The Understudy

The stone is colder than I thought it would be. I mean, I knew it would be cold. It’s October in Massachusetts, and Ashwicke Academy doesn’t heat the stairwells because apparently character is more important than circulation, which is a very expensive way of saying the heating bill made someone in administration weep. But I didn’t expect the chill to seep through my shirt this fast. My shoulder blade is pressed against the bottom step, and the edge of it is digging into a spot just left of my spine in a way that’s going to leave a bruise the shape of an ugly burn. I can already feel it forming, that hot little bloom under the skin. Good. Bruises are evidence. Bruises are sympathy.

The vent is right above my head. An old iron grating, painted over so many times the scrollwork looks like melting frosting. One of the slats is bent outward, and if I tilt my chin just so, I can hear everything happening in the headmaster’s office. The office I’ve been in exactly four times. Once for a commendation, twice for donor events with my father, and once when I was twelve and they found me crying in the library because my guinea pig died; his name was Proust, which is a stupid name for a guinea pig, but I was twelve. I remember the way Dr. Aldridge’s desk smells like Lemon Pledge, and how he keeps a jar of those strawberry candies that nobody ever takes because they’re always stuck together. Right now my ears pick up the old man breathing through his nose; a soft whistle on every exhale that grates. I hate him for that. A headmaster with a wheeze and a candy jar. You’d think he’d have the decency to be interesting.

Jett is talking in earnest. I can’t see him, obviously. I’m wedged under the staircase in a service alcove nobody remembers exists; one of those architectural afterthoughts where they store extra chairs and a mop bucket that smells, I’ve decided, exactly like third-period detention. But I can picture him in my mind. He’ll be standing in front of Aldridge’s desk with his hands clasped in front of him like he’s already in handcuffs. That’s the thing about Jett: he can’t help looking righteous. It’s exhausting. He has this way of lowering his voice when he admits things, like he’s auditioning for a play where the saint confesses to a crime he only technically committed. The scholarship martyr. The boy who reads Dostoevsky at the lunch table and looks up at the ceiling when he chews, like he’s having a conversation with God about the moral weight of his chicken tenders.

Okay, that’s unfair. The chicken tenders at Ashwicke aren’t bad, actually. They use panko. I remember because last year, at the winter formal, I ate four of them in the corner while everyone else danced, and Jett came over and asked if I was okay, and I said yes but he didn’t leave, he just stood there holding two cups of that awful sparkling cider the school buys in bulk from a company that definitely also manufactures floor stripper. He said, “You don’t look okay,” and I said, “That’s just my face,” and he laughed. He laughed like I’d meant to be funny, and I hadn’t, and that made me hate him more. Or maybe it made me hate myself. It’s hard to tell the difference sometimes. My therapist—yes, I have a therapist, her name is Dr. Miriam, she has a ceramic turtle on her desk named Kierkegaard, says I intellectualize my emotions as a defense mechanism. She’d say that confusion is a good thing. She’d say sitting with ambiguity is a sign of growth. I say sitting with ambiguity feels like chewing tinfoil. Cold tinfoil, specifically, cause it sticks to your fillings in a way warm tinfoil doesn’t. I don’t know why I thought of that just now.

Jett’s voice drifts down through the vent. Muffled, but I can hear every word. “…and I knew what she was planning. I knew about the test answers, the emails. I knew she was going to frame me.”

There’s a pause. Aldridge says something I can’t quite catch, possibly some paternal nonsense about how “we can work through this together” or “the truth is always the first step toward healing.” Aldridge collects motivational quotes the way other people collect dust. He has a framed poster in his office that says What would you attempt if you knew you could not fail? and I’ve always wanted to answer: blackmail, perhaps. Or arson. Though the poster has a watermark in the corner that says “LiveLaughLead.com” and I think if you need a website to teach you how to live, laugh, or lead, you’ve already failed all three.

Jett continues. “I confronted her at the top of the stairs. After the debate society reception. I told her I had evidence of what she was doing, and she…” He stops. His voice cracks, and the crack is either the most perfect piece of performance I’ve ever heard, or it’s real. I don’t know which is worse. “She laughed. She said no one would believe a scholarship kid over a Whitmore. She said the board would eat me alive. And then she turned to walk away, and I… I pushed her.”

There it is. The confession.

I let my head fall back against the stone. A small spider is making its way across the ceiling of the alcove, and I watch it for a second, because watching a spider is easier than processing the fact that Jett just handed me exactly what I wanted, wrapped in a bow made of his own idiot integrity. He actually did it. He pushed me. Not hard enough to kill me. I’m not dead, obviously, I’m lying here with a throbbing shoulder and a bloom of blood on my temple and a very clear view of a spider that I’ve decided to name Kenny; but hard enough that when I fell, I fell wrong. I tumbled down three steps instead of the full flight I’d planned. I hit the landing at an angle I didn’t anticipate. The impact knocked the wind out of me in a way that wasn’t acting. For about four seconds I was genuinely, humiliatingly afraid. The kind of afraid where your stomach drops and your brain goes white and you think, oh God, this is it, this is the stupid way I die, on display for everyone, in a stairwell that doesn't even have proper heating.

I didn’t plan for him to push me.

That’s the part nobody will ever understand. Not Aldridge, not my parents, not Dr. Miriam and her turtle. I planned for a fall. A fall I could control. I’d mapped it out for weeks: the faulty security camera in the east stairwell, which I reported broken myself, six separate times, like the anonymous citizen doing her civic duty, which is a phrase my father uses when he’s donating money to get his name off a scandal, and I hate that I just quoted him in my own head. The exact time the corridor would be empty after the debate reception. The way I’d lean back and let Newton’s first law do the work and then lie there, crumpled and tragic, until someone found me. The plan was beautiful in its simplicity. Which is a cliché, fine, but it was. Jett would have no alibi; he’d be the last person seen near me. And the rumors I’d already planted, the forged emails, the test answers slipped into his locker by my friend who owes me a favor, would do the rest. I’d be the victim of a jealous, violent scholarship student who couldn’t bear to be outshone. And I’d win. The Ashwicke Cup, which is just a brass owl glued to a block of pine, would finally sit on my shelf instead of gathering dust in the debate society cabinet because the judging panel last spring was stacked with Jett sympathizers who thought earnestness was a substitute for technique. But I fixed that. I’m fixing everything.

But Jett had to go and be good. He figured out part of my plan. Not all of it, never all of it, I’m not sloppy; and instead of going to Aldridge, instead of protecting himself, he decided to confront me. He stood at the top of the stairs with his cheap jacket and his too-short trousers and his earnest face, and he said, “I know what you did.” And I laughed, just like he told Aldridge. I laughed because it was funny. Because I’d spent weeks constructing this flawless trap, and here he was, walking into a different trap of my making, one I hadn’t even set. He was giving me a real shove. A real crime. A real, recorded confession, because, yes, my phone is on the floor next to me, hidden under my palm, recording every word that comes through the vent.

He wasn’t supposed to do that. He was supposed to yell at me. He was supposed to threaten me. He was supposed to do anything except exactly the thing that would make my lie true. And now it is true. Which is messing with my head.

I think about the way his hand felt on my back. Fingertips, just below my shoulder blade, right where the bruise is forming. There was a moment, a half-second maybe, where I could have caught myself. The railing was right there. My balance is good. I do Pilates on Thursday with a woman named Anja who has the passionate warmth of a glacier but the core strength of a goddess. I could have grabbed the rail and steadied myself and turned around and said, “Nice try, Jett, but I’m not that easy to kill.” But I didn’t. I let myself fall. No, I chose to fall. The push gave me momentum, but I added the surrender. I made a decision in the space between his touch and the empty air, and that decision was: let go.

Does that make it my fault? Or his? Or both? I think both is probably right, which is the most unsatisfying kind of right there is.

I don’t know. I don’t think the law knows either. Dr. Miriam would say fault is a construct designed to impose linear narratives on chaotic systems. Kenny has no opinion. He’s moved to the corner of the alcove and appears to be building something optimistic out of dead fly parts.

Aldridge is speaking again. “…appreciate you coming forward, Jett. But I have to ask, why? Why confess now?”

Jett’s answer is soft, almost too soft for the vent to catch. “Because I thought she was dead. When I saw her at the bottom of the stairs, she wasn’t moving. And I realized I didn’t want her to be dead. I realized I didn’t want any of this. I just wanted her to stop.”

That’s… not what I expected him to say. Not at all. I expected him to save himself. That’s what I would have done.

I feel a weird, hot pressure behind my eyes, and I blink it away because I am not going to cry in a utility alcove over a boy I’m actively framing for assault. That’s not in the plan. Crying is not in the plan. The plan is: lie here, look hurt, record the confession, leak it to the student paper, and watch Jett get expelled so thoroughly that even his scholarship fund forgets his name. The plan is to win. The plan is to destroy him so completely that nobody ever questions my superiority again. The plan is not to feel a sudden, nauseating wave of something that might be guilt or might just be the concussion I’m probably giving myself by not seeking medical attention.

I can hear footsteps now. Aldridge is walking Jett toward the door. He wears Brut, the kind my grandfather wore, and it clings to the office curtains like glue. A headmaster with a wheeze and a candy jar and a dead man’s cologne. You’d think he’d have the decency to be interesting, but no. I have maybe two minutes before they come down the stairs and find me. I need to look properly injured. Not too injured, just injured enough to be believable. I shift my weight, arrange my hair so the blood on my temple is visible, and warm up the expression I’ve rehearsed in the mirror: confused, frightened, a little bit brave. It’s a good expression. I’ve used it before. Too many times, maybe. Maybe someone will finally notice it’s a performance.

My phone is still recording. The audio file will have everything: Jett’s confession, Aldridge’s wheezing, my own breathing in the background if you listen close. I’ll edit out the part where I’m thinking about Kenny, apparently. That would be hard to explain. Though honestly, Kenny is probably the most honest witness in this entire building, and I’m about to delete him from the record. There’s a metaphor in that somewhere, but I’m too tired to find it.

Here’s the thing about winning: it feels a lot like losing, if you do it right. I’m lying on a cold stone floor in a school I’ve attended since I was five years old, and I’m about to ruin a boy’s life, and I can still feel the ghost of his hand between my shoulder blades. Light as a question. He pushed me. But he came back. He pushed me, and then he confessed; not to the push, but to wanting me alive, which is somehow worse. And the confession will be the thing that destroys him, not the push.

The door above opens. Aldridge’s voice echoes down the stairwell. “Miss Whitmore? Victoria? Are you down there?”

I let out a small, pitiful moan. The acoustics are excellent, the stairwell carries sound like a cathedral. Or a bathroom. Cathedrals and bathrooms both have that same echoey quality, have you ever noticed that? Focus, Victoria. “Help,” I whisper. “Please.”

They’re coming down now. Jett first, perhaps, because he’s the one who feels responsible. Aldridge behind him. I close my eyes and let my body go limp. The phone is still recording, placed under my palm, and I can feel it vibrate slightly as the file saves.

I won. I won so completely that it’s almost boring.

But there’s a spider in the alcove who watched the whole thing, and I know, in some deep and inconvenient part of myself, that no one will ever believe he tried to save me. Not the headmaster, not the board, not the student paper. And definitely not Jett, who will spend the rest of his life thinking he’s a monster because I let him become one.

The last thing I hear before the world goes soft and performative around me is Jett’s voice, cracking on my name. And I think: “No one will ever believe he tried to save me.”

Especially not me.