The next few days were just the same routine. I hung out with Devin, Garret, and Heath, struggled to pass algebra, slept through science, and ate dinner with my dad every night. The only change that surfaced was that I was suddenly aware of Marissa. She was in my English class, which I had actually forgotten in all honesty, and my lunch period. I continued to keep my encounter with her to myself, but it kept buzzing through my mind without rest.
I wanted to talk to her, but I didn’t know what to say or even how to approach her. We hadn’t ever had a full conversation, and it would seem weird to my friends and hers if I just suddenly started talking to her. So instead, I tried to forget about her, but I think it’s pretty easy to see that forgetting was impossible. Something about the enigma that was Marissa Colt kept me guessing and wondering what in the world she had been doing in the bowling alley’s ventilation shaft.
So I decided to find out what was in the vents that could’ve possibly inclined her to crawl through them. First I needed an excuse to return to the bowling alley alone though. My father was all I had for family; my mother had ran off with some buff jerk years ago, taking my baby sister with her. For all we knew she was in France, fucking those fancy Europeans and ruining my poor sister’s life. But none of that mattered now, all that mattered was Marissa Colt, and those ventilation shafts.
“Hey dad, I think I left my wallet at the bowling alley on Saturday,” I said to him while he stirred a mess of onions and peppers in his trusty frying pan.
“And you’re just now realizing this?” He turned around and frowned at me, keeping the wooden spoon he held carefully over the pan.
“It’s not like I spend money every day, dad. I just noticed it was missing today because I was doing the laundry,” I claimed. It was believable though, because I always did laundry on Tuesdays, and my dad did laundry on Saturdays. I also made dinner on Monday nights because he wanted me to know how to cook before I went to college.
“Hmm,” he gestured at the car keys sitting on the table, “Be back for dinner.”
I fist pumped the air and stifled my excitement as I slid past him, snatching the keys. I glanced at the clock and knew that I had only about fifteen minutes to make it to the bowling alley, through the vents, and back home before dinner would be ready. I’d have to be quick.
“Bye dad!” I shouted, practically running out the apartment door and flying down the four flights of steps. The elevator was much too slow.
I sprinted into the parking lot and jumped into our old Impala, turning the ignition, rolling down the window, and buckling my seatbelt all in one motion. It was almost summer, and I needed the breeze since the AC didn’t work.
I sped out of the lot and down the street to the bowling alley. I got there in just under three minutes, which was pretty impressive, but meant I had been speeding hardcore. I thanked the almighty powers at large that there had been no cops on my route, and reminded myself to take it a bit slower heading back.
Then I ran into the bowling alley and just glanced at the people behind the desk with a look I hoped displayed extreme urgency as I ran into the bathroom.
Luckily it was unoccupied and I slid right in without a problem. I locked the door behind me and spun around to find the vent cover still loose on the ceiling. Just as I had left it on Saturday.
I unscrewed the cover with my fingers and let it hang down on its hinges as I used the light of my phone to see inside it. It looked a little dusty and kind of gross, but I didn’t see any spider webs or rats, so I gripped the edges and pulled my head into the shaft. The light from my phone illuminated the immediate vicinity and that was when I realized that this was an unused vent. There was no airflow at all, to the point that the air I was forced to breathe was stagnant and stale. But I had to find out why Marissa Colt was in there, and what she was doing.
I climbed into the vent the rest of the way, having to stay on my hands and knees as I crawled towards the turn in the metal tube. The whole system seemed to have been unused for years, and fortunately for me there were no forks, or if there were they were blocked off by secondary grates. I crawled through those vents for a good five minutes before I saw any sort of exit.
It was in the form of a still rotary fan missing one of its three blades. And on the other side was the last thing I ever expected to find when it came to Marissa Colt.
I emerged from the stuffy ductwork into a small, makeshift room with a couple beanbag chairs, pens and notebooks scattered all over the place, a guitar leaning against the wall, and hung on a rack on the opposite side, an array of razor blades and knives.
Frowning, I carefully stepped around the mess on the floor and examined the blades closer.
Both razors and two of the three knives were stained with a dried maroon color that suggested exactly what I didn’t want to think. I stepped backwards as my heart started pounding in my chest, only to slip on one of the splayed out notebooks and fall into all the papers.
I landed with a thud that echoed through the shaft and sent several of the loose parchments fluttering through the air. I grabbed one before it hit the floor and tried to ignore the similar red stains as I read the words in a whisper.
“Every day just like the last/Just a girl and her haunting past/Wishing for a brand new start/Pining for a brand new heart/One that doesn’t feel the pain/Mother help, she’s gone insane.”
I dropped the page in my lap and looked around at the hundreds of poems, deciding immediately that Marissa wasn’t some serial killer like I had assumed at first when I had seen the blood stains.
Marissa Colt, the happy, successful, mostly average girl that had as few enemies as a kitten, had a secret hiding spot in the ventilation shaft of the local bowling alley where she didn’t murder others, but instead slowly worked on killing herself.
I took a closer look at the guitar against the wall, noting even more maroon stains, and found worn strings that didn’t even look like they were the right kind. I didn’t understand how she got a guitar and beanbag chairs into her secret room, considering the vents were too small to fit more than my broad shoulders, but I shrugged it off as I suddenly understood why she had been so shy in that moment when I caught her crawling out of the vent.
I had run into her just after she had been in this place, writing poetry, playing music, possibly harming herself, and just releasing her pain. She had been vulnerable and weak when I found her, and I became extremely relieved that I had been the one to find her over somebody else.
Somebody else might have not respected her privacy like I had, or maybe they would’ve recognized her vulnerability and used her.
I was far from perfect, but I respected other people and their privacy, and that was what Marissa needed on Saturday. But now things were different. I knew Marissa’s deepest, darkest secret, and knew things about her I doubted anyone else in the world knew.
What I should’ve done was gone to her parents and told them that their daughter was having trouble dealing with things, and needed some help. Maybe even outright tell them about the stained knives.
Instead, I might’ve made the biggest mistake of my life.
I crawled back through the vent and emerged in the bathroom far later than I had originally planned.
“Uh oh,” I said under my breath as I flushed the empty toilet and washed my hands. There was no way my dad would just ignore how late I was. I brushed the dust off of me and then ran from the bathroom without a second glance at the employees. I wanted to go see Marissa and talk to her about what I had found, but I was already late for dinner, and again, I didn’t know what I should say to her.
Something along the lines of, “Hey! I found your secret stash and I know way more about you than you ever wanted me to!” That didn’t seem like it would go over well.