Study Days

Inez is blubbering like a baby. “You don’t understand. It’s, it’s just I’ve sacrificed everything to get here. I was valedictorian in high school, you know?” How could I forget? She only mentions it all the time. “And my parents…my dad picked up a third job for my SAT prep course because I wanted to come here so badly. It nearly killed him.” She wipes her nose with a blanket. “I owe them so much, and pre-med is the only way I can pay them back. But it’s so hard.” I hand her a tissue. She takes a huge, trumpeting blow and I covertly scoot an inch away.

“Exams are in two days. Everybody’s gotten a little weird. Like, what’s good with Sam? One minute she’s talking like a robot, and the next she’s making these veiled threats, like ‘oh, you better get it together, or else.’ She’s creeping me out.”

Inez snorts. “Right. And what’s up with her hair?”

I look at her pointedly. “Girl, I know you not talking.” We both burst out laughing, the acknowledgement of how far Inez has lost it suddenly hilarious at this hour.

Then she stops laughing. “Wait,” she says, sitting up.

My giggles subside. “Yeah?”

“Veiled threats? From Samantha? You know about her, right?”

“No. What exactly am I supposed to know?”

“People said she was kicked out of her old school for murdering another student.”

“What? Are you serious?”

“You didn’t hear that during your orientation? It was going around that one of the female RAs was at Columbia, but then she had a complete nervous breakdown and stabbed one of her residents with a knitting needle.”

I didn’t hear anything like that at my orientation, but there was that unsettling feeling again, just behind my belly button. And Inez was insistent. “Didn’t Sam say she was a transfer student on our first day?”

I shrug. “To keep it real with you, I can’t remember anything that happened on the first day.”

Inez sucks her teeth and whispers, “of course not,” which I try not to take personally. Try, but fail. Even though she’s never said it aloud, I know Inez thinks she’s smarter than me. I might not have graduated first in my class and might suck at chemistry, but we both got into this school. And not because of some affirmative action bullshit, like some of my classmates smirk about behind my back when they think I can’t hear them. It’s easy to be a genius when you’re so busy studying that no one invites you to parties and your DMs are drier than the dining hall food.

But I am well rounded. My life is full. And I am way smarter than anyone gives me credit for.

I have to be.

“She definitely said it. Hang on. Lemme Google it.” She whips out her phone, entering 1-2-3-4 as her passcode. Some genius. She tries searching for Sam by name, but neither of us can remember her last name. Then she tries “Samantha Columbia RA” and “RA attacks student Columbia” but nothing comes back. We’re both ready to give up when Inez gasps. “Found it,” she says, opening up a New York Times article. “Student, twenty, found dead in her dorm room,” Nez reads, her voice disturbingly excited. “In a tragic event at Columbia University, a student identified as Alexandra Zhang was found deceased in her dorm room yesterday. Miss Zhang was a bright, young woman, attending the school on a highly-selective robotics scholarship. Her roommate, Samantha Reynolds, described Alex as ‘more than just a friend; she was a part of me. Everyone who met her loved her. It’s strange to think that now, she’s gone in such a quiet, solitary way.’”

My heart back flips in my stomach. “She was a part of me?”

“That’s so creepy,” Nez says, voice still full of twisted glee. It’s like she’s watching one of her true crime documentaries. I hate that crap, but Nez is completely into it. If she had it her way, we’d fall asleep every night to stories of serial killers and cannibals. “‘A quiet and solitary way,’ what does that even mean?” She continues scrolling. “It doesn’t say anything about the knitting needle, though. I’m trying to see what the cause of…oh.” She stops.

I scoot closer to her. “What? What does it say?”

She points to the bottom of the article. “Officials have ruled Miss Zhang’s death a suicide.” She lowers the phone, her voice almost disappointed at the news.

“When was this?” I ask.

Nez scans the article. “Mmmm…looks like it was last December, during a…” Her voice trails off.

“What?”

She clears her throat and reads aloud. “Emergency services were delayed arriving at the scene due to the severe snowstorm rocking the Northeast.”

I gaze out the window at the thick, white flakes swirling in the dark. Same storm. Same month. Same silence in the halls. If you squint, you might be able to imagine that time was looping back in on itself.

As if the storm had brought something else back with it.

Read Study Days here.