Victoria Sees It by Carrie Jenkins (love letters to the dead TXT) 📕

to make their son a walking anagram by naming him Brian. As if they couldn’t think of any other letters to use.

And that was it. Deb strolled away across the stairwell, I went back to the College library to work, and she was gone.

I knew something was wrong when Deb didn’t come to Hall. Ordinary Hall was a cheaper, informal meal, earlier in the evening than Formal Hall, and required no special clothing. I sat there alone that night, with a small plate of lumpy mashed potato and floppy green beans, waiting. I could tell something was off. Even Henry VIII looked a little different, a little more ridiculous. A huge square with head and legs poking out. Had his eyebrows shifted from their usual position? I had to tell myself not to be such a weirdo. This painting had been in the College since 1567.

After dinner, Deb didn’t come to the JCR to smoke either, and that was definitely not right. I waited for her for twenty minutes, then I went to her room and knocked on her door. When that didn’t work I went back to my own room. My head hurt terribly now, and my mind was noisy but useless. I lay like that all night, clothed and rigid on top of my bed, frozen in a panic response.

I called my aunt the next morning. I hadn’t phoned her for weeks, but she hadn’t seemed to notice. I plodded, slipper-footed, down the stairwell of Hermes Court to the payphone in the echoing lobby, and slid my card into the slot. I pressed the beeping metal buttons in their familiar order, but today it felt strange and wrong. I was all out of phase. When my aunt picked up, I must have sounded like an idiot.

“I had a friend…I need to talk to someone…she’s gone missing.”

“Hello sweetheart! Uh, what do you mean? Who’s missing?”

“My friend Deb. She isn’t here. She hasn’t been here since yesterday.”

My aunt laughed. “She probably went home.”

“No, she wouldn’t. I mean, she would tell me, she wouldn’t just go away like that. She’d have told me when she was coming back. Or where she was going at least. Anyway you can’t just leave during Full Term—you need an exeat, and you can only spend three nights out of town or you won’t have kept term…”

She wasn’t listening. She had never wanted to understand College life with its arcane terminology. Either that, or she hadn’t wanted to try to understand it and fail.

“Maybe she met a boy!”

“What? No!” It was so obvious that Deb wouldn’t have gone off with a boy that I hadn’t considered it for a minute. I didn’t quite know how to explain why it was so obvious. All I found to say was, “She’d have told me.”

“Why should she?”

“She’s…my friend. We hang out together.”

“Well, friends don’t have to know where each other are the whole time, do they? Maybe she got sick of you breathing down her neck! Why don’t you spend some time with your other friends?”

I didn’t answer that.

“Your uncle sends his love.”

I didn’t answer that either. There was no way in hell my uncle had told her to send me his love, and we both knew it, and we both knew that we both knew.

The headset clicked that I was running out of credit, and I explained that I’d have to go soon as I didn’t have another card. She didn’t offer to call back.

“Okay, sweetie. Well, have a lovely week!” And in her singsong voice, “Don’t forget to study!”

God.

—

The next day I went to Professor Bell’s lecture on my own. Deb was supposed to be there. I picked a spot on the horrible wooden benches that gave me a good view of the door, and I watched the door like an abandoned dog for the entire lecture. Deb didn’t come. I don’t know if Professor Bell noticed that I didn’t look at her once that whole hour, but I didn’t care, her lectures were always dead boring anyway. She drawled on about the pay-Neil gland (I knew from my own earlier reading that she meant “pineal”) as my hope drained slowly out of the room, like the kind of dirty sink-water that leaves a rim of scum behind. I went back to my bedsit and went to bed and stayed there motionless for a few days. I’m not sure how many.

It should be long ago, but it feels so close I could touch it. The dire stillness of those first nights, when I lay awake in the dark and just waited for Deb. And then, when I got up again, the slow, dull dawning of the new situation.

What made it all the more chilling was how nobody else seemed even to realize that she was gone. Suddenly, it was as if Deb had never been there. That felt like an awfully cruel trick. Can you imagine waking up one morning and finding everything in your room has been shifted two inches to the left? You don’t know what to do with that information. There’s something hideous about it. Grotesque.

I supposed it made sense that the College would want something like this hushed up, and that the family would try to keep fuss to a minimum, so that the media would leave them in peace and so on. And I knew that Deb’s people had money—the old kind, the kind that keeps itself quiet—so they would be able to arrange things. Cambridge is a weird place. The College is patrolled by these stolid men called porters who deliver the morning post but are effectively their own police force. Did you know that? It’s a seriously weird place. Although none of them said as much, they all somehow managed to imply, in their attitude and expressions, even in their gait, that absolutely nothing out of the ordinary was going on. They radiated business-as-usual as they meandered under the Great Gate, touching their bowler hats whenever a student or