Whenever I'm so sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: 'I'll go take a hot bath.'"

Sylvia Plath

I had never been able to stand being around a lot of people for a prolonged period of time. I don't know why, but it made me feel sick. One year for my birthday, my grandmother had given me a book by Sylvia Plath called The Bell Jar. In the book, Ester, the main character, had a similar issue and cured herself of the sick and dirty feeling that the day had left her with by soaking in a bath of that was almost too hot to bear. I was sick of being sick so I had decided to take this advice from a book written by a woman who stuck her head in an oven. And it was on that day that I decided Sylvia Plath was a genius. After the day I had had, with the drugs and people and the naked feeling I was left with after being read like an open book, I decided to take one of those baths.

I closed my eyes as I slide into the almost scolding water and felt that if I opened them again I would see everything that had tarnished me wash off of my skin and blossom out into to the water. I would see the banker who had pushed me three days ago, the adulterer who stole my cab, split ends, mashed piano fingers, and Sherlock Holmes all swirling around grotesquely in my bath water as I became pure once again.

The tingling of my skin was still prominent as I dressed for bed and it was intoxicating. I was reborn only to be killed again by a knock at my door. No one visited me. Not even the lost, drunken students knock on my door. Thinking it must had been a mistake, went back to putting on a shirt. It wasn't a mistake, however, as three solid knocks fell upon my poor door once again. I didn't want to open it. I wanted to be alone in the solitude of my dorm room and not be bothered by anyone. Three more knocks echoed and I knew the devil was on my doorstep.

My suspicion was found to be false when I opened the door to find someone far worse than a biblical evil. Sherlock Holmes stood in front of me looking quite different then earlier. His clothes were actually clean, for starters. He wore a slightly wrinkled grey button up shirt, a pair of dark washed jeans, and a long coat with the collar flipped up.

"What do you want?" I asked, irritated.

"Do you want to see a dead body?"

"I'm not dressed properly to go see a dead body, Vern." His eyes narrowed a bit at my Stand By Me reference.

"I'll wait." It was his turn to be irritated.

"Why?"

"'Why' what?"

"Why would you take me to go see a body?"

"It's a game," He said, "a game of deductions."

The morgue in the campus hospital was closed so we had to sneak in behind a janitor. I hadn't been in a morgue before. I wasn't supposed to take my lab class until the spring half of this semester. I had seen a body before, but it wasn't in a place like this. I had gone with my grandmother once when I was eight to visit a friend of hers. The woman was old and frail. "Myrtle will be 90 this April," my grandmother had told me on the ride to her country home. Myrtle didn't live to see 90, though. While we were there, she had a stroke and ended up dying before help could get there. It had taken an hour for the ambulance to get to us. Myrtle's home was hidden by thick, leafy trees in a secluded part of Hodgemoor. For about 20 minutes, I sat on a dusty couch while my grandmother tried to help Myrtle and watched the light leave her eyes. After she had died, my grandmother ran outside crying leaving me alone with the body of her friend to stare at me until I finally got up and closed her eyes.

Sherlock opened a door and ushered me inside first. The smell of formaldehyde was strong and made my eyes burn a bit as I watched him as he put on a pair of latex gloves and looked at the different storage compartments before unlocking one and sliding the body out.

"How did she die?" Sherlock asked me while he carefully draped the sheet that covered the body.

The body was that of a younger woman who was at least 21 years old, not much younger than me. She had short, red, curly hair and freckles dotted all across her face.

"She drowned." I said looking at her blue lips and the lividity around her head, neck, and chest.

"What else?"

I looked at the woman more closely at the woman. On her leg was a single cut. It wasn't deep or long enough to be fatal. It was a simple razor nick from shaving.

"She was severely hemophobic. She saw the blood from her shaving nick and passed out in the tub. She hit her head, too."

"How are you so sure she drowned? The cut on her leg doesn't have to be from a razor."

"The cut isn't deep enough to be a stab wound and there is nothing else to suggest she was attacked."

"What about the head injury?"

The head injury didn't look fatal, but I had no way of examining it to my fullest capability. It was covered by the woman's hair and I didn't have any gloves that would allow be to move her hair without compromising any possible investigation. It was then that a pair of latex gloves suddenly hit me in the face and Sherlock was trying not to let a smile touch his features, which he failed to do so.

I put the gloves on and moved the woman's hair out of the way.

"What was her name?" I asked look up at Sherlock. He stared at me for a second before going to her ID tag hooked around her big toe.

"Analiese Berlitz." He read off.

Analiese was German, or at least had German roots.

"It's blunt force head trauma, but that doesn't mean someone attacked her."

"Look at the rigor mortis. How recently had her body been moved after death?"

I look at the blood and other fluids that collected on back of Analiese's whole body and lifted her arm. She was limp so she had been dead for about a day at least. It was hard to tell how she had been moved prior to coming to the morgue. There's only so much you can get from a cleaned up corpse. I told this to Sherlock and he nodded replacing the sheet over Analiese and slid her back into storage.

"Why did you want me to go see the body?" I asked Sherlock as we walked back to the dormitories. That had be the main question that I had been turning around in my head along with how she really died. I was still confident in my answer that she was a homophobic who passed out and drowned, but Sherlock's notion that she was murdered was a possibility.

"I told you. It was a game." He said.

"But why me? Why was I the one who was chosen to partake in this great game?"

"You're the only one who could give me a challenge. You were also the only one daft enough to break into a morgue and illegally examine a corpse with a highly functioning sociopath."

"Is that the closest I'm going to get to a compliment?"

"Who said I meant that as a compliment?" Sherlock willingly let me see a quick smile before it faded as fast as it came.

I let out a small laugh as we continued walking. It'd been awhile since anyone had made me laugh, even if it was brief. I had never been one to make friends easily. People found me difficult, "too intelligent for my own good", and too opinionated and outspoken. Most of the friends I had made in my lifetime I earned by keeping quiet and earning the title as "shy", which I was far from. It was only when they became an insufferable arse that I would reveal how I truly was. That was also how I dealt with bullies occasionally. Once, when I was in fifth year, a seventh year boy started to pick on me so I told him his mum was having an affair with his uncle and his father was gay. He went home that night to tell his parents and spent the night week crying because it was true. Now I'm not saying that I found Sherlock to be a friend. He could still be a complete and utter twat, but, at the moment, he was tolerable.

"What time is it?" I asked him. It seemed that most of what we'd said to each other so far was a question.

Sherlock looked at his watch, "1;27."

"There's a Chinese place still open a few blocks from here. I think I'm going to go there." Sherlock look at me funny from the corner of his eye, "Is it a crime to have dinner?"

"No, it's just not often that a restaurant is open at 1;30 in the morning."

"They double as a bar. It won't close until 3."

We walked a little more in silence until we came to the dorms were we would go our separate ways. We said our short goodbyes and I started farther down the side walk towards the street and Sherlock towards to entrance to the building. It was then that I did something that I never did before and would never repeat.

"Sherlock!" I called after him. He turned to look at me. "You showed me a dead body. The least you could do is let me buy you dinner." I hadn't expect him to comply, but when he started towards me, I knew there was a possibility that Sherlock and I could be friends.