Jeff hesitated outside Alice’s dorm room door. It was early morning, and he could hear faint chirps of alarms going off in some of the nearby rooms. He raised his fist to knock on Alice’s door, but changed his mind. He wanted to see her more than he’d ever wanted anything. He wanted to tell her she could stop worrying and being afraid, that everything was going to be all right. Except, he couldn’t. Nothing was going to be all right again. Jeff didn’t know how to tell Alice that. He stood in the hall, waiting for the words to come.
Down the hall, two girls came out of the bathroom, swinging their shower caddies and giggling. Jeff quickly turned his face away.
“Jeffie, is that you?” the taller girl asked. “Why are you just standing there?”
“Did Alice throw you out last night, Jeffie?” the shorter girl asked. “She’s been so weird lately. What is up with her anyway?”
“You can look at us, Jeff, we’re not naked,” the tall girl said.
Jeff considered making a run for it, but suddenly the door swung open and Alice was standing in front of him.
“What’s going on out here?” she asked. She looked at Jeff and her eyes got wide.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” she whispered. “Get in here.”
She yanked Jeff into her room and slammed the door, muffling the startled expletives from the girls in the hall.
“What in the hell happened to your face, Jeff?”
Jeff sat on the edge of Alice’s bed. “Baby,” he began.
“Did you get into it with him, Jeff?” Alice’s voice was soft. “I begged you to let it go. You promised you would. You promised.”
“I know, baby. I tried, I really did,” Jeff said. “But then I saw him in the quad last night with those asshole friends of his, and — ”
“And what? Do you think this makes us even or something?” Alice cried. “Jesus! Have you looked at yourself in the mirror?”
“I don’t care what I look like,” Jeff retorted. “Baby, I did it for you. I love you. I did it for us. That bastard isn’t going to hurt any other girls, anyone else, not again.”
“You don’t know that!” Alice exclaimed. “And now you have this huge gash right across your fucking forehead!”
As if on cue, Jeff’s forehead began to throb. He winced and sighed.
“Baby, he got the worst of it,” Jeff said.
Alice stood in front of Jeff, and took a long look at the boy she had loved since the first grade. The first boy she had kissed. The boy who had given her a box turtle for her ninth birthday. Who had been giving her the last bite of his dessert for as long as she could remember. The man who sat on the edge of her gurney in the ER the night she was raped. The man who walked her to her counseling sessions, who consoled her when her attacker went free. Alice looked now, and the torn shirt, the mudstained jeans dirtying her bedspread, the filthy fingernails.
“Jeff,” she whispered. He raised his face and met her gaze.
“Jeff, what did you do?”
“I buried him, baby,” Jeff said softly. “That’s what you do with dead people.”
