In My Dreams I Hold A Knife

Everyone on the float stares at Jessica, waiting to see how she will respond to Eric’s question. Coop and Mint complain that Eric is being cruel and that they’ve been generous with their time, but they’re sick of his accusations. Eric brings up two other crimes committed the same night Heather was murdered. One was the vandalization of Dr. Garvey’s house, painting the word “rapist” in every room. Jessica ponders whether she could have broken into Dr. Garvey’s house but thinks it doesn’t “feel right.” Eric mentions that Dr. Garvey wrote Heather a recommendation letter for the fellowship she won the day she died and that he only wrote one other letter. Everyone turns to Jessica, knowing that the additional letter was for her.

Jessica, dressed in her pink Sweetheart dress for the Phi Delt party, waits in front of her computer for the fellowship winner to be announced. When Heather is announced, Jessica is crushed and stunned. Heather walks in, breezy and excited about the fellowship, which she says she applied to on a “lark.” Before leaving, she mentions the two of them being rivals for Phi Delt “Sweetheart.” Filled with rage, Jessica throws her laptop against the wall, destroying it. Wanting to numb the pain, she takes Adderall, then searches through Heather’s drawers for a bottle of Courtney’s pills that Heather had taken from her to try to break her habit. She chases the pills with whiskey. She rips photos of the East House Seven from Heather’s corkboard, stabbing Heather’s eyes with a pen and cutting them to pieces with scissors, finally acknowledging her hatred. Then she walks out the door into the night.

Confronted with Eric’s question, Jessica doesn’t know the answer. She remembers nothing from the night after cutting up the photos and walking out of the dorm. She is not sure of what she’s capable. After trying to retrieve her memories with a therapist years earlier, the memories of the night are still buried. Caro asks Jess, “What did you do?” (227). Frankie interrupts, annoyed that they’re making a scene at the Homecoming parade. Jessica admits to cutting up Heather’s photos. Then Eric asks, “Did you kill my sister?” (228). The crowd, watching now, tenses. She doesn’t know the answer, so she jumps off the float and runs.

Jessica wakes in the campus art studio, her arms and hands caked in dried blood up to her elbows. She’s sore and has no memories of the night after taking the pills and cutting up the photo. Near her on the floor, she finds a manila folder. Inside, the runners-up for the prize are listed. Jessica did not make the top three. She senses she has done something wrong but doesn’t know what. Her survival instinct kicks in, however, and she knows she must clean up. She showers in the gym, finding cuts across her thighs. A flash of memory overtakes her: an image of bloody blonde hair against sheets. She throws her soiled dress and towels in the bottom of the trash can and steals someone’s gym clothes, planning on going back to bed and sleeping off her sorrow.

Jessica runs across campus, admitting to herself that she had always hated Heather because everything came so easy to her. There was love, too, and she’d tried to use it to “stifle” the hatred, but she assumes that her hate must have won out. The memory fragments make sense if she is the killer. She arrives at Blackwell Tower and runs up the winding staircase. The storage room, which students used in her time at Duquette to have sex and smoke pot, is now filled with old furniture. She goes to the window, watching the parade wind around campus and realizes the parade ends at Blackwell Tower. She takes a chair from the corner and throws it repeatedly at the window until it cracks. Looking out the window, she understands that all her decisions based on ambition were wrong: “wrong major, wrong career, wrong obsessions, wrong allegiances” (238). Behind her, a voice says, “What the hell—?”

During Spring Break, the friends arrive at a Myrtle Beach vacation house rented for them by Mint’s parents. Heather calls Mint and Jessica “sensitive flowers.” To prove her wrong, Jessica runs toward the ocean, yelling that she is going skinny-dipping. Heather overtakes her and takes off her clothes more quickly. Caro runs into the ocean in her clothes. Coop comes up to Jessica, who is waiting on the sand. She can feel his eyes on her, seeing the real her. Mint “barrels” up behind them, throws Jessica over his shoulder, and runs into the ocean. Underwater, Jessica wants to freeze the moment, feeling her whole life ahead of her.

In Blackwell Tower, Coop approaches, telling Jessica to get away from the window. When Jessica admits that she may have killed Heather, he tells her that she came to his apartment that night covered in blood. She told him about her father’s death, losing the fellowship, and having sex with Dr. Garvey. Jessica then notices a frame in Coop’s hand and sees that it is Dr. Garvey’s diploma from Harvard. Enraged at what happened to Jessica, Coop had been the one to vandalize the professor’s house, stealing the diploma. He tells her, “I’ve been keeping this for you” (247). Jessica realizes that Coop knew all this about her when he proposed at graduation, fully accepting her for the “dark and light” inside her. Jessica throws the framed diploma against the wall, and it splinters and breaks. When Coop hands her the diploma from inside it, she tears it to pieces. Coop tells Jessica that the other break-in Eric mentioned was at the Student Affairs office, and Jessica finally remembers what she did.

Jessica, hoping to “restore the balance” between right and wrong, fair and unfair, plans to take back Heather’s fellowship win. She walks to the Student Affairs building and breaks a window, climbing through the jagged glass. In a file cabinet, she finds a folder labeled “Post-Grad Fellowship.” She takes out the papers with her and Heather’s names, then another that says “committee notes.” She reads the letter Dr. Garvey wrote for Heather, realizing that the fellowship wasn’t a lark as Heather had said but something she’d been planning for months. She then reads the letter he wrote for her and sees that it is short and bland. She realizes she had sex with Dr. Garvey for nothing.

Sitting on the floor, she sees that her plan is “futile” and understands that breaking into the office was a huge mistake. She scrambles through the glass shards, cutting herself in numerous places, then lays on the grass, sobbing, feeling all her sadness and sorrow, the pain of wanting so much and getting so little.