Ophelia, Alive Page 5

  “My paper.” It was due yesterday, by midnight, and I worked on it for weeks, and I have to turn it in because I can’t get another D, and my stupid professor hates email and only accepts hard copies. But it’s only four hours late, and maybe if I slide it under his office door he won’t know the difference.

  “What?”

  “I have to go.”

  It’s there on my desk, and I grab it and run out the door. I hear her say something about how I might want a coat, but I’m already halfway down the stairwell, the gray-painted concrete steps flying by six at a time, and me barely touching the bannister till I land at the bottom and slam through the exit door into the dark, and it’s snowing. The sky’s cracked wide open, with white pouring out, catching the wind and slicing into my face.

  I shove the pages up my shirt to keep them dry, and I can’t see anything with the snow in my eyes, and it’s catching my eyelids and melting down my skin like half-frozen tears. Nobody walks by. Campus is empty tonight.

  The snow’s getting deeper, it’s up past my ankles, inside my shoes, melting and refreezing on my bare arms. But I’m here. In the dark and the white I can barely see it, but inches from my face is the door to the English building, a giant brick thing that smells of sweat and paper and incense, dark and cold and empty, and I grope for the handle and it’s locked.

  I jerk on it hard, but it fights against my wrist bones.

  Not just locked, but it’s chained with a padlock that’s frozen with ice and with snow and it clacks and clunks against the door when I pull on the handle.

  (I kick it.)

  I can do this. I know secret passages. I can get in.

  But now I see a glow, to the right, over my head. A bridge, a skywalk, lit up and warm and hanging in the sky. The building next door, the tall one with the coffee shop inside, stays open 24 hours, and it’s joined to the English building by the skywalk above me. It’s a long shot, but maybe I can get in that way.

  I burst through the door, suddenly remembering what warm air feels like, and I charge past the coffee counter, vaguely hearing a voice that says Please buy a macchiato or something I’m so bored, and I leap up the stairs as fast as I can. Three floors up, to where the skywalk is.

  I slam the door open.

  It’s quiet up here, and the lights are bright and buzzing. Empty, white hallways to my right and my left, and a glass tube of a bridge spanning off in front of me, its light pushing out into the white darkness outside. Three walls of glass and a tiled floor, and there’s something lying in the middle of it, and I squint as I approach, my footsteps echoing.

  I stop.

  What is that on the floor? A person? There’s a person lying on the floor of the skywalk. Just lying there. A sleeping bum? Sometimes they come in here to get out of the cold, and it’s not like I blame them (I tug at my shirt that’s soaked through with snow). I cringe at the thought of walking past a sleeping bum in the middle of the night (one-in-five girls raped, one-in-five girls raped), but I have to turn this in. I have to keep walking.

  There’s a window open somewhere, there has to be, because I feel a draft tugging at my frostbitten ear, and I hear someone breathing, but I have to keep going, have to get across the bridge. In the light and the dark, it’s bouncing up and down, rolling in the puddles of fluorescence, rocked by the wind and the snow, and I close my eyes and push myself forward. “Hello?” I don’t know why I said it, but I did, like I actually want to wake this guy up or something. It only came out as a whisper, and I’m glad it did, but I can still hear it echoing through the empty building.

  He says nothing.

  “Excuse me?”

  Oh God, why am I still saying things? But again he just lies there, and my bones are fighting against my muscles, but I force myself to keep walking. I have to turn this in. I’ll just sneak by him, he won’t even wake up, and then I’ll go back to my room where it’s warm and stay in bed for a week and never go outside in the snow with the hobos again. Keep going. My steps echo like my voice.

  I step onto the skywalk.

  I swear I feel it bouncing and swaying like a rope bridge. That’s crazy, it’s part of the building, it’s steel and it’s concrete, it’s safe. Steps behind me. Eyes on me. Just echoes. Just imagination. You’re just scared.

  I run.

  I push on the bouncing floor (hard), and jump forward into the light and the dark, and I charge for the end of the bridge, and it’s miles away but I’m almost there, thinking just keep looking forward, but I glance at the bum and his eyes are both fixed on me, staring.

  I scream.

  I scream and I jump and my head hits the wall and my hands both reach out for the railing and catch only air and my skin rushes into the glass, but he doesn’t move.

  He’s still sitting there. Just staring at me with eyes that don’t move, and there’s blood on his face and it runs down his beard and it’s caked on his shirt. And bruises on his neck and cracks in the glass and the back of his head is flat, bashed in, bashed hard against the cracked glass, his mouth hanging open. New torn plaid flannel shirt, backpack, beard, jeans, he’s a student. He’s a student and he’s staring at me with his dead eyes. I gasp for air, I’m trying to breathe, and the floor’s getting closer, and my eyes still can’t focus, and I don’t want to fall, but I’m falling. I reach for the rail but I can’t catch myself and I fall onto him, breathing in sweaty beard air and stuck on his eyes, his dead-opaque eyes that reach into me and won’t let me go and I choke and I choke. I’m breathing in the hipster blood caked on the hipster beard, and I push him away and I’m tripping hard over his worn, checkered shoes, and I’m running and running.

  Colors fly by. Yellows and whites and blacks and drips and clicks and echoes. The stairs and then the door, and I almost trip over the hood of the Jag parked outside, and the night flies by and the snow flies by, and the lamps and the sidewalk and the trees and the door, and I’m back in my dorm and I’m running up the stairs, halfway up the stairwell, and my face smashes into her gut.

  We collide. She’s on her way down, and I just knocked her over, almost knocked her over, but I grab her and catch her and it’s my roommate and she says, “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “No—yes—never mind—come with me, come with me right now!” I grab her by the hand, pulling her with me, and I’m running, we’re running, down the stairs, and we’re back outside and the snow’s stopped now, and the air is cold and black and full of stars and a thousand tiny lights ignite the white on the ground. It glows white like a sun against a black sky, and you can see everything but I don’t see anything except the glowing bridge at the top of the hill.

  She tries to pull away but my hand squeezes tight and she says things like Ow you’re hurting me and What is this about and What the hell is wrong with you but I don’t even hear her. I’m running like we’re being chased, and maybe we are, and all I can think about is showing her the thing, the guy, the dead guy. She’s keeping up.

  Then we’re back at the door, the one where the coffee shop is, and I throw it wide open, the barista is gone, probably in the back doing inventory, and roomie is trying to stand in the heat of the vestibule, but I can’t slow down, I pull her inside and upstairs. Six flights of echoes and sweat and her saying Just tell me what’s wrong, and we come to the door and I throw it wide open and stop.

  I stop dead.

  Because he’s gone.

  The skywalk is empty. Just a hollow glass tube that buzzes with light like it always does and hangs in the night and the stars. I’m breathing big, silent gasps through my mouth, and I drop her hand, and I squint in the light that’s burning my tears with its silence. My ears pop, and I feel the cold air leaking through the seam between the building and the bridge as I stumble out onto it and the emptiness rushes at me like a train.

  I look at the floor, at the ceiling, trying to think, trying to understand. She’s behind me now, touching my shoulder like we’re friends. “What’s wrong?”

  “I
—” and my voice cracks and I’m gasping again, and I see the crack in the glass out of the corner of my eye. It’s still there. Still cracked. “I—”

  “It’s okay,” she says. “Breathe.” She stands there, awkwardly, hand on my shoulder, in pajamas. She’s in her pajamas. I didn’t notice till now.

  “I—saw something.”

  “Yeah, I got that much.”

  “It was right here,” I tell her. “It’s gone now.” I’m rubbing at my eye.

  “What’d you see?”

  “Um—” I suck in more breath. “It was a body. A dead guy.”

  “That’s—that’s a hell of a thing.”

  “What do I do? What do we do?”

  “Uh—” and she steps away, half-shrugs, looking out at the stars like she’s on the bridge of a spaceship.

  “But we have to—I mean, we can’t just—” I’m still gasping.

  “Hey, hey, calm down,” she says, hand on my shoulder again. “It’s okay. There’s nothing here.”

  “But I—saw—”

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” She’s looking me in the eye now, hands on my shoulders, biting her lip, thinking What did I just get dragged into?

  “Okay—” I tell her—“this isn’t what you’re probably thinking.”

  She inhales through her mouth and forgets to close it.

  “I’m not stumbling around drunk at 4:30 in the morning.”

  “I didn’t say you were.”

  “But you were thinking it.”

  “I wasn’t thinking anything.”

  “I was up here not ten minutes ago, staring into the eyes of a corpse. I know that’s—I know it’s weird. I know it doesn’t make any sense.”

  And she shrugs. “Okay.”

  “You believe me?”

  She says, “I mean, why not, right? It’s not like I have any real reason not to.”

  “So what do we do?” I ask her.

  “Uh—with regard to—?”

  “Should we tell someone? Call campus security? The police?”

  “Who was it?”

  “Huh?”

  “The dead guy you saw. Who was it?”

  “I—uh—I don’t know. Some guy.”

  “And where did he go?”

  “I…don’t know.”

  She sighs, and leans against the window, pushing on the stars with her shoulder and rubbing her temples, processing everything. Finally: “What were you doing up here at four in the morning, anyway?”

  “I, uh, had a—” And I realize my Hamlet paper, which I hadn’t thought about since I saw those dead eyes, is still shoved up my shirt, soaked in snow and sweat. I reach in and pull it out into the light, and the ink is running, but it’s readable. “I—ugh.”

  “Oh my God,” she says, “is that your Hamlet paper?”

  “I—what? How would you know that?”

  She laughs at me and says, “We’re in the same class, Ophelia.”

  “Wait, really?”

  Rolls her eyes. “It’s fine, it’s a big class. Don’t worry about it.”

  “Okay.”

  She sighs. Long and loud. “God damn it,” she says. “I’ve been waiting all year to have this conversation, and now I finally get the chance, and it’s…it’s now. Four-thirty in the morning, and I’m exhausted, and we’re talking about a dead body that may or may not exist. I’ve been rehearsing this conversation for months, and I finally have the opportunity, and…and damn it.”

  “What conversation?” I say.

  “I just…look,” she says. “I know this totally isn’t the time, but I’ve been saving this up for months, so whatever: I’ve literally known who you were since our freshman year. We’ve had, like, a dozen classes together over the last five years, and I think you’ve said maybe ten words to me, total. And this year we’re roommates, and the two of us might be the only fifth-year seniors living on campus, and you probably haven’t even bothered to learn my name.”

  “Uh—”

  “It’s on the door to our room. You see it literally a dozen times a day.”

  “Uh—”

  Sighs. “It’s Kate,” she says. “My name’s Kate.”

  “Hi, Kate.”

  “Hi, Ophelia,” she says, shaking my hand. “Can we start there? Good, we’ve met. Can our room not be awkward and silent and weird for the rest of the year, now?”

  “Uh…sure.”

  “All right,” she says. “All right. Good.”

  The wind is whistling in the crack in the glass.

  And finally, she says, “Should we go turn your paper in?”

  “Uh…okay.”

  She opens the door to the English building, and we both step into the dark.

  The hallway lights are on a timer, which means they won’t come on for another hour and there’s nothing either of us can do about it. But slowly my eyes adjust, and I recognize the familiar forms of the English building, which looks about like you’d expect an English building to look: no concern for aesthetics and no money for new furniture. The hallway is filled with old desks and ragged bulletin boards and a sofa that’s probably been sitting there since the ‘70s. In the shadows, they’re all jagged parodies of themselves. The dark swallows both of us, till she’s nothing but footsteps and a voice beside me.

  “So…” she finally says. “‘Intro to Shakespeare,’ huh? I guess you put it off as long as you could, too, huh?”

  “Haha, yeah. Just couldn’t work up a ton of enthusiasm for lectures about what sonnets and iambic pentameter are—ow.” I say ow because I just walked into that stupid couch.

  “Oh my gosh, so much yes,” she says. “Such a dreary class. So many bored freshmen, right?”

  “And such a bored professor. Sometimes I wonder if he’s channeling Ben Stein on purpose as a private joke.”

  She laughs. “Yes. That. That must be it.

  “Someday,” I tell her, “I’m going to raise my hand and start asking him a bunch of really smart questions just to throw him off. Something like Is Romeo and Juliet really about the inescapability of fate? I’m pretty sure it’s just about how dumb teenagers are.”

  She laughs. “Are we on the right floor?”

  “I think it’s one down,” I tell her, and we start down the staircase, our footsteps echoing loud. Somewhere a faucet is dripping.

  “Okay,” she says, “so now that we’re actually talking, can I ask you something that’s been bugging me for years?”

  “Uh—I guess?” I’m feeling the walls and the doors, trying to find the right office number.

  “How do you get stuck with a name like Ophelia, anyway?”

  “Ugh,” I grunt. “My mother.”

  “Been some tension there, huh?—ow.” (She just walked into a drinking fountain.)

  I sigh. “Only recently. Anyway, she’s a big Shakespeare nut. My dad insisted on a normal name for my older sister, but she complained for years that everyone had the same name as her. So when I showed up he shrugged and told my mom, Okay, give her whatever weird name you want. And so now, here I am, trapped in a world full of strangers who think it’s hilarious to tell me to get myself to a nunnery—oh hey, here we are. This is his office.”

  I crouch down, feeling for the bottom of his door, cold dust on the floor tiles sucking the moisture from my hand.

  “Awesome.”

  “What?” she says.

  “There’s a whole stack of papers jammed under here. I’ll just slide mine in the middle, and he won’t even know it was late.”

  The pages, clammy and floppy as they are, don’t really slide in as well as I’d hoped, but I manage to jam them in.

  I stand up. I exhale.

  “Feel better?” she says.

  “Uh, yeah. I actually do.”

  “Be able to sleep tonight?”

  “Uh—” In the dark, it’s hard to tell how much she’s joking. I hesitate, I blink against the shadows. The adrenalin I was running on is winding down, and I find myself starting to sw
ay.

  “Here, why don’t you lean on me?” she says, offering me her arm. “You’ve clearly been through a lot in the last hour.”

  And it’s awkward, standing here in the pitch-dark with a girl I live with but barely know, her elbow jutting out toward me, rising and falling with breathing that I can hear. But it’s cold in here and her arm is warm, so I take it.

  “Can we just go out the main entrance?” she says.

  “I wish. It’s padlocked from the outside. We’ll have to head back toward the skywalk.”

  She helps me up the stairs. And as we climb, she asks: “So, you and your mom don’t get along?”

  “Not lately.”

  “Over the name thing, or—?”

  I laugh. “Nah. Nah, not that. She’s just in the process of cutting me off, kicking me out, and—I dunno, I guess I’m just—I guess I’m just kind of scared of turning into her? Y’know?”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s just—” I say—“here I am on the verge of getting a useless English degree, no idea what I want to do with my life, and I look at her, and she’s got a master’s in British lit, and she’s done literally nothing her whole life. She just sits all day in her mansion. It’s what she’s done as long as I’ve known her.”

  “Well, you don’t have to be like that,” she says.

  “I mean, I guess not.”

  “All you have to do is choose to actually do something.”

  “In this job market?—ow.” (I walked into the damn couch again.)

  “I’m not talking about a job, Phelia. Not necessarily. What do you want to do with your life? What do you want to accomplish?”

  I hesitate—I mean, I try to, but she’s pulling me along, so my feet just drag on the tile. “I mean, I can tell you what I used to tell everyone when I was a freshman.”

  “Monster truck driver, right?”

  “Well, obviously. No, I used to tell everyone that I wanted to be a writer.”

  “What English major doesn’t?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know.” The glow of the skywalk is getting closer, and I can’t get my mind off what we might find when we get back there. Finally she says:

  “Well, what do you want to write?”

  “I—I don’t know.”