The Room Where It Happens

[MurderWeasel]

is Juliette's room.

It's not a big room, though it feels more spacious than its physical size suggests. This is due to its setup and organization—the closet contains a chest of drawers (filled with socks, undergarments, shirts and skirts, all folded neatly, and an old worn journal still half-empty underneath) and clothes on racks and hanging from a rod (jackets, blouses, dresses), the bed is tucked into a corner (and always made before its occupant starts her day in earnest), and the desk is kept clear, except for a laptop computer and a mug containing three pens (one red, one blue, one black) and two pencils (mechanical, 0.5 lead). The mug is shaped like a cat's face.

There are other drawers, drawers in the desk and drawers under the bed, but these drawers are also all neatly organized. One desk drawer is for blank paper, empty notebooks, a yellow legal pad. One desk drawer is for folders, each containing the work related to a single class from the current semester, each neatly ordered chronologically. When the semester ends, this drawer will be emptied into a file box, which will be transported to the attic. One desk drawer holds a small package of tissues, Tic Tacs (Freshmint flavor), a spare set of keys, assorted change in a four-inch diameter glass bowl (totaling three dollars and sixty-seven cents).

The shelves in the room are sparse. They contain pictures and books. The pictures are pictures of Juliette and pictures of her friends and family. She smiles as a first-grader, hair tied into pigtails, red shirt wrinkled and smeared with glitter. She scowls as a third-grader, eyes locked directly into the camera's lens, hair a short bob, a yellow jacket over her blue shirt. The other pictures are more recent or of other people; Juliette always wears a perfect little smile, but only in the first-grade photo does she show her teeth. The books placed among these pictures are books for school on the middle shelves, books for fun that have been read on the bottom, books for fun that have yet to be read on the top. The school books are sorted by class, the personal ones alphabetically by author's last name. The shelves easily accumulates dust, and even after their weekly feather-dusting sometimes wear a thin veneer of grey.

This matches the carpet, though it is grey by design; it is vacuumed every Monday after school, free of stains because nobody ever eats in this room. The walls are pale blue, blue like a bird's egg or the sky on a very cold day. Nothing hangs on the walls. The overhead light is one large bulb, slightly frosted, bright enough to illuminate and diffused enough not to offend. There are two other light sources: a standing light to the left of the desk, and a reading light on the bedside table, next to a coaster (in the classic smiley face design) where a glass of water is placed every night. The standing light is sleek and silver but a little bit cheap-looking. Its bulb gets hot when it's on for too long, and every so often it flickers. The reading light is small, beige, and it casts a pale blue gleam. It has served faithfully for years.

A single window opens from the room to the outside, though the white curtains are usually drawn while the room is occupied. Through the window can be seen the street, the lawn, the neighbors' houses. Cars drive by, sometimes. Children play. Dogs poop on the lawn and then someone from the house cleans up after them, grumbling all the while.

The room, for all its formal sterility, has a certain measure of homey comfort that does not feel like a calculation. It is what it is for appearances, true, but it is also exactly what its inhabitant wants and needs it to be.

On June 24, 2017, Juliette careened up the stairs and threw herself into her bed and suffocated a single scream with her pillow.