“It doesn’t seem terrible,” Jayla said quickly.
“I just didn’t ask a lot of questions last year, but this year—” My voice echoed over the bathroom tiles.
“You don’t need to explain. But…where did you want me to start?”
“Umm…it was around two or three a.m., right?” I was trying to keep my voice low. “Everyone was sleeping? And then something woke you up? Can you start from there?”
“Yeah. Okay.” Jayla hesitated. “Well, I woke up to Taylor screaming. Like, I could hear her through the wall. I jumped up in bed. I didn’t run out of my room right away. There is this shock when you wake up suddenly sometimes, you know? When you’re not sure what just happened?”
“Of course,” I said.
“Well, it was like that. But then I heard this other noise in her room, this ruckus like she was freaking out, banging against something or thumping the walls, I don’t know. I sat there with my heart just kind of pounding for a minute. But then I got up and went to the hallway and started knocking on her door. And a few seconds later Lily comes out of her door, screaming that she just saw Taylor on the ground out the window. And she starts calling 911. And I don’t really believe her at first, so I’m pounding harder and then finally I just tried the door, and it opened and we both ran in and looked out the window and…Lily was right. She was…she was down there.”
We were both silent for a moment. I was trying to stay focused on what I should ask next—to keep my brain from forming very vivid pictures of what Jayla was saying.
“And then I left and got the RD, Tricia,” Jayla went on. “Lily was still screaming and crying at the window until Tricia and I came back, and Tricia asked me to take Lily into my room…and she went down to be with Taylor and called the Barton RD to come be with us while she waited for the ambulance.”
“Was Taylor…still alive?”
The grim echo of my voice in the bathroom was driving me crazy. I got up and stormed out.
“I don’t know. I know she wasn’t by the time the ambulance got there, so I’m guessing, hoping, not.”
“So when you heard her when you first woke up…was she saying anything? What was she screaming?” I tried to lower my voice again as I headed down the stairs.
“Oh…she wasn’t saying anything. Just screaming. Shrieking. Like you do when you’re waking up from a nightmare or whatever. There were no words.”
“So why do you think she was screaming?” I asked, pushing my way out of the building’s glass doors.
Two youngish-looking boys passed by as I said this. One of them, ruddy-cheeked and bespectacled, paused to stare at me. I winked at him and he scurried away.
“I don’t like to speculate, but…”
“It’s okay,” I said, watching the two boys disappear behind a nearby dorm. “Anything you can tell me is helpful.”
“I’ve got to think whatever she was taking might’ve been giving her some kind of hallucinations or voices or something.”
“But…does pot do that, though?” I asked, pacing along the side of the building. It was too cold to find a bench to sit on. But at least the crisp air was bringing me back to myself.
“There was a lot of it in her system,” Jayla said slowly. “They found that out later. Probably you knew that. She might’ve had a whole bunch of those brownies, not just one. That’s…hard-core.”
“Yeah…,” I said. A cold gust of air blew over me, practically taking my hat off. “I guess.”
“Well…it’s not a satisfactory explanation to me, either,” Jayla said with a sigh. “But it’s the one that makes the most sense. I don’t think she…”
Jayla trailed off. She didn’t want to even say suicide.
“Did you ever wonder if someone was in the room with her?” I asked, tugging at my hat.
Jayla was silent for a moment. I stamped my feet and wiggled my toes.
“Um…not really. No one ever came to her room much. Except…”
I drew in a breath.
Except me. That was what she was going to say.
“But the way she was screaming, could it be she was screaming at someone?”
“Like I said, there were no words. It wasn’t like a Get out of here, don’t touch me kind of situation. It was like someone waking up from a nightmare.”
I considered this distinction for a moment, unsure if it was clear to me. But it felt inappropriate to call it into question. Jayla had been there; I had not.
“I know this might sound a little weird, but did you hear anything else unusual going on in her room before that night?” I asked. “Like, say, in the week leading up to it?”
It seemed odd to me that no one would have awoken the night she took the footage—the way she’d torn out of her room and thrown her phone and everything.
“Umm…not that I can remember. But you know, Taylor and I chatted sometimes. In the bathroom, the hallway, whatever. And in that week or so before…she seemed a little messed up. Not her same self.”
“Oh. Yeah?” I felt like I’d swallowed a paperweight and it was slowly sliding down toward my chest.
“Well, I grabbed lunch with her a few days before…because she looked kind of lonely.”
I gulped. Lonely, in part, because her shadow had left her.
“Did you guys talk?”
“A little. She said she was failing calculus, and falling behind on all of her homework because she’d lost her laptop. She thought maybe someone stole it in the library. I was like, Don’t you want to report that? She said no, she hated talking to the administration, maybe she would just order a new one online. But it seemed like she should be worried about it.”
“Taylor lost things all the time,” I murmured.
“When I saw her a couple days later,” Jayla continued, “she said a librarian called her after the laptop turned up in the library Lost and Found. She was like, I guess I have to start doing work again, like she was disappointed she didn’t have that excuse not to study anymore. I thought a lot about that later. That she seemed totally…apathetic, I guess. Like how I could have said or done something to make her feel better? But at the time I just thought she was…I don’t know…unfriendly? Checked out because it was senior year? Done with all the Windham shit? I just didn’t think she was in serious trouble. And I probably should have, looking back.”
“There’s no way you could have known,” I said softly.
We were both quiet for a moment.
“Umm…do you know what happened to the old RD, Tricia?” I asked. “Where she ended up?”
“No idea. I’ve only kept up with a few kids from my class, even. You might ask someone who was on the soccer team. She was also the coach. Maybe someone kept in touch.” Jayla paused. “Did you have any other questions?”
“I don’t think so,” I said reluctantly. I couldn’t feel my face anymore, in any case.
“Well, let me know if you do.”
Jayla wished me luck with the rest of the school year, and I wished her the same. After we hung up, I sat still for a moment, staring at the CALL ENDED message, unsure how I was supposed to feel.
I headed to Anthony’s hall, rubbing my hands against my cold cheeks. First I walked fast, and then I walked slow. But either way, my boots seemed to want to tap out the rhythm: I. Made. Her. Jump.
12
Anthony and I brought our trays to a small corner table where we could be by ourselves.
“I’d have come to you if you’d wanted,” Anthony said after eating a couple of limp vegetables in silence. “I could’ve used a crisper serving of broccoli tonight. A properly cooked piece of fish.”
Anthony always made me smile with his middle-aged sentiments and turns of phrase. The Farnswood dining halls had the same menu as Windham because it was all under the same dining services. But in Anthony’s dinin
g hall the food was always mushy and overcooked. He told me recently, No one wants to complain because the cook is a nice guy and seems kind of depressed.
“Sorry,” I said. “I wanted to get out of there. I need a break from Dearborn.”
“Yeah? What’s up?”
“Does it ever bother you,” I said slowly, “that even if what happened to Taylor was all because of a freakishly trippy dose of cannabis, it was also, like, a fulfillment of a prophecy?”
Anthony touched his new chin stubble. “Uhh…can you unpack that for me a little?”
Anthony’s greatest ambition is to host one of those nightly cable news shows where the various pundits and politicians argue and sputter and generally make asses of themselves while the host stays smart and suave. His personal hero is Don Lemon on CNN. There is no doubt in my mind that he’ll get there one day. He acts, half the time, like the cameras are already rolling for him.
“Well…” I sighed. “For years, people told a story of the ghost of a girl who jumped from that building. Or hanged herself. I mean, kinda the same thing. And then history buffs like Star are all like, Nope, no one ever died by suicide in that building. And then, though, Taylor does.”
Anthony regarded me sadly.
“Old buildings have ghost stories,” he said. “Ghost stories often have a suicide or a murder in them. Boarding school kids fetishize suicide. These are all well-known facts even outside of Windham lore. I have a friend at Harrington Prep and a cousin who went to Mosely. They both have buildings like Dearborn and ghost stories like that.”
“But their ghost stories didn’t come true,” I whispered.
“Look, Haley. I’m still depressed about Taylor, too. But we all know she had so many fucking issues.”
As if to punctuate this remark, his phone emitted a quick guitar riff.
He took it out of his pocket again.
“Who the hell are you texting right now, Anthony?”
He put it back in his pocket. “Sorry. Vince Courtier.”
“Huh?” I said. Vince Courtier was sitting two tables away from us. In fact, he was looking at us while he shoveled apple crisp into his mouth.
“He’s kind of, like, my new friend.”
“Uh…huh,” I said uncertainly.
It’s kind of an open secret at Windham-Farnswood that Anthony is probably gay. He never says so for sure. But girls don’t bother having crushes on him anymore, like they did freshman and sophomore years. Last year there was a senior named Leo who he hung out with a lot, at least in the beginning of the year. I’m pretty sure they were together. And then I’m pretty sure they broke up. Anthony was sad for a little while without saying why. Being friends with him was like the opposite of being friends with Maylin. There was a lot, with him, that apparently didn’t need to be said.
“Now, what was I saying?” Anthony asked.
“So many fucking issues,” I reminded him.
“Oh! Right. Well, yeah. You know what I mean.”
“Yeah,” I muttered. “We don’t need to talk about them all. Not tonight.”
Anthony hesitated. “Do you want dessert?”
I shook my head. I knew he didn’t want any, either. He almost never ate sweets.
“I want to show you something,” I said, taking out my phone and earbuds.
* * *
I studied Anthony’s face as he watched the video. It changed from skeptical to curious to anxious.
“Let me rewind that part,” he said in the middle.
“What part are you on?”
“Is she whispering something?”
“I don’t think it’s her, though,” I said slowly.
“Then who’s with her?” Anthony asked.
My gaze met his.
“Nobody,” I said. “It’s the middle of the night. In her room.”
Anthony was silent, watching the video for a minute more. After Taylor dropped her phone in the Dearborn hallway, he looked up at me.
“It mostly goes on like this for six or seven minutes until she comes back out of the bathroom and picks the phone up and shuts it off,” I told him.
“Then I want to hear the whisper again.”
He backtracked the video, listened, and backtracked again.
“I think she’s saying the name Samuel,” I offered.
Anthony nodded. “Samuel was sixteen.”
“You think?”
“Yeah.” Anthony pulled the earbuds out of his ears and handed them to me. “Listen.”
I backtracked and listened.
Yes. He was right, now that I listened again.
“Who is Samuel?” he asked softly.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But the ghost girl of Dearborn, according to the story, had a boyfriend who dumped her.”
“Oh God.” Anthony rubbed his eyes. “Taylor was probably messing with someone. Someone who believed in that ghost. That’s probably why she made this video.”
“I don’t know…”
“You and I know she liked messing with people’s heads. I mean, just look at the Jocelyn Rose thing….” Anthony didn’t look entirely convinced of what he was saying. We both knew that the Jocelyn Rose video had been an entirely different kind of prank. More Taylor’s style. Effortlessly cruel. A prank ghost video was almost wholesome in comparison. And strangely ambitious.
“But who?” I persisted. “Whose head was she messing with in this case? She didn’t have any friends left. Except you, I guess.”
“Well, she didn’t show it to me,” Anthony said.
“Then who?”
Anthony shrugged. “It is conceivable that she made friends with some other girls after you…after you guys had your…friend breakup.”
He’d just barely stopped himself from saying something like after you ditched her.
“Yeah. Sure. But something about this feels real to me. She seems really afraid. Really frantic. And she wasn’t that great of an actress.”
That was why Jocelyn Rose got cast as Abigail in The Crucible last year, and not her. I chose not to add that out loud.
“Well,” Anthony said, gazing at the dessert table. I could tell he was holding something back, too.
“Anthony?” I prompted.
“Maybe I should mention one thing. Now that you put it that way.”
“Yeah? What?”
Anthony sliced at a broccoli floret with a butter knife, roughly removing its head from its stem.
“Well,” he said slowly, “one of the last times I talked to her…a couple weeks before she died…maybe even less than that…she told me she was thinking of spending a night or two in the infirmary. It was kind of random. She clearly wasn’t sick. Like she didn’t have a cough or the sniffles or anything. She just said she needed a break from the dorm.”
The Windham infirmary—like the Farnswood one—was a no-questions-asked place. It was assumed that if you showed up, you were sick. But you couldn’t do anything there but rest. You had to stay in bed and do nothing but eat an occasional bowl of broth with toast. You couldn’t even bring your laptop or use your phone except to contact your parents. It definitely wasn’t the sort of place that would normally appeal to Taylor.
“You’ve never mentioned that before.” I felt myself becoming numb—finger by finger, toe by toe, moving toward my hands and my feet. “Did she actually go?”
Anthony shook his head. “No. I mean, I guess not. I remember seeing her the next day, and figuring she decided not to go. I mentioned it to the dean when they had their little investigation, but didn’t think that much of it. It had just seemed like typical Taylor, scheming to get out of a term paper deadline or whatever.”
“But maybe she really did need a break from the dorm,” I said. “If the dorm itself was part of the trouble.”
“Maybe,�
� Anthony said softly.
He was scaring me a little. He was supposed to double down on his insistence that the Dearborn stories were just stories, and that I should stop torturing myself about Taylor’s death. But the video had rattled him—made him forget his script.
I put my phone in my backpack, out of sight.
“I wonder if some girl killed herself in her Dearborn room a long time ago, a girl broken up about her boyfriend, Samuel, there would be ways the school could cover it up, make sure it didn’t appear anywhere in its history, its archives.”
“There could be,” Anthony said, picking up his fork and poking at his dry fish. “And schools like this have their reasons.”
“Thank you for your honesty, Anthony,” I said.
“No problem,” he muttered.
* * *
Since it was freezing, I turned down Anthony’s offer to walk me to the shuttle stop.
“Text me when you get back to Dearborn,” he said as I pushed through his dining hall’s doors. “So I know you’re okay.”
“Sure,” I said. Even though we both knew that just because I got safely to Dearborn would not mean I was okay. “Bye.”
I pulled on my gloves as I walked to the shuttle stop. The wind was frigid, and my face felt frozen after only a minute. My hair blew around my face wildly, my ears stung. At the bus stop, I wrapped my arms around me and stamped my feet, feeling too stiffly cocooned to pull off my backpack and find my hat in it. I tried to hum away the cold.
The wind blasted my face. I closed my eyes. In the momentary darkness, I heard my mother’s voice shouting the obvious question:
WHY AREN’T YOU WEARING YOUR HAT?
My mother and I had talked a few days ago—only briefly, about my brother’s latest basketball game and her efforts to find me a cheap plane ticket home during the spring vacation. It had felt like a conversation we’d had a hundred times before. Sometime in the middle of last year it had started to feel like my mother and brother weren’t my immediate family anymore. More like an aunt and cousin who wished me well from a faraway place. And I spoke to my dad even less.
When All the Girls Are Sleeping Page 6
