Maureen Johnson - The Madness Underneath

The light was on. The bathroom used to have an on-off switch, but it appeared that it would now be illuminated at all times.

There it was. Just a bathroom. The smashed window had been replaced, as had the shattered mirrors. There was a faint tang of fresh paint as well. The crack in the floor was still there, though an attempt had been made to fill it in with some kind of white substance. The spot where I’d been stabbed was over by the sinks. I went over and stood there, running my hand down the wall. I’d slumped here. I’d slid down. I remembered looking around this room and thinking that this was where I was going to die.

But I didn’t.

I walked across the room, to the toilet stall where I’d seen—and accidentally blasted—the woman. I pushed the door open.

There was a toilet. Nothing more.

“Just a bathroom,” I said.

“Just a bathroom,” Jazza repeated.

I looked at the crack in the floor. It was a lot like my scar. The room and I had been broken, and we had a similarly shaped reminder of what had happened to us. And if the Ripper came back, which he wouldn’t, I would blast him into a giant ball of white light and smoke. One brush of my hand, and that was all it would take. I was empowered, literally. That’s what I had to remember. I was bigger and badder than any ghost that crossed my path. That hadn’t occurred to me before. They needed to fear me. I’d never been fearsome before.

“Better?” she said.

“Yeah.” I nodded, giving her the best smile I could manage under the circumstances. “I think so.”

8

THAT EVENING, AFTER JAZZA HAD GONE OUT TO SOME KIND of German language immersion meeting at a pub, I prepared myself for my date. This mostly involved deciding which of my small selection of similar outfits to wear and putting my hair up and taking it down again.

When I was ready (hair up, wearing jeans), I spent fifteen minutes staring out the window, waiting to watch Jerome cross over from Aldshot. I didn’t want to stand outside. It seemed much cooler to come sweeping down the stairs like Scarlett O’Hara in a sweater, with an “am ah late?” (I had noticed that I had one thing going in my favor—my English friends seemed to love it when I amped up the Southern thing. If anyone at home had heard me talking, they would have wondered why I was suddenly talking like someone who lived on a plantation and had servants weaving magnolias into her hair at that very moment. My English friends couldn’t tell the difference between real South and cartoon South, and this, to me, was adorable.)

He appeared at six fifty-five, his curly head bobbing along, his scarf looped casually around his neck. I waited out the five minutes, even though I could see him right below.

“So I was thinking,” he said, rocking back on his heels, “a meal, and…I don’t know. We can go anywhere you like.”

“Where do people go?”

“I have no idea. Do you want food? Are you hungry?”

“I’m always hungry,” I said.

“What kind of food?”

“Whatever you’d like.”

“I’d like whatever,” he said. “Whatever you want to do.”

“Are you hungry?”

“I’m hungry,” he said.

Once we had established that we were both in the mood for food, it took five more minutes to establish that food should be Italian food, and another ten of looking at Jerome’s phone for possible places to obtain said Italian food. The restaurant we’d decided to go to was near Spitalfields Market, which is pretty much where everyone goes on a Saturday night. Every pub was filled to capacity, and people spilled out into the streets. We dodged around a giggling and very drunk band of women wearing fascinators that looked like tiny top hats, except for one in a tiny bridal veil.

The place was very small, with about ten tables. Small restaurants, I realized, were scary. Small restaurants watch you. Small restaurants expect something of you. You have to be a better sort of person, and I wasn’t sure if I was that person yet. They seated us like we were together, which we were. When I was asked if I wanted a glass of wine to start, I laughed out loud, and the guy just looked at me and wandered off. A small plate of bread appeared between us, and the waiter took away our wineglasses in a snatching motion that felt a little judgmental.

I’d been planning on ordering the cheapest or close-to-cheapest thing on the menu, which turned out to be spaghetti and meatballs. Jerome ordered risotto, which just sounded cooler. Mine sounded like food you get for children. Maybe I would get crayons as well.

“How is it so far?” he asked. “Being back?”

“It’s good,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Well, I haven’t done any actual work yet, so I guess I’ll see.”

Though I’d talked to Jerome every day, I had never told him that I wasn’t doing any work from school. We never discussed my work from school. It was like my work, or lack thereof, was my dirty little secret—as opposed to the mushy and sometimes vaguely graphic things we’d said to each other. It was my secret shame.

“What about you?” I asked.

“The Oxford and Cambridge UCAS was due back in October. I didn’t apply. For Bristol and Durham, it’s due in January, but…I think I’m going to take a year and try to run my own business, just to see what happens.”

“Business?”

“Tours,” he said. “I started giving Ripper tours when you were away. I didn’t want to say, because…I mean…I didn’t talk about you. There were just so many people around, all the time. And they wanted tours of the area, so…”

“It’s okay,” I said. And it was okay. Jerome had been obsessed with the Ripper from the start.

“What I was thinking,” he said, “was that I could stay in London for my gap year and do walking tours and freelance work. My uncle has a spare room in his house in Islington he’ll let me stay in. I could make all the money I need to pay the university fees. It’s not the most exciting gap year, but it will keep me from being destitute. What about you?”

“I guess…I go home, and…”

At this point, I was interrupted by the arrival of a plate that contained very little spaghetti and three suggestively large meatballs.

College applications. I was supposed to start collecting those. I was supposed to have taken the SAT at a remote testing center in November. I was supposed to start asking for recommendation letters. A lot of things hadn’t happened. The gaping hole called “my future” gaped a bit more.

Maybe I would go home and just repeat school. Maybe I would work at the grocery store for Miss Gina and save up money for a year, like Jerome was doing. Maybe I’d be assimilated back into the crazy quilt that was Bénouville, Louisiana, and never, ever, ever leave again. It was, after all, a swamp. And swamps suck people in.

“I’m freestyling it a little right now,” I said, poking at my spaghetti.

The waiter futzed around us, moving our bread basket and hovering pointlessly, demanding updates on our enjoyment levels while we had mouthfuls of food. If dates were like this, then dates were kind of weird. I felt like every move I made was being watched. I think Jerome felt equally uncomfortable, so we skipped dessert, paid up, and decided to take a walk around the market. Then we looped through the crowded streets, hand in hand. Jerome was talking about some things going on in his building, and it was nice just to listen for a change.

We took the long way back to school, walking down Bishopsgate, through the throngs of people coming in and out of Liverpool Street station. We turned onto Artillery Lane, which is a very narrow, very Dickensian street running along the Wexford campus. There was no one around, and this was about as close as we could get to Wexford without actually being back on the grounds. We both came to a stop by a little recessed spot next to one of the buildings, a stump of an alley off of the alley where they kept the trash bins. A sub-alley used for trash is also a fine spot to kiss. I mean, people talk about the top of the Eiffel Tower and tropical beaches at sunset—but those places sound demanding, like they expect something from you. That’s just too much backdrop. A dark London trash alley is real privacy, and it doesn’t judge you. It’s probably just glad that you’re there to kiss, because those alleys probably see far more unpleasant things on a nightly basis. The small pile of empty vodka bottles and discarded T-shirt and single sneaker in the darkest corner spoke to that.