“No,” Tom says. “Headless. We have her head. Just not the rest of her. Oh, God. I can’t believe I just said that.” He looks at me miserably. There are purple shadows under his bloodshot eyes from his night spent at the hospital, and his blond hair is plastered unattractively to his forehead from lack of product. Under ordinary circumstances, Tom wouldn’t be caught dead looking so unkempt. He’s actually fussier about his hair than I am.
“You should go to bed,” I say to him. “We’ve got things covered in here, Sarah and I.”
“I can’t go to bed.” Now Tom looks shocked. “A girl’s been found dead in my building. Can you imagine how that would look to Jessup and everybody? If I just…went to bed? I’m still on employment probation, you know. They’d just decide I can’t hack it and—” He swallows. “Oh, my God, did I just say the word hack?”
“Go back in your office, shut the door, and close your eyes for a while,” I say to him. “I’ll cover for you.”
“I can’t,” Tom says. “Every time I close my eyes, I see…her.”
I don’t have to ask what he means. I know, only too well. Since the same thing keeps happening to me.
“Hey.” A kid in a hoodie, with a tiny silver pair of barbells pierced through the bottom of his nose, leans his head into the office. “Why’s the caf closed?”
“Gas leak,” Sarah, Tom, and I all say at the same time.
“Jesus,” the kid says, making a face. “So I gotta walk across campus to get breakfast?”
“Go to the student union,” Sarah says quickly, holding out a meal pass. “On us.”
The kid looks down at the voucher. “Sweet,” he says, because with the voucher, the meal won’t be subtracted from his daily quota. Now he can have TWO dinners, if he wants to. He shuffles happily away.
“I don’t see why we can’t just tell them the truth,” Sarah declares, as soon as he’s gone. “They’re gonna find out anyway.”
“Right,” Tom says. “But we don’t want to cause a panic. You know, that there’s a psychopathic killer loose in the building.”
“And,” I add carefully, “we don’t want people finding out who it was before they’ve gotten hold of Lindsay’s parents.”
“Yeah,” Tom says. “What she said.” It’s weird having a boss who doesn’t actually know what he’s doing. I mean, Tom’s great, don’t get me wrong.
But he’s no Rachel Walcott.
Which, on balance, is something to be grateful for….
“Hey, you guys,” Sarah says. “What am I? Ha, ha, ha, thump.”
Tom and I look at one another blankly.
“I don’t know,” I say.
“Someone laughing his head off. Get it? Ha, ha, ha, thump.” Sarah looks at us reprovingly when we don’t laugh. “Gallows humor, people. To help us COPE.”
I glance at Tom. “Who’s with the birthday kid?” I ask him. “The one at the hospital? If you and I are here, I mean?”
“Oh, crap,” Tom says, looking ashen-faced. “I forgot about him. I got the call, and—”
“You just left him?” Sarah rolls her eyes. Her contempt for our new boss isn’t something she tries to hide. She thinks Dr. Jessup should have hired her to take over, even though she’s a full-time student. A full-time student whose part-time hobby is analyzing the problems of everyone she meets. I, for instance, allegedly have abandonment issues, due to my mother running off to Argentina with my manager…and all of my money.
And because I have not pursued the issue as aggressively as Sarah thinks I should via the courts, I allegedly suffer from low self-esteem and passivity, as well. At least according to Sarah.
But I feel like I have a choice (well, not really, because it’s not like I’ve got the money to pursue it in the courts, anyway): I can sit around and be bitter and resentful over what Mom did. Or I can put it behind me and just get on with my life.
Is it wrong I choose the latter?
Sarah seems to think so. Although this is only the stuff she tells me when she’s not busy accusing me of having some kind of Superman complex, for wanting to save all the residents in Fischer Hall from ever coming to harm.
It really isn’t any mystery to me why Sarah didn’t get the job and Tom did. All Tom ever says to me is stuff like he likes my shoes, and did I see American Idol last night. It’s much easier to get along with Tom than it is with Sarah.
“Well, I think murder trumps alcohol poisoning,” I say, coming to Tom’s defense. “But we still need to have someone there with the resident, especially if he doesn’t end up getting admitted….” If Stan finds out we have a resident in the ER with no one there to supervise his care, he will flip out. I don’t want to lose my new boss just when I’m starting to like him. “Sarah—”
“I have a lab,” she says, not even looking up from the sign-in sheets she’s gathering to photocopy, ostensibly so the police can check to see if Lindsay had any guests the night before who might have decided to repay her hospitality by cutting her head off.
Except, of course, Lindsay hadn’t. We’d been over the logs twice. Nothing.
“But—”
“I can’t miss it,” Sarah says. “It’s the first one of the new semester!”