial and whole, my bloody hand-heel print on the lab bench. Both our prints on the emergency phone. The nitrogen valve Diane must have turned off.
The lab is you. It was something Dr. Severin told me long ago, the day she hired me. You’re one of us now. And the lab will come to feel like home. Maybe, if you’re like me, more like home than home ever felt.
That was all she said, but she was right. The lab did, and does.
Its lenses and scopes become your eyes. Its buzzing spectrometer, the buzzing of your brain. Its clicks and beeps forever clicking and beeping like your heart never stopping.
You are everywhere. The lab is you.
We save this part for last. The most incriminating sight: those shoe prints smack in the center of the great lake of blood, my sneaker ridges like gnashing teeth.
“I have an idea,” Diane says, leaning over the wound itself. “It’s old blood, but it’s the best we can do.”
It takes me a few seconds, but then I see what she means to do. The surest way to obliterate the shoe print is to engulf it.
“I’ll do it,” Diane says. “You don’t have to look.”
“No,” I say. “We can’t. Diane, no.”
I’m kneeling now, and Diane is too. The body is dark red from chin to waist, the red weeping into the furrows of his shirt.
Red streamers streaming from the center of his throat. It has a kind of terrible beauty.
Heels of gloved hands to stiff shoulder blades, we tip the torso off the floor, his neck flopping like a doll’s.
I do it, but I don’t look. I never look. My eyes not on him but on Diane’s shoe covers as we lift him. It takes nearly a minute for gravity to do its work, for the pooled blood to seep over the shoe print, effacing it. Or close to it.
His body tilting, the wound gaping, we both feel the last of Alex’s heart release itself. Together, we let slip the last of Alex’s thumping heart.
“I think we’re done,” she says.
I don’t say anything.
“Kit.”
“Stop talking,” I say. “Stop talking. Stop talking. Stop talking.”
I say it over and over again.
Back in high school, at the Golden Fry, I was always the one to scrape the mold from the bottom of the ice machine, to kneel under the pressure cooker, cleaning the grease traps. I was the only female employee who ever did it. The other high-school girls, their nails gelled, their hands forever damp from the coconut and vanilla buttercream and cherry blossom balms they squeezed from tubes so tiny they hung from their key chains—they were never going to do it.
The nineteen-year-old manager was too afraid to ask the older ones. Justine and Careena, all of twenty-four and twenty-eight, both seemed so brine-hardened by real life. In Justine’s case, she’d been sharpened to teeth-baring rage; in Careena’s, dulled to sloe-eyed sorrow.
So it was often left to me, and I never minded after the first time. I guess deep down I took a certain pride in going to such places. I was very young and didn’t want to be afraid of anything.
Now, before I put a needle into a mouse’s quivering belly, I cross myself twice, every time.
We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals. That was what Serge told me the first time he watched, approvingly. I am sure Mr. Kant meant the heart of a woman too.
“We have to go,” she says, on her feet now. She extends her arm, her gloved hand.
Because I am not moving, crouching still over the red blur my shoe print once resided in.
“Come on.”
I look up at her. The fluorescents burning off her.
“Give me your hand,” she says, offering hers. “Hurry now.”
At the eyewash station, I shove my forearms over the spout.
Diane is stuffing all the used Kimwipes, a pair of mop heads, the shoe covers—rinsed but still red-seamed—into a plastic biohazard bag.
“Who comes in on the weekend?” she asks.
“Anybody might,” I say.
She’s looking at my clothes, stiffening on me like brown paper.
I don’t move and don’t look at the slumped thing on the floor. Any second, I expect to hear a soft click from the door and see Zell, Maxim, Juwon, anyone. Above, in the ceiling, I hear a scratching and imagine more mice, imagine Serge up there in the crawl space, tracking them down.
When I look over again, she’s pulled her old lab coat from her backpack, the scarlet one from Freudlinger’s lab, like a flood of blood pouring over her arm.
“Put it on.”
She’s so much taller than me, it falls to my ankles.
Walking down the long, empty hall, I can hear my clothes rustling under the lab coat. My sneakers, wet from the sink and ammonia saturated, squeak with every step. It’s so loud I want to plug my ears.
Beside me, Diane moves with purpose, but the biohazard bag swinging like a stoplight bothers me.
“We need to get rid of that,” I whisper.
“Where’s the campus incinerator?”
I shake my head. “There’s cameras all over campus.”
After tucking the bag behind her backpack, close to her body, she presses the elevator button and we step inside.
As we descend, I look at myself in the security mirror, my face stretched, my arms red wings, hoping, hoping the elevator doesn’t stop on any floor.
When the elevator chimes at the ground floor and the doors open, I exhale at last.
It’s only when we turn the corner and head to the front doors that we see Serge.
Diane touches my arm with her fingertips.
“Good morning,” he says, that deep Slavic voice of his. “Good morning to you both.” He looks at me. “Are you going to church?”
I stare at him dumbly. He gestures to my ensemble, my body swimming in Diane’s lab coat.
“I do not think,” he says, “I have ever seen you in a dress before.”
THEN
Can you imagine what it might feel like for someone to confess a murder to you? What it means to hear it, to know it, to carry it with you? You have been made an involuntary accomplice. Accessory after the fact. What would you do? Go to the police? Urge repentance? Offer words of understanding? Pray?
Or would you run?
At first, all I could do was hide. I skipped AP Chem, which pained me, so close to news about the Severin scholarship. But even avoiding my locker, our shared classes, I couldn’t escape her. She knew my beats. Finally, she found me in the library, on the floor behind the tall stacks, curled over my overheated, sticky-keyed laptop.
She found me anyway.
I saw her feet first as she prowled the stacks like the monster in a movie. Those black flats, shiny as soldier boots.
“Kit,” she said. “I don’t understand.”
I told her I couldn’t see her. I didn’t ever want to see her again.
“But the AP exam is coming,” she said, kneeling down next to me. “We need to study.”
“Diane, we’re not study partners anymore,” I said. I just said it. “We’re not anything anymore.”
She looked at me, a notch of pain over her brow. It was as if she’d had her first one-night stand without knowing it. She’d shared something with me, something as intimate as if she’d let me between those long, locked legs of hers, and now I was pulling away.
“Oh,” she said, nodding almost to herself. Rising slowly, brushing the dust off her knees. Then adding, softly, “I ruined everything.”
Watching her walk away, wending through the stacks like a pale ghost, I felt something awful inside, even if I couldn’t name it.
That night, I dreamed of Mr. Fleming. His weekend khakis and his funny mustache like a bristle brush. In the dream he was on a gur
ney, his heart swollen to five times its size. And Diane in her long gored skirt, staring as he thumped his own hands over his heart like his hands were paddles. Like he could will himself back to life.
I dreamed of my own dad calling me, his voice pained and throbbing through the phone. Like the phone itself was quivering with it. There’s a girl here, he said. She says she’s your friend. She says she has something to give me…
And I dreamed of Diane coming into my house at night, sneaking down the shag carpet of the hallway. Dreamed of waking up to her white face above me.
Isn’t this what you wanted? the dream Diane asked me, as if just noticing me there in her dad’s apartment, her dad dying on the floor.
Was it what I wanted? Didn’t I crave all her secrets, plucking the heart of her mystery?
I wanted to know her secrets, but I didn’t want them to be this.
Why did you tell me? I asked, and it sounded like a whimper, and I wasn’t even sure if I was awake or asleep. Now it’s part of me too.
That’s how it felt, like a tumor lashed to my insides.
I’m sorry, she said, crying softly but smiling too. You told me your secret. I wanted to tell you mine.
In the morning, I told my mom I was sick, the sickest I’d ever been. Maybe I was dying. Something inside me, cramps like an animal crawling inside my ovaries.
She let me stay home for three days. I didn’t shower or brush my teeth, a mouthful of fur. Finally, the third morning, she dragged me into the shower stall, scrubbed me down like one of her mangy rescue mutts.
“Tomorrow you go back,” she told me.
After she left, I tried to study, but the words kept turning into pictures and I kept falling asleep on the afghan or having dark, semi-awake thoughts.
At one point, I guess I started moaning. It got so loud I frightened myself.
