Rooms by Lauren Oliver

Author:Lauren Oliver
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2014-09-23T00:00:00+00:00

SANDRA

What does Alice remember about the turtle?

We’ve never talked about it. We’ve never even talked about how Maggie and I were buds for one afternoon. Tit for tat. God knows there’s plenty Alice has never discussed with me. If secrets were stuffing, the woman would be done up like a Thanksgiving turkey.

For example: the suitcase in the bedroom wall.

The funny thing is it never would have come out if Martin hadn’t made that idiotic comment about Jimi Hendrix.

It was January 1987. Martin and I were lying in bed, drinking wine, watching the snow come down. Snow was falling soundlessly outside, piling in heavy drifts against the doors and windows, softening the fields and wrapping the world in silence. In all the years I was up north, I never got tired of watching the snow.

We’d been at it for a few hours—the drinking, I mean—and were already pretty wound up when the Doors came on and Martin said, out of nowhere: “I don’t see what the big deal about Hendrix is. I think Krieger’s just as good.”

We started going back and forth, and I got up to pour a drink, and just because I was distracted and busy calling Martin an idiot, I tripped over the lip of the carpet and wound up on the floor.

Instead of helping me up, he said, “Don’t you see, Sandra? Don’t you see what you’re doing to yourself?” And he looked at me like I was some smelly, homeless beggar—like he wanted to turn away but was too polite.

I kicked him out before he had time to put his pants back on. The sight of him hop-skip-jumping over the gravel on the driveway, barefoot and ass shining like a moon, almost made it worth it.

That was when I put my foot in it. Literally. Back in the bedroom, furious, I sank my foot halfway through the wall before I realized what I’d done—and realized, too, that instead of support beams and drywall I’d kicked straight through to a narrow rectangular laundry chute made of hollow pressed tin. And there was something inside it: a large box, I thought at the time, wedged in at an angle.

I had to rip my wall open even more to get it out. It was a small leather suitcase, layered with dirt. I was hoping for something scandalous, a skull or a pile of stolen jewels, and I have to say I was pretty disappointed when I opened it to find a brown tweed jacket, a single black sock, a St. Aquinas University pin, and a length of pink ribbon, like a child’s hair thing.

To this day, Alice won’t tell me why she hid the suitcase, or when. Of course I have my theories. But I don’t press. When you’re up each other’s asses all day long, you really have to draw the line somewhere.

For three months the suitcase sat in my bedroom, in front of the hole in the wall, safe on its mound of plaster. I didn’t think of trying to return it.

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