Crashing Into You (12 page)

I turned around and hobbled
toward Evan. He was in better shape, standing perfectly still as he tried to
regain control of his breathing, but he still didn't look too good.

I pulled out my phone. “I’m
gonna call the main office downstairs. See if they can send someone.”

Evan took out his phone, too.
Started dialing.

“Who are you calling?” I
asked.

“Who do you think?” he said.
“Melanie.” He put the phone up to his ear. I noticed tears welling up in his
eyes, like he knew an awful truth I hadn't begun to imagine. “I’m gonna keep
trying her… until she picks up… until I hear her voice… until…”

The ringing was faint, from
inside my dorm. But it was there. Evan brought his phone down and stared at me,
and I stared right back. Neither of us said a word. We both covered our noses
and opened the door. The ringing echoed across the room, and came from under
the desk.

From Melanie's purse.

I walked across the room, dropped
down to my knees, and pulled the purse toward me; it had been hidden pretty
well under her desk, but I was still shocked I hadn't seen it before. I
accidentally caught another whiff of the smell, and gagged, briefly, against
the carpet. I took out the phone. It was Melanie’s. It rang one more time,
before Evan’s call went to voice-mail.

I looked back at Evan. He
wasn’t focused on me; he was looking up, in a hypnotic trance.

“Oh dear God,” he said.

I followed his gaze to the
top bunk. The realization didn’t hit me right away. I still thought the smell
had to be coming from a dead rat, or a dead mouse, or any other kind of dead
critter.

But then I saw the feet. Again.

“
What
?” I said.

I jumped up on Melanie's desk
and darted my eyes toward the bunk. Near the edge were the covers, rolled up
into a ball. On the other side, shoved up against the wall, was a body, turned
on its side. Flies were circling it.

“No,” I said. “No, no, no,
no…”

I crawled up onto the bed,
brought my hand down from my nose to the mattress. My tears started to
overwhelm me, to the point that the stench didn’t faze me.

“Melanie…” I reached out for
her arm. My hand was shaking. My whole body trembled with a miserable medley of
terror and grief. “Melanie, talk to me…”

I pushed on her shoulder, and
she rolled toward me. I struck my fists against the ceiling and screamed.

Her eyes were all white, her
skin was piss yellow, her face was melting against the sheets like a microwaved
ice cream bar. Her mouth dropped open, and a worm slithered out, right onto my
hand.
 

I screamed, again, this time
so loud I must have caught the attention of the entire campus. I fell off the
bed, and slammed my head, my back—everything—against the carpet.

I got the wind knocked out of
me.

But I really wished I had
blacked out.

“Melanie,” I said. “She’s…
she’s…”

Evan pulled me up and wrapped
his arms around me. He started sobbing, uncontrollably, against the top of my
head.

“She’s
gone
,” he said.

Chapter 14

“Are you ready?”

I stared at myself in the mirror. The lipstick was too
much. I grabbed a piece of toilet paper and blotted it off. “I just need one
more minute,” I said. “Can you hang on a sec?”

I pulled down on my dress, the only one I had in the
appropriate color. It was so tight and uncomfortable that I considered tossing
it in the trash and buying something at a thrift store along the way, but there
wasn’t time.

I cocked my head to the left and right, then grabbed
another of my lipsticks. Raised it to my face.

Another knock on the door. “Sydney, we have to go.
We’re gonna be late.”

I sighed, and set the lipstick down. “All right, I’m
coming.”

I followed Lukas out of our apartment, toward the
parking lot. We headed down the two flights of stairs and passed the crowded
swimming pool. He unlocked his Volkswagon Jetta and opened the passenger door for
me.

“You don’t have to do that,” I said.

“It’s fine.” He nodded to me as I sat down, then hurried
over to the driver’s seat and turned on the ignition. He was wearing all
black—shirt, slacks, belt—but sported a pink tie. “The funeral
should have a
little
color,” he told
me an hour ago. “It’s what Melanie would have wanted.”

I wanted to assure him he had no idea what Melanie
would have wanted, but then I remembered he knew about as much as I did. Would
Melanie have wanted to be buried or cremated? Would she have wanted her funeral
to be in the morning, afternoon, or evening? Would she have even wanted me
there?

These were questions I kept asking myself all morning,
but the only person who could have answered them was gone, for good. One minute
I was yelling at her at the side of a road, and the next, she was dead. I was
grateful for our encounter at the coffee shop, that her last memory of me
wasn’t my screaming like a maniac—but still, as her roommate, and as her
friend, I could have done better.

Lukas pulled out of the complex and headed down
Canterbury Street, toward the 405 freeway. “Do you know what the parking
situation is there?” he asked.

“I'm not sure, actually. I've never been to this part
of the city.”

“You know the exit we take, right?”

“Yes. Here, I have the directions.” I pulled the paper
out of my purse, and unfolded it. “So the place is called Oakwood Memorial
Park. Take the 118 east to Topanga Canyon. It's in Chatsworth.”

“Chatsworth? Really?” Lukas let out a quick laugh.
“I’ve been there before. That’s where they make the porno movies.”

I rolled my eyes. “They do not.”

“They do, too! I read it online. Apparently if you
rent a place in Chatsworth, you have to check off on your lease agreement that
you’ll let them film sex scenes, gay and straight, in your bedroom. And if you
say no, then you have to...”

He stopped his lame joke when I started crying. I’d
cried enough for five years in the never-ending week following Melanie’s
passing, and I didn't think I had an extra tear to shed. Of course, I was
proven wrong last night, and again now, as we pulled onto the freeway.

“Aww, Sydney…” Lukas said. He grabbed the box of
Kleenex from the back seat and handed them to me. The man had come prepared.

I blew my nose, then shoved my hands over my face. “Oh
God,” I said. “It’s horrible, it’s just so
horrible
…”

“I know.”

“How could I have let this happen?”

“It's okay. We've gone over this—”

“How could I just let her die?” I struck my fist
against the glove compartment.

Lukas didn’t yell at me, didn’t scold me for beating
up his car. He just said, as he always did, “Shh. It’s okay.”

“I was so stupid,” I said. “I was such an idiot. Three
whole fucking days…”

“I know,” he said.

“She was dead in the room, all that time, and I didn’t
even know. What good is an A on my sociology final when I can’t fucking see
that my roommate’s dead?”

“Hey, you deserved that A—”

“It doesn’t matter. None of it matters. If I had just paid
a little more attention to Melanie than to my goddamned finals, maybe she’d
still be alive.”

Lukas bit down on his lower lip, like he was trying to
find the right choice of words to put me at ease. “You don’t know that, Sydney.
Melanie died in her sleep. Even if you had found her the next
morning—hell, the middle of the night—there’s nothing you could
have done.”

I shook my head. I thought back on that weekend over
and over again, like a nightmare I could never wake up from. It had been two
weeks since her death, eleven days since we found her rotting in the dorm, and
all I’d accomplished since that catastrophic moment was moving into my new
apartment and learning the joys of insomnia.

“I should have gone with her to that party,” I said.
“She asked us if we wanted to go. I might have, if I hadn’t been such a pathetic
little bitch at that party
Friday
night.”

“Hey, hey, don’t talk about yourself like that!” He
raised his voice. Lukas never raised his voice. “People say it all the time,
and it’s true, as much as I hate to admit it. Sometimes... shit happens. Things
that are always meant to happen, that we can't possibly stop, even if we try.”

“But... she told me at Starbucks she didn't want to
get wasted that night, didn't even
want
to stay out late. If I had been there, I would have kept an eye on her. I
wouldn’t have let anything happen to her.” A tear trickled down my cheek. I
wiped it away. “I promised I'd make it up to her. And now I never can.”

“She died of alcohol poisoning! Do you understand
that?” He swerved into another lane, and a loud truck honked at us from behind.
Lukas merged back into the slow lane, and steadied the vehicle.

“Watch the road,” I said. “Can you please not kill us
on the way to a funeral?”

Lukas ignored my question. “Here's the thing,” he
continued, “she died, because she drank too much alcohol, because she was so
dumb to think that getting drunk somehow equated to being accepted.”

“Shut up,” I said. “You weren’t there. Maybe her
so-called friends made her drink more than she wanted, you don't know. You have
no idea what was going through her mind.”

“I don’t claim to. What I’m saying is, from the first
day you’ve known her, you’ve told her all about the dangers of alcohol, what it
can do if you abuse it. I mean, that's your thing! She knew about what happened
to you in high school, how you almost died. And she
still
did this to herself. She’s the idiot, Sydney. Not you.”

I shook my head. “Don’t call her an idiot.”

“Why not?”

“Because she's fucking dead, that's why!” I slammed my
head back. “I’m sorry. You know I'm not yelling at you. I’m yelling at the
situation.”

“It's fine,” he said.

“I don’t know how I could have survived these last couple
weeks without you, Lukas. You know that, right?”

He tapped his hand against my leg, and attempted a
lame smile. “I’m sorry all this had to happen.”

“I am, too,” I said. “We were so close to having the
best summer of our lives.”

Lukas shrugged. “Who says we still can’t?”

I rested my chin against my palm and stared at him. He
was so collected, so confident. I wished I had what he had.

We descended into the San Fernando Valley, headed east
on the 118 freeway, and made a left onto Topanga Canyon Boulevard. The farthest
I’d ever traveled outside of campus was Santa Monica, so this outer part of Los
Angeles was foreign territory to me.

It was a little generic, with all the fast food
restaurants and hotel chains, but I didn’t see a pornography studio anywhere in
sight, and the closer we got to the cemetery, the more the trees on both sides
of the road seemed to flourish. After so much time spent on the depressing L.A.
freeways, we were back in the green again.

“It should be up here on the right,” I said, pointing
to nowhere in particular. When I saw the family of six crossing the street
dressed all in black, I knew we were in the right place.

“I’m gonna go over here,” Lukas said, and he parked
the car in the dirt across from the cemetery.

He turned off the ignition, and we just sat there for
a moment. Neither of us budged.

“You gonna be all right?” he finally asked.

I massaged my eyelids, and said, “Yeah. Yeah, I’ll be fine.”

“Okay.” He stepped out of the car and opened the door
for me, again. He didn’t need to, but that was Lukas.

I wedged my purse under the back seat, and stepped out
into the blinding sunlight. We had to walk up a long, winding road to get to
the church on the top of the hill. From far away it looked tiny, like a little
shack, but as we got closer it grew to the size of a cathedral. I’d only been
to one funeral in my life—for my paternal grandfather, who passed away
when I was twelve—and all I remembered was a lot of awkward crying. I
also remembered a room that sat about twenty people, but, judging from the
building before me, it looked like at least a hundred were coming to pay their
respects to Melanie Swanson.

We reached the front steps of the church. Melanie’s
mother Mary was at the top, a veil over her face, greeting guests and dabbing
at her eyes with a handkerchief, and Melanie's dad Bill stood to the right of
her, shaking hands and doing his best not to cry.

Someone else was there, too, standing to the left of
Mary. She was also shaking hands and receiving hugs from various people. No
veil covered her face. It was as plain as the cloudless sky above us.

“What the fuck,” I said.