Extract from a Novel

Lena Zeller

He is the youngest corpse she has ever seen. There is an unmistakable boyishness clinging to the shape of his face. Not the freshest body but, mouse-carcass offering that he is, he can only be a few hours old. 

People never listen to Violet. They call her a know-it-all, as if knowledge should make her feel ashamed. It is thus unsurprising, if a little disappointing, that he didn’t take her advice. His skin is so pale that it’s debatable if he still constitutes a boy. He might. In the way that ice is always frozen water, waiting to melt into its true form. 

His lids are open, eyeballs clouded and caked with dirt. It is disgusting how dead he is. She has tried her hardest to get used to this, but hers was always an acquaintance fuelled by adrenaline. It is worse now that she can take her time if she wants to. 

If this were a time for being honest with herself, she might note that she could have done more to warn the kid. It had certainly not been her responsibility to keep him alive, but she probably could have managed it, had she not recently been so preoccupied with wallowing. She would like to be here out of some, maybe not entirely misplaced, sense of guilt. Instead, she has let herself be summoned to a graveyard in the middle of the night, the same old leash drawn tight. 

Not an entirely creative place to bury a body. They could have at least done her the courtesy of digging him a shallow grave, but of course they have not. And now here she is, sleeves smeared with grave dirt, hair caked with sweat and dust. Trying to breathe through her mouth and fighting the vague urge to sob or retch, or laugh hysterically. 

Violet tries and fails to focus on the sourness of her own sweat instead of the rotting-meat and compost odour coming from the body. Life has done most people a disservice by sanitizing death down to morgue makeup and backyard puppy-gravestones. People used to walk past piles of dead bodies in the street. They used to fall asleep in the same rooms as them. The smell could never have been pleasant, but it must have seemed human once. 

There is nothing to be done about it. The corpse demands to be dragged out of the grave, the dirt has to be returned to its proper place. Violet’s arms ache, her head is filled with cement. Eyelids like lead, she briefly considers curling up in the hole and taking a short nap. By this point it has become painfully clear to her that she hasn’t slept or eaten in days. She needs to get the hell out of here and take care of the body so she can collapse into the loving arms of death, or sleep. Whichever may succeed in seducing her when the time comes.

He does not have any kind of visible wounds. Somehow that makes her feel worse. It certainly does not matter to him whether he was stabbed or not. 

Dead is dead. 

Violet peels her sullied gloves off her hands, cringing as earth and something inexplicably wetter touches her bare fingers. Throws them into the nearby dirt. She kneels down next to the body and reaches out for one of his hands. A kind of mocking funerary gesture. 

Her hands feel like she has just pressed them against the stove, but the pain has not quite had time to set in yet. And then the body sits up and vomits dirt and blood and bile onto her jacket. 

‘Ew,’ Violet says, unappreciatively. 

He comes to spluttering and coughing up more dirt, and Violet has never done it like this before. There is an added horror to the decay of a few hours and the dirt and the fact that she’s had enough time to think about it. That he will know, he will remember. No matter what, he will be her problem now. She’ll have to witness whatever comes next. And maybe she’s horrible. Maybe she has done something to deserve this. Because the thing that hurts the most is that she never thought she’d have to do this alone again. 

The body turns his head and vomits again, narrowly avoiding her this time. Which is good, because that would be unforgivable. Whatever had been inside his stomach has the sickly sweetness of cough syrup that has gone bad in the back of the cabinet. There’s the distinct smell of inspecting your tires after you barrelled through roadkill. It is a miracle that she does not follow suit, empty as her stomach is. 

 Violet does not hold the body’s head as he retches. She doesn’t offer any words of encouragement. This is not fine. He will not be fine. She cannot bring herself to touch him. Touching him would disintegrate them both. But she needs to do something other than stare at him like an idiot. 

‘Nick?’ she asks carefully. It comes out in a whisper.

The body makes a noise that makes Violet feel optimistic that he still remembers his name. It seems like he can’t speak, or has forgotten that speech is within the realm of possibility. The body is thrashing, but it isn’t the kind you’d expect of someone who has woken up without any recollection of what has happened. It is weak and incoherent. He’s wheezing, his eyes unfocused. He looks so young. Violet feels the absurd urge to brush his hair off his clammy forehead like her mother used to do for her whenever she had a fever growing up. 

In that moment his eyes find hers and the recognition only seems to alarm him more. Violet doesn’t know if it’s her he is recognizing or the simple fact of being alive, of eye contact being a thing you can hold. Yes, this is real. She tries to look at him in a way that says, I find it upsetting too, kid. His breathing seems to ease incrementally. He sounds, absurdly, like he’s asleep. As if his lungs have found their default setting again and he is desperate not to disturb it. Violet reaches for his hand, but flinches away. He was so much easier to touch when he was dead. Paralysed, she can do nothing but stare at him. She simply has to assume that he has a pulse. 

Eventually, the body loses consciousness again. She manages to drag him to the car. Recoils at the idea of pulling her gloves back on. Covered in grime. Vile. It’s easier to touch him now that he’s no longer moving. 

Two Years Earlier

People are tracking mud inside and nobody seems to care. Whenever she thinks back to the night she met Maddie, that’s what she thinks of first. Ducking inside, hair damp with rain and absolutely baffled as to why anyone would allow for shoes in the house under such weather conditions. Violet keeps her own shoes on out of some spiteful compulsion to ruin what is undoubtedly a very ugly and expensive carpet.

It will be her first and only frat party, if you can call this monstrosity of mahogany furniture and inbreeding a fraternity house. Her roommate, Rachel, has invited her so many times by now that Violet has finally decided that the only way out is to trudge along and dedicate herself to being so utterly insufferable that no invitation will ever be extended again. 

During the glittery-eyeshadow-and-gas-station-vodka portion of the evening, Rachel was so earnestly excited that Violet almost began to feel bad. But then she entered Dante’s much neglected country club slash gym locker themed circle of hell and found herself incapable of regret. Almost immediately, somebody hands her what she thinks might be a cup of piss, but turns out to be an inexplicably hot beer. She almost would be less insulted if it were piss. 

Violet wonders how it is somehow more pathetic that the keg this concoction has come from has been hidden from plain sight when Rachel taps her on the shoulder and excuses herself to find someone she’s promised to meet. Violet knew that this was a pity invite, of course, but she might have felt more dignified about the whole thing if she’d been abandoned after thirty minutes, and perhaps next to a cheese plate of sorts. 

Already tired, Violet decides that she is going to do a lap around this place, maybe find some small uninsured object to take home with her, definitely not drink the beer and leave. Perhaps collect some kind of funny anecdote nobody would trace back to her standing five feet away, uninvolved. And then there she is. 

The girl she has seen through her window. Same blonde hair, almost more perfect in the dim light than it is when crossing the quad. Same girl at the same time each day. Looking up at her exact window every time. Meeting her eyes for just a second. Once, noticeably, with what might have been a smirk. Not that Violet has been noticing her. Not that she’s made sure to be by the window every day at 2:47pm. Nothing significant has ever happened on an uneven minute before.

Violet is noticing the girl now. Most people in this room are probably noticing her. Absurdly, she has never considered her to exist outside of her own gaze. Outside of two and a half weeks at 2:47pm, her hair a little mussed, her collar sticking up. Has never considered keeping an eye out for her anywhere else. 

It makes her feel sick how at home she looks here. Talking to a blond boy who looks like he belongs in a golf catalogue. Of all the strange places she will later watch Maddie slip into like she has always been there, this one will always ache the most. That first moment of thinking that she was wrong, that there was never a smirk. She is only the girlfriend of some horrible guy, who probably says things like no homo and my father just completed another merger.

But she does not particularly look like a fraternity girlfriend. She is just standing there with her glass of red wine and her pristine white dress shirt and hair that little fairies have spun from gold. And Violet is still mesmerised by her, even here.

Which naturally means that she turns around immediately and tries to make for the door. Tries, because after a few steps there is a sudden pressure at her wrist. Startled, she turns around. Her eyes are brown. The girl’s. 

‘Sorry about the crows,’ she says. 

‘What?’ Violet has only just processed that the girl has voluntarily caught up with her. Somewhere inside her mind a wheel grinds to a sputtering halt. 

‘I’m sorry about the crows. I’ve seen you feeding them from the quad,’ she says. ‘You’re not supposed to do that, you know. You’ll never be rid of them.’

‘No need to apologise.’

‘That used to be my room last year,’ she says. ‘They like corn flakes. The crows. Fed one the once and they kept coming back. I had names for them all by the time I moved out.’

Violet doesn’t know what to do with this information. She’d stupidly assumed that she had gone unnoticed, possible smirk and all. It is disconcerting to discover that she’s been watched back. She feels a little twinge in her chest knowing it isn’t truly her who’s drawn the girl’s attention. 

‘What were they, then, the names?’ she asks. 

‘Oh, I cannot tell you that,’ says the girl, ‘a crow’s name is extremely personal. They’ll have to reveal them to you themselves.’ She is smiling at her. Violet wonders if this is a kind of game being played with her, if this is just another kind of bullying. It is only when the girl reaches out her hand and rests it on Violet’s arm that she realises she might be flirting with her. 

‘What about your name?’ she asks, rubbing her thumb and forefinger across the edge of her sleeve. 

‘Madeline. Maddie,’ says Maddie. 

“Violet,” says Violet, even though she has not been asked, and it makes her feel nauseated to presume the information could be relevant.

But the girl, Maddie, only smiles faintly and says, ‘I know.’

Before Violet has the chance to question how strange that is, her wrist gets trapped by the other girl’s hand. 

Maddie says, ‘Come on, I want to show you something.’ And then Violet is being led, without caring all that much about the fact she hasn’t been asked, through the crowd.

They pass a handful of people sitting and chatting on the stairs and a couple who may or may not be having sex in a hallway. Violet feels hot under her skin. They arrive at what must be a bedroom, and do not stop to knock. Out of all the places for a beautiful girl to be leading her, a frat boy’s room is not among Violet’s top hundred. She does not precisely like the implications. A stranger’s room is unclean, for one. 

Violet is a little frightened of what, she has to admit, is a rather neatly made bed. Taking in the standard wooden furniture, she wonders at which point she’ll have to say something about how much she hates that bed. 

But Maddie ignores it entirely, moving farther into the room and opening the window. Fresh air is good. Fresh air will help her feel less like she is choking on her own breath. Maddie seems far too comfortable in this strange room. She steps on the desk with sure feet, opens a window and climbs out onto the slanted edge of the roof. Holds out her hand and says, ‘Come on then.’

The lack of beds out there is so relieving to Violet that she barely hesitates, letting herself be pulled out onto the roof. She’s not afraid of heights, but when the wind hits her she realises that she is not too keen to be on the roof of a three-story house either. Madeline, for her part, seems unfazed by the hazard of loose tiles. 

Violet avoids falling to her death as she takes her first, careful step. She can’t tell if it is the tiles or her legs that feel unsteady beneath her. Slowly, carefully, she manages to manoeuvre her limbs so they are sitting side by side. The rain has stopped, but water still seeps through her dress, wet fabric clinging to her ass. It occurs to her that Maddie is a complete stranger, and she has followed her out here. ‘What are we—’

‘Look,’ Maddie says.

They are sitting so closely that Violet can see the place where blonde eyelashes have been missed by mascara. She tries not to look at her. Lets her gaze drift out onto the lawn. There is nothing there but a handful of trees, half illuminated by yellow streetlights. You can catch a glimpse of the campus from here. The scattered freckles of a few stars. 

‘It’s a very nice lawn,’ she says. It isn’t, really. 

Maddie lets out a bell chime laugh. She gently takes Violet’s jaw in her hand and angles it towards one of the trees. ‘Look. There.’

And there, on one of the branches, is a small nest. It’s impossible to tell from this angle if it is occupied or not. ‘They had babies in spring. You might still see some of the younger ones around.’

Violet wonders how she knows that. Has that blond guy taken her up here? Is this his bedroom? ‘Oh, so you’re just really into birds.’

‘Oh yeah,’ she says, ‘big time,’ but she is looking right at Violet. Her hand is still at her jaw even though there is nothing more to see. 

And for some reason her other hand is on Violet’s leg. It is remarkable how very little time she usually spends thinking about that leg. She is almost certain that she could not pay more attention to it now if a knife were sticking out of it. A million ants have come alive against that hand. 

Maddie leans a little closer to her. Violet didn’t realise how freezing it is out here until she feels warm breath cloud her face. There is a moment where she could pull away, if she wanted to be cold again.

Violet has never kissed anybody, if you do not count the time she pressed her mouth to a confused elementary school friend’s. Or the mere fourth of a guy’s tongue it took to make sure that she definitely didn’t like men. 

Violet didn’t know that she’d been hoping for fireworks until they did not come. For something like the first sip of champagne, the way it warms your throat and goes to your head. To sink completely, utterly inside of her body. Instead, she feels like her thoughts are spilling out of her head faster than she can catch them. How do I move my mouth, where do I put my hands, am I bad at this, can she tell that I have never done this before, should I have done this before, what is wrong with me that I am not enjoying this, why am I afraid, what is wrong with me that I am afraid, are my lips dry, have my teeth always been arranged this way? 

And then Maddie pulls back, still keeping her hand on Violet’s cheek, just looking into her eyes for a moment, and she feels grounded again. She’s shaking like one of those small dogs. Maddie cocks her head a little as if to ask, may I, and then they are kissing again, only this time she knows what is going to happen, and instead of thinking am I feeling what I’m supposed to be feeling she only thinks, vaguely, that it’s nice. 

Violet isn’t quite sure how long it takes before she pulls away. She wonders what Maddie might be seeing on her face. If she’s wide-eyed and flushed. 

Violet doesn’t really want to go back to the party. There is nothing down there that she likes. But she finds that she doesn’t mind being led back through the window and into the fluorescent glow of student housing. She stumbles a little on her way down from the desk and Maddie catches her, momentarily pressing their chests together. 

Downstairs people are louder and the floor has taken on an irreparable stickiness. Maddie doesn’t make any move to leave Violet behind, but she is scanning the crowd for someone. Probably anyone at all, to save her from this dull girl who doesn’t know how to kiss. 

Seemingly not having spotted who she sought, Maddie simply guides Violet towards the bar, which consists of several mismatched Ikea coffee tables dubiously stacked on top of each other. She pours a cup of something, makes no move to add a mixer, and hands it to Violet. Violet takes a sip and braces herself for her best this isn’t vile at all face. When she feels a hand on her ass. Underneath her dress, right where her underwear has left a calamitous sliver of exposed skin.  

Violet is furious. She spins around and is faced with a man she has never seen before. A few years older than her, presumably one of the frat brothers. She opens her mouth to say something. She is furious, she is. She’s always been clever, has never taken offense silently. But nothing comes out of her mouth. Her chest feels too hot. She needs air. Air is not reaching her lungs. His hand is no longer on her but she can feel it linger like a burn. 

The guy is smirking at her as if he’s just made a great conversation opener. ‘Sorry,’ he says with all the slurred sheepishness of having bumped into her by accident, ‘great ass.’

There is a loud noise and then there is blood gushing in small rivulets from his temple.  

Maddie stands next to him, half a shattered bottle still in her hand, looking quite calm. There is glass and liquor dripping from his hair. 

‘What the fuck?’ the guy half yells half whimpers at her, but the blond from earlier has already materialised behind him, dragging him away by the arms before he can even lift them. 

People are staring at them. Whatever split second it has taken for Maddie to grab that bottle has gone on long enough for the crowd to subtly shift away from them. Maddie drops the bottle and nods her chin at the room, before turning back to Violet. 

‘Are you okay?’ she asks and Violet nods, but her eyes are stinging. She doesn’t know when that started. From the looks on the faces around her she knows that she is supposed to feel shocked, and maybe even a little afraid. There is a bit of blood on Maddie’s hand, smearing her sleeve. But Violet just feels tired, and possibly a bit grateful, and she wants to cry somewhere that isn’t here. Maddie runs her teeth over her bottom lip. She was right to hit him, Violet thinks suddenly. His skull should have cracked open. 

Maddie carefully takes hold of both of her arms. Violet hasn’t noticed that the room is tilting under her until she feels steadied. People aren’t quite staring anymore as they make their way out of the room, but Violet feels the crowd part for them more easily than it did only a minute or two ago. 

They don’t talk on their way to Violet’s dorm. It’s not as though Maddie has to ask where it is. The night air is making her feel calm and dizzy. Several times she tries to come up with something to say, but the words cut to pieces on her teeth before reaching her lips. 

‘Well, fuck that guy,’ Maddie says quite matter-of-factly. 

Violet’s soft laugh makes a cloud of her breath. She doesn’t know what to do with her hands. She keeps trying to remember the kiss, but comes back to the way it felt to just stand there in front of that man. Silently. She counts ten steps in her head and reaches out to take Maddie’s hand. It feels warm and loose in hers.  

When they reach Violet’s dorm, Maddie gives her hand a small squeeze and asks, ‘Will you be okay?’

And Violet says, ‘Yeah,’ instead of thanking her or asking for her number. 

Instead of kissing her or saying goodbye, Maddie simply starts to walk away. She turns around briefly, half shouts, ‘Don’t let the crows bite,’ and is gone. 

Violet lingers by the door for a few drawn out moments. She’s sure that she will never see that girl again.