Double Minds by Terri Blackstock

with a circular drive. Parker passed those buildings where she’d studied Music Business. The school would have been out of her price range had her mother not been a professor in the English Department. That gave Parker free tuition and a great education. She turned onto the street that would take her to the dorms. The campus commons couldn’t be seen from the street because the buildings were all turned inward, providing a perimeter for the campus.
    Brenna, being a freshman, had most likely lived in one of two dorms—Wright or Maddox. Parker imagined that word of the murder had spread like wildfire among the girls, so she took her chances and went into Maddox Hall. She crossed the lobby to the front desk. A girl sat at a computer with her chin propped on her hands, her Facebook screen up. She looked up when Parker approached her.
    “Can I help you?”
    Parker leaned in and softened her voice. “Yes, I work at Colgate Studios.”
    The girl perked up. “Where Brenna was murdered.”
    “Yes,” Parker said. “Did you know her?”
    The girl swept her bangs behind her ears, but they fell back into her face. “I saw her sometimes, but I never really talked to her. I didn’t have any classes with her. Do they know who did it yet?”
    “Not yet. I’d really like to talk to some of her friends. Her roommate, maybe. Tell her how sorry I am.”
    “Yeah, sure. I’ll call her.”
    “Thanks.” Parker knew the roommate would have to come down to get her. Security prevented visitors from going up without a resident to escort them. She went to one of the couches in the lobby. A TV was blaring America’s Next Top Model . A girl on a loveseat nearby was watching. Parker tried to focus on the search for the next poor girl to starve herself invisible, but her mind kept wandering back to Brenna’s roommate. What would Parker say to the girl? Her stomach tumbled, and that sick feeling returned.
    She heard the elevator open down the hall and looked in that direction. A girl with black spiked hair and a nose ring emerged. Mascara was smeared beneath her eyes, and her nose was red, as though she’d cried all night. She wore a bulky sweater with too-long sleeves that she bunched in her fists.
    “Hi, are you the one from Colgate?” the girl asked as she approached Parker.
    Parker introduced herself. “I worked with Brenna.”
    The girl glanced toward the desk. “Yeah, she told me on the phone. I’m Marta. Brenna told me about you. She really liked you. You’re the songwriter, right?”
    Parker was surprised that Brenna would have shared that about her. “Yeah, and also the receptionist. She was at my desk when …when it happened.”
    Marta’s face crumpled. “What was she doing there? She worked afternoons, not nights.”
    “I had the same question. Were you two good friends or just roommates?”
    “We didn’t even know each other when we came here last fall,” Marta said, hugging herself. “But we became good friends. We were going to room together again next fall, in Hillsboro.”
    Hillsboro was one of the nicer campus apartments. Upperclassmen got first pick, but younger students participated in a lottery to determine who could live there. At least, that was how they’d done it when Parker went there. And since she couldn’t afford Hillsboro, she’d worked as an RA and lived in the dorms.
    “You want to come up? You might as well. Everybody else has.”
    “Yeah, if it’s okay.” They started to the elevator. “What do you mean, everybody else has?”
    “I mean the cops. They were here, looking around. I thought they were gonna make me move out. It was like a crime scene. I sat out in the hall with the other girls on my floor, waiting for them to finish. They took a lot of her stuff. Her computer, her notebooks, her journal.”
    They reached a door with a dry erase board on the outside, with the names Brenna and Marta drawn in curvy block letters and colored in with hot pink. It was filled with messages left