starts clacking away at it. A few seconds later, a bunch of girls at the bar all pull out their calculators and start giggling. “Okay,” she says with a smile. “Let’s go.”
* * *
We get a taxi, and she’s all over me, trying to burrow away from her sorrows. Desperation. Our lips never meet, but she drapes herself across my lap like a wilted flower; her fingers toy idly with my lapels. I remember to ask her where she lives before just blurting it out to the driver, and then she turns to look up at me. “Carlos?”
“Hmm?”
“Hi.”
“Hey.”
She rolls back over and slides her fingers down my chin, along my neck. “Oh,” she says, her carefully trimmed eyebrows creasing with concern. “You’re so cold! My good- ness.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“We might have to do something about that.” Her hand moves from my neck down to the relative comfort of my shirt and stays there for the rest of the ride.
* * *
There’s something different about this place. It’s emptier; certain things are missing from the wall, and a heaviness hangs in the air. You can feel it the second you walk in. Then I realize it’s all David’s stuff: gone. Amanda takes my hand and leads me down the hallway past David’s door. It’s ajar and his room is empty, stark-naked empty, not even a bed. “C’mon,” Amanda says, beckoning with one finger. “This is my room.”
It’s a mess: papers and textbooks all over the floor, clothes piled in the corner, half-full coffee cups on the bedside table. A paperback copy of The Alchemist lies open on the bed next to a rolled-up sock and a small pile of receipts. She displaces all that to the floor with a single, drunken swipe and plops down, leaning back on her elbows. “Hey.”
I’m standing over her, looking down as she squirms herself around, trying to be seductive.
This is all wrong. Terribly wrong.
I open my mouth, about to make some ridiculous excuse for leaving, when she sniffles and then breaks down completely.
“Um.” I step back and then forward again, caught between two no-good protocols. “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” she sobs, wiping tears away and snorfling. “I’m sorry. I’m totally fine.” Ask a stupid question. “I just . . .” She sighs and horks a booger into a tissue. “It’s just been hard, is all.”
“What?”
“My roommate,” she says, her voice quivering. Then she bursts into tears again. I sit on the bed beside her and pat her back. “He . . . he died last week. Just . . . died.”
“That’s terrible. How?” Probably not the right question, but I need to know.
“Just . . . he was s-sick. He was, I don’t know, no . . . He was fine, well, no.” She takes a deep, shivery breath and collects herself. “He’d been acting weird since New Year’s.”
“Weird how?”
“Just . . . off, you know. Like sometimes he was cool, but sometimes he just wasn’t himself. He’d fall into this darkness, like there was a rain cloud around him that he couldn’t shake. And then suddenly he was sick. Ugh . . .” She blows her nose again and rallies some of her composure back. “And we thought it was just the flu or whatever. Finally convinced him to go to the ER. Called nine-one-one for him and everything, but the stupid paramedics were assholes, talking about ‘Oh, why’d we call nine-one-one if all he has is a fever,’ or whatever. Assholes.”
“Jeez.”
“And then they sent him home with just some antibiotics, but he didn’t get better.” And she starts bawling again, this time dropping her head against my shoulder, her tears and snot soaking into my suit jacket. “He just kept getting worse. It was like he was gone, like he wasn’t even there, you know? Just gone. And he kept having bloody noses, all the time. Just filled up trash can after trash can with those bright red–stained tissues.” She lets out a gaspy sob. “And then the next morning he didn’t get out of bed, and we went to check on him, me and Amanda . . .” A long pause. I wonder if maybe she fell asleep. Then she says: “And he was deeeeeeaaddddd,” and breaks down sobbing again.
“Wow.”
“They didn’t even take him, those fucking ambulance pricks. There was blood all around his body and he was pale as a sheet of fucking paper, and they didn’t take him because they said there was no point; he was too far gone.”
“Had he been stabbed?”
“No!”