The Membership Card

Chapter 5: Save It for Downstairs

"I already said it." My voice was still steady, which surprised me. "I'm sorry. That part's real. And the money — the fifty-one thousand eight hundred, whatever's left of it — I'll give it back. Tomorrow. Any way you want it."

"You'll give it back."

"I will."

"And then I get a phone call from a detective." Her breath was warm against the side of my head. "You hand me the money, I turn around, and it's a room with a phone I can't use and a door that locks from the outside. I've done that. I'm not doing it twice."

"I'm not calling anyone."

"You're not calling anyone." She said it slowly, the way you'd repeat something for a child. "You're saying it with a knife on your neck. That's supposed to mean something."

I didn't have anything for that.

She moved her arm — not tighter, just a shift, the weight of her settling behind me like she'd finally found a comfortable way to stand. A car went by on the far road and the sound reached us late.

"It doesn't matter anyway," she said. "The money doesn't fix it. I want you to understand that part before — I need you to actually get it. There's no amount. Fifty thousand, a hundred, whatever you got left. I put it in my account and Wednesday comes and one of them is standing at the register where I work. That's who they are. They found out about each other and they came and they did this—" she tipped her chin, meaning her face, "—and they never even said why. So no. No money."

"Chloe."

"They're not going to stop. You think you've had a bad year. They're not finished with me. Ever. This is — every day this is — "

Her voice caught, and she stopped, and made it flat again.

"So it doesn't matter what you do. But if I do this, if I do one thing, then it stops. They put me somewhere with a fence and I eat at a certain time and nobody comes at me on the street. That's quieter than anything I've got."

"You'd be in prison."

"I'd be in prison," she agreed, like I'd gotten the arithmetic right. "With a bed. Do you know how long it's been since I slept through a night?"

I could feel her hand on the knife trembling, just the smallest amount, the way a muscle goes when you've held it too long.

"Run it," I said.

"What?"

"Run the floor plan. You've got it in your head already — you've been running it the whole way here. Where do you go afterward? Who watches your mom's house while you're inside? You said yourself no one's picking up." A light on the far side of the quad hummed. "If you've got it worked out, I want to hear it."

Her arm pressed harder against my chest. If she heard me, she didn't slow down for it. She was chewing the story over anyway, and the only sound was the knife, very quietly, against the collar of my shirt.

"There's nothing to run," she said. "Because there's nothing left to run it against. They know where I work. They know my shifts. This is the end for me either way, so." A breath. "So it's the option. It's the only option where it stops."

"Are you going to say something?" she said. "You get one."

I said the true thing. "I'm sorry."

"Okay."

"Chloe—"

"Okay. I heard you." She lifted her chin, and there was almost something like being done — she wasn't going to say it out loud, wasn't going to give me a speech, the way you don't read the last paragraph of a letter you'd already written. She turned her head so that her voice came from right beside my ear:

"Save it for downstairs."

The arm across my chest tightened. The knife left my throat and pulled back to her shoulder.

I dropped.

I don't remember deciding. I folded down and away, chin to chest, hands up around my head, and the blade went through the air where my neck had been and cut nothing. Behind me she caught her balance and reset, and I knew the second one was coming the way you know a car is behind you on a dark road, and then — nothing. The air over me changed. There was a hard double thud, someone's shoe, and then both her arms were caught.

I looked up.

Two people, one on each side. Maya had Chloe's left arm in both hands and her whole weight forward, jaw set. Priya had come in low, both hands locked on Chloe's right forearm, leaning back with it the way you'd hold a door shut. The knife was in Chloe's right hand, and for one turn of her body it swung out and came within a foot of my face before Maya got her elbow in and drove it back.

Chloe screamed. Not words. Just noise.

"Let go of me! Let GO —"

I was up. I don't remember standing. I got my hand around her wrist first and then her fingers, both hands to pry them open — something in her wrist made a sound I didn't want to identify — and the knife came free. I turned and threw it. It rang off the far end of the walkway, skidded, and came to rest at the base of the safety lamp, a thin bright line on wet concrete.

"I'M GOING TO KILL YOU — GET OFF — I'LL KILL ALL THREE OF YOU —"

She was still fighting them. Maya grunted and got her around the shoulders; Priya had both hands on one wrist now. Chloe's feet kept moving like she could find a way out of being held.

I pulled my jacket off. I got her arms behind her — she twisted, and I got my knee against her back and worked the sleeves around her wrists, one, then the other, then pulled it snug and knotted it, twice, and by then she was just breathing hard and not moving and saying things in a low voice instead of screaming.

I dug in my bag for my phone and called 911, and stood there with the phone against my ear and my knee still on her back while I said the address and what happened, and looked up at Maya, who was standing over us with both her hands still out, like she'd forgotten to put them down.

They took her away in a car parked at the service gate. The city police came and stood around and asked us the same questions twice. I gave the same answers twice. It was almost two in the morning before anyone wrote anything down in a way that let us go.

I sat down on the curb. Maya sat down next to me, then Priya.

"How."

Maya looked at her hands. "You usually text. Eleven-thirty, you text, it's maybe the last ten minutes of the library. There was no text."

"So we walked over," Priya said. "We thought maybe you fell asleep in a carrel. Which you have done."

"I've done that twice."

"Twice." She held up two fingers at me like evidence. "So we're on the path, and we see you up ahead, standing still, and there's somebody behind you, and—" she stopped. "Yeah. So. That's how."

"You didn't call anybody. You didn't get a cop."

"There wasn't time for a cop," Maya said.

"You just — grabbed."

"I grabbed her arms. That's the part I'd planned." She said it dry, and Priya laughed, and then the laugh went wrong and turned into a sound I hadn't heard from her before, and she pushed both hands over her face.

I put an arm around each of them and sat there. That's all I did for a while. My hands were shaking now, which was fine, because they could.

"Thank you," I said. "Tonight."

Maya made a dismissive noise and patted my elbow twice. Priya leaned into my shoulder and let it out. Nobody said anything else for a while.

The rest went through the courts over the next year. Attempted murder, the charge was called, and the sentence was ten years. There'd been a weapon, and there'd been planning — she'd followed me across the quad, and she'd told me what she was going to do before she did it, and the state put all of it up on a screen.

She has the scars across her face. She has a record. I've thought about it more than I've said out loud. I sat with it that fall and couldn't lay the two halves next to each other — the girl who wanted a locked door and three meals, and the knife at my throat — and I stopped trying to. She made every choice, and I didn't make any of them for her.

I went back to class.

Maya moved her desk to the window. Priya started dating someone in agricultural engineering and we gave her grief about it every single meal. There were finals, and then more finals, and a summer where I went home to the resort for three months and my mother put me to work carrying coffee. In September the fourth roommate moved in, and I stood in the kitchen while the three of them argued about whose turn it was to clean the sink, and finally went in and did the sink.

I had a whole life in front of me.