The Dead Student Read Free Page B

state attorney’s offer of a ride home. He stood outside in the waiting room while crime scene analysts perfunctorily processed the office. This took several hours. He spent that time trying to make his mind go blank.
    And then, when the last flashing light from all the police cruisers clicked off, he descended into a maelstrom of helplessness and without thinking about what he was doing, or perhaps thinking it was the only thing remaining he could do, Moth went hunting for a drink.

 
     
    2
     
    You’re a killer.
    No I’m not.
    Yes you are. You killed him. Or her. But you did it. No one else. You, all alone, all by yourself. Killer. Murderer.
    I didn’t. I didn’t. I couldn’t. Not really.
    Yes you could. And you did. Killer.
    One week after her abortion, Andy Candy lay in the fetal position, curled up in pink frills and pastel throw pillows on her bed in the small room in the modest home where she had grown up. Candy wasn’t her actual name, but a playground rhyme used since her birth by her once-doting, now-dead father. His name had been Andrew, and she was supposed to be a boy and named after him. Andrea had been the best at-the-hospital compromise her folks could arrive at when presented with a girl baby, but Andy Candy it had been ever since, a constant reminder of her father and the cancer that had stolen him prematurely, a weight that Andy Candy carried permanently.
    Her last name was Martine, pronounced with a slightly frenchified tone to it, a family acknowledgment of ancestors who had come to the USA nearly 150 years earlier. Once Andy Candy had dreams of traveling to Paris as an homage to her ancestry and to see the Eiffel Tower and eat flaky croissants and sweet pastries and maybe have an affair with an older man in a sort of New Wave romance. This was just one of many pleasant fantasies about what she would do as soon as she graduated from the university equipped with her shiny new English Literature degree. There was even a colorful travel poster on the wall of her bedroom showing a quite stunning hand-holding couple walking next to the Seine in October. The poster underscored the simplistic Paris Is for Lovers travel agency vision of the city that Andy Candy believed absolutely had to be true. In reality, she did not speak French, indeed no one she knew spoke French, and other than a high school trip to Montreal for a theater presentation of Waiting for Godot she had never been anywhere special. She had never even heard the language spoken out loud by anyone other than a teacher.
    But, in any tongue, Andy Candy was now in pain, in tears, in utter despair, and she continued to argue with herself, one second a hand-wringing supplicant, forlornly pleading for forgiveness, the next haranguing herself, like something more than a housewife kitchen scold, more even than a zealous prosecutor: a cold-blooded, dark-hooded, and relentless inquisitor.
    I had no choice. None. Really. What could I do?
    Everyone has a choice, killer. Many choices. It was wrong and you know it.
    No it wasn’t. I had no alternative. I did the right thing. I’m sorry sorry sorry, but it was the right thing.
    That’s so easy, murderer. Just so-o-o-o easy. Who was it the right thing for?
    For everyone.
    Really? Everyone? Are you sure? What a lie. Liar. Killer. Liar-killer.
    Andy Candy hugged a worn toy teddy bear. She pulled a handmade quilt decorated with red hearts and yellow flowers over her head, as if she could shut away the fury of the argument. She could feel two parts warring withinher, one whiny and apologetic, the other insistent. She wished she could be a child again. She shivered, sobbed, and thought that by hugging a stuffed toy animal she could somehow shed years, travel backward to a time when things were much easier. It was as if she wanted to hide in her past so that her future couldn’t see her and hunt her down.
    Andy Candy buried her head into the toy’s fake fur, and she sobbed, trying to muffle her voice so she