Empire Falls

whose fault it was,” Jimmy said, feeling the need for one last warning.
    “We could switch, if you’re worried,” the boy said, wiseass.
    “Go on, before I give you a ticket for double-parking.”
    Zack nodded. Before crossing the street, though, he went around the cruiser and retrieved the plastic horn from the gutter, then trotted over and handed it to the driver of the pickup.
    T HE MOST OBVIOUS EXPLANATION for the bloody bed, he’d figured as he sat there with his eyes clamped tightly shut, was that he was still dreaming. After all, he’d been tormented by one terrible dream after another all night, their fragmented contents coming back to him now in flashes. This must simply be the latest installment. When he opened his eyes again, he’d be back in bed, maybe even his own bed, hungover but safe and sane. Except that when he tested this theory, he found himself still seated at the base of the wall in some stranger’s dorm room. The only difference was that he’d begun to whimper. Clearly, a terrible thing had happened here in the night, and since he was alive to witness its aftermath, it stood to reason that the act had not been done to him—though he now noticed that his own skin, here and there, was crusted with blood—but rather by him. For a long time, probably since he was fifteen or sixteen, he’d been indulging dark, violent fantasies before going to sleep at night, and one of these, it seemed, had somehow come to life. He’d persuaded some girl to come up to this room with him last night, and then she’d pissed him off, and he’d killed her. He vaguely remembered trying to convince several different girls to have sex with him the night before. As far as he could remember, none of them had been even remotely tempted, but one of them must’ve said yes. Once again he felt his stomach heave.
    Despite the psychological plausibility of this scenario, Jimmy Minty took some solace from the lack of supporting physical evidence. If he’d killed some poor sorority girl, then where was she? He got onto his hands and knees and crawled over to where the bedclothes were balled up at the foot of the bed and lifted them up. No girl there. He then padded around to the other side of the bed. Still no girl. Next he checked out the closet, which was full of all manner of shit except a dead girl. Was it possible he’d tried to kill her and she’d somehow managed to escape? He poked his head out into the hallway, half expecting to see a trail of blood. There was a large foamy stain on the wall, but that almost certainly was beer. He closed the door again.
    Okay, so maybe he hadn’t killed anybody after all. But somebody had bled like a stuck pig all over the bed. Much of the blood was already dry and crusty, like the spots on his knees and stomach and chest. In other places it was still sticky and moist. Sitting down on the edge of the bed, Jimmy thought for a moment, then reached down and took a clean corner of the top sheet and wiped a spot of dried blood off his knee, surprised that it stung when he did so and that bright beads of blood began forming slowly along what he now recognized as a tiny cut.
    How wonderful to discover that the blood was his own, that his whole body was covered by tiny, razor-thin cuts! True, it made him weak to consider that so much blood should’ve leaked from his own person, but at least he wasn’t a murderer. He’d planned on applying to the Maine Police Academy, and it wouldn’t look good on his application if he’d gone and killed some girl at a frat party, even if he explained that he was drunk at the time and didn’t remember. It had taken him the better part of a year to come up with the police academy idea, and he didn’t want to have to start all over, even with the leisure of a lengthy prison sentence to develop other career possibilities. No, if the blood was his own, it meant that he could still be a cop—and what the present circumstance called for, it occurred to him, was some detective work. How on earth had he managed to wake up covered with cuts he didn’t remember getting? It was a puzzle.
    He’d heard plenty of stories about wild frat parties, about a bizarre ritual called hazing that the older members inflicted on the pledges. Mostly the pledges were just driven out into the country someplace, their clothing confiscated, and left there to make their humiliating way back to campus. Or else they were forced to drink until they passed out. Maybe