Room 4B

Aliyah

The cab driver from the train station charges me forty-one dollars for a ride that takes eleven minutes, and on the way he asks me twice if I’m sure about the address, like I might have copied it down wrong off the back of my hand.

“Wexley Hall. Blackmoor College.”

“I know what it is.” He checks me in the rearview mirror and takes inventory: the duffel with the broken zipper, the two blue IKEA bags, the cardboard box with SHEETS / TOWELS / DON’T OPEN written across the top in my aunt’s handwriting, in Sharpie, underlined twice. “You a student there?”

“Starting today.”

He doesn’t say anything else for the rest of the ride, and when we pull up he stays in his seat with the engine running while I haul everything out of the trunk myself.

Wexley is four stories of black stone with ivy grown over half the windows, the building they put on the cover of the brochure, shot in October light with a girl in a scarf laughing on the steps. Today it’s August 29th and ninety-one degrees, and the ivy smells like a wet basement in the heat. Fathers in boat shoes and pastel shorts carry mini fridges up the front steps with their faces going red. A girl in a white tennis skirt stands on the lawn directing two hired movers with a lacrosse stick, pointing it like a conductor’s baton. Somebody’s Bluetooth speaker, propped in a second-floor window, is playing Fleetwood Mac to the whole quad.

I drag my stuff across the grass to a folding table set up under a laminated sign that says RA. The RA is tall and skinny and sunburned across the back of the neck in a hard pink line, and his name tag reads DEV, HE/HIM, ASK ME ANYTHING, with a smiley face somebody drew next to it in ballpoint.

“Name?”

“Aliyah James. Transfer.”

He runs a finger down the clipboard, through the J’s. The finger stops. Then he looks up at me the way the cab driver did in the mirror and checks the clipboard again, slower, in case the paper changed its mind while he wasn’t looking.

“Okay. Fourth floor.”

Dev pulls a key off a big steel ring and holds it a second longer than he needs to before he lets go. The tag is green plastic with 4B written on it in Sharpie, and somebody has gone over the Sharpie twice, pressing hard, the way you’d mark something you didn’t want anyone to miss. “Housing doesn’t usually assign that one. There was a hold on it.”

“Well, there isn’t anymore, is there, Dev?”

“No.” He gives me the key. “Did anybody tell you about it?”

“It has a radiator that knocks. And a view of the quad.”

That’s what the housing portal said, word for word, under a photo of a window with ivy around it. It’s also what I wrote in the emails I sent to the Office of Residential Life on June 3rd, and again on June 17th, and again on July 2nd, asking for a single on account of a sleep disorder I don’t have. I attached a doctor’s note to the last one. The doctor was real, a man in a strip mall in Irvington with a bobblehead of Derek Jeter on his desk. The note took him nine minutes to write, and he billed my aunt’s insurance for thirty.

“Sure.” Dev is already looking past me at the next person in line: a blonde girl, her mother in a sun hat, and a golden retriever wearing a red Blackmoor bandana around its neck. “Welcome to Blackmoor.”

The front stairs are marble, worn into shallow bowls in the middle of every step by a hundred years of people going up and down them. Between the second and third floors I pass two girls carrying a rolled-up Persian rug between them like a body. One of them reads the green tag swinging from my key. The other one stops walking so suddenly that the rug sags in the middle and nearly hits the stairs.

“Oh my God.”

I keep going. I spent four years working the counter at my aunt’s laundromat on Ferry Street in Newark, and you learn faces there the way other people learn a language. The woman who stares at you over the folding table while you count out her change is almost always harmless. The one who never looks up from her phone is the one who’ll come back on Thursday and swear you shrank her cashmere.

The fourth-floor hallway is quieter than the rest of the building, and cooler, with a long runner of red carpet down the middle and brass numbers on the doors. Somebody has taped a printed flyer for the first floor meeting to the fire door at the top of the stairs. Most of the doors stand open, and music and arguments about closet space come out of them, along with the smell of new paint and somebody’s sandalwood candle.

4B is at the very end of the hall, beside the tall window. It’s the only door on the floor that’s closed.

A girl sits on the floor in the doorway of 4A, across the hall, eating dry Froot Loops out of the box by the handful. She has box braids piled up on her head in a purple scrunchie, a pen behind each ear, and a pharmacology textbook with a cracked spine open across her knees, the pages crowded with yellow highlighter. She looks up at my key, then at my face, and goes back to her book without any change in her expression at all.

It’s the first normal thing that has happened to me since I got off the train.

“You’re the transfer.” She doesn’t look up.

“Is that a problem?”

“Not for me.” She turns a page. “Nia.”

“Aliyah.”

“Okay, Aliyah.” She shakes the cereal box at me, and I take a handful because it would be rude not to. “So you know, half this floor is going to act weird about your room. The other half is going to act extra normal about it, and that’s worse.”

“Which half are you?”

“I’m a nursing student. I work the night desk downstairs four nights a week. I don’t have the energy for either half.” She looks at me properly for the first time, a long, level look over the top of the textbook. “You know, though. Right?”

“I know a girl died in there.”

“In April.”

“I read about it.”

I read about it forty-one times, on my phone, in the back office of the laundromat between loads. The Blackmoor Ledger ran it on the front page: junior Margot Friel, 20, found unresponsive in her residence hall room on the morning of April 14th. Accidental overdose. The obituary ran three days later in the Greenwich Time, a long one, the kind families pay for by the inch, with a photo of her on a sailboat squinting into the sun with her hair blowing across her face. It listed her parents. It listed her grandparents, her horse, her best friend Vivienne, and her boyfriend Silas.

It didn’t list me.

There are flowers outside my door.

I missed them from the stairs because they’re set down flat against the wall, below eye level: a long white florist’s box with the lid off, full of white lilies, the cellophane still crisp around the stems. White lilies are funeral flowers. Even I know that, and my family does funerals at Greater Abyssinian Baptist with a folding table of pound cake and somebody’s cousin singing “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” a little flat.

A card sits tucked between the stems. Heavy cream stock with a torn-looking edge, the kind of paper you pay extra for so people know you paid extra.

Two words in black ink. A man’s handwriting, upright and sharp, the pen pressed hard enough to dent the paper all the way through.

Get out.

I turn the card over. Nothing on the back. No florist’s name, no signature, no little printed logo.

“Nia.”

She looks up, sees the lilies, and stops chewing with her cheek still full.

“Those weren’t there at six. I came up from my shift at six.”

“Who sends lilies to a dorm?”

She doesn’t answer, which answers it. She looks down the hall toward the stairs, and then past me at the tall window at the end of the hall. It faces the quad and the gray stone chapel and, beyond those, the long green rectangle of the lacrosse field. A single figure in a gray hoodie is walking the sideline down there with a stick over his shoulder. Nobody else is on the whole field.

When I turn back from the window, Nia is watching me. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Whatever you’re about to do.” She stands and brushes cereal dust off the front of her scrubs. “Put those flowers in the trash room. Lock your door. And if anybody on this floor invites you to Sterling Hall this week, you have a migraine.”

“What’s Sterling Hall?”

“Lock your door, Aliyah.”

She goes into 4A and shuts her own door behind her, firmly, the way you’d close a conversation.

The key to my room sticks in the lock, then turns. The door swings in on a room somebody has kept. The mattress is bare, a blue-and-white ticking stripe. The corkboard over the desk still has four pushpins stuck in it in a neat row, holding nothing at all. The closet door is open a few inches, and the closet smells like another girl’s perfume, something warm with fig in it. Under the window the radiator is already knocking, iron on iron, in August, like someone on the other side of the wall wants in.

I carry the lilies inside and lay them in the sink, box and all.

Then I sit down on my sister’s bed and read the card again.