Where I End and You Begin (2 page)

I
complete my walk of shame the next morning when I finally stumble into Marchand House, my own dormitory at the far north of the campus. The House is an old mansion built back at the turn of the last century and donated to the university to provide extra housing for students. By necessity it only holds about forty people at peak capacity, so someone decided that it should hold scholarship-only students on the assumption that we will spur each other in our work efforts.

Which is sort of hilarious, since as far as I can tell most people who get in on scholarships are the smart people who never had to work at anything and all we do is encourage each other to procrastinate. Everyone knows everyone else and there’s a lot more talking about internet porn than studying going on.

My skin is sticky and disgusting, and I know I am dirty in more ways than one, but when I open the door I feel as though I’ve come home, and I stand in the foyer and pause, inhaling. The house has a musty smell, a bit rank, a bit comforting.

The walls of the foyer are painted a pale yellow, illuminated by the tall floor to ceiling windows that let in the gray light of the cloudy day, and the sweeping double staircase, its white paint peeling and worn, that leads to the upper floors is nothing short of inviting. For dorm life, a converted mansion is pretty sweet, and for sumptuous yet slowly decaying surroundings, well, it’s got that on lock down, too. I love that sort of shit. The only step up in housing would be the swank new junior and senior apartments. That’d be like being an adult, living on your own. Tempting. I’d have the option after next semester.

Breathing deeply, I move toward the staircase just as a brightly colored projectile sails through the air and bounces off my head with barely a tap.

Then again,
I think,
if I moved out next year, who would shoot Nerf darts at my head the moment I walked in the door at eight AM?

I turn and glare into the living room, one of the mansion’s old parlors.

The furniture has been rearranged, and all the cushions on the couches have been removed and built into a very impressive structure in the middle of the room.
Bunker.
That’s the word for it. Two Nerf guns poke out from between the small dark space between the roof and the front wall.

“Good morning,” I say. “What are you doing?”

The top cushion lifts, and I see it’s Alice and Jibril, the resident night owls of Marchand House. “We are lying in wait,” Alice says.

“Lying in wait to destroy our enemies,” Jibril adds. He winks at me, as though this is a grand joke.

“What enemies?” I ask.

“We have a theory that we can make enemies if we indiscriminately shoot whoever comes in the door. Then the word will spread and we’ll have to shoot everyone who comes through the door because everyone will be our enemy,” Alice says.

“It’s a practical application of global politics,” Jibril says.

I think about this for a moment through the post-liquor haze. “Is this for a class?”

They both laugh, as though I have made a very clever joke. “No,” says Jibril. “Just an experiment.”

“Okay,” I say. “Good luck.”

“Wait,” Alice says. “Are you our enemy now?”

I think about this. “No,” I say at last. “Don’t think so.”

They both look relieved. “So you’ll still be able to drive us out to do some urban-ex this weekend?” Jibril asks.

I nod. I’m one of the only people in Marchand who has a reliable car. Key word: reliable. Jibril had a car. It broke down the second week of school and stayed in its spot for at least thirteen months before we all got drunk one night and pushed it across campus and parked it in the middle of the quad.

“Good.” Alice looks relieved. She ducks back into the pillow fort bunker. “You should come with us this time,” she says.

“No thanks,” I say. Driving Alice and Jibril out to weird places is a good excuse to put the beer aside and actually do some studying or some grocery shopping.

“Well, think about it. Okay, time to destroy our enemies.” She sticks her gun back between the pillows, taking aim.

“Who’s winning?” I ask.

“Despair,” says Jibril.

I nod. Given the evidence, this is an accurate assessment. I climb the sweeping staircase.

The old wood creaks under my feet, groaning at bearing the heavy load of me. The white paint has been refreshed every year, but it’s still wearing away under a thousand hands hauling tired students up or bracing drunk students coming down.

Then I lift my foot and misstep. My sole refuses to find purchase, sliding easily over the edge, and then for the flash of a second, I imagine am falling, plummeting down the stairs. In my head I hear the crack of bones, the crunch of my spine, the bursting of inner organs, even though the staircase isn’t nearly tall enough to kill me. In my head, the world flows past me, and I am mired in time, unable to go back and retrace my steps. I know that all it takes is one second of inattention, and I’m at the bottom of the stairs, lying still like a puppet with its strings cut. If I fall I will die here, and I can’t change a thing—

I bite the inside of my cheek, willing the morbid thoughts to cease.

I’m standing in the middle of the staircase. All that happened was my foot slipped a step and my shin hurts. I must have banged it. I’m not dead. I didn’t fall. Yet.

Oh.

I get flashes like that sometimes. Standing on the side of a street, I imagine a car, out of control, careening around the corner and smashing me into the wall behind me, leaving only a strawberry jam stain behind. Or in the mall, walking along the balcony, I’ll wonder what it would feel like to throw myself over and fall two stories headfirst into the tile below.

These thoughts happen. That’s just the way it is. Some days it’s so bad I can’t get out of bed. But I’m moving now, so it’s okay.

Closing my eyes I take a deep breath and carefully stuff the vivid imagining away. Then I keep climbing, the stairs sighing with each step.

The creaking stirs something in my memory as I climb. A ghost story about stairs.

Ghost story.
Why would I be thinking about ghost stories? I frown, digging hard, and then it comes to me and I remember.

I heard a ghost story last night, though that story wasn’t about stairs, but about windows. The drink had almost erased it.
That
must be why I’m feeling morbid this morning. The realization relieves me.

The worn handrail slides under my hand as I chew my lip, the ghost story about stairs solidifying in my head as it emerges from the mire of memory. I don’t remember reading this ghost story in a book, so it must be an internet tale I read somewhere. A man in a haunted house. His second floor had a balcony leading off the stairs and every night he heard footsteps climbing up the steps. The wood would groan and protest until the ghost reached the top. Then, after a little while, the balcony railing would begin to creak, softly, rhythmically, and a little girl would start to cry.

Someone had hung himself in that house, and a little girl had found him. Marchand House has no such stories, but it looks like it should.

Violent deaths,
I think as I step up to the landing. The long, dark hall stretches out in front of me, age-blackened wood floors, institutional white walls, green painted doors, all shut. The bathrooms at the end, their frosted doors closed. Empty. Quiet.

My room is immediately to my right, over the foyer. The biggest room in the whole house. I turn and open the door. We never keep it locked.

Though maybe we should, because Tanya is in the middle of our room doing naked yoga.

It’s a testament to how comfortable Tanya is with her body and others that she doesn’t even waver in her tree pose. “Morning!” she chirps brightly as I close the door. She doesn’t even open her eyes. When we first met, she explained that she wanted to be a California girl, and I asked her why she’d come to a podunk town in Indiana instead.
To practice,
she said. She practices by eating vegan and being naked a lot. I don’t think she’s ever been to California.

I sigh as I close the door behind me. “I could have been one of the guys,” I say.

“They’d flip out and run away,” she says. “If you’d been one of them you would have said, ‘I’m sorry!’ and then slammed the door before I could say anything.” She’s still holding her pose, her eyes closed. “So where were you all night this time?”

“Getting drunk and laid,” I say, though I can’t remember the getting laid part very well. That’s probably a bad thing. “Like always.”

“Sounds exciting,” she says. “Are you going to class today?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I can’t miss any more classes or my letter grades start dropping and then... well.”

Tanya doesn’t say anything. We’re scholarship students. She knows as well as I do that if our grades drop below a three point five GPA then we get put on academic probation. If we can’t bring it up by the end of the next semester, we get kicked out.

My GPA... well. Just the thought of my GPA after this semester makes my stomach hurt, and I’m not sure I’d be able to pull it out of the mire in the spring.

In the pit of my belly, I feel as though last night’s liquor suddenly sours and curdles.

“We going for breakfast today?” she asks.

“I don’t have any money.”

“I’ll spot you. You know that.”

I press my lips together. “I have enough for a breakfast bar.”

“Ugh,” she says. “That shit is bad for you. You need whole foods.” She changes position to warrior pose.

My stomach churns. “I need another drink,” I say.

“You don’t. Go take a shower.”

She’s right. I slip past her and go to the closet, grabbing my bathrobe. I strip my disgusting clothes off, but when I bend slightly to unbutton my jeans my stomach suddenly bubbles and I let out a loud belch. Bile burns in the back of my throat and abruptly I become very wobbly.

Cold water,
I think.
Cold water.

I need to keep it together. Keeping my lips firmly shut, I shimmy out of my jeans and underwear, throw them in my overflowing hamper, then wrap my robe around myself, grab my caddy and speed-walk out of the room, trying to hurry without over-tipping the delicate balance between
nauseated
and
blowing chunks.
Every step is another painful jarring of my delicate stomach, and when I reach the frosted doors of the bathroom, I rip them open.

No one else is in here. My feet slap against the dingy white and black checkered tile. Three toilet stalls stand in front of me, and at the back of the room are two shower stalls where, presumably, the old bathtub used to sit, back when rich people lived here.

I stagger over and step into the nearest stall and pull the curtain behind me. Throwing my robe over the side of the stall, I crank the cold water on and stand there, shivering.

My stomach doesn’t settle. Taking deep breaths, I sway on my feet and brace myself against the wall, the spray cascading down over me. The grime and muck of sticky early morning encounters washes away, the stink of bodies and alcohol sluicing down the drain and out of my head, but I just shake harder. The shuddering ricochets around inside me, rattling my belly, until finally, at last, I shake the sickness loose.

I lean over and puke straight down the drain.

Tears stream down my face, mingling with the spray. Hot and cold. Salt and fresh, flowing down together.

Rum comes up, and so does coke. Wads of mucus. Vodka. Some of it goes up my nose, burning, and I cough and splutter, but when it’s done I feel better. Shaky, but better.

I turn the water to hot and let it fall over me, warming up the hollow cold in my bones.

Before I know it I’m jerking awake. I fell asleep standing up beneath the spray. I don’t know how long I’ve been out, but since I didn’t fall over it couldn’t have been long. Hastily I soap up and scrub, washing my hair as fast as I can. Then I shut off the water, rub down, and leap out of the shower and hurry back to my room.

Tanya’s already dressed, her make up in place, and she fiddles around on Facebook while I twist my long, dark hair into a hasty braid and pull on a pair of mostly-clean jeans and a sweater, capping it off with a camo hoodie I found at Goodwill. No one will ever accuse me of being fashionable.

“Ready?” Tanya says.

I open my mouth to say yes, but then I pause.

Tristan is in my first class. That’s how we know each other. I crept out of his room without saying goodbye or waking him up.

Shit.

I reach for an empty beer bottle sitting on my desk, shove aside the curtain covering my closet, and stick the bottle under the spout of the box of horrible wine I keep hidden in the back. Tanya and I are both nineteen, so we’d get in deep shit if it were found. But no one ever looks, thank God.

I fill the bottle halfway up, then chug it. It burns on the way down, but immediately I feel the warmth spreading through me, and I know in a few moments I won’t care so much about Tristan, or how dirty I feel, or the classes I’m probably failing.

I toss the empty bottle in the trash and turn to Tanya. “Okay, ready.”

She’s looking at the trash can, her mouth twisted.

“Hair of the dog,” I say.

But then she looks at me, shaking her head. “You know,” she says, “sometimes I can’t tell if you’re coming or going.”

“I’m
going,
obviously,” I say. I throw my backpack over my shoulders, and then we go.

But on the way down the stairs, my sloshing brain can’t help but think of ghost stories.

T
he ghost on the stairs. I think about him a lot, but not because of
him.
The footsteps, the sound of his body swinging from the balcony. The
ghost
, of course, I understand that part. He’s dead.

It’s the little girl I don’t understand. Was she still alive when the new owner of the house heard the ghost? Or had she died by then?

That’s the part that scares me. Not the idea that there might be the lingering dead among the living, but the little girl. After she died, did she go back, hoping to stop the ghost before he reached the top of the stairs? Or was she caught forever in that moment, unable to alter it?

Did her spirit fly back to that house, left to cry forever on the landing of the stairs, just her and a dangling corpse, caught in an endless loop, playing out until the end of time?

The question burns in me because I don’t know the answer. What is a ghost, really? Living people can be haunted.

But that little girl. Can you be alive and still haunt a place?

Are you haunting someone right now?