In My Dreams I Hold a Knife

by Ashley Winstead

Your body has a knowing. Like an antenna, attuned to tremors in the air, or a dowsing rod, tracing things so deeply buried you have no language for them yet.

College: a freedom so profound the joy of it didn’t wear off the entire four years.

The whole of it intoxicating, even before the red cups came out. Four years of living life like it was some kind of fauvist painting, days soaked in vivid colors, emotions thick as gesso. Like it was some kind of play, the highs dramatic cliff tops, the lows dark valleys.

The East House Seven. Mint, Caro, Frankie, Coop, Heather, Jack, and me. The people responsible for the best days of my life, and the worst.

But even at our worst, no one could have predicted that one of us would never make it out of college. Another, accused of murdering her. The rest of us, spun adrift. East House Seven no longer an honor but an accusation, splashed across headlines.

I studied myself the way I’d done my whole life, searching for what others saw when they looked at me.

The whole world awash in Jessica Millers, a dime a dozen.

I would go to Homecoming, and walk the familiar halls, talk to the familiar people, insert New Jessica into Old Jessica’s story, and see how things changed.

and Coop…Coop… That’s where I lost the thread every time.

I released the ball of hair into the trash. Even tangled, the highlights were pretty against the Q-tips and wads of white tissue paper. But in a flash, a vision of torn blond hair, sticky and red, matted against white sheets. I shook my head, pushing away the glitch.

He was getting better. It had been years since he’d called me in the middle of one of his panic attacks, his voice high as a child’s, telling me over and over, I can’t stop seeing her body.

If he entered a room, everyone stiffened and fled. But not me. My limbs had remained relaxed, limber, fluid around him—no escalating heartbeat, no tremor in the hands—despite the police’s nearly airtight case.

But in the end, the police weren’t able to convict Jack. In some ways, it didn’t matter. He was a murderer in everyone’s eyes. Everyone except for me. Slowly, inch by inch, my body’s knowing filtered into my brain.

“Never stop being a sweetheart, okay? You’re one of the good ones.” I didn’t want to be a sweetheart. How uninteresting, how pathetic. But I did want to be one of the good ones, which sounded like an exclusive club.

“One more thing. I’ve been getting these letters—” “Please don’t tell me it’s the Jesus freaks again, saying you’re going to burn in hell for all eternity.” Jack winced. “No. Kind of the opposite.” He looked down at me, at my raised brows. “You know what, it’s not important. It might not mean anything in the end.”

I started looking up from the floor to people’s faces when they spoke to me, because for the first time, I felt I might be worth the attention.

Crimson and white. Blood and spirit, like the Duquette motto: Mutantur nos et vos, corpus et animam meam. We will change you, body and soul. I was ready to be changed.

“I’ll take the risk,” Heather said. “As long as it’s good weed. Nothing skunky, please—life’s too short.”

“It’s like Freud said,” a dark voice cut in. “You have to kill your father before you’re free.” A pause. “Or was that a rap song?”

“Frankie, you and your big mouth.” Jack blew out a frustrated breath. “One secret, man. I dare you to keep one secret in your whole entire life. Do it, and I’ll die of shock.”

Terror and anticipation: the world’s most potent chemical cocktail. Before Bid Day, I’d never witnessed so many girls about to expire from it in my life.

“To Caroline Rodriguez,” Coop toasted, “a living saint, who rescued me from depression and poverty after law school. May I eventually be worthy of her.” Caro blushed prettily. “To Caro and Coop,” everyone sang. I echoed, a beat too late.

“Running away?” I froze midstep. “I guess your brand hasn’t changed much, either.” I turned slowly, hoping against hope, but there he stood, tall and lit by the glow from the tent, his face half-shadowed.

Honest, or drunk?

“I was drunk,” I whispered, the words like a door closing. “Of course.” He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them, dark and burning. “Coward.”

Power looked like Maseratis parked in the season-ticket-holder spots at football games and familiar names on the baseball stadium.

What if he looked up from his cereal bowl and noticed me—really took me in for the first time in years—and hated what he found?

“Are you sure?” His voice was husky, taut with worry. Like I held something precious in my hands, something he’d waited for, and there was a chance I’d take it away.

It’s just my body, I thought. Just my body, not me; just a moment, not forever. He can have it.

“We’re all here,” Eric said. “Finally, after ten years.”

“My sister,” Eric whispered, “was stabbed seventeen times when she was sleeping in bed. Who the fuck cares about healthy? I care about justice.”

“For years, I’ve traced leads, putting the pieces together, uncovering what you’ve hidden. Do you want to know what I discovered?” No, no, no. “Jack didn’t kill Heather. But someone in this room did. One of you is a monster, hiding behind a mask.”

Last night—bruising memories, the edges blurrier and blurrier as the night went on, until they were swallowed up in darkness. Instead of trying to search them, I willed in more darkness to eat the memories whole.

What her death must have done to him. His whole life—the person he’d been growing into—reshaped around his sister’s death. Like a vase at a potter’s wheel, smoothed and molded around the dark, hollow space of her absence.

A slow, satisfied smile crept over Eric’s face. He raised his hands and clapped. “Brava. Truly, a stirring performance.”

I slid out of my chair to my knees and clasped my hands together. The diners around us hushed, their attention turned to the spectacle of the begging girl. “Please,” I cried, my voice thick with tears. “Please take me back. Please don’t leave me. Please love me. I’ll do anything.” Down, down, down, I went. I would never, for the rest of my life, forget the horror, the depth of disgust in Mint’s eyes, when he finally saw me for who I really was.

She would never understand why he’d dated Jessica Miller, that absolute nonperson, since freshman year.

And she’d felt in that moment like she was being let into some secret club, some tight circle where she and her mom would be closer than ever, not just mother-daughter, but two women.

I made myself forget. The black hole at my center stirred. A flash of memory: Two hands, covered in dried blood. No. I shoved the image away.

My hands, splayed on the floor, rust-red from fingernails to elbows, covered in flaking blood. Crimson splattered across my pink dress like ink on a Rorschach test. The horrible question: What had I done?

Coop closed the distance between us. “Fuck it. I don’t care if you’re good or bad. I love you, and you love me. Say it.”

And then, at the bottom, there was Caro.

Each photo had been torn into jagged scraps, then pieced back together, like a puzzle. In each, Heather’s head was violently scratched out in pen, so hard the strokes had cut into the photograph—manic swirling circles, knifelike X’s. In the last picture, the pen strokes had been so intense that half of Heather’s face was missing, a gaping maw where her smile should have been.

It turns out the real you is a quilt, made up of the light and the dark. The life you’ve lived in sunshine and your shadow life, stretching underneath the surface of your mind like a deep underwater world, exerting invisible power. You are a living, breathing story made up of the moments in time you cherish, all strung together, and those you hide.

The thing about my father was—he was getting sick. At eight years old, I noticed it, even when no one else did, even as they kept whispering about where he’d go (up, up, up) and when (any day now).

For a second, the face that stared back at me was a stranger’s. “Dad?” His voice was garbled. “Who are you?” My heart squeezed painfully. “Jessica,” I whispered.

Then he slumped against the dresser and looked at me. Really looked. “I hate it here,” he whispered. He squinted at the light over my shoulder, which came from the door I’d left cracked open. His pupils turned to slits, like a cat’s. “I really do.”

She was running, she was screaming, she was banging on my rib cage to get out. But I locked her inside. I knelt on the bed. This time, I let the danger catch me. I drowned her in the dark.

“I didn’t kill her.” My voice cracked. “I’m not hiding anything.” Liar.

My thoughts blurred into a single desire: I wanted to claw it back from her. I wanted to punish her, erase everything unfair that had happened.