The Finishing School

14

CARMEN REYES DRIFTED in and out of consciousness. She wanted desperately to stay asleep. Being awake was too horrible. But the physical agony of her confinement prevented her from escaping awareness for more than a few minutes at a time. She was in too much pain. Her limbs tingled with fiery numbness. She was parched and hungry. She needed to go to the bathroom. And breathing required actual thought, if she wanted to avoid swallowing the rag stuffed in her taped mouth.

In moments of lucidity, Carmen relived the events of the night before, seeing them again in the darkness with nightmarish clarity. Last night had felt like a bad dream even while it was happening. From the moment Carmen heard Whitney’s voice, she’d had a strange sense of foreboding. She just knew something was off. If only she’d listened to that instinct.

“Aw, c’mon, Carm, we’ll study for a while, then you can party with us,” Whitney had said, in a wheedling tone Carmen had never heard her use before. It was bizarre, in fact, for Whitney to want anything from Carmen, let alone her company.

“Gee, thanks. But I shouldn’t.”

“No, seriously. I want you to come up. It’s me and Brianna and a special friend of mine who really wants to hang with you.”

“Who’s that?”

Whitney gave an evil giggle. “It’s a surprise.”

Carmen felt sick with anxiety at the thought of what might be going on up there. Drugs? Orgies? She knew the gossip. Who didn’t? Whitney was all anybody talked about.

“I really can’t,” Carmen replied. “Maybe you’re ahead of where I am for the quiz. I really need to just, like, study all night.”

“I need your notes, girl,” Whitney insisted.

“Okay, well, I guess I could bring them upstairs. Do you have a way to copy them?”

“Duh, yeah, it’s called like a fucking Xerox machine. What do you think?”

Carmen didn’t exactly have a Xerox machine in her own apartment. “Okay. I’ll bring them up, but I can’t stay long.”

“Fine, be that way. But come up now, okay? I mean, right now.”

“Okay.”

She’d told Papi she was going upstairs to the Sewards’. His whole face brightened, like he was proud his daughter had such fancy friends, and it made Carmen pity him and want to protect him at the same time. How could she explain that it wasn’t like that?

She took the service elevator up to the penthouse floor. Inside the building, Carmen was help, not a tenant. Even if Whitney invited her, she wouldn’t presume to ride in the front elevator. The service elevator let her out in the back foyer, where the Sewards kept their trash cans. It smelled of garbage and brass polish. All day, every day, Papi polished the building’s brass fixtures. It gave him a rash that he had to treat with a special ointment.

Just as Carmen reached out to press the buzzer, the dead bolt opened from inside.

“Smile, you’re on Candid Camera!” Whitney exclaimed, holding a tiny pink phone up to her eye and pressing a button.

“Did you just take my picture?”

“Mmm-hmm. God, I’m starving. Fucking major munchies. Want some smoked salmon or something?” Whitney asked, backing into the kitchen. Her eyes were funny, the pupils nearly invisible pinpricks in the light blue irises. Carmen knew enough to realize that Whitney was high on something.

“No thanks.”

Whitney opened the door of an enormous stainless-steel built-in refrigerator and peered inside. She was dressed exactly as she had been in school earlier that day, in an abbreviated navy sweater, white thigh-highs, and electric blue Pumas, but she’d taken her kilt off and was walking around in teeny-tiny thong panties. She had a small flower tattooed on her lower back. Whitney turned, shoving a piece of orangey pink smoked salmon, sliced so thin it was nearly translucent, into her mouth with her fingers. The panties were sheer enough that Carmen saw Whitney had one of those Brazilian bikini waxes, everything gone except a small triangle, like a stripper. Carmen had read about that in a Cosmo magazine she kept hidden under her bed but had never seen it in real life. Whitney had a long, perfect torso and legs, tanned a dusky gold. Carmen tried not to stare, but it was almost impossible to look away from Whitney’s unreal beauty, so recklessly displayed. In Carmen’s house they didn’t prance around half naked.

“Mmm, yum. Salty.” Whitney licked her oily fingers.

“I brought the notes,” Carmen said, holding out her calculus notebook.

“We’ll get to that. Come on. Back in my room.”

Carmen followed Whitney down the hallway leading to the rear bedroom, marveling as she had the previous few times she’d visited at the enormous, empty rooms they passed. A darkened dining room with a glittering chandelier and elaborate murals of New York in the time of the Algonquins. A library whose floor-to-ceiling mahogany bookshelves were filled with perfectly aligned hand-tooled leather books. A “music room” that held no musical instruments but boasted numerous settees, ottomans, and window treatments in candy-hued silk. It went on and on, all of it looking as if no people ever set foot in it. A neutron bomb might’ve hit and killed all the humans, so undisturbed were the spaces. Strange to be fabulously rich and yet leave no impression on your own home.

Whitney turned and walked backward down the hall in front of Carmen. She lifted her phone to her eye again and began snapping Carmen’s picture repeatedly.

“Why are you doing that?” Carmen asked.

Whitney didn’t reply.

They got to Whitney’s bedroom. Whitney whisked in ahead of Carmen, heading straight through to the bathroom door across the room, and disappeared.

The second Carmen stepped over the threshold, she knew something was terribly wrong. Her nose told her. The whole room reeked of shit. There were piles of it in spots on the otherwise pristine white-and-gold carpet. At first Carmen thought dog and racked her brain trying to remember if Whitney had a pet. But no. The turds were human, no doubt about it, and here and there had these strange, bright orange things in them, like plastic pellets.

“Whitney?” Carmen called, her voice shaking. She felt cold and dizzy, practically welded to her spot near the door. But events were unfolding exactly like a nightmare, because Carmen simultaneously had a powerful compulsion to see what was in that bathroom. She knew it was bad. She knew she should turn and run screaming right out of that apartment and down fifteen flights of stairs. Yet instead her leaden feet advanced step by step across the floor until she stood right in front of the bathroom door, which Whitney had left slightly ajar.

A wheezing sound emanated from inside. Like ragged breathing. Of its own accord, Carmen’s hand reached out and pushed the bathroom door inward.

Brianna Meyers sat naked on the toilet, reclining backward, almost sliding off, her arms and legs slack. Her eyes, which had been staring into space unseeingly, seemed to flicker in response to Carmen’s appearance. Carmen remembered that Brianna hadn’t been in school today, wondered how long she’d been in Whitney’s bathroom.

“Jesus,” Carmen whispered in shock, stepping all the way into the bathroom. “What is it, Brianna? Are you sick?”

Brianna’s mouth opened and tried to form words, but no sound emerged. Her entire body dripped with sweat. It ran in rivulets down her belly. Her long, dark hair was wet, plastered to her forehead. Carmen looked down and saw streaks of shit on Brianna’s legs and feet. Meanwhile, Whitney sat on the edge of the bathtub idly examining the label on an Ex-Lax package.

“Whitney, Brianna needs a doctor. We should call 911,” Carmen said accusingly.

“It’s something she ate. Right, Bree?” Whitney giggled, but this time Carmen saw real fear in her eyes.

“Listen to the way she’s breathing. Something is really wrong,” Carmen insisted. She still thought there was a possibility of salvaging this situation, of making things normal again. Little did she know.

Whitney’s head jerked up. She was looking past Carmen, at the open doorway behind Carmen’s back.

“Okay,” Whitney said sulkily to whoever was standing behind Carmen. “Here she is. Happy now?”

The split second it took Carmen to whip her head around and see who was behind her was the most nightmarish of all. Because she instinctively knew who she’d see standing in the doorway, and the knowledge was terrible. With Whitney’s words a lot of small events from the previous days snapped into a pattern for Carmen, with the precision of a mathematical sequence. It all made sense. Now she understood perfectly why she’d been lured to Whitney’s apartment. She’d walked right into a trap. A trap she probably wouldn’t get out of alive.