Chapter 16
Amy
The last thing I remember clearly is the party.
Not even the party but the edge of it. The warmth of the room. One minute, I’m standing near the kitchen with my cup and the music in my chest and Rose somewhere behind me talking to the guy with the green eyes.
The smell of a space full of people who have decided, for one night, to stop being careful.
I don’t remember anyone handing me anything.
I remember the dark red, sweet taste of rum in a plastic cup.
I didn’t think I needed to inspect it closely enough because I poured it myself, but the room was loud, and I wasn’t being careful enough.
I’ve been cautious my entire life, and I thought… I thought I was being careful.
I remember the warmth moving through me faster than it should. My stomach dropped before my mind caught up with why.
I remember a name. Marcus. Third year. He wore an easy smile and his hand at the small of my back steered me toward a door I had not agreed to go through.
I remember thinking this is wrong.
And then I don’t remember anything at all.
I come back to myself in pieces.
First, cold. The cold of stone beneath my palms, outdoor stone, the kind that has absorbed a whole day’s absence of sun. My hands in front of me, my leg slightly scraped at the right heel. A tear in my tights at the knee, the skin underneath unbroken.
Then the alley.
It runs along the north side of the east academic building, a narrow alley between the building and the stone perimeter wall.
A single security light at the far end, its bulb blown, throwing nothing but the memory of light. Behind me, distantly, the muffled bass of the party still runs.
And on the ground, six feet in front of me, is Marcus.
I don’t understand what I am looking at for a long moment.
My brain wades through the fog of whatever was in that cup, assembling the information in the wrong order. His expensive sneakers. His jacket at an angle that jackets do not go at unless the body inside them is at an awkward angle. His face turned away from me. Marcus. The guy from the party.
My first thought is that he’s unconscious.
Then I see his hand. The way his fingers are spread against the ground in odd angles, motionless.
I scramble backward until my shoulders hit the wall, and I sit there breathing through my mouth. The cold stone is the only fixed point in a world that will not stop tilting.
Marcus is not moving.
The metallic edge of the air is not ambiguous anymore.
But I don’t scream. My brain is trying to catch up to the scene in front of me.
Something in me that learned at a young age to stay quiet when the worst things were happening, keeps the sound from coming out.
I press my hand over my mouth, and I breathe through my nose in the long-controlled intervals that Dr. Osei taught me. I look down the alley, then at Marcus, and I try to understand what I’m looking at.
My clothes are on. My palm is scraped. But I’m here. I am whole.
Whatever happened in this alley, I am on the living side of it.
The security light flickers.
I look up.
Left. Right.
There is no one else here.
But the air feels displaced. The space that was recently occupied by something large and deliberate and is now very carefully empty. The way a room feels after someone has just left. The way the dark feels when it has recently held something I did not see.
I get to my feet.
My legs are unsteady, but they hold. I smooth my shirt with shaking hands. I can tell Marcus is alive, but he’s clearly knocked out by the way his chest is moving with shallow breaths.
I head to the end of the alley, out onto the lamplit path, and I keep walking, all the way back to the dormitory without stopping.
I sit on my bed until four in the morning, turning over the blank space in my memory the way you probe a wound to understand its depth.
Someone must have put something in my drink.
I close my eyes and search through the fog of my memories and remember Rose telling me her ride was there. I remember her assuring me it was okay and that mine was on the way.
Then Marcus had his hand on my lower back.
And then someone else had their hands on Marcus.
I don’t know who.
But somewhere underneath the fear and the fog, underneath the part of me that is still shaking and will be for days, is a quieter feeling. Something that sits in my chest like a coal, small and very warm.
I’m not afraid of the dark the way I was an hour ago.
Before I realize how long I’ve been sitting on my bed, the building starts to wake up around me. I wait until I take a shower. Then I go to breakfast.
I don’t say a word about the alley to anyone. I don’t call Rose. I don’t call security.
Because whatever could have happened didn’t, and I have a very good feeling about why.