They Never Learn, page 2
The door is propped ajar, and Allison bumps it the rest of the way open with her hip. She’s already moved in to the right half of the room; the bed is made with a red-and-black comforter, and there’s a row of Broadway musical posters—Wicked, Rent, Phantom of the Opera—hanging above it. As she promised, there are multiple fans, all switched on high: two slowly oscillating between the beds, and a box fan stuck in the window, blowing stagnant air out through the ivy.
“If you don’t like that side,” she says, “we can switch. I just took the same one I had last year.”
“No, it’s… this side is fine.” I set the duffel down on the bare mattress. “Wait, you’re not a freshman?”
“Sophomore,” she says, sitting cross-legged on her own bed so her skirt drapes over her knees. “My roommate from last year transferred to Penn.”
“Hey, Allie, you ready—”
A boy walks right into the room like he lives here too. Once he sees me, though, he stops, suddenly awkward.
“Oh, hey,” he says. “Sorry. You must be—”
“This is my new roommate, Carly.” Allison gestures between us with a dramatic roll of her wrist. “Carly, this is Wes.”
Wes is slightly built, with narrow shoulders and brown hair that flops over his forehead, skimming the edges of his wire-rim glasses. He must be her boyfriend. Although she didn’t introduce him that way, and he’s not quite the type I would have pictured her with. I mean, I only met her a few minutes ago, so I don’t really know her, let alone her taste in guys. But I can tell just by looking at Wes that he’s like me: a fade-into-the-background person. Whereas Allison… she shines like a spotlight’s pointed on her.
“Nice to meet you, Carly,” Wes says, before turning his attention right back to Allison. “Did you still want to—”
“Yes!” She springs up off the bed. “Yes, sorry, I lost track of the time, but I am ready!”
Allison slips on some sandals and grabs a lanyard holding her keys and Gorman ID. She doesn’t look back at me, but Wes does, pausing in the doorway to cast one sidelong glance my way before following Allison out.
The low roar of the fans makes it seem like the room is breathing. My parents are probably only a few miles away, heading west on Route 422, but I feel like I’m on a separate planet, finally free.
I can be happy here. I know I can.
3 SCARLETT
“Don’t kill me.”
I swivel around in my chair. Dr. Andrew Torres stands on the conference room threshold, holding up his chipped Shakespearean insults mug with a guilty smile.
“I took the last of the coffee,” he says.
I salute him with the cup of dark roast I picked up at the library coffee cart on my way to work. “I’ve got it covered.”
He laughs and slides into the seat on my right. “You always do.”
After taking my leave of Tyler’s corpse, I still had time for an abbreviated version of my morning routine. Shower, mascara, lipstick, hair styled into soft waves. But I had to grab breakfast on the go. I’m always starving after a kill, even the ones that don’t require physical exertion. I finished my cranberry muffin before I even made it across the Oak Grove to Miller Hall.
I was one of the first to arrive for the staff meeting. The rest of the faculty are filing in now, chatting amongst themselves, but none of them acknowledge me. Drew is the only coworker with whom I have anything approaching a friendship, and that’s because he finds the rest of the English faculty almost as tedious as I do.
“How was your summer?” Drew asks, as we both flip to fresh pages in our notebooks. He’s used the same plain narrow-ruled style as long as I’ve known him, buying a new one to commemorate the start of each semester. “I hope you didn’t spend the whole time working on that fellowship application and studiously avoiding fun.”
“Not the whole time,” I say. “Thank you again for the letter of recommendation.”
Drew waves me off. “Your work speaks for itself. If they don’t choose you, they’re idiots.”
He’s the one who told me about the Women’s Academy fellowship in the first place. The academy is a private archive, dedicated to preserving the work of lesser-known female writers. They recently obtained a collection of previously undiscovered letters from Viola Vance, the turn-of-the-century poet who’s been the main subject of my scholarly research for the past several years. Whoever wins the fellowship will have exclusive access to the letters for twelve months, as well as a flat around the corner from the archive in London.
And it’s going to be me.
“Rafael and I would love to have you over for dinner next weekend,” Drew says. “He brought a truly obscene amount of wine back from our trip to Paris, and if you don’t help us, we’ll be forced to drink it all ourselves.”
I smile. “Can’t have that.”
Drew’s husband, Rafael, is as vivacious and outgoing as Drew is serious and scholarly. They seem like an odd match, but somehow it works; they’ve been married for more than twenty years now.
“If you want,” Drew says, “you could even bring—”
“Oh God, did you hear?” Our colleague Sandra Kepler slides into the seat next to Drew, her long silver earrings jangling like wind chimes. I lay my palm over my notebook page. Force of habit—I haven’t written anything yet besides today’s date.
Drew takes a sip of his coffee, shooting me a look. Sandra can be equally histrionic about topics ranging from devastating departmental funding cuts to copier paper jams. But I have a good guess about what might be upsetting her this morning.
“Hear what?” Drew says.
Sandra drops her voice even lower. “Tyler Elkin.”
I furrow my brow, like I’m trying to place the name. It would seem more suspicious if I recognized it right away—I only had Tyler for a single one-hundred-student lecture class, and I notoriously don’t follow Gorman sports.
“The football player?” Drew says. “What about him?”
“He was found this morning…”
Sandra leans toward us, so close I can smell the burnt faculty-lounge coffee on her breath.
“Dead,” she says. “At his fraternity house.”
That was fast—even in a town this size, where gossip travels at the speed of light, I thought it might take a few more hours for word to circulate.
I widen my eyes, holding my mouth in a little o of shock. “How did he—”
“I don’t know. The police are still there, I saw the cars on my way to campus.”
One of the downsides to committing murders outside the school grounds: the police are called in right away, while the evidence is still fresh, instead of campus security bumbling around the crime scene first. But I already weighed those risks when making my plans. Tyler would have been too difficult to get alone on campus; he always traveled with a pack of other football players and hangers-on.
The police don’t worry me much anyway. A few of the Gorman Township officers aren’t entirely inept, but they still have only rudimentary forensic training and laughably outdated laboratory equipment. And if a death is written off as a suicide, a random fall, a freak accident, they only look into it as much as they need to file their bureaucratic reports. Some days, I almost miss the challenge of evading the Chicago Police Department.
“Everyone’s talking about this Instagram post he made, though.” Sandra holds out her phone to show Drew and me the sunrise picture at the top of Tyler’s feed. It has a couple thousand comments already.
For the benefit of Sandra and Drew, and anyone else who might be paying attention, I press my mouth closed again and arrange my face in a studied mix of concern and consternation.
“How awful,” I say.
“I know.” Sandra shakes her head. “He was so young.”
“Even younger than that boy last year,” Drew says. “The anthropology major?”
Sandra presses her hand to her chest. “Such a shame.”
Twenty is young. But if Tyler was old enough to gang-rape a girl and try to get away with it, he was old enough to pay the price. And as for the boy last year, he got off easy, considering what he did to his poor girlfriend. He beat her bloody for months on end, but after I pushed him into the river from the county’s most popular suicide-jumping bridge, it took him mere minutes to drown.
I can feel hardness bleeding into my eyes again, so I look down at the table, hoping it appears that I’m overcome with emotion. Then our boss sweeps into the room in a cloud of English Leather cologne, and it’s time for a different sort of dissembling.
Dr. Kinnear is more than ten minutes late, even though he called the meeting. He always acts like he’s terribly busy, running from one important engagement to the next with hardly a chance to catch his breath. He probably just took too long to jerk off in the shower.
Kinnear takes up his position at the head of the conference table but doesn’t sit down yet, bracing his hands against the high back of the chair. He gives us all a weary smile, with a hint of sadness crinkling his eyes behind his tortoiseshell glasses. He must have practiced in the mirror.
“I’m sure you’ve all heard the tragic news by now,” he says.
Everyone nods somberly, myself included. The department’s youngest adjunct is actually crying, dabbing at the corners of her eyes with one of the brown paper towels from the bathroom. Kinnear takes a moment to give her a comforting squeeze on the shoulder. Rumor has it they slept together after the last faculty holiday party. At least she’s more than half his age, if only by a few years.
The young man seated next to her takes a handkerchief out of his pocket and offers it to her. Dr. Stright—he’s Kinnear’s favorite, because he’s basically a younger version of Kinnear. They even look alike: sandy hair, blue eyes, pretentious eyeglasses, and simpering everyone-please-like-me smiles. Now that Kinnear is well into his forties, Stright has the dubious distinction of being the sole good-looking young male professor in the department. He has all his students call him by his first name, like he’s one of them. A pathetic ploy, but the undergrads—especially the girls—seem to eat it up with a spoon.
“I don’t know any more than you do now, I’m afraid,” Kinnear continues, “but I’m sure more details will be made public as soon as the police feel comfortable sharing them.”
“So we don’t know yet?” Sandra asks. “How he was—”
“From all indications,” Kinnear says. “Mr. Elkin took his own life.”
Good. If they’re at all competent, the police should soon determine that the strychnine he drank came from the box of rat poison sitting right on top of the shelves that served as my hiding place this morning.
I didn’t even have to plant the poison. I found it during one of my preparatory stakeouts of the garage, probably left over from some rodent infestation years prior. I took what I needed to doctor Tyler’s drink and put the box right back where I found it. Perfect for my purposes: it supports the story that poor Tyler, wracked with guilt, decided to put himself out of his misery with the nearest thing at hand.
“Now,” Kinnear continues. “As devastated as I know we all are, we still have business to attend to. Classes will be commencing as scheduled on Tuesday.”
There’s a low murmur of assent around the table, and everyone less prepared than I am—which is, as usual, the vast majority of my colleagues—readies paper and laptops for the meeting.
Kinnear takes his seat, looking directly at me with a smile. “Scarlett?”
Not Dr. Clark. Never that. It was somewhat less infuriating when we were both just faculty. But then he glad-handed his way to the interim department chair position after Dr. McElhaney retired last year, and now he thinks he can treat me like his fucking secretary.
“Yes?” I say, although I already know exactly what he’s about to say.
“Would you mind taking notes again? You’re so good at it.”
I force myself to return his smile and click open my pen.
For the next forty minutes, Kinnear drones on about term dates and lesson plans and the orientation of new students (which ones, I wonder, will he try to fuck this year?). I write as he talks, filling the lines of my notebook with impeccable cursive. I chose my seat at the back corner of the table carefully, so no one can look over my shoulder and see what I’m writing, not even Drew.
Because I’m not just writing meeting notes. I’m jotting down dates, times, and places and events where Kinnear mentions he’ll be. Weaknesses I can exploit, ways I might be able to get him alone, humiliate him, make him suffer, make him scream.
Now that Tyler’s dead, it’s time to turn my attention to my next target. And unlucky for Dr. Kinnear, he’s risen to the very top of my list.
4 CARLY
I creep through the darkened room, trying not to make a sound.
My first class on Mondays is early—well, too early for Allison anyway, and I’m doing my best not to wake her. Even asleep, she looks glamorous, her hair splayed artfully across the pillow. I sleep in faded plaid pants and an oversize T-shirt, but Allison wears a satin nightgown to bed every night.
I slip off my pajamas and replace them with a pair of jeans as quickly as possible, then wrangle my bra on without fully removing my shirt. I still feel weird getting dressed with someone else in the room, even if that someone is unconscious. Our schedules seem to be totally opposite, so Allison and I have barely spoken since move-in day. I’m in bed by ten, just like back home, while she stays up way past midnight, studying by the soft glow of the string lights wound around her headboard.
As I’m zipping up my backpack, Allison shifts positions with a soft sigh. Her nightgown slides down to reveal the tops of her breasts, and suddenly it seems as bright as midday in here. I avert my eyes, hurrying toward the door.
It isn’t until I’m halfway across the lawn that I realize I forgot to put on my hoodie. I had it laid out on the bed and everything: my favorite one, the black fabric faded to dark gray with too much washing, ragged holes in the sleeves where my thumbs poke through.
I’m still early enough I could go back for it. But I don’t want to disturb Allison. I hunch my shoulders so my backpack straps almost touch my earlobes, hugging myself as I continue my trek into the heart of campus. Whitten—or “Whit,” as everyone seems to call it—is right at the edge of Gorman, near the woods that border the university’s property. It’s a bit of a walk to get to class or the dining hall, but at least it’s nice and quiet.
Campus is nearly silent at this time of the morning. There are only a few other students in the Oak Grove: a group of boys in running gear stretching on the steps of the library and two girls sharing a steaming cup of coffee on one of the squat red benches lining the path. Everything here seems to be red: the school’s official color is crimson, and most of the buildings are the same red brick as Whitten.
This morning’s class is the only one in my schedule I haven’t attended yet: a Monday writing seminar that didn’t meet the first week of the semester because of Labor Day. It’s in Miller Hall, the same building as all my other English classes. Miller is red brick like the rest, but with a sloping slate roof and charming arched windowpanes. I’ve heard other students complain about how musty it is in comparison to the newer construction buildings on campus, but I love it. It feels like an old schoolhouse, right down to the wooden desks with decades of carvings from former students.
I have to wander the halls for a while before I find the right room number, and even then I’m not sure I’m in the right place. This doesn’t look like a classroom. The space is tiny, made even smaller by the bookshelves lining the walls and the brown loveseat sitting in the corner, and there aren’t even any desks, just a bunch of folding chairs set up in an uneven circle. A few of them are already occupied, though, by a dark-haired girl with purple glasses and a severe pixie cut, a tall guy in an argyle cardigan sweater, and—
Shit. Not only is Allison’s boyfriend here, he’s smiling at me. Once I make the mistake of meeting his eyes, Wes scoots his bag away from the chair next to him.
I pretend not to notice his gesture of goodwill and take the seat farthest away from him instead (which isn’t very far, anyway, in this cramped room). Now I’m overheated, sweat gathering between my shoulder blades as more students fill in the circle. I don’t know what I’m so freaked out about; Wes seems like a nice enough guy. And Allison doesn’t seem like the type to get jealous if another girl talks to her boyfriend, the way my dad does when my mom speaks to any man who isn’t him.
As if someone like Allison could ever be jealous of someone like me.
The sound of furniture legs screeching against the floor startles me to attention. A young man with sandy-blond hair picks up the last empty chair and flips it around so the back faces into the circle.
“I think this is all of us,” he says, “so why don’t we get started?”
This is the professor? He barely looks older than we are. He sits astride the turned-around chair and pushes his rectangular black glasses higher on his nose.
“Okay!” he says. “Well, welcome, everyone. Those of you who’ve taken my classes before know I like to keep things casual, so please call me Alex, none of that ‘Doctor’ or ‘Professor’ stuff. Some of us are already acquainted, but let’s go around the circle and introduce ourselves anyway.”
He looks over at Wes. “Mr. Stewart, you want to kick us off?”
“Sure.” As he looks up to address the class, Wes’s gaze catches on me again. “I’m Wes Stewart, junior, English/theater double major. From Indiana originally.”
That means Allison must be from Indiana too. I knew they went to high school together because Allison has their prom photo tacked up above her desk, Wes standing behind her with his hands on the waist of her spangled velvet dress.
The introductions continue around the circle. I barely hear them; I’m too nervous about mine. I rub my sweaty palms against the faded denim on my thighs, but it doesn’t seem to help any. When it’s finally my turn, there’s an awkward pause that’s probably only a second or two but feels like an eternity. I swallow and force myself to speak.
