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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.
Our ensemble cast as stars, ever since the fall of freshman year, when we’d won our notoriety and our nickname. 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.
I studied myself the way I’d done my whole life, searching for what others saw when they looked at me. I wanted them to see perfection. I ached for it in the deep, dark core of me: to be so good I left other people in the dust.
I never could tell which story was right—Exceptional Jessica, or Mediocre Jessica. My life was a narrative I couldn’t parse, full of conflicting evidence.
I lived with the constant unfolding of memories, past scenes still rolling, still playing out. I heard my friends’ voices in my head, kept our conversations alive, even if for years now it had just been me talking, one-sided, saying, Just you wait
“I’ve spent every day of the last ten years investigating my sister’s murder. Following leads the police didn’t have, rumors passed around by students, things no one realized were connected.” He looked at us, feverish. “The cops missed so much.”
“My sister,” Eric whispered, “was stabbed seventeen times when she was sleeping in bed. Who the fuck cares about healthy? I care about justice.”
“I don’t know why she told me,” Frankie continued. “Other than she was drunk. What Heather didn’t realize was that I already knew. Because I was the one Jack was cheating with.”
“In case you were wondering, the autopsy showed Heather had three major bruises on her head, five minor.” Eric tapped his foot on the concrete floor, stealing Frankie’s attention. “But none of them caused a concussion.”
But the day it leaked, my first thought—I couldn’t help it—was that sometimes, you really didn’t have to lift a finger to get exactly what you wanted. Sometimes, all you had to do was sit back and do nothing, and it was just that easy.
I straightened my shoulders. “Me, get over it? My college boyfriend cheated on me with you, married you, and ten years later, you’re crowing about it. I feel sorry for you, Court. How little has happened in your life that you’re still obsessed with this?”
“What I’m trying to say”—Coop’s breath came faster now, his heart back to pounding under my palm—“is that they knew your dorm, and they’d threatened your life, and Heather’s system was flooded with a drug just like tweak.”
Eric finally stepped out of the shadow, into the light. “The cops found no evidence of a break-in. They suspect whoever killed Heather knew the code to the suite.”
“You drugged your best friend to get her out of the way so you could be queen of a fraternity party?” Caro’s face was so red you could see it, even in the dim light from the lamps.
My perfect plan, ground to dust, ruined by Eric Shelby. But as I stood there, a new plan slowly formed, more ambitious than the first. If I could pull it off, I wouldn’t just be proving myself—I could settle every debt, right every wrong. Quiet the insidious whisper. Unmake the black hole.
The memory came back, this time more vivid. Waking up, disoriented, my head pounding. The sunlight too bright, streaming through vaguely familiar windows. Bracing my hands against the floor to push myself up, only to feel my hands stick to the wood. Looking down. Breath catching. 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?
“Sometimes I used to watch you,” she said. “When you didn’t know I was there.”
Memories are powerful things. But—and this is important, my therapist said—so are the dark spaces. The things you choose, consciously or not, to repress. Always, they’re the things you need protection from. The too much: too terrifying, too shameful, too devastating. The things that, if allowed, would threaten the very core of who you’re supposed to be. 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
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I dropped to my bed, looking at the paper without interest. It was a poem by Mary Oliver. I scanned until I came to the last line, a question: Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
Walking into Dr. Garvey’s room, the wild, terrible knowing seized me again. But this time, I didn’t run. This time, my legs moved slowly, one after the other, toward the bed. My arms remained by my side, clenched, as he unwound his bow tie. My face a mask, set in flat lines.
“The night of Heather’s murder, two other crimes were committed, but of course, neither got as much attention. The second crime the cops investigated but, like Heather’s case, never solved. The first was never even reported. It was considered minor, only a campus issue. That crime was my most important clue. It took me years to find it. Took joining the Alumni Office, making friends with the one person who was on staff back then, who remembered the night Heather died. And what they found the next morning.”
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. All the way back to the first day, freshman year.
She told me my blackout was like the black hole, a way to repress. She wanted to know what was inside it. But I couldn’t remember, hard as I tried. The dark was impenetrable.
Oh god. I remembered taking the Adderall, and the diet pills, chasing both with whiskey. What was I thinking? I felt a flash of panic—I’d cut up those photographs. I had to go back, clean up the pieces, before Heather opened her drawer and found what I’d done.
The last thing my therapist said to me was a warning: “Listen to me, Jessica. The real you—whoever she is—will get what she wants in the end. Whether you realize it or not. It’s what the subconscious always does. Wouldn’t you rather know? Don’t you want to see it coming? You have to reconcile yourself.”
Coop’s eyes darkened, his lashes dipping as he looked at the diploma. “I had all this rage that had been building for days. When you left my apartment, I went to Garvey’s house and smashed everything with a baseball bat. I’m the criminal, Jess. I’m the one who wrote on his walls, caused all the damage.”
“Two break-ins, one night,” he said softly, tracing my jaw. “Two?” I pulled back. Coop looked at me like I’d hit my head. “Of course. I broke into Garvey’s. After you broke into the Student Affairs office.”
I had hated Heather. I’d hated her so much I’d tried to take away her fellowship, her future, the opportunity she’d carefully plotted and earned. That must be the wicked, unforgivable thing I’d done that had haunted me for a decade. That was how I’d gotten bloody, covered in cuts—escaping through the office window. Not stabbing Heather seventeen times.
“I wanted to know what color dress you’re wearing to Sweetheart so I can get a matching bow tie.” Instead of smiling, she flinched. “Um…pink, I think.”
“No.” Mint only had eyes for me, and I couldn’t look away, trapped between the cold, open sky at my back and the man who wanted to burn me, the man who was inching closer. “You were going to ruin my life, and you didn’t care. You want to know what happened? Garvey’s TA told me you fucked him, but he didn’t just tell me—he spread it to everyone. All the brothers were laughing at me. Just like people did to my father. You made me weak
The fire inside Mint flashed white-hot. “Are you kidding?” Jack was supposed to be one of his best friends. And he was going to betray him? Rat him out to the police over Trevor
He looked at her with a thrill of anticipation, wanting to soak in the pain on her face, the horror and regret. Blond hair, not brown. His grip loosened on the scissors. They clattered to the floor.
He had just one stop to make, one smoking gun to plant. It was poetic, really. One betrayal in exchange for another. Jack Carroll thought he could send Mint to the cops, and now Mint would send the cops to him.
Everything I thought I knew gone in the blink of an eye, our past scratched out and written over with the truth, the words dark and terrible. And I was going straight to hell, because the first thought that crossed my mind when Mint unraveled was, I won
Ten years ago, on Valentine’s Day, Mint had stormed out of Sweetheart, snuck into my room, and stabbed Heather seventeen times because he thought she was me. Heather was always taking what was mine, and the secret of her murder—the great, intractable mystery of her death—was that she’d simply done it one too many times. It had been about me this whole time.
He pulled back to stab me again and I saw it, like déjà vu: I was going to die like Heather. She’d taken my place ten years ago, giving me a decade-long reprieve, but now fate was back to claim me.
Jack stopped struggling against the cop. He stood stock-still, wonder dawning on his face. “I can’t believe it worked,” he said, so faint that I almost didn’t hear. “The plan actually worked.”
Jack ducked under the cop’s arms and ran for the ambulance doors. “I was going to tell you,” he called. “Before you left, at the bar, I was going to warn you. Eric had been writing me letters for months. We’d come up with a plan. He said I couldn’t trust anyone, and I—” Jack looked ashamed. “I decided not to chance it. Some part of me thought it could’ve been you.”
And that’s when it happened. Sometime in the night, the final puzzle piece fell into place, and I remembered the whole truth of the night Heather died. But “remembered”—that wasn’t right, was it? After this weekend, I knew better.
Making peace with Jack was like taking an antidote to the twin poisons of anxiety and guilt. My need for forgiveness was so intense it was nearly physical. So I made a second vow, right there in that moment. A silent one, only to myself: for as long as I lived, I would never tell anyone else the truth of what I’d really done.
The terrible thing I’d done, what I’d spent a decade avoiding and chasing in equal measure. I’d found Heather that night, and I’d left her to die. I’d been cowardly and selfish, intoxicated and in shock. I knew now that nothing would have saved her by the time I’d found her, but that wasn’t the point. The point was, I’d made my choice.
The thing I’d been chasing for ten years, the thing that kept pulling me back, time and again, to the past. Freedom. Wild, delicious, profound freedom, the whole world uncircumscribed, my whole life ahead of me, newly unfixed. It could be anything.
