Dark Rooms Read Free Page B

it. His second thought was how the other colors that came out of the body—the greenish beige of snot, the watered-down yellow of pee, the milky off-white of semen—were dull, muted, earth tones. Blood, though, was so vivid. So vivid it looked fake! Like the stuff you squeezed out of a tube on Halloween.
    His gaze kept going, up and up and up— with the backbone connected to the shoulder bone, and the shoulder bone connected to the neck bone, and the neck connected to the head bone . . . —at last reaching the face. The moment he realized who it belonged to was the same moment he realized he could smell the blood as well as see it. All of a sudden, a wave of nausea washed over him, made him vomit (a weak, indefinite brown) where he knelt.
    Stumblingly, he ran to my house. He was hysterical, babbling and breathless, but Mom understood him well enough to let him lead her by the hand to the graveyard. She was the one who called 911.
    An ambulance arrived only minutes after the police cars. But it was too late. Nica was already gone, a bullet from a .22 lodged deep in her left kidney. Time of death was established at between 6:45 and 7:30 A.M. , though she’d likely been shot earlier. The knowledge that it took a while for her to bleed out—hours, possibly—was almost more than I could bear, and I knew if I thought about it, really thought about it, I couldn’t. So I didn’t think about it. Wouldn’t let myself.
    It was surprisingly easy not to listen once I set my mind to it. When the details of the murder were told to me, I just sort of let them wash over my brain and out my ears. Which is why I’m not exactly clearon how the police deduced that whoever killed Nica probably wasn’t a stranger to her. But deduce it they did. And when it was discovered that I was the last known person to have seen her alive, they were very eager to talk to me.
    Oh, those endless, bleached-out hours going over my story with Detective Ortiz. The stale air of that box of a room at the back of the station, the hard plastic of the chair, the can of Coke gone warm and flat from sitting out too long, me saying the same words in the same order again and again, telling Detective Ortiz everything Nica told me the day before, skipping only the part about the new guy—an omission for Jamie’s sake, it would hurt him to know she’d moved on so fast—just wanting to go to sleep, that total exhaustion, where even my face was numb, and none of the talk mattering anyway because she was already dead dead dead.
    Her sophomore year, Nica was named homecoming queen. The victory was a fluke. Not that she wasn’t one of the prettiest girls in school. In fact, she was probably the prettiest. Which should’ve all but killed her chances. A word about Chandler: Chandler, as a school, thought it was too cool for school, too cool for a lot of things. The only way it would deign to participate in any of the traditional rah-rah teen rites of passage was ironically. And Nica, as it so happens, lost the vote. She came in a distant second to Quentin Graham, a Mississippi boy who showed up to class several days a month in a Chanel suit and pillbox hat. But the administration refused to recognize a male, no matter how chicly turned out, as a legitimate contender. (Refused, basically, to recognize the other meaning of the word queen .) And Nica won by default.
    It was an utterly forgettable event in her life. She sat next to Mr. McFarlan, the assistant headmaster, wearing a crown—a Burger King one, borrowed for the occasion from Maddie’s boyfriend, RubenSamuelson—for five minutes at morning chapel the day before alumni weekend. That was it. The only reason the title rates a mention is because it was a detail so seized upon by the media after she died. It put, I think, the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval on her loveliness, made it official. Officially poignant, too. And pretty soon it