Authors: Kim Askew
Exposure
KIM ASKEW AND AMY HELMES
F+W Media, Inc.
Chapter One: Fair Is Foul and Foul Is Fair
Chapter Two: I Dreamt Last Night of the Three Weird Sisters
Chapter Three: How Now! What News?
Chapter Four: Full of Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing
Chapter Five: It Is a Knell That Summons Thee to Heaven or to Hell
Chapter Six: That Which Hath Made Them Drunk Hath Made Me Bold
Chapter Seven: What's Done Cannot Be Undone
Chapter Eight: Nothing in His Life Became Him Like the Leaving It
Chapter Nine: Present Fears Are Less Than Horrible Imaginings
Chapter Ten: Say, from Whence You Owe This Strange Intelligence?
Chapter Eleven: To Throw Away the Dearest Thing He Ow'd, As 't Were a Careless Trifle
Chapter Twelve: Look Like the Innocent Flower, but Be the Serpent Under It
Chapter Thirteen: I Have Almost Forgot the Taste of Fears
Chapter Fourteen: Out, Damned Spot!
Chapter Fifteen: This Place Is Too Cold for Hell
Chapter Sixteen: Screw Your Courage to the Sticking Place
Chapter Seventeen: Your Face Is as a Book Where Men May Read Strange Matters
Chapter Eighteen: Why Do You Dress Me in Borrowed Robes?
Chapter Nineteen: Stands Not Within the Prospect of Belief
Chapter Twenty: Be Bright and Jovial Among Your Guests Tonight
Chapter Twenty-One: Double, Double, Toil and Trouble
Chapter Twenty-Two: Drink, Sir, Is a Great Provoker
Chapter Twenty-Three: The Patient Must Minister to Himself
Chapter Twenty-Four: Is This a Dagger Which I See Before Me?
Chapter Twenty-Five: Me Thought the Wood Began to Move
Chapter Twenty-Six: Two Truths Are Told, As Prologue to the Swelling Act
Chapter Twenty-Seven: When Shall We Meet Again?
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Leave All the Rest to Me
FOUR GIRLS IN ONE DORM ROOM. If it's not the very definition of hell, it's at least purgatory. Sharing a hundred and fifty square feet of living space in an ecru-painted cinderblock cell with three randoms, any of whom could turn out to have chronic Doritos breath, an unhealthy obsession with goth metal, or a tendency to slip into bizarre “baby talk” on the phone with her parents. School officials are forever insisting that roommate selection for incoming freshmen is completely arbitrary, but that never seems to explain how every dorm room ends up with a token weirdo.
For the residents of Room 315 in Birnkrant Hall, Skye Kingston was that girl. There was nothing overtly freakish about her, aside from the semi-creepy Diane Arbus photographs of circus midgets and identical twins plastered on the wall next to her bed. She was majoring in fine arts, with a specialty in photography, but “artsy” probably didn't entirely account for her singular personality; the way she seemed to hover attentively around campus like a studious fly on the wall.
Skye didn't resemble the Quasimodo-types typically identified â and ostracized â within the first few days of the semester. She wasn't mousy, overweight, or sporting an unfortunate excess of hormonally induced facial hair. Rather, her looks tended to land her on the other end of the hot-or-not spectrum, somewhere between “stunning” and “drop-dead gorgeous.” She was model tall, with Eastern European features: long red tresses, pale skin, and glacial blue eyes that appeared, at once, both severe and serene. Hers was an exotic beauty, in stark contrast to the tanned, toned bottled blondes with whom she shared tiny quarters on the dorm's third floor.
Whether or not she was cognizant of her good looks was up for debate. Her striking face was usually buried in a book â not hogging the bathroom mirror. She seemed to have a quiet confidence that was uncharacteristic of most of the freshmen girls who roamed the campus in lemming-like packs, thus singling her out out as an “untouchable.” Upon occasionally emerging from the study lounge or library stacks, she'd peer out at the world through an ancient-looking 35-millimeter camera, avoiding direct eye contact with the unwashed masses of undergrads surrounding her. With a name like Skye Kingston, many presumed she had climbed straight off Daddy's yacht prior to arriving on campus. Others, including her roommates, had been speculating for weeks about the real story behind this mysterious freshman who defied classification.
“Did she live in an igloo or something?”
“No, you idiot. She's not an Eskimo!”
“I heard she lived in pitch black for half the year because the sun never rises there.”
“That would explain the pasty-white skin.”
“Well, I'd kill to have her skin, actually. It's like porcelain.”
Skye sighed underneath her covers, listening to her roommates' gossip with a detached fascination. Like the Northern Lights in her native Anchorage, these Skye-centric chat sessions had become a nightly phenomenon, a fun pastime they routinely turned to after exhausting all of their catty comments about other socially condemned undergrads. Surely they couldn't think she'd be asleep already at quarter to ten, and even if she were sleeping, being openly conjectured about while she was less than four feet away was ludicrously ballsy of them.
“Maybe she's a vampire.”
“Um ⦠in that case, I'm putting in for a room transfer!”
“Well, supposedly she dabbles in the occult. That's what somebody in the caf told me at dinner yesterday.”
“For real?”
“Yeah. Apparently she was involved with some lesbo coven of witches.”
“Oh, come on, guys. You really don't think â ”
“Some girl on the fourth floor heard from her R.A. that her boyfriend
murdered
a dude.”
“No way.”
“I'm serious. It was apparently all over the papers and stuff in Alaska.”
“Holy shit.”
Skye's heart began to race furiously underneath the covers. Being called “Ice Princess” and “Nanook of the North” was bad enough, but this time they were nearing a dangerous precipice with their idle gossip, threatening to reopen old wounds. She shifted underneath her blanket and cleared her throat. She hated confrontation â always had â but she had to at least let them know she could hear every word they were saying from her top bunk. Her movements prompted a shushing giggle down below.
“Uh ⦠Skye? Are you awake?”
“What?” she said, knowing she was likely to regret it.
“You're from Alaska, right? And, well, it gets really cold there, right? And I'm wonderingâ¦.” the roommate could barely stifle her laughter. “Did your butt cheeks ever freeze to the toilet seat?”
The room below Skye's bunk erupted into self-satisfied cackles.
⢠⢠â¢
Sleep continued to elude Skye as her three roommates performed their fastidious evening bathroom rituals and finally clamored noisily into their twin beds. As she lay roasting underneath her blanket, she reflected on her bunkmates, who, so far, seemed to be the type of girls more worried about the intricacies of performing the perfect keg stand than such trivial matters as homework or attending class. She recognized the insecurity behind their conceit, and hoped that time would help soften their cutting edges. She had survived their brand of callousness before â barely, god knows. She didn't relish the thought of having to endure it all over again: the manipulation, the backstabbing, the selfish lust for power, the reckless disregard for people's feelings ⦠people's lives.
Skye threw the blanket off her sweaty torso â Southern California was too hot for her â and took a deep breath. She hadn't planned on delving into her tumultuous past, but a candid discussion seemed in order. If laying all her cards on the table helped to break the ice, then it might be worth reliving the pain.
“âMurder' is a strong word, but not entirely off base,” she said, breaking the dark silence. “If you insist on turning me into a movie of the week, I should at least provide you with some semblance of the facts.”
She could hear the unsettled sound of sheets rustling and bedframes creaking, and saw the silhouette of one startled roomie as she sat up from her pillow.
“First, to answer some of your ongoing questions, the answers are, no: I've never seen Santa Claus. Yes: I
have
eaten reindeer meat, but it wasn't Rudolph. No: I would not strip for a Klondike Bar. And yes,” she finally added, in a more stoic tone. “My boyfriend
did
kill someone ⦠in a manner of speaking.”
Skye stared at the ceiling three feet above her bunk. She had affixed glow-in-the-dark star decals there to remind her of home, forming the constellations of Ursa Major, Cassiopeia, and Orion. California's night sky was virtually a starless swath of smoggy gray. But looking at her artificial version of Alaska's heavens gave her little comfort. The perspective was all wrong. She was too close to the ceiling. You needed distance to really appreciate the staggering scope of it allâ¦.