“That would be Jaws,” Josh says, adding a smug “I’ve seen that movie twice.”
“Twice?” Charlie says with mock surprise.
“And how many times have you seen it, Siskel and Ebert?”
“Twenty.”
Josh lets out a low whistle. “Why would you watch the same movie twenty times?”
“It’s a masterpiece,” Charlie says. “The real question is why wouldn’t you watch it twenty times?”
“Because life is too short.”
That had been another of Maddy’s favorite phrases, used whenever she needed to cajole Charlie into doing something she didn’t want to do. Life is too short to not go to this party, she’d say. So Charlie would go and Maddy would get lost in the crowd, and more often than not, Charlie would wind up back in their dorm room, watching movies.
“I want to give you a quote,” Josh says.
“I’ll guarantee I’ll guess it.”
“I’d be disappointed if you didn’t.” Josh clears his throat. “ ‘We all go a little mad sometimes.’ ”
The way Josh says it hits Charlie like electricity. A tiny zap at the base of her spine. She’s heard that line quoted a thousand times before, and always with too much emphasis, too much over-the-top creepiness. But Josh delivers the line exactly the way Anthony Perkins did—calm, matter-of-fact, like it’s no big deal to admit madness.
“Did I stump you?” Josh says.
“Psycho,” Charlie replies. “Alfred Hitchcock. Nineteen sixty.”
“How many times have you seen that one?”
“Too many to count.”
It had been among Charlie’s favorite Hitchcock films, watched as frequently as Rear Window and Vertigo and North by Northwest. She hasn’t seen it since Maddy’s murder, and might not do so ever again. She’s not sure she can handle the shower scene and its frenzied cuts and screeching violins, even though she knows the blood was chocolate sauce and the stabbing sounds were casaba melons and that Hitch never once showed a blade piercing flesh. None of that matters. Not when she thinks about Maddy’s fate.
“You seem to love your major,” Josh says.
“I do.”
“Then why are you dropping out of school?”
“Who says I’m dropping out?” Charlie says, irritated. At Josh for being so presumptuous. At herself for being so transparent.
“Those suitcases and box in the trunk. No one packs that much just to go home for a short visit. Especially on a Tuesday in the middle of the semester. That tells me there’s a story behind all this.”
“There is,” Charlie says, her irritation growing. “And it’s none of your business.”
“But you are dropping out, right?” Josh says. “I haven’t heard you deny it.”
Charlie slumps in her seat and looks out the window, which has fogged up thanks to the car’s heater and her incessant movie talk. She runs a finger along the glass, creating a clear streak.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” she says. “Taking a break, I guess.”
“College life too much for you?”
“No.” Charlie pauses, changes her answer. “Yes.”
Until two months ago, she had loved being at Olyphant. It wasn’t the fanciest school. Certainly not the Ivy League. And not like NYU or Bennington or any of the other places she’d once dreamed of attending. There wasn’t enough money for that, and Charlie hadn’t been a good enough student to earn a scholarship. She’d been awarded some cash, yes. But nothing close to a full ride.
She settled on Olyphant because it was one of the few schools she and Nana Norma could afford. A small liberal arts college in New Jersey. The film department decent, if not notable. She had planned on working hard, keeping her head down, graduating with a degree that would set her up nicely for grad school somewhere bigger, better, and more prestigious. She thought she’d eventually become a professor at a school similar to Olyphant, teaching film studies to the next generation of cinephiles.
What she hadn’t planned on was Madeline Forrester swanning into their dorm room that first day of college on a gust of cigarette smoke and Chanel No. 5. She was beautiful. That was the first thing Charlie noticed. Pale and blond and voluptuous, with a heart-shaped face that reminded her of Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind. Yet she seemed slightly worn around the edges. An intriguing exhaustion. Like a hungover debutante dragging herself home the morning after a cotillion.
Framed in the doorway, teetering on three-inch heels, she surveyed their shared room and declared, “What a dump!”
Charlie got the reference—Maddy was impersonating Liz Taylor in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? impersonating Bette Davis in Beyond the Forest—and her whole body fizzed like a jostled bottle of champagne. She’d just met a kindred spirit.
“I think I adore you,” she blurted.
Maddy fanned herself. “As well you should.”
Her style was easy to adore. Maddy talked fast, using a clipped Yankee accent purposefully meant to invoke Katharine Hepburn. Rather than the clothes favored by every other girl on campus—stone-washed jeans, white Keds, GAP sweatshirts under denim jackets—she dressed like a fifties socialite. Pastel cocktail dresses. White gloves. Pillbox hats with delicate veils. She even owned a mink stole, bought secondhand at a yard sale, its fur shabby and matted in spots. At parties, she’d smoke using a cigarette holder, waving it around like Cruella de Vil. Affectations, all. Yet Maddy got away with them because she never took them seriously. There was always a twinkle in her eye that made it clear she knew how ridiculous she could be.
On the surface, they seemed like an odd pair. The glamour girl and her blandly pretty roommate giggling on their way to the dining hall. But Charlie knew they were more alike than it seemed. Maddy grew up in the Poconos, firmly lower middle class, her childhood home a beige ranch house on the outskirts of a small town.
She was extremely close to her grandmother, from whom she claimed to have inherited her wildly dramatic streak. Mee-Maw was what she called her, which Charlie always thought was weird, even though Nana Norma isn’t exactly normal. Maddy spent the first four years of her life being raised by her grandmother as her deadbeat dad roamed the northwest in an endless quest to avoid paying child support and her mother drifted in and out of various rehabs.
Even after her mom got clean, Maddy stayed close to her mee-maw, calling her every Sunday just to check in. Sometimes when she was staggeringly hungover. Other times as she got ready to go out. Charlie noticed because it always made her feel guilty that she rarely called Nana Norma just to check in. She only called when she needed something, and hearing Maddy ask her grandmother how she was doing usually caused Charlie to picture Nana Norma home alone on the couch, lit by the flicker of whatever black-and-white movie was on the TV.