13

KEEGEN

“WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING AT?” Kyla asks. She comes up behind me when I’m sitting on my old corduroy couch and wraps her arms around my neck. A Kyla necklace, she once called it. Feels more like a noose.

“Nothing.” I shut my laptop.

(I was watching the video, again. It keeps popping up on different sites. And yeah, that’s the real her. I’m so glad somebody had the balls to post it. I guess it was some chick at Tabby’s school. I wonder what Tabby did to piss her off.)

Let me guess. You fell for it. You thought Tabby had nothing to do with what happened to Mark. I guess I can’t be that hard on you. I mean, lots of people fell for it. There’s this Facebook group, the Tabby Cats, all about how she’s getting shit on in the media. I think it’s mostly horny guys hoping to have a chance with her. I bet they’ll write her letters in prison if she ends up there.

I sure as hell hope she does.

I can tell a very different story about Tabby Cousins, from the day they met to the day Mark died. That day, Mark knew something was up. He fucking knew.

I can show you the last text he ever sent me, before they left on that hike. I already showed the police, even though I knew it wouldn’t prove shit. He didn’t mention Tabby, but he didn’t have to.

How is that not fucking ominous?

Tabby didn’t even like doing anything outdoors, unless it was smoking up outside at a party. Then all of a sudden she wanted to go for a hike. Even suggested the Mayflower Trail, which is long and steep and leads up to this lookout point. Mark told me when she first mentioned it, rolling his eyes like he knew it was never going to happen, just like it never happened when Tabby said she would stop drinking or stop being jealous of every girl Mark looked at.

“We should go out or something,” Kyla says. She always wants to go out. I mean, I used to like that about her—she’s outgoing, and yeah, she’s blond and tanned and I’m sure a lot of guys have liked that about her. But she seems to conveniently forget that I work at a grocery store and can’t exactly afford to take her on dates. Besides, there’s nowhere for us to go in Coldcliff. Just a sketchy eastside bar where bikers hang out and some downtown restaurants that cost way too much.

I should be focusing on my own relationship here, but whatever. Somebody has to tell the truth about Tabby, so I’m your guy.

I never liked her. It’s not a secret. She was a bad idea. I figured she was something Mark had to get out of his system. And yeah, I understood the appeal. High school girls, you get to be a man around them. You get to be their college guy fantasy. Don’t crucify me for saying that either, because you know you were thinking the same thing. And honestly, we didn’t even know she was in high school at first, because that was one of her very first lies. Her and Elle, barely wearing any clothes, but covered in a shit ton of makeup. Who dresses like that for mini golf? Mark and Tabby argued all night. I knew he was turned on. Mark was on the rebound, fresh out of a relationship with this chick Sasha who never had anything to say. Mark wanted a fight.

The end of the night—Mark and Tabby in the back of my shitty Civic, practically clawing each other’s skin off. Me and Elle sitting in the front seats like the parental chaperones. I could almost hear Mark in my ear, telling me to put a move on Elle, and normally I would have because she was there, and she probably would have gone for it, but I just had this feeling that if I did, it would end badly. So I kept my hands to myself.

Mark didn’t. He was always touching Tabby. His hands on her shoulders, cupping her ass, tilting her head back to kiss her. “Dude, she might actually be the one,” he told me when he was drunk.

I’ve talked to the cops twice. There are at least two of them on the case—Detective Stewart is the one I trust. He’s the one who knows Tabby did it. He keeps asking me questions about their relationship, and the more I talk, the more I realize how fucked up it really was.

They were always fighting, constantly on the verge of breaking up. It was their thing. You know that couple you never want to hang out with, because you know they’re going to be at each other’s throats all night? Well, that was Tabby and Mark. She’d yell at him and he’d make some comment he knew would get her all riled up, usually something about all these big plans he had for when he graduated from college, and they’d get into it, right in front of everyone.

“You’re a fucking dumbass,” she said once. “You think you know everything. Well, you don’t.”

Mark stayed silent, which pissed her off even more.

“Just wait,” she spat. “Something’s going to happen that you didn’t see coming.”

Looking back, everything she said was a thinly veiled threat. Mark made it sound like the hike was pretty spontaneous, but I know she had been planning the whole thing, probably for way longer than anyone could have suspected.

You’re wondering why I didn’t say anything, if I knew Tabby was going to do something like that. But it went the other way, too. When they didn’t want to rip out each other’s throats, they wanted to rip off each other’s clothes. It was like whatever fueled their relationship was dialed up to the max. They didn’t know how else to be except extreme.

“Why don’t you just end it?” I said to Mark more than once. He always had the same answer.

“I can’t just get rid of that girl. You don’t understand.”

I hated that last part. You don’t understand. Like Mark felt something deeper than I ever had, or maybe ever would.

Stewart asked me what that text really meant, the last one Mark ever sent. “Was Mark planning on breaking up with Tabitha?” Those were his exact words, like an awkward parent probing for information about your relationship.

“I don’t know,” I told him. “He said he was a couple weeks ago. Then he changed his mind. It was hard to keep track.”

Mark really did say he was going to do it. At a party, the week before he died.

“She’s a lot to handle,” he told me at the end of the night, when Tabby was crying in the bathroom. “I think I should just break up with her. Start the year without any baggage.”

Then he didn’t bring it up again. Maybe he thought they could fix it. Mark was big on fixing shit that other people would have just thrown out. When we first got our driver’s licenses, he liked to cruise around looking for the shit people put out at the curb on garbage day. Tables missing legs and old dishwashers and stained armchairs that looked like they’d been punched in the overstuffed gut. I’d help him load up the back of his dad’s truck, and when we got back to his house, we’d lug everything into the basement, where he’d make magic happen. One day he wanted to turn it into a side business. You know, when he wasn’t busy being a hotshot lawyer.

So it’s no wonder he thought he could fix Tabby, fix whatever they had that was so deep and so worth saving. He was too blinded by whatever power she had over him that he couldn’t see what the rest of us already knew. That the girl is broken.

His cause of death was drowning, and now there’s a backpack. The fall didn’t kill him, but that stupid creek did. It doesn’t make any sense. Mark was a champion swimmer, and he never would have drowned. Something else killed him. Someone.

“I’m bored,” Kyla says in the pouty voice she uses that she thinks is cute. “Come play with me.”

I don’t want to play with her. But I also don’t want her getting too far away.