Lili Anolik - Dark Rooms

As I reached the sidewalk in front of my house, I spotted the cruiser with the siren. It was whipping around the corner of Upham, wide into the right lane of Fiske, rear tire bouncing off the median strip. An unmarked sedan followed seconds later. No swirling cherry lights, but I could tell it was a cop car nonetheless. No mistaking it for anything else. And watching the two vehicles cut sharp rights onto Schofield, the street the graveyard entrance was on, I felt my legs buckling, collapsing beneath me. I dropped first to my knees, then to all fours, the shock of certainty hitting me: Nica was dead.

My sister was dead.

Nica’s body had been found by Graydon Tullis, a sophomore in Endicott House who’d snuck into the graveyard with a couple of guys from food services to get high before morning detention, the very session my dad was overseeing. Afterward, the food services guys had headed down campus to start their shifts at Stokes Dining Hall, and Graydon had headed east to main campus. He was applying Visine as he walked, chin tilted back, lower lid thumbed down, when he tripped on something, went sprawling into a face-plant. He turned around to investigate, thinking it was a tree root, or one of those baby tombstones your eye can sometimes skip over.

But it wasn’t.

It was a pair of feet in frayed-lace Converse. Slowly Graydon’s gaze traveled upward, all the while the old camp song “Dem Bones”— with the toe bone connected to the foot bone, and the foot bone connected to the ankle bone, and the ankle bone connected to the leg bone … —running through his mind. (A dazed-sounding, pouchy-eyed Graydon told me all this a couple weeks later. Not that I asked. He cornered me as I was ducking out of Stokes, apple in hand, looking for a deserted classroom to eat it in.) And then his gaze arrived at the hipbone connected to the backbone. His first thought was how teeny-tiny the hole was and yet the crazy amount of blood that had leaked from 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 as 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 clear on 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, Ruben Samuelson—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 started to seem as if her full name actually was Homecoming Queen Nica Baker .

Edgar Allan Poe, in his essay “The Philosophy of Composition” (Studies in American Literature: The Rise of the Supernatural, Ms. Laine, sophomore year), stated that, “the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.” And Nica was not just dead, she was murdered. Raped, too. Her story thus offered up the most potent narrative combination known to man, everybody’s favorite set of lurid extremes: sex and death, Eros and Thanatos, kiss kiss and bang bang. The public couldn’t get enough.

Once Nica’s identity was released, our house was besieged. TV news crews, journalists, and photographers were all camped out on our lawn, waiting for a whimper, a tear, a twisted feature—some scrap they could wolf down, some tasty little bite that would tide them over until the real meat came: a break in the case. Trespassing on private property was illegal, so the police set up a barricade, pushing the motley crew back, forcing it onto the sidewalk and street, which made its presence feel no less oppressive, and getting in and out of our driveway near impossible. I’d say the experience was surreal except I hate that word. It was surreal, though, the merciless intensity of those people calling out my name, my mom and dad’s names, the flash cameras constantly going off, giving the scene the queasy, too-bright, side-tilted quality of a hallucination.

Mom, Dad, and I fought back the only way we knew how. By withholding. After that first day, the police pretty much left us alone. They were very polite, deferential almost, less because of who we were, I think, than because of what Chandler was, the influence it wielded in Hartford. And once they were done probing us, our stories and our alibis, we returned to the house, retreated to our rooms to cry. Well, Mom and I to cry, Dad to I don’t know what. His eyes were bone-dry, as if they were unable to weep or didn’t see the point. But mostly we retreated to our rooms to wait. Eventually, we reasoned, boredom would set in or another sensational crime would be committed—a murder victim who was even younger than Nica, who was actually rich, not just by-association rich, who got violated more egregiously, more bloodily, more kinkily—and the restless pack would move on, leave us to grieve in peace.