Page 52 of The Death Row Club
She stops, hand still wrapped around the knob. “Together?”
Embarrassment abruptly overtakes me.What the fuck, Nicola?I rush to provide an explanation. “We’re supposed to stay in twos, right? Just to be safe?”
The longer she stares at me, the warmer the back of my neck feels. Sweat breaks out across my temples. I shouldn’t have said anything; now she thinks…
Slowly, she walks forward, until she’s standing right in front of me. My gaze drops to her lips, to the freckle nestled in the left corner. “Just to be safe,” she repeats. She reaches around me, my breath catching in my throat, turns the knob, and pushes my door open.
I barrel into the room, grab my pajamas off the chair, and lock myself in the bathroom before she can say anything else. “Back in a sec.”
I strip down, avoiding the mirror as much as possible. Back in high school, I was mercilessly bullied for being fat, but college opened up an entirely new world for me: one where people, artists, saw bodies like mine as aesthetically interesting. Claire asked me to pose for her once, when she was taking her first photography course. “I could watch you all day,” she told me as I stripped off my clothes, one piece at a time, revealing the curves that composed my shape. She set up her lighting equipment, staged her twin bed to look the way she wanted, then after a few clicks of the shutter, she climbed onto the mattress, camera still looped around her neck.
“I thought we were shooting portraits for your class,” I whispered as she ran her fingers up the inside of my thigh.
“Maybe I want some for myself.”
Afterward, she flipped through the photos with me curled up next to her, chin propped on her bare shoulder. When we reached the most intimate ones, in which hair stuck to my sweat-drenched forehead and my face scrunched in what looked like a mixture of ecstasy and intense pain, I reached across her for the delete button.
“No!” She slapped my hand away. “Are you kidding? These are the best ones. Look at you.”
I didn’t want to look at myself. I was too ugly in these, too exposed.
“Look,” she tried again. “You’re beautiful.”
I glanced at the screen out of the corner of my eye, not willing to face myself head-on. She didn’t switch between photos; instead, she lingered on the one I could only assume she liked the best. As the minutes passed, as I became acclimated to this version of myself, I began to notice little things: the way my thighs puckered, all the texture there; how the soft rolls at my midsection added dimension and volume; the way the camera indicated the movement of flesh under my arms. My body might not have been like Claire’s, might not have conformed to the rigid beauty standards of the aughts, but that didn’t have to mean it wasn’t beautiful.
She set the camera aside and pulled me half onto her lap. I looked down and marveled at how my hips eclipsed hers, at how perfect we were together.
“I love you,” she murmured, and I loved her, too.
But times change, situations change. Now, it’s not until I’m safeguarded behind baggy sweats and an extra-large T-shirt that I feel comfortable enough to check my reflection.Jesus, what am I doing?I should tell Greer to go back to her room. Shift the dresser, block the entrance from possible intruders, and I’ll be fine until morning. Instead, I switch off the lights and crack the bathroom door.
Greer is standing over my desk, looking at something. Her jeans have been tossed onto the floor, along with the bralette. When she bends forward, the hem of her T-shirt rides up her thighs. I swallow hard at the sight.
“It’s Claire, isn’t it?” The portrait I tried to throw away is spread open before her. “Not exactly the same—the chin’s different; the eyebrows, too—but it’s still her.”
I cross the room, the balls of my feet cold against the hardwoodfloor, and resist the urge to snatch the paper away. “I wasn’t trying to draw her. It just happens, whenever I try to draw anyone. Doesn’t matter who it was supposed to be, it always ends up being her.”
She studies the portrait, and even though it’s just a standard drawing of a woman from the neck up, it feels like all my secrets have leaked onto that page. She presses her thumb to the corner, right above the strange stain. “I never asked, because it seemed too personal, but were the two of you…?”
“Yes.”
I’ve never told anyone before, except for my father. I don’t know why I’m telling her now, especially since lying would be so much safer. Maybe I want to be seen for once, for someone to understand how much Claire’s death impacted me. None of the news segments at the time even mentioned my name; I was a “college roommate,” a “fellow art student,” even, fromThe Buffalo News, an “acquaintance.” Not that I wanted to be perceived as her partner, especially not in a small town where almost every closet boasted a red baseball cap, but the knowledge that they saw me as such a minor character in her life, a walk-on role, still rankles me.
Greer doesn’t look surprised. “Do you want to talk about it?”
For something that’s been locked away for so long, the words come easily. “We started dating toward the end of freshman year. She didn’t want anyone to know because her parents, her father in particular, didn’t approve of ‘alternative lifestyles,’ and she would’ve done anything to please him. But mine was fine with it.” A lump forms in the back of my throat. “At least I thought he was fine with it.”
“Do you know why he targeted her?”
“I think…” I fiddle with the drawstring on my sweats. “For the longest time, it was just the two of us. Family, friends, neighbors, they helped out here and there, but at the end of the day, the only people we knew we could count on were each other. When I moved awayto college, I wondered if he might start dating someone. Part of me wanted him to, so I wouldn’t be responsible for him anymore. But he never did.”
I look at the portrait of Not-Claire. “I brought her home the summer after sophomore year, so she could meet him. She was distant, distracted—I remember that—but, otherwise, they seemed to get along well. Then one morning, I knocked on the guest room door, and she wasn’t there. I wasn’t bothered at first. Claire used to disappear for entire days with her camera; I assumed she was wandering around town, snapping photos, that she’d be back by dinner at the latest. But at dinnertime, there I sat, staring at the empty chair across the table with that feeling, in the pit of my gut, that something had gone horribly wrong.”
I told myself she’d caught a lift to the train station, was headed back to Cooper Union at that very moment. I tried to push my anger to the surface: How could she leave without telling me? Was my hometownthatboring? Was shethatdisappointed with our workingclass life—our Walmart clothes, our Costco meals? I called all our mutual friends, asked if any of them had heard from her. I kept wishing someone would text me a photo of her barhopping back in the city—a photo that would’ve crushed my heart but at least proved she was okay. But that photo, that message, that call, never came. Not until a week later when she finally washed up on the shore.
“Did he just not like her?”
“Yes, but it was more than that. He didn’t… I don’t think he liked the thought of anyone in my life being more important than he was. He wanted to keep me for himself.”
