The following morning, our group met in the cafeteria, but no one was remotely interested in eating breakfast. Jazmin picked at some toast. Jamal and Alex had taken food, but their scrambled eggs were turning into rubbery blobs, the baked tomato bleeding red watery liquid on their plates. I kept checking the door, but Miriam still hadn’t come down. Other students would glance over at our table and then look away. No one wanted to sit near us. It was as if our tragedy might be contagious and they wanted to give us a big berth—but not so much space that they wouldn’t be a part of the drama. I wanted to hurl my silverware at them to make them stop staring. What had happened to us wasn’t entertainment.
I closed my eyes and when I opened them I saw Connor. He sat alone at a table in the back. I blinked, but he was still there, watching our group. I wanted to point him out to the others, but I was paralyzed. It had all been a horrible mistake. He was okay. There would be some explanation of what had happened.
Except there was none. I’d seen his body. I couldn’t stop seeing it. This wasn’t real. But Connor was looking at me, his mouth in a grim tight line. His expression was one I knew all too well—disappointed and exasperated. He’d worn it when he told me that I needed to stop following him around. When I begged him to give us, to give me, another chance, even though I knew he wouldn’t. It was the same look he’d had yesterday when he accused me of using Alex to make him jealous. He looked disgusted with me.
A thick rivulet of dark blood started to run from his hairline down the side of his face. It was a rich red. Then another, and another. I blinked and he was gone.
A night of almost no sleep was getting to me. I felt less connected to reality. At one point last night I’d woken up to realize I was standing in front of the sink in the community bathroom and didn’t even know how long I’d been there.
I pinched the bridge of my nose. The smell of bacon repulsed me.
“How’s Miriam doing?” Jamal asked.
Jazmin shrugged. “The residence arranged for a doctor to come last night. She gave Miriam something to put her out.”
“I saw Tasha around midnight, just sitting in the lobby. She had to talk to Connor’s parents and tell them what happened.” Jamal pushed his eggs around on his plate.
“Are they coming here?”
Jamal put his fork back down. “I dunno. There’s no real reason for his parents to show up. It’s not like he’s missing or anything. I would guess the police will ship . . .”—his Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat—“the body back.”
Everyone’s voice was hushed, as if we were in a church. I closed my eyes, willing the image of Connor out of my head. It kept popping up like a horror show jack-in-the-box. All night I’d start to fall asleep and then would jolt awake thinking of him, picturing his skewed eye looking up at me.
Alex squeezed my hand under the table. He thought I was upset because of what I’d seen. He didn’t know about my history with Connor. No one here did, other than Miriam, and I wasn’t even sure how much she knew. Part of me wanted everyone to know. It warred with my other half that wanted to bury the information as a secret.
Kendra stabbed at the eggs on her plate but never lifted her fork to eat any. She seemed focused on simply destroying them.
Tasha slipped into the room. Her hair was pulled back with a scarf. She wasn’t wearing any makeup and her skin looked ashy. We all sank lower into our seats, watching her as if she were a bomb technician and the room were at risk for exploding if we moved too quickly.
“Okay, I know everyone had a rough night,” Tasha said.
“How’s Miriam?” Jamal asked.
Tasha rubbed her palms on her jeans. “She’s about as well as can be expected. Sophie’s with her. Miriam’s talked to her parents and they’re on their way.”
“Is the trip canceled?” Kendra asked. I iced over. It hadn’t occurred to me that they might cancel the trip, but now that Kendra said it, it made sense. Connor was dead.
I hadn’t wanted to come, but now that I was here, I didn’t want to go back.
“The program has decided to go ahead with the trip but will refund partial fees if anyone wants to return to Vancouver.” Tasha tossed back her coffee as if it were a shot of whiskey. She winced at the heat and then wrapped her hands around the chipped white mug. “Changing your flight will depend on what kind of ticket you have and on which airline; you might have to buy another ticket if you want to leave early. Talk to your family before you decide anything.”
“What if we want to stay?” Jamal asked. He chewed his fingernails. The flesh around what was left of the nails was shredded and red. He glanced up and down the table, taking in how everyone was staring at him. “I mean, Connor and I weren’t, like, friends or anything.”
Jazmin wrinkled up her face. “Nice. You know it’s not all about you, right?”
Jamal threw his hands up in the air. “I know. I’m just saying that I don’t see what the point would be of going home. I feel bad the guy decided to kill himself, but it has nothing to do with me.”
“We don’t know if Connor killed himself,” Tasha said, cutting short Jamal’s rant. “It might have been an accident. There’s nothing to be gained by getting peeved at one another. There’s no right or wrong way to handle this.”
Jamal glared at Jazmin, vindicated. I refused to look over at Kendra. I wondered if she’d told Tasha about the argument Connor and I had had at the station.
“To answer your question, if you want to finish the program, that’s fine. Most of the fees, dormitory charges, and activities were all prepaid. I’m here for the duration.” Her voice was flat. She didn’t sound thrilled about the idea. “So, anyone who wants to continue, we will. I’m going to encourage you to talk to your parents, if you haven’t already. The program heads have already reached out to your families, by phone if they could reach them and otherwise via email, so they know what’s happened. There wasn’t much on the schedule today, but the optional tour to Hampton Court is nixed. I’m going to meet with each of you one-on-one to check in and see how you’re doing and what your plans are. If anyone’s struggling, we’ve arranged for you to have access to a local counselor. Now isn’t the time to bottle this inside. If you’re having trouble, you need to tell me.” Tasha pushed her sleeves up, her arms strong, the muscles defined under her dark skin.
“So that’s the plan. I’m putting a sheet by the door with times to meet with me. Sign up and then come to the library for your scheduled slot. Otherwise you’re free to do whatever you want today. I’ve arranged for the van to take anyone who wants to go to a nondenominational service this evening. We’ll pick up our regular schedule tomorrow to see the Victoria and Albert Museum. Any questions?”
I held my breath, waiting to see if Kendra would say anything, but all the fight seemed to have leaked out of her.
No one spoke, so Tasha stood, and that seemed to be the cue everyone was waiting for to be released. I signed up for my time, the pen dragging on the paper, and then hauled myself back upstairs to my room to call my parents.
The phone rang forever before my dad picked up. “Kim? What’s wrong?”
I heard my mom pick up the extension. “Kimberly?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” I said. That wasn’t true—everything was wrong—but I wasn’t entirely sure how to put it into words.
“Then why are you calling?” Mom asked.
I pulled my phone away from my head and looked at it. Her response made no sense. “They told us to call,” I said eventually. “Tasha said you guys know what happened, that they told you.” My voice cracked.
“It’s okay, pumpkin, it’s just that it’s one in the morning here. When you called, we thought something else might have happened,” Dad said.
I winced. I’d entirely forgotten about the time change. “Sorry.”
The sandpaper sound of my dad rubbing the stubble on his chin came through the phone. I could picture him sitting at the edge of their king-size bed, the mountain of throw pillows my mom liked clustered at his feet like begging dogs. “How are you coping?”
“Okay.” The image of Connor’s body flashed across my brain in neon colors.
“Do you want to come home?” Mom asked. I could imagine her in her purple Ralph Lauren floral nightie, her hair sticking up as she held the phone from the guest room.
I tried to answer, but my throat had squeezed shut. I wanted her to want me to come home, to meet me at the airport and fold me into her arms and tell me everything would be okay. I wanted her to make the decision for me.
“It’s fine if you do,” Dad said, filling the silence. “I know this must be very hard. Your mom and I know you really cared for Connor despite everything.”
“I don’t know what to do,” I said, pushing the words out.
My mom sighed. “Oh, honey. I’m so sorry you’re going through this. I think the best thing you can do is move forward and finish the trip.”
“What happened is a tragedy,” Dad said. “And it’s going to be extra difficult on you because of your history with him.” I nodded even though my dad couldn’t see me. History. That’s what it was—past tense. “Hopefully they’ll have some answers for his parents soon. It sounds like they don’t know the whole story.”
“With what the program costs, you’d think they would have kept a better eye on all of you,” Mom chimed in.
I didn’t bother pointing out we were old enough to not be tied together like a set of kids from a preschool. Tasha had been paying attention, but she couldn’t be everywhere.
It had to have been an accident. He’d been at the edge of the platform. Connor was usually pretty coordinated, but he’d been off ever since we got here. Maybe he wanted to get a closer look at a poster and his foot slipped. Or maybe he hadn’t heard the train; if he had his cochlear implants turned down for some reason, he might not have realized he was leaning too far forward until it was too late. It would have taken only a second.
Part of me wanted to tell my parents about the fight I’d had with Connor just before he died. I felt guilty that the last time I’d spoken to him had been so nasty. All of it had been horrid. I’d wished him dead for weeks and now I wanted to take it back. I felt sick that I’d ever been that spiteful, even in my head. What if I had put that negative energy out into the universe in some way? I’d wanted karma to take him out.
Then a thought exploded in my head, zapping away the fog that had filled my head since the night before.
It hadn’t been karma. I sat down hard on the bed.
“I should let you go—it’s really late,” I said, cutting off my mom and whatever she had been saying.
“If you need us, you just call,” Dad said before I clicked off the phone. I dropped it on the floor, not trusting myself to say anything else. My brain raced in circles.
It wasn’t just that I’d wished Connor would die after what he’d done to me. I’d talked to Nicki about killing him. But it had been nothing but a joke.
Right?