by Nick Pirog
:02
By the time I get to my feet, the first minute of my day has already come and gone. My neck is stiff, a consequence of sleeping in such an awkward position, but I count myself lucky. I hadn't hit my head on anything. No blood. No concussion.
I rub my neck as I peer out the window. An echo of the President's face plays over my eyes and I shake my head, eliciting a shooting pain through my sternocleidomastoid—the long muscle running from the clavicle to just below the ear. Could that really have been him? But it was. There wasn't a shadow of a doubt that the man I'd seen was Connor Sullivan. The 44th President of the United States.
I walk to the kitchen and sit down in front of the laptop. After a short couple seconds I have pulled up the bio of Connor Sullivan on Wikipedia. The once three-term Governor of Virginia has dark brown hair parted on the left and gray-green eyes that aren't unlike my own. But that's where the similarities end. Sullivan is the tallest president, dwarfing Lincoln by three inches and Madison by nearly fifteen. He is a head taller than me, which would put me eye-level with the most famous chin dimple in the free world. It only adds to his allure that he was an All-American small forward at Dayton.
I thought about adding a quick update to his long and tedious Wikipedia page: April 18th – murders woman in Alexandria, VA.
On this note, I search the local news outlets for an attack or murder, but come up empty.
My cell phone chirps and I quickly respond to my father's “are-you-still-alive?” texts and know that he will finally be able to sleep knowing his baby boy is alive and well. My mother left when I was six, unable to cope with my disease, leaving my father to care for me. He worked two jobs, sixteen hour days, but he was there every night when I woke up at 3 a.m. He tried to make my life as normal as possible. When I was young, I had twenty minutes of school each morning with Professor Bins. Math, science, spelling – he covered everything. My father was adamant that I develop social skills and would pay parents, literally pay them, to get their kids to come play video games or tag or ping-pong with me for a half hour. (I actually still keep in touch with a couple of them on Facebook.) My dad would call in favors or shell out grand sums of money for establishments to make special arrangements for me. On my tenth birthday I woke up at an amusement park. For an hour the two of us had the whole park to ourselves. When I was eighteen he set up a prom for me. The girl was the daughter of a woman he worked with, and she wasn't all that cute, but it had been exciting nonetheless and I did get a quick kiss out of it. He administered my SATs to me over the course of ten nights, standing over me with a stopwatch (I got a 1420 by the way). On my twenty-first birthday I woke up and my dad had turned the house into a bar and it was full of coeds. I later found out he paid a University of Virginia sorority a couple thousand dollars to pack the place.
I contemplate calling him and telling him about his favorite president, but my father would bury me in a thousand questions and my hour would dissolve like sugar in water.
I grab a sandwich from the fridge and try to shake last night from my mind. Last night was the past. I don't deal in the past. I deal in the present. And presently, I'd wasted eighteen minutes of my day.
I grab my phone, slip on my Asics, remember to grab a beanie, and run out the door.
It is 3:26 a.m.
I will have to cut my run short. I do a seven-minute mile out, then a six-minute mile back. By the time I stand beneath the streetlight, the same streetlight Connor Sullivan parked his car under a day earlier, it is 3:39.
Twenty-one minutes.
I turn and face the house. It is silent, as if the wrought iron gate surrounding it protects it from all threats, even sound. I pull my hand into my shirt sleeve and fiddle with the lock atop the gate. It unlatches and the gate swings open with a soft creak. I know what I'm about to do is wrong, both ethically and legally, but what if there is a woman in the house that needs help? It had been nearly twenty-four hours since the scream; she could feasibly still be alive. Right? Either way, you might be asking yourself, why wasn't I calling the police to come check it out?
Simple.
This was the most exciting thing to happen in my 14,000 hours of being awake.
I slide through the opening in the gate, then tiptoe up the steps. There are two narrow panes of glass running vertically along the door and I lean forward and peer into the house. My eyes are still pinging with the light from the streetlamp and I can't make out a single shape. I lift my hand, still covered by my sleeve – I have no plans of leaving any fingerprints – and push down on the wrought iron handle. It gives and the door pushes inward.
I wiggle my foot in the space and push inward until I can fully slip my body through. The door eases shut behind me. I pull out my cell phone and click on the flashlight app. The room brightens.
Breaking and entering. Check and check.
From the shape of the house, I know the garage is left and the kitchen, living room, and bedrooms are to the right. I take a deep breath and whisper, “Hello.”
No one answers.
I begin moving slowly through the house. It is bigger than it appears from the outside, stretching back nearly double what I would have predicted. The house smells clean and tidy and it is. The kitchen is spotless, save for two dishes in the sink, which I deduce once held grilled cheese and tomato soup. The refrigerator is full. Some healthy items. Some not so. There is a large sectional in the living room adjacent to a flat screen TV that I assume, by the 3D glasses next to the remote, is one of the newer models. There are two small bedrooms and one master. The master is the only one that appears lived in. Trinkets, mostly of elephants, fill every imaginable surface.
The bed is made. The pillows perfectly plump and arranged.
My phone vibrates and I realize it is the alarm I set. Knowing full well there was a good chance I might end up inside the house across the street, I'd set the alarm to go off at 3:50.
I start back toward the front door and pull it open. Giving the foyer one last survey, I decide that if Connor Sullivan had in fact hurt the woman – who might or might not be the owner of the house –then she wasn't here. So, he'd either come back to clean up his mess or there had never been a mess to start with, ergo, the woman wasn't hurt. Regardless if it was A, B, C, or otherwise, she wasn't here.
A shadow.
I flick my head around, which sends a bolt of lightning through my neck. The two Advil and the Icy Hot I applied had markedly alleviated the pain, but the wrenching of my neck has overpowered the drugs.
I groan at the cat.
He is tan and black, and his eyes are orange against the light from my cell phone. He comes forward and rubs against my leg.
“Hey, cat.”
He doesn't respond.
I reach down to pet him, but before I touch him, he darts away and slinks down the hallway. I shine my light after him. He meows at a door. I walk toward him and pull the door open.
The smell is overpowering.
I can smell it in my eyes.
I can hear the smell.
The woman is on the hood of the car. She's wearing a blue tank top and plaid pajama bottoms. The woman's neck is swollen and is a tie-dye of red, purple, and blue. Icy Hot and Advil will not help this woman.
The cat bounces up and begins meowing at the woman. Below the neck, the woman's body is drained of color, a pastel white. The cat curls up on the woman's chest and lies down.
I take a couple steps forward. By my best guess the woman is in her early twenties. Blond hair and petite. Eyes that were once electric blue are dull and rimmed in blood. She’s still attractive in death and I wonder how many necks she’d turned in life.
There is a chiming and I look down at my phone. I've been standing over the woman's body for seven minutes.
Shit.
As I turn to leave, I realize the sound isn't coming from my phone. It is coming from another phone. Possibly the woman's. The phone rings a third time. It is under the car. I get down on my
hands and knees. I drop to my belly. I army crawl until my torso is halfway beneath the low hanging Audi. My fingers touch the outside of the phone's pink casing. I groan, edge forward, try and flip the phone back over on itself. It takes me seven tries. I grab the phone, push myself painfully from beneath the car, and get to my feet.
I am huffing and puffing.
I look down at the phone. It is a white Samsung Galaxy S4 in a pink case. The call has expired. The time is 3:59.
I sprint out of the garage and to the front door. Can I get home in time? It's a hundred yards then up three flights of stairs. What if I fall over in the middle of the road? What if I only make it to the front yard? What if someone finds me, then comes and finds the woman's body?
I will wake up in jail.
I decide there's no way I can make it.
I have to hide.
I run to one of the small bedrooms, open the closet, and lie down. I'm still looking for a way to extend my legs when I fall asleep.
