We sit next to each other, a foot away from Lainey’s body.
“What are we going to do?” Melody asks, in a small timid voice. Melody has never once sounded timid in our entire friendship.
“I don’t know,” I mutter, rubbing my temples. My head aches. My body aches. My heart aches. I put my hands over my eyes, willing this nightmare to go away. But the nightmare isn’t going away. The nightmare is real. “Maybe we wait for the police to come. Maybe we confess. I don’t know.”
Memories wash over me.
Lainey breaking the chair swing that one of Melody’s moms had installed in our dorm room. We literally fell on the floor laughing, and she was so pissed at us until finally she just started laughing too. The kiss she blew to us midcourt, when she made the buzzer-beater to beat Michigan. When she didn’t come out of her room for a week after her father died, and we got her set up with a therapist. When she signed her WNBA contract, and we celebrated all night at the Dead Rabbit and then nursed a shared hangover for three days straight. When she met Ruby after a game against Seattle, and her face lit up every time she talked about her.
And now I’ve killed her. I’ve killed my best friend.
How will I tell her mom? How will I tell Ruby?
I won’t have to worry about marrying too-perfect Jay, or the live wedding band, or the Twinkie cake, or his fucked-up son who won’t say a word to me. Because I’ll be in prison. How much time would you get for manslaughter, second degree? Criminally negligent homicide? Five years, maybe, a decade?
A sardonic voice runs through my head.
You might even be on Crimeline.
I can almost hear the Fletcher Fox voice-over. “A bachelorette party prank that went wrong. So very wrong.” And the pictures will be of Lainey, lying prostrate in the balaclava. Pictures of us all as roommates. Videos of her on the basketball court. Smarmy half-suggestions about a love triangle between us. And there will be pictures of me, and Melody too, maybe. Pale faced and crying in the courtroom. We will go to prison, but no justice will be done.
No family is avenged. No missing girls are found.
Nobody wins.
“What would Lainey want us to do?” Melody asks. She sits listlessly, hugging her knees. Oddly, the exact same question had popped into my head.
“I don’t know,” I say, hoarse from crying.
“She wouldn’t want us to go to jail,” she says, her face streaked with blood and tears. “Would she?”
I keep rubbing my painful head. I need more Tylenol. But a mean little voice breaks in. You don’t deserve it. You don’t deserve anything for the pain.
“It doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t matter what she would want,” I say, resigned. “I’m going to jail no matter what.”
“No,” Melody says, insistent. “I’ll tell them I did it. It’s my fault anyway. I’ll take the blame.”
I exhale, my mind and body absolutely run-down, without an ounce of stamina left. “Melody, do you know anything about a crime scene?”
“Um …” She purses her lips, her eyebrows tilting in thought.
“You don’t have gunpowder on you,” I say, and lay my palms out to demonstrate. “I do. I’m the one carrying the physical evidence.”
She blinks, taking this in. “Just rub some on me, then.”
“It doesn’t work that way,” I mutter.
“Then we’ll find more bullets,” she says. “I’ll fire the gun. We can say we were fighting over the gun and you were close. That’s why you have residue on you still.”
I fold my palms back up, squeezing my hands. “Then we’ll both go to jail. What would that achieve?”
She stares ahead in thought. I’m too tired to even think. Is this the last room I’ll ever see as a free woman? This stupid, cursed hunting lodge, where two women were murdered now.
Melody touches my arm, and I pull away, fighting the urge to shake her off.
“Alex?”
“I don’t want to talk right now,” I say, my head down, staring at my knees.
“But … I might have an idea,” she says, a glimmer of hope shining in the words.
Despite myself, I turn to her. “What?”
She swallows. “A way we might not have to go to jail.”
I don’t say anything for a second. The truth is, as much as I want to punish myself, as much as I know I deserve this, I don’t want to go to prison. I don’t want Jay on Crimeline, talking about what a wonderful person I was. Or … maybe that’s not even what he would say.
“What is it?”