Ophelia, Alive Page 13

  “Well?”

  “Shut up, shut up, we need to stop talking so much. We’re gonna wake someone up, they’re gonna hear us—”

  “Phelia.”

  “What?”

  “Just open the damn closet.”

  I close my eyes, and I count to three, and I twist the knob, and the door swings open, dumping a body onto my shoulders, and I hold my breath tight to muffle the scream. Arms around my neck, cold and stiff, goo against my face and an awful smell pouring out of the mouth that won’t close, and I squeeze my eyes shut and push her away.

  “Not at me, not at me!” And Kate’s got her now, pushing her back towards me, yelling things I can’t hear, and we juggle her back and forth. A hundred and fifty pounds of coed (give or take) hangs on both of our necks and squeezes us together till our faces are smashed between stiff, clammy arms.

  Kate’s nose is grinding into my cheek, and I catch her eye in the corner of my own and say, “What do we do?”

  She gapes at my cheekbone from point-blank range, mouth hanging open. “I—let’s—”

  “Can you maybe—?”

  “Here, put your arm around her back—”

  “Okay—”

  “No, not like that!”

  “Sorry.”

  “Okay, and I’ll get her feet, and—”

  And then somehow with some twisting and some rolling, I’ve got her by her armpits and Kate’s got her feet, and her chest is sagging on the floor, but we’ve got her, at least, and I say, “Okay, let’s get out of here.”

  We waddle sideways, toward the door, like a beast with three backs, and Kate puts her hand on the doorknob, half-twists it, and “Wait.”

  “What?”

  “How will we—how do we get her down to my van?”

  “What do you mean? We just take the elevator, and—”

  “Really. The elevator.”

  “...or the stairs?”

  She’s wincing from the weight of the body. (Please, I’m holding the heavy part.) “Come on, Phelia, you really can’t see the problem with that plan?”

  “Well, I mean—”

  “You’re talking about going right out the front door with a dead body,” she hisses. “There are other people here. I mean, you know that, right?”

  “Uh—damn it.” How is it we didn’t think of this? We spent literally an hour planning out exactly what we would do once we got to the hospital, but we didn’t spend a second discussing how to get the body there in the first place. “What do we do?”

  Cyndi’s dead legs are dragging Kate lower and lower, and she leans against the wall, leaving me shouldering almost all the weight. “Well, uh, we can’t go out the door.”

  “We can’t go out the door? What does that leave? A window?”

  She bites her lip and drops her end, and Cyndi’s weight jerks me toward the floor as Kate wanders absentmindedly toward the window. “That’s actually not a bad idea,” she says.

  “What?”

  “The window. We’ll get her out through the window, and then—”

  “You want me to climb out the window?” I say, and she stares at me like I’m an idiot, and maybe I am. It’s so hard to think straight.

  “No. We drop her out, and then we go pick her up.”

  “We’re five floors up. She’ll splash.”

  “Bodies don’t splash.”

  “Hers might!”

  “Look, c’mere.”

  “Come over there? But what do I do with—”

  “Just drop her.”

  “On the floor?”

  “Yes—no—look, just drag her, if you want. Or something. Look—what I’m trying to tell you is there’s a dumpster down there we can drop her into.”

  “And then what?”

  “I’ll pull the van around, we fish her out and throw her in the back, and we’re in business.”

  “What if someone sees us?”

  “You have a better idea?”

  I don’t.

  “Look,” she says, “I’m gonna go down there and pull the van around. You see if you can get the screen off the window.”

  “Uh—how...?”

  “There’s a screwdriver in my desk. Just make it happen.” And she runs silently out the door and the next thing I realize is that I’m half-squatting in the middle of the room with a corpse hanging around my waist, tongue dangling out the side of her mouth, whitish pupils staring straight into my eyes. I’m sweating and cold just like she is, and the lights are too bright, and I’m wondering, do I drop her and go look for the screwdriver or do I try to pull her over there with me and let her hang onto my waist while I’m combing through Kate’s drawers, or what?

  White eyes filled with cold accusation

  And a tongue that knows no satiation;

  Her boobs drag on the floor

  While I pick through a drawer

  And I prep for a defenestration.

  I always wanted to use the word defenestration for something. Anyway, Kate seriously needs to organize these drawers, because I can’t find anything. There’s makeup piled on top of pencils and pens next to dirty dishes and junk mail, and so far I haven’t come across anything you might find at a hardware store, not even a rubber band or a nail. In the fifth drawer I try, I see a nail file sitting on top, and I figure that’s better than nothing.

  There are only four screws holding the screen onto the window, and they’re Phillips heads, which makes it awkward to loosen them with a pointed file—I have to hold it mostly sideways and sort of crank it—but eventually all four screws fall loose onto the floor, where they disappear into her rug. I stick my head out the window and I see that she’s standing in the dumpster, waiting. She whispers something up at me, but she’s so far down that I can’t actually hear anything she says. I say, “Are you ready?” and she says something, and I shrug and push Cyndi out the window.

  I watch her body topple end-over-end through the night while Kate screams and jumps out of the way, followed by a muffled clang when Cyndi hits the dumpster. Then the dust settles and Kate’s standing there, dirty and scared, staring up and me and gritting her teeth. “What was that?”

  “I thought you said to drop her.”

  “I said to wait.”

  “Just now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s what you were saying?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh.”

  “You didn’t hear me?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Why didn’t you ask me to repeat what I said?”

  “It, uh, seemed rude, I guess.”

  “Seriously? Just get down here and help me. We need to stop yelling.”

  “Yeah.”

  As I crank the window shut, I realize how sore my arms already are. I guess I’ve been running on adrenalin up to this point (how else could I have lifted a body out the window?), and I’m starting to realize just how hard it’s going to be to keep this up. I’m seeing spots, but I catch my breath and I stumble toward the door. I lock it but I leave the lights on, and I trip down the stairwell and out into the security lights in the alley, where Kate’s waiting in the dumpster.

  “Over here!” She’s whispering, but still loud, and it’s kind of annoying (to be honest) that she feels the need to tell me where she is. I can actually see her, even from way over here at the door—she’s just a head, bobbing down above the lip of the dumpster, while she grunts and strains trying to pull the body out, and suddenly I feel pretty good about myself for being able to move the thing on my own. Her curly dreads are flipping up and down in the harsh shadows, and she grunts and pulls with her back. “Gimme a hand?”

  I’m sore and my arms feel like they’re dragging on the ground, but whatever, this needs to happen. I’m looking the dumpster up and down, trying to find a way in. It seemed like a good enough idea to drop the body in here, but now I’m honestly wondering what we were thinking. It’s not like I didn’t know that dumpsters were big, but at the moment I’m looking at having
to scale a ten-foot vertical wall made of rusty metal, and I’m realizing that there’s no such thing as a simple plan. I’m trying to think back to the time when my dad made me take gymnastics, but it’s been so long. I’m reaching up, grabbing at anything, but there’s nothing but sharp, jagged rust.

  “You having trouble?”

  “No. Yes. Shut up.”

  “Would you like to know how I got up?”

  “Uh—I can—yes.” So humiliating. I didn’t ask to be a fatass, it just happened. Damn Snickers bars.

  “Look over at the wall of the building. See how the bricks are sort of uneven?”

  “I can—uh—yeah.”

  “I sort of shimmied up that way. Y’know, put my back against the dumpster and pushed against the wall with my feet—”

  “Were you raised by mountain goats?”

  “No, I was—just get up here, please?”

  I look the bricks in the wall up and down—they’re actually rocks, yellow limestone with mortar in between, so it’s a little bit like mountain climbing, which coincidentally is something I’ve been avoiding my whole life. I grab a brick and lead with my right foot.

  I’m thanking God right now I was smart enough to wear my Chuck Taylors. Honestly, I really felt like wearing flip-flops, but it’s good to know I was smart enough to realize that was a bad idea. This wall would cut up flip-flopped feet pretty bad, and I’m about to jump into a rusty dumpster. I’m not sure how current my tetanus shot is, either (it used to be my mom’s job to keep track of that, but I imagine she’s given up on that sort of thing lately). I give one last push against the wall with my foot and jerk the rusty lip with my hand, and I land facedown in garbage juice.

  Now I wish I had gone to the gym more.

  (If my swimsuit still fit, I could swim more—

  ‘Cause the lifeguard there’s hot,

  And I like him a lot,

  And I think I might like to see—

  “Phelia!”

  “Uh—” I’m trying to pull myself to my feet, but the goo is sticky and all I can see is brown. I think I’m standing on something sharp. And I need to stop with the limericks. They’re starting to get compulsive.

  Also, that lifeguard’s not even that hot. I was just looking for a rhyme.

  “Are you all right?” Kate’s saying. “You look like you’re spacing a little.”

  “I’m okay, I’m sorry, it’s just—y’know—”

  “I know. Just give me a hand with her.”

  “Yeah.” I grab Cyndi’s armpits—again (why do I always have to get the heavy part?)—and we inch our way up the dumpster’s slope. Kate’s going up backwards, pulling (jerking) on her knees, and I’m stumbling forward, pushing like Sisyphus, and Cyndi’s dragging her butt on the metal.

  CLANG

  I dropped her arm. I dropped her arm and it hit the metal and it was loud and we freeze and we stare. Kate’s eyes jerk left and then right, like she’s trying to see behind her without moving her body, and we listen, but there’s no one coming. Nothing but silence in the air, swirling around us like the steam from our sweat that I can see rising, even though it’s a cold night.

  I crouch down, slowly, reaching for the arm. That clang left me on edge, and now every little sound, even the pop of my knee from crouching, makes me sure someone’s coming. I wrap my fingers around the cold skin, and I stand back up, and we start shuffling toward the metal slope’s crest once more, until finally we’re looking down at the wide-open hatch of Kate’s van, where the yellow dome light illuminates the Peavey amps and the cigarette burns.

  “So now we just...”

  And we stand there and look at each other, because we’re slowly becoming aware of the thousands and thousands of details we never once thought of when we were making this plan. The dumpster is huge, and the van is ten feet below us, and we’re wondering now, what do we do? Just throw her?

  (Or...?)

  I say, “Maybe I could hop down there and you could toss her to me?”

  “Are you kidding? You’ll die.”

  “Yeah, probably.” A cold breeze whistles by, and we both shiver. I say, “Maybe we could just...toss her in.”

  “Into the hatch? Like, directly into my van?”

  “...yeah?”

  “But my shocks!”

  “That van’s like 40 years old. Does it even have shocks anymore?”

  “Yes—I mean—I don’t know. I don’t know anything about cars. But if we wreck my van, that’s the end of my music career.”

  “Uh—?”

  “Oh, and we’re stuck with the body,” she adds.

  “Yeah.” We stand here looking stupid, till I finally say, “I can’t come up with anything better. You?”

  Sighs. “No.”

  We both swallow hard, and I say, “Count of three?” and she nods, and we swing her once, twice, and then three times, and try not to close our eyes too tight, and let her go flying, down toward the faint-glowing light. And I hear a clank and a thud and Kate’s busted shocks squeaking, and when I look I see a stiff, gray corpse lying on the stack of amps, a single arm sticking out into the night over her bumper.

  It looks totally metal.

  That’s not a thought that I want to hang onto, because there’s nothing funny about this situation, nor is there anything funny about the noise we just made. We’re staring at each other, wincing, waiting for someone to come running out the door shouting What’s going on, but the door stays closed.

  And then, suddenly, she jumps down onto the pavement, and I wish for a second that I was as in-shape as she is. Then, blindly, I grab at the edge and jump off. And with my eyes closed I feel my feet swinging in the dark and my hand shredding flesh through my glove on the filthy, rusted metal, till I let go and wait forever for gravity to work its magic. And my face and my hands feel the asphalt.

  “You okay?” She yells that over her shoulder because she’s already in the driver’s seat with the engine running, and I trip over my hands and feet running for the passenger door, which I jerk open. I hop inside and the torn vinyl of the passenger seat is cold on my ass, and before I even get my door closed, we’re rolling forward. “Put your seatbelt on,” she says.

  sun. jan. 16.

  2:51 am.

  putting my seatbelt on…

  “Seriously?” I say. “My seatbelt?”

  “What?” She turns onto a back road with no streetlights.

  I reach around for my seatbelt and say, “We’re out in the middle of the night to dump a dead body, and you’re worried about whether or not I’m wearing my seatbelt?” I’m reaching around for it, but I think it might be caught in the door.

  She says, “You gotta take care of yourself first, right? If you die on the way there, I’ll have two bodies to get rid of.”

  “Thanks for your concern.” I finally have the thing dislodged from the door, and but I have to slam the ends together several times before they latch.

  “I’m just saying.” She turns down another residential road. We’re weaving, doubling back, trying not to leave an obvious trail. “If you don’t look out for your own health, you won’t be able to look out for anything else. I mean, why do you think we have a gym on campus? Just so shallow people can get laid?”

  “That’s what I always assumed, yeah. Well—that and it’s an excuse to jack up student fees.”

  She makes another random, arbitrary turn, and says, “God, you’re cynical.” Her headlights catch a cat crossing the street, and he freezes for a second, and his eyes glow yellow and green before he disappears into the dark. “How does someone get so cynical, anyway? If I were Freud, I’d guess you were abused as a child.”

  “Worse. I was abused by children.”

  She laughs, but then she realizes I’m serious. “Wait, what?”

  I bite my lip. “Ever been cussed out by a room full of twelve-year-olds?”

  “No, but it sounds hilarious.”

  “God damn it,” I say, “I knew you’d say that. You o
pen up to someone and they just think it’s funny. Every. Damn. Time.” I pull my feet up on the seat and I hug myself.

  She sits there silent, gearing up and down as we curve in between some HOA-funded parks and swimming pools, and I hope she actually knows where we’re going and isn’t just waiting for me to give her directions. Her headlights catch someone, and we both jump, but he’s just a jogger, a pudgy old guy with a sweatband on his head and a dumbbell in each hand. If I looked like that, I’d run at night too. (Maybe I should.)

  And she finally says, “You’re right.”

  “What?”

  “You’re right. I shouldn’t have laughed. I’m sorry. I thought you were joking.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “I know,” she says, her eyes tracing the shadows. She takes a deep breath, and she adds, “And you’re right. Abuse is abuse. It doesn’t matter who’s doing it.” Houses fly by, houses with gnomes and votive statues in their gardens. “It’s like—well, like with rape, I guess.” She’s biting her lip, thinking hard about whether she wants to continue with that thought. “If you get raped by a guy, there are support groups, and You’re so brave, and stuff, but if you get raped by a girl, you’re just a freak.”

  “People get raped by girls?”

  “See? That. Exactly that. That’s the reaction you get, if you’re lucky. But I had a guy friend, and this chick slipped him something one night and then had her way with him, and for a long time he was just too embarrassed to tell anyone.” She gears up and adds, “And finally, he told me, and I just laughed at him. Like his pain somehow meant less because someone weaker than him had caused it. And then—” She turns right. “What I’m trying to say, I guess, is I’m kind of an asshole. I know I am. I’ve hurt so many people, and not even in a fun way. Just by being a callous bitch when they tell me about their pain, y’know? And, y’know, I’m sorry.”

  Streetlights whipping by. Wind beating on the side of the van. With every bump, Cyndi’s hand slaps on the floor, and one of her jagged fingernails is tearing at the carpet. Kate’s driving faster now, barely paying attention to the road. And finally, I say, “This really isn’t the same as that.”