"Please, Quinn, come sit down," my advisor begged.
I yanked my arm away from her reaching hands. Before my thoughts returned to my body, I had started running. I dodged around the ambulance before the fat guard could catch up. His lanky partner tried to cut me off on the front steps, but I spun out of his reach. The guards keeping the front hall clear were too shocked to move. I slammed into the stairwell and ran up two steps at a time.
Sienna lived on the second floor at the end of the hall.
"Quinn, no! That's her sister," Sienna's roommate cried as I ran past where she sat wrapped in a blanket in the stairwell. The EMTs in the doorway called out, but I could not stop.
A detective in a gray suit looked up as I barreled through the door of Sienna's dorm room. His bright badge and ashen face stopped me.
"Is it true?" I asked.
"You're the sister?" he asked. His gray eyes swept towards the bathroom door. "I wouldn't."
He made no move to stop me, seeming to understand that I had to see for myself. I lurched towards the bathroom and stopped two feet short of the threshold. A wet puddle of bath water mixed with dark blood inched towards the door.
Sienna was gone. My perfect sister with her flawless beauty and driving ambition was gone.
I sank to the floor, unsure gravity could keep me from spinning away. I clung to the rug with both hands – Sienna's outrageously-priced woven rug she had begged our parents for last Christmas. I gritted my teeth and swallowed hard. Sienna would never forgive me if I threw up on her rug.
#
Sienna's dorm room was not more than a small box. The forensic photographer worked around me while two police officers joined the detective. They spoke at a regular volume, fully aware that shock had rendered me deaf to their words. I could not understand what they were saying.
"Everything seems to line up: high pressure major, friends say she was very focused, her schedule is intense. There's no major event, no tipping point so far," one of the uniformed officers said.
"Pretty typical," the detective agreed.
I gripped the rug so hard I felt my knuckles creak. The tears were building, a hard pressure pounding in my head, but they would not come. Only ragged breaths escaped, and each one hurt my throat. I wanted to cry, I had no idea what else to do, but I could not.
Sienna always knew what to do next. I always joked she would have made an excellent cruise director. At home, she had all of us scheduled down to the next five minutes during the holidays. I needed her to tell me what to do now.
I gasped for air. The detective stepped to the door of the dorm room and waved an arm down the hallway. In a moment, one of the EMTs sat on the floor next to me.
"Here," he said. "Take this. It’s a low dose anti-anxiety pill. It'll help calm you down."
It was something to do, some small action to get me off the rug and standing on shaking legs. I took the pill and let the EMT help me up. He stood firmly between me and the bathroom and held out his arms to usher me out the dorm room. Two men and a black stretcher waited in the hallway.
They were going to take Sienna's body away.
"Can I go with? I want to go with," I asked the EMT.
He shook his head. "Stop talking like that or you'll be overnight in the psych ward. You're going back to your dorm room to call your family."
A warm numbness spread through my body as the EMT escorted me downstairs to the campus security guards. Everything seemed far away and soft. I imagined my life becoming a video game, the origin story of some dark superhero. The flashing lights of the police cars, the open doors of the ambulance, the arrival of the coroner's van, they were all on a screen. I was safe on the couch in my dorm room, dozing as I watched the introduction.
If only it had all been a bad dream.
And then, I was on my dorm room couch. My roommate paced the floor in front of me. Her long, delicate fingers weaving together and squeezing with nervous energy. She spoke to me, occasionally sat next to me and tried to talk, but I could not hear anything she said.
"It's
all over campus by now. I'm not sure you should stay here. People are going to be coming by and now's not the time. Right? Quinn?" she asked.
Darla kept going to the door. She never opened it, just called through, but the knocks kept coming at regular intervals. I could feel Darla's nervousness growing. She wrung her hands and stood exhausted in the middle of our small room. In my hazy mind, she became the gatekeeper. Was I a prisoner or the hidden princess?
Sienna had been the princess. My father called her Princess all the time. There was no way she would be sitting in a fog during a crisis like this one. She would have had everything organized by now.
I felt like I could not even blink without a colossal effort.