They Never Learn, page 4
“Oh, no!” Allison sits up again and reaches for my hands. “No, it’s just—Wes is not my boyfriend. He’s more like my brother. We’ve known each other forever. Besides—”
She leans closer, amusement still shimmering in her eyes.
“I’m kind of over dating boys at the moment.”
7 SCARLETT
The emergency staff meeting is held at the theater building, Riffenburg Hall, since it’s the one place on campus with enough seating to accommodate the entire faculty and staff. Well, aside from the football stadium, but I suppose that might seem a bit disrespectful, given the circumstances.
Even though I’m a full fifteen minutes early, most of the seats in the auditorium are already taken, the low buzz of voices filling the space like a swarm of hornets. I spot a single open chair near the front and start moving toward it. Someone touches me on the elbow, and I spin around, face already sharpened into a glare.
It’s Jasper. He doesn’t even flinch at the vicious expression on my face.
“Hey,” he says. “I saved you a seat.”
I shrug my elbow out of his grip. We’ve talked about this—him acting too familiar in public.
He motions toward the center section, a few rows back, where his leather satchel and houndstooth coat are draped over two adjacent chairs. Drew, Sandra, Stright, and several other members of the English faculty are in the same row, though Kinnear is strangely absent.
Drew waves to me, holding a flyer printed on garish green paper. There’s one waiting on my seat too, with the clasped-hands logo of the campus counseling center and big block letters spelling out SUICIDE PREVENTION: A Community Effort.
So Jasper was right: this is about Tyler Elkin. Perhaps I’ve been worried for nothing. Whatever else this meeting means, it’s a clear indication his death has been accepted as a suicide, publicly and officially. Which means no one will be looking for his killer.
Kinnear appears, but not in the audience with the rest of us. He strides onto the stage, wearing one of his seemingly endless collection of scarves wound around his neck in a way he probably considers rakish. I let my mind wander again to one of my favorite fantasies: tugging the silk so tight around his neck his eyeballs pop like pimples.
I haven’t strangled someone in ages. I save certain methods for when it’s personal, which it so rarely is these days. Most of my victims are like Tyler: men to whom I have only the most tenuous connections. Murdering someone in my social or professional circle requires much more care, precaution. Finesse. I’ve wanted to kill Kinnear for years, but I’ve forced myself to hold off: for the right opportunity, for the perfect time. If I get the fellowship, though, I’ll be leaving Gorman in a few months, so time is running out.
A woman joins Kinnear onstage, taking up a position a few feet away from him. She’s gorgeous, wearing an impeccably tailored pencil skirt and a satin blouse the same shade of red as her lipstick. Dr. Samina Pierce, the head of the psychology department.
I’ve seen Samina around campus—she’s impossible to miss—but it’s rare to find her in the same room as Kinnear, despite the psych and English departments both being headquartered in Miller Hall. Rumor has it that she and Kinnear used to be married—though what a woman like her could possibly see in him is beyond me.
Kinnear taps the microphone. The crowd falls silent.
“Dean Whitmyre sends his apologies,” Kinnear begins. “He wanted to be here with you today to discuss this important new campus initiative. But I hope I’ll be an able substitute.”
I guess all his sucking up is really paying off. Shouldn’t be long now until his interim chairship turns permanent. That position should belong to Drew. He’s more qualified than Kinnear by every conceivable measure, and he has years of seniority. But Drew refuses to engage in the political games and petty sabotages that are Kinnear’s specialty.
Last year, I had everything in order for my tenure application—until Kinnear took my spot on the committee I needed to complete my service requirement, then barely bothered to show up for the meetings. Meanwhile, Dr. Stright, despite being hired three semesters later than me, sailed through the tenure process, thanks to Kinnear’s full-throated recommendation. Men like them are the ones who really get away with murder.
“As you all know,” Kinnear says, “Gorman lost one of its own recently. Tyler Elkin was amongst our best and brightest, and he was taken from us far too soon.”
Jasper leans in to whisper in my ear. “Well, maybe not our brightest…”
Drew glances over at us. I shift in my seat, crossing my legs to put some additional space between me and Jasper, and pretend to give Kinnear’s speech my rapt attention.
“—prevention begins with each and every one of us, but we can’t do it alone. To that end, Gorman University is establishing its first-ever suicide prevention task force.”
Murmurs thread through the crowd. The past few years have seen a spate of suicides—not all my doing—and the school’s leadership has always done their best to sweep them under the rug before word got to Gorman’s wealthy alumni network. It’s the same nothing to see here approach they take with student sexual assault reports. Their obsession with protecting the university’s reputation has allowed plenty of misdeeds (my own included) to go unpunished, while the administration keeps waving their hands, pretending everything is fine.
Until now, apparently.
“I’m pleased to announce that the task force will be headed up by Dr. Samina Pierce.” Kinnear motions to her. “Dr. Pierce, would you like to say a few words?”
Kinnear doesn’t step out of the way quite fast enough, and Samina’s sleeve brushes against his as she takes her place behind the microphone. I could swear I saw her shudder when they touched, but she recovers her professional poise quickly.
“Thank you, Dr. Kinnear,” she says. She still speaks with a trace of her native British accent. “And thanks to all of you for taking the time to join us on a Saturday.”
The agenda she outlines for the task force all seems pretty standard: increased staff at the counseling center, new suicide prevention training protocols for the existing on-campus crisis center hotline, workshops for faculty and staff to help them identify and reach out to students who might be struggling with depression or other mental health disorders.
“Finally,” she says, “we’ll be performing a comprehensive investigation of all deaths by suicide that have occurred on the Gorman campus over the past decade.”
My chest seizes. A comprehensive investigation…
Only a fraction of my kills would be included in the campus suicide statistics. Others I’ve done well outside the school grounds, or made to look like accidental rather than self-inflicted deaths. Overdoses, car accidents, even an electrocution for one special target.
“I’ve already begun assembling a cross-departmental team to perform hands-on analysis and conduct interviews with selected faculty and students,” Pierce continues. “We’ll also be building a database to map commonalities in the deaths and identify personal or environmental risk factors we may be able to mitigate.”
I always go to great lengths to avoid creating patterns or leaving forensic red flags, but my most useful accomplice is the negligence of law enforcement.
Samina Pierce, however, seems anything but negligent.
She steps back from the microphone, clearly meaning to end the meeting. But Kinnear seizes the opportunity to take over again. “If anyone has any questions or concerns, I’d be happy to stick around and chat—unless you have somewhere to be, Mina?”
She purses her lips but nods, acquiescing. Most of the audience heads for the exit, but a few people, including Drew and Sandra, approach the stage.
Jasper brushes his copy of the suicide prevention flyer onto the floor, then dons his coat. “You want to get some coffee?” he asks. “Discuss next week’s lesson plans?”
Next week’s lesson plans have been locked in for months now. He’s not even attempting to be subtle.
“Another time,” I say, and then I head toward the stage steps.
Samina Pierce is even more beautiful close-up, her dark hair and olive skin lustrous despite the harsh lighting. A small crowd has gathered now, but Sandra and Kinnear are doing most of the talking, something about poetry writing as a therapeutic modality for suicidal students. As soon as I step onto the stage, Samina’s eyes go straight to me.
Drew steps back to include me in the circle. “Dr. Pierce, do you know—”
“Dr. Scarlett Clark,” she says, extending her hand for me to shake. Her grip is firmer than I expect, but her skin is rose-petal soft. “Yes, of course.”
She’s clearly someone on whom I should keep a very close watch. But a task force isn’t the police. They’re not looking for a culprit, only for data patterns, and data can be manipulated.
Just like people.
8 CARLY
I stay at the library until dark. That way, by the time I go back to our room, Allison should be long gone, off doing whatever normal college students do on Saturday night.
Instead, I arrive to find her sitting cross-legged on my bed.
“Hey,” she says. Her own bed is stripped bare. Maybe she’s doing laundry?
I stop, letting my backpack straps slide down my arms. “Hey.”
She’s dressed more casually than I’ve ever seen her, in leggings and a Gorman sweatshirt with the neck cut so it hangs off her shoulders, but she’s wearing her usual dramatic makeup: red lipstick, perfect feline flicks of eyeliner. She leans back on her hands, letting her feet dangle off the edge of my bed. “What are you up to tonight?”
I open my mouth to respond, but she puts her palm up before I get a word out.
“Reading is not an acceptable answer.” She springs up, offering me her hand like she’s a gentleman helping a lady out of a carriage. “Come on, I want to show you something.”
A nasty voice whispers in the back of my mind: It’s a trick She’s mocking you. But Allison doesn’t seem like a mean person. She doesn’t seem nice either, she seems… confident, I guess. Maybe I’d be that way too, if I looked like her.
I take her hand, and she smiles wider, threading our fingers together as she leads me out of our room and toward the window at the far end of the hall. She tugs at the pane until it raises, with a screech so loud it sets my teeth on edge.
“Come on,” she says again. Then she climbs over the sill, trying to tug me along with her, out onto the zigzagging fire escape bolted to the side of the building.
I freeze, pulling back on her arm. “Are we even allowed to—”
“You sound like Wes,” Allison says with a wink. “It’s fine, I come up here all the time.” She climbs a few steps, the black metal creaking ominously under her weight, then stops and looks down at me again. “Just don’t tell Samantha.”
Our RA mostly ignores us in favor of her on-again, off-again boyfriend, but I do not want to get on her bad side. But I don’t want Allison to think I’m some scared little girl either, so I take a deep breath and climb out the window after her.
By the time we get to the roof, my knuckles are pale and throbbing from gripping the railing so hard, but after the rickety fire escape, the flat expanse feels like safety. It’s bright and surprisingly warm up here, everything cast in a soft white glow from the strings of lights looped around the crumbling brick chimney—the same kind Allison has by her bed.
“Since you never want to go out,” Allison says, “I figured I’d bring the party to you.”
Her laptop sits a few feet away at the base of the chimney, all the blankets and pillows from her bed strewn in front of it. There are bowls with snacks set out too—popcorn, mini Oreos, small cubes of cheddar cheese—and a four-pack of Orangina.
She planned all of this. For me.
But why? Surely she has more than enough friends already, and way better things to do on a Saturday night.
“Sit down.” She takes my hand again, leading me toward the blanket nest. “You can pick the movie.”
I don’t understand any of this. But it would be rude to refuse when she’s gone to so much trouble. I sit on one of the pillows, and Allison stretches out beside me on her stomach. While I look through her extensive movie collection, she kicks her feet idly in the air, tossing pieces of popcorn into her mouth one by one. Her hair slides over her shoulders, the ends brushing my knee.
My eye catches on one title: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I’ve never seen it, but I know the Alexander Pope poem the title must come from. Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind! Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d.
“Oh, I’m so obsessed with that one!” Allison says. “Isn’t it brilliant?”
“I’ve never seen it,” I admit.
She sits up. “What? Okay, we need to fix that immediately.”
Allison starts the movie, adjusting the laptop screen so we can both see it, then reclines against the stacked pillows. I try to follow the action—a man walking on a snow-covered beach before boarding a train, a woman with bright blue hair chatting him up—but I’m too distracted by Allison’s proximity. She keeps picking up the bowls and passing them to me, settling back down even closer than she was before.
“I want to be Clementine for Halloween,” Allison says. “What do you think, could I pull off the blue?”
She runs her fingers through her hair, letting the long blond strands fan out over the pillows. I imagine her with hair like the woman in the movie, the way it would set off the afternoon-sky color of her eyes and the creaminess of her skin.
“Yeah,” I say. “You’d look—”
“Oh, wait, this is my favorite line!”
She sits up again, knocking into the popcorn bowl. As the actress on screen speaks, Allison matches her words—the same pacing, diction, everything. It sends a strange little chill up my spine.
“ ‘I’m a vindictive little bitch, truth be told.’ ”
She shoots me a sly look, and I want to dart my eyes away, retreat into myself, but this time I don’t. I look her right in the eye and smile back.
“Thanks for doing all this,” I say.
“My pleasure.” She twists off the top of an Orangina bottle, taking a sip and then offering it to me. Her lipstick stains the glass. “I should be thanking you. You’re helping me keep my mind off the audition I just had.”
I take the bottle but don’t drink. “Audition? For what?”
“For Cabaret. The theater department’s doing it later this semester.”
“What part did you try out for?” I ask, even though her response won’t mean a thing to me. I’ve heard of Cabaret but I don’t know much about it—I think it has something to do with Nazis?
“Sally Bowles,” Allison says. “I want it so bad. I practiced my audition piece all summer.” She flings her arms back over the pillows with a dramatic groan. “But I’m afraid I fucked it all up. If I have to watch some other girl play her while I dance around in the background… Like I would actually kill for this part. I would end a life.”
I’m not sure how to respond to that. “When do you find out?”
“Monday. It’s going to be a very long weekend.” She turns to look at me, propping her head on her hand. “You ever feel so anxious it’s like your stomach is trying to eat itself?”
I nod. Yes. Every day.
“I bet you were amazing,” I tell her. “I bet you’ll get it.”
The wind picks up, whipping my hair into my face. I reach to smooth it down, but Allison beats me to it, tucking it behind my ear.
“You’re sweet,” she says.
That’s the last thing I am. But she doesn’t have to know that.
Allison turns onto her back again, and I stretch out too, my legs parallel to hers. We spend the rest of the movie that way, hands brushing as we reach into the snack bowls at the same time. She keeps pointing out favorite moments in the film, little observations I would never have picked up on.
By the time the credits roll, Allison has fallen asleep, her head lolling against my shoulder. The screen switches back to the movie’s cover image—Clementine and Joel lying on the frozen lake, Clem’s bright hair spread out on the ice like a lick of flame.
I think about turning off the computer, heading to bed. But I don’t want to wake Allison. So I lie there, in the blue glow of the screen, and listen to her breathing. It’s soothing at first—I feel warm and content, truly happy in a way I haven’t in years.
But it’s not long before the panic creeps in again. My throat tightening, my heart throbbing with the suspicion that happiness must be a trick, a trap, a rug about to be pulled out from under me, and any second now I’m going to fall.
9 SCARLETT
Samina Pierce wastes no time.
Mere hours after I introduced myself at the emergency faculty meeting, she reached out to schedule an appointment for the very next day so we could speak further about my offer to assist the task force. When I arrive at her office on Sunday evening, I find that she’s already transformed the space into a command center. University records are stacked in neat, color-coded piles on her desk, and the whiteboard on the wall is covered with an elaborate web of photos and documents.
She ushers me inside, then asks if I’d like some tea. “I only have the caffeinated stuff, I’m afraid,” she says.
“No, thank you. I’d be up all night.”
“I think I’ve rendered myself immune.” She smiles. “I could drink a whole pot at midnight and still sleep like a baby!”
Samina seems just as put-together and well rested now, at the end of what must have been a hectic day, as she did first thing on Saturday morning. Everything about her, from her glossy hair to her shiny leather pumps, seems entirely too glamorous for this cramped and dingy office space—too glamorous for Gorman in general, honestly.
“Be right back,” she says. “Make yourself comfortable.”
As soon as she leaves, I step closer to the whiteboard, studying the years of campus suicides she’s connected with red lines of dry-erase marker. They’re not all mine, of course. But the ones that are stand out to me like they’re illuminated with spotlights. I remember every man I’ve killed, in vivid detail. His name, his crimes. His last words, if I allowed him to have any.
