1.
I DIDN’T MEAN TO KILL Josh Harper.
Really, I didn’t. It’s just that I was nervous, and condoms are more complicated than I was expecting, and one thing led to another and—well.
Now there’s blood everywhere and he’s dead.
* * *
I wipe my hands on the rumpled sheets until they’re clean enough that I can pull my underwear on. I put on my bra, but I can’t get the hooks done. My hands won’t stop shaking. In the end, I leave it unhooked. I pull my dress on over it, and struggle to grip the zipper on the side. By the time I get the dress zipped up, blood has stopped pumping out of Josh Harper and naked feels like a hundred years ago.
I’m not sure where my shoes are. I know that I kicked them off, but I can’t remember when or where. I’m turning around in a slow circle, staring at the floor, watching for the flash of my gold heels. I catch a glimpse of myself in the full-length mirror on the back of Josh’s door. I’m a blur of bright blue, and I realize that my vision is fuzzy because my eyes are brimming with tears.
“Okay,” I whisper to myself. “Okay, okay, just think. Think. Think think think.” I wipe at my eyes and try to look at anything that isn’t my reflection or the bed. The room is dark save for the light of a desk lamp, which casts a soft yellow glow on the desk and the bed.
Josh is on the bed.
There’s so much blood on the bed.
I smooth my skirt. My palm catches on a patch of glitter, which immediately sheds, raining sparkles onto the carpet. I wipe my hand on a non-glittery section of skirt, leaving behind a bright smear of silver. I frown. I hate glitter. Why did I pick a dress with glitter on it? Probably because Roya said it looked good on me. Even as I stare at my skirt, frowning, I know that I’m not thinking straight. You’re in shock, I think, but I can’t stop glaring at that stupid patch of glitter. I want to scream. I can’t believe I didn’t already scream.
My phone buzzes in my purse and I nearly have a heart attack. My purse is at the foot of the bed. My phone is buzzing and I have to get it and it’s on the bed. On the bed where Josh is. On the bed with all the blood.
Shit.
Okay. I can do this. I just won’t look.
I reach over and accidentally grab Josh’s foot.
It’s still warm. And he’s still wearing his socks. Ten minutes ago, he was telling me that they weren’t his socks. He had borrowed them from his dad. He’d laughed nervously while I’d pushed him backward onto the bed, stopping him from taking them off.
What’s your hurry? he’d asked me, and I’d shoved my mouth onto his instead of answering, and then.
I let go of his foot and grab my purse. It’s a little tiny sparkly thing that’s totally impractical and only fits my student ID and my cell phone. I fumble with the clasp, which is slippery with blood. My phone buzzes inside again, twice in a row.
The group text is going crazy.
It takes me a long time to reply—autocorrect can’t even interpret the fumbling input of my shaking hands. Josh bedroom 911.
Five minutes later, five girls pour into the bedroom. My best friends. Four one-night-in-a-lifetime dresses plus Paulie’s powder-blue tux. They’re all in here and nobody is missing them because we all went to prom alone-together in solidarity with Iris after her boyfriend cheated on her. Well, everyone except Roya, and she ditched Tall Matt halfway through the night anyway. The point is that we’re all single, but none of us is alone, and that’s how we want it. At least until the end of the year. Why am I thinking about this? There’s something else I should be thinking about.
Oh. Right.
I look at the girls. They’re all gorgeous, all perfectly themselves and shining with party-sweat, and they’re all looking at me. They’re all looking at me, at me, at me. I can’t look back at them. I can’t look away. There’s nowhere safe for my eyes to land. They’re too bright—the colors are too saturated. It’s too much. Roya is wearing a deep red gown and I can’t look at her. My mouth is dry. My hands are too big. I feel short.
Iris looks at me like I’m a monster. Like I’ve got an eyeball hanging out. I know what I look like: I look like a girl you’d forget, if she didn’t have that just-killed-a-boy aesthetic going on. I look like a girl on a prom night gone horribly, horribly wrong. Wide-set brown eyes that are probably glassy with nauseated fear. Curly brown hair that just passes my shoulders, stiff with hairspray and I-almost-had-sex-mussed. Eyeliner runoff halfway down my cheeks. Blood. Blood everywhere.
I don’t need to look in a mirror to know that I’m a mess.
Iris is the one staring at me, and Iris is the first one to speak. “Well,” she says. “What the fuck did you do?”
* * *
Here is what I did.
I tried to have sex with Josh Harper.
I didn’t really want to have sex with Josh Harper. But I wanted to have sex with someone, and Josh Harper was around, and relatively sober, and I’d felt his boner against the top of my butt when he’d tried to grind on me at prom, so I figured it wouldn’t be too tricky to get him to have sex with me. And I was right. Sort of.
* * *
“Oh my god,” Marcelina says, covering her black-lipsticked mouth with her hands. “Oh my god, Alexis, oh my god, what happened to his dick?”
* * *
Here is what happened to Josh’s dick.
It exploded.
I was trying to get the condom on him, and I guess I was doing it upside down or something. I don’t know, it looked a lot easier in the YouTube video I watched with the banana. But the room was dark and I couldn’t really see what I was doing, and it was my first time touching a guy below the waist, and it felt weird, and the condom wouldn’t go on. And then Josh asked if it was my first time.
I didn’t answer right away. He started to push me away, and he said something about how he didn’t want to do anything I wasn’t ready for. He was sweet about it. He was kind. But I wanted to have sex with someone, anyone, I needed to just get it over with, and I figured it didn’t matter if I was ready or not because Roya was probably going to fuck Tall Matt anyway, so—I lied. I lied and said that it wasn’t my first time and that it was fine. I tried to ignore the ache in my chest. I told him I wanted it, even though I didn’t.
The lights were off, but I guess Josh heard my voice do that stuffy thing it does when I’m trying not to cry. And he said I didn’t sound so sure, and he tried to grab the condom out of my hand, and I got flustered. And we were both struggling with the condom.
And then his dick exploded. And not in the way people joke about, not in the it-happens-to-a-lot-of-guys kind of way.
Every summer Marcelina cuts a hole into a watermelon and jams a handful of cherry bombs into it and then lights them and we run away and watch the carnage.
That’s the way Josh’s dick exploded.
* * *
“Did he try to—” Maryam is getting that face like she’s going to kill someone. If Josh wasn’t already dead, I’d be worried for him.
“No,” I tell her. I tell all of them. “No, he didn’t—we were—oh my god.” I bury my face in my hands. “I don’t know what happened. It was an accident.”