TABBY KNOWS ABOUT DALLAS. She didn’t find out because I told her, but because of what came after. Dallas was supposed to be nothing serious, a good excuse to lose my virginity because he was there and willing. But he went and became a defining moment in my life anyway. It’s unfair, how I fail spectacularly at not taking something seriously. It’s like my body has other plans.
Maybe Tabby knows the feeling.
It’s the first day of school, so of course I’m seeing him today, and I won’t be able to avoid him like I did all summer. He’s a year younger than us—Tabby called me a cougar when she found out—so he won’t be in any of my classes, but he’ll be everywhere else. I’ve known him for years. His family lives three doors down from ours, and his mom sometimes comes over and drinks wine with Mom on our deck, their laughter puncturing the sky. Now, every time Mrs. Mackey comes over and says “Hi, Elle,” I wonder what she knows. Now, whenever she and Mom are half drunk, voices carrying into the night, I wonder what they’re really talking about. If they stumbled onto dangerous ground.
“You’re nervous,” Tabby says when she picks me up in her dad’s blue Camry. “Relax. You don’t owe him a goddamn thing, remember?”
Her voice is hard, unflinching. She’s back, the girl who had the ability to make me feel both seen and invisible. Mark had done something to her, made her less somehow, turned her from larger-than-life into something scared of its shadow. Her shadow is here now, longer than ever, covering both of us like a tent. I’m used to its shade.
“You’re right.” I take in what Tabby’s wearing, or the lack thereof. Shorts that have ridden up so high that I can’t see where they end and a low-cut tank top. It has been three weeks since Mark died, three weeks during which Tabby has vacillated from a state of disaffected calm to a waterlogged mess, shot through with bolts of laughter and girlishness that she apologized for, like she shouldn’t be allowed to be happy when he’s six feet under. But now here she is, looking more herself than she has in months. Mark never liked her showing too much skin, she told me. I argued that it didn’t stop him the night they met.
The truth is, Mark not being around has made things easier. She’s easier, looser, more like she used to be. Maybe you’re thinking it would have been like that anyway. He doesn’t go to Coldcliff Heights. He’d be away at Princeton. But control makes distance evaporate. It shrinks people into specimens, easy to view under a microscope. And Mark’s eye was constantly on his microscope, studying Tabby.
I’m not sure how Tabby will act when we walk into the school. If she’ll reach for my hand or link her pinkie through mine, like I reached for her months ago, sure I was about to face my own reckoning. I’m not sure if she’s nervous, or if she’s scared to enter the real-life version of the online gossip minefield. But if she is feeling either, she hasn’t shown it. She isn’t shrunken anymore. She’s her full height, confidence sweeping behind her like the train of a wedding dress.
We shuffle down the hall, our flip-flops thwacking the ground. Pockets of girls are clustered by their lockers, staring. Tabby doesn’t seem phased.
“Apparently they have no lives of their own,” I say. “Isn’t there anything else to talk about?”
Ever since Lou linked to that article and the comments dogpiled underneath it, everyone has something to say about Tabby. Nobody thinks Mark’s death was an accident. There are too many indicators that it wasn’t.
SOMEBODY pushed him, one of the last comments said. If it wasn’t her, who was it?
That stuck with me. The image formed of somebody else there, on the Split, with Tabby and Mark.
Sometimes I picture it being me. My hands against his back. Sometimes I imagine how it would feel, his hot skin. How it would sound, his scream.
But that’s only sometimes, and I’d never admit that to anyone else. I see what the media does to girls. It drains them, a collective vampire sucking until its mouth is a ruby smear. It drains out every detail, everything they’ve ever done. It empties the blood and goes for the vital organs. For her lungs, until she can’t breathe. Her brain, until she can’t think. Her heart, until she can’t feel.
“That cop asked me to come in again today after school,” Tabby says, as casually as if we were talking about an annoying teacher. “Stewart. The one who hates me. I’ve already told him everything I know. I mean, whatever. I have nothing to hide.”
They haven’t gotten to her yet. Maybe they’ve feasted on a bit of her blood, but she can make more. Tabby has thick skin.
I don’t get a chance to respond, because a few guys from our grade stop in front of us. Connor Lawson and Brian Hull as well as Lance Peterson, who Tabby made out with during freshman year. He told all his friends that she gave him a blow job and didn’t know what she was doing. She shrugged off the rumors like a too-big coat, but a week later, Lance got suspended for having weed in his locker. I never asked Tabby if she was responsible for putting it there.
“There she is,” Connor says. “I just have to ask. Did you do it?”
We keep walking. I give him the middle finger. Tabby laughs.
“You don’t seem too torn up about it,” Brian shouts after us. “I saw you at his funeral. You were smiling the whole time.”
They don’t know Tabby, and I do. Tabby’s mouth betrays her in little ways—not even what she says but what she doesn’t say. Her perma-smirk, as I once called it. The way she laughs at inappropriate times. I’ve seen her do it when she gets in trouble with a teacher, when her mom says This isn’t funny, Tabitha Marie.
Tabby doesn’t dignify the comments with a response. It’s not until Lance jumps in that she stops walking.
“I guess we knew what she was capable of doing. She’s already lied and cheated. We knew she could be a killer.”
She whips around and puts her hand on his chest, pushing him backward. Her nails are painted purple. Most people would say Tabby isn’t a patient person. Her temper can be an animal, forever pulling on an invisible leash. But she’s patient when it comes to her personal grooming. Her nails are always the same length, always painted, never jagged and bitten like mine.
I focus on her nails. Connor calls her a crazy bitch. A crowd is drawing closer, eager for more. I grab Tabby’s hand to tug her down the hall, but she wiggles out of my grip.
“You want a show? Here I am. Instead of hiding behind your fucking computers, say it to my face. Tell me what a terrible person I am. And what a fucking perfect person he was.”
But nobody says anything. There are a few laughs. Most people are on their phones, probably taking pictures. They’re thinking, Look. She got mad. And we all know angry girls are mentally unhinged.
And there, standing behind everyone, is Dallas. He’s maybe the only person not looking at Tabby. He’s staring at me instead. Asking me a very different question than the one everyone was too afraid to ask Tabby before today.