Chapter 3
This is where it starts, really, with my decision to head back to the hotel.
Corrine and Campbell try to convince me to come to Sig Phi with them, but I am far too injured to drink tepid beer while bleary-eyed barely legals assure me I’m much smaller in person than I appear in photographs.
I slip out the side door, but innocuous little Emma King spots me and asks if I’d mind company.
Though I tell her not to leave on my account, she insists in a way that will come to matter later.
We tango around the line of cars in the driveway and fall into step.
It’s tenish, muggy but mild, and the air is stuffed with the scent of some perennial so sweet it smells rotten.
“I love LA,” Emma declares. She says it on an exhale, and I am in no mood for this brand of youthful whimsy. I want to be alone, to lick my wounds, to think my strange thoughts.
“It’s a great place to live,” I say in a lackluster tone.
“I mean. I’ve only been there once. PT took us to visit Jonathan on set.”
I nod. I remember the year they came. The show was still going, but we were on a hiatus, and my husband and I had taken a trip to Hawaii that went poorly for us.
“It’s not easy to get there,” Emma remarks. “From here.”
There is some suspicion in how she says this.
It is complete conjecture on my part, but my brain instantly leaps to a scenario where Emma knows that while of course I went to the trouble of returning to campus to honor PT, I was also hoping for a run-in with the ex who ruined me exactly the way I told him to. Paranoia is also an option here.
“I have a writing retreat planned for myself right after this.” I feel ridiculous, explaining myself to Emma, like I am a teenager whose parent has detected alcohol on my breath.
“Professor Toner canceled all his classes the day before he died. Did you know that?”
This is a very abrupt thing to say, and I don’t know how to react, so I only shake my head. No. I did not know that.
“Do you think that’s weird?”
I frown. Consider it. “Did he say why?”
“He didn’t give a reason. Just sent out an email letting us know and gave us some reading to do.”
“Okay,” I say slowly, fitting this information in with what I know to be true. “He had a massive heart attack. From what I understand, people don’t feel very well in the days leading up to that.”
“He had Band-Aids. All over his hands.” Emma demonstrates, turning her hands front to back.
I stop walking. “How do you know that?”
“I’m the one who found the body.”
I stare at Emma, gobsmacked. She’s lying. To my face. About finding the body of our professor. “I thought it was the house cleaner.”
“I mean, technically, yes. But he had emailed me the night before and asked me to come over first thing in the morning. She was already there when I got there. She told me he was upstairs in the bathroom, and so I ran up to check on him. And he was lying there and he had at least, like, ten Band-Aids, all over his hands, and I mean, clearly he had something to tell me. And then he died before he could.” Emma is wringing her hands, like she’s nervous, but her eyes are also sheened with excitement.
Maybe what she is saying is true, but from my vantage point, there is something unbelievable about her story.
“Did you tell the police this?”
“No. I left before they got there.”
“Emma,” I say, firmly, “if this is true, you need to be talking to the police, not me.”
“Come on,” Emma says with sudden, snotty force. And then she has the gall to roll her eyes at me.
“Come on what?” I repeat in a new, icy tone. Emma is displaying that overfamiliarity that I loathe in young people with dreams of becoming somebody. Fear is underrated. It’s okay to show it, to certain people, in certain situations. Fear has taken me far.
“I guess it’s not so much that they don’t care,” Emma relents, “as they’re out of their depth.”
Their depth. Emma no doubt cribbed that from whatever true-crime podcast she listens to on her incline treadmill walks while she tries to burn brown fat. “You’re going to need to talk to someone else about this,” I tell her, and start down the street again.
“Did PT say anything to you? About my script? Because I think that’s why he wanted to talk to me that morning.”
Gross. Is this Emma’s misguided way of trying to pique my interest in her work? “He apologized on your behalf,” I say out of the side of my mouth, “for turning it in a week late.”
“I know, I know,” Emma groans, hurrying to keep pace with me. “I’d been working on something else all semester, and I just knew it wasn’t right, and then it was, like, the deadline was coming up and I switched gears in a panic.”
“I’d carved out time to read it the week it was due. So now I’ll get to it when I get to it.”
“Wait,” Emma says. “There’s something else.”
Emma puts her hand on my arm, trying to stop me so we can have this conversation standing still.
She shouldn’t touch me. I give her a look that communicates as much, and she removes her hand, looking startled and a little bit hurt.
I don’t feel bad. Would I have touched Jonathan Granger without his permission when I was twenty-two years old? Not even with.
“I’m parked here,” I say, but where the curb slopes for the entrance to the parking lot of the science building, I can see that I’m blocked in by another car.
One of those dark gas-guzzlers with three rows of seating.
Connecticut license plate. Rangers sticker on the bumper.
I cup my hands around my eyes and peer through the passenger-side window.
Tookie’s wand is wedged between the driver’s seat and the center console. This is Campbell’s car.
Someone is sitting between the peeling columns of the old Sig Phi house, holding a vape box to his lips in an overhand grip, bare legs dangling off the side of the porch.
I don’t immediately recognize him, but then he hops onto the grass, turning his newly acquired baseball hat backward as he approaches me.
It is the kid who turned on the light in the upstairs guest bedroom and blocked the door when I was trying to leave, still wearing his shorts and his blazer.
Leather flip-flops stained with oily toe marks have replaced the loafers.
“We’ve been waiting for you,” he says to me in a witchy way.
“Good,” I reply without smiling. I know the way the light is hitting me right now. I know all my angles. I know exactly what he’s looking at when he sees me.
“Come inside for a cocktail,” he says. From the fraternity house thumps an old Jason Derulo bop.
I remember how we used to listen exclusively to the Talking Heads and David Bowie, a little Chaka Khan, because we thought it was proper drug music from another, cooler era.
We wouldn’t have been caught dead listening to anything current like Jason Derulo.
That theory hasn’t changed, evidently. What’s considered throwback has.
“Faye doesn’t want your plastic tequila,” Emma says in an uppity way. I had hoped she would go home when I told her I had to swing by the Sig Phi house to find Campbell and ask him to move his car, but to my dismay, she has remained dutifully glued to my side.
The kid fists his shirt, twisting the fabric like he’s been shot. “It’s not shitty, Emma. It’s Casamigos.”
“Casamigos is full of additives,” I counter.
“It’s good enough for my brother-in-law and Henry,” he says.
I stare at him in astonishment. This is Corrine’s brother? “You’re Corrine’s brother?”
He rocks back on his heels with a triumphant smirk.
“Oh my God,” I say with a laugh. “You know I met you once at the lake. You were sitting backward in a chair, crying because you were bored.”
The smirk doesn’t disappear, but I no longer buy it.
“Remind me your name.”
“Winthrop. But everyone calls me Win.”
Of course, I think, they do.
The first time some fat junior appraised me at this very door and deemed me hot enough to step inside, I remember thinking that the house didn’t feel like a house, though I couldn’t say why.
But if my androgynous interior designer has taught me anything besides to submit to terrazzo flooring, it’s that too much space and not enough furniture are what conspire to create a general atmosphere of ennui.
It’s why I can feel the playlist in my central nervous system, why it seems as though there are fewer people inside than a census would show, like a marathon-set nightclub before 1 a.m. Miami, not Los Angeles.
No one stays out past ten in California.
There is a smattering of students around the pool table, pretending not to stare, and two guys spazzing with laughter in the corner. I have no doubt I am what’s so funny. I do need a cocktail, actually, but saying so would be unbearably corny.
“Everyone is upstairs,” Win says.
To my relief, he starts toward the great room.
We pass the small second kitchen on our left, where a kid with skinny legs and a square torso beats a bag of ice on the ground; to our right a couple of girls huddle together on a futon, taking a selfie before their mascara melts off their faces.
Then we are climbing the coffin-wide stairwell and turning down a long, lopsided hallway, stopping before the door to the room where Campbell and Henry used to live.
“Ain’t Nobody” synthesizes softly from the other side.
“It’s me,” Win says, rattling the pretty old crystal doorknob I am noticing for the first time.
We wait for close to a minute for the pushpin lock to pop, and then it is Corrine standing there with an impatient set to her mouth, as though we have been the ones to keep her waiting.
I can tell by the way she’s swallowing over and over—like she’s nervous, which she is never—that she’s coked to the gills.
“You changed your mind,” she says with a welcoming smile I almost believe.
“I think your car is blocking mine,” I tell her. “I just need someone to move it.”