16
ELLE
I DON’T KNOW HOW THINGS changed so quickly, how Tabby went from being Mark’s widow—it’s a morbid expression, but I heard it somewhere and it stuck—to being a suspect. Or a person of interest, as she called it. Because Mark’s death is no longer considered just a tragedy, or an accident.
Mark’s death is now basically a murder.
And as far as everyone knows, there was only one person in the woods with him that night.
I don’t know if it was the YouTube video or something the police found that they haven’t disclosed, but everything’s different now. Tabby has pretty much been quarantined at her house, and they have a warrant to search her cell phone. Yesterday she called me from her parents’ landline.
“It’ll blow over,” she said, followed by a laugh. I had no idea how she could make a joke.
“What if it doesn’t?” I said. “What if they actually think you did it?”
“They already think I did it, Elle. But they won’t be able to prove a goddamn thing.”
She must be scared, under it all. She must be terrified. But Tabby never lays all her cards on the table. She rarely lets people know she’s hurting. Even me—I’m her best friend, and it’s like she still wants to protect me from something. From herself, maybe.
Lou Chamberlain is in my first-period English class. She’s nice enough to me in public and always sends me Facebook invites to her parties, but she’s the one who posted the video. She’s the reason why everyone’s eyes are on Tabby. Something like two hundred thousand sets of eyes—how many people saw that video before it was taken down? The comments still dart in front of me, the things people said. Violent. Crazy. Psycho bitch.
I told anyone who would listen that Lance provoked her. Nobody cares. They share a common enemy, and now she has been ousted.
I force myself to march up to Lou’s desk, even though I hate confrontation. “Why did you do it? Why did you post that video? Do you realize what you’ve done to Tabby?”
Lou arches a blond eyebrow. She’s pretty, in a generic way. I don’t know what Beck sees in her. Civilization, maybe. Or it could be that he just ran out of girls.
“What I’ve done? Honey, somebody had to do it. Don’t hate the messenger.”
“What do you have against her? She never did anything to you.”
Lou squints, like she’s seeing me for the first time. “Maybe you don’t know her as well as you think. Maybe she wanted it that way.”
I grip my knuckles and picture the mark they would leave on Lou’s petal skin. “What the hell are you even talking about?”
“Just—never mind. But honestly, do you think it adds up, her version of the story? Ask yourself that. All I want is justice to be served.”
“You didn’t even know Mark,” I say. She didn’t. The closest she and Mark ever got was attending a few of the same parties, with dozens of bodies between them. They’d probably never exchanged a word.
“I’m not saying I did,” she says. “But he didn’t deserve how he died.”
Sometimes—in this dark part of my brain—I think Mark planned all of this. The hike was his idea. Obviously. I mean, Tabby hated exercise. Bridget inherited all of the athletic ability in that family. Tabby and I used to joke that we were the two laziest people in existence, two overgrown house cats.
“Mark wants to go on a hike,” she told me. I think it was the Monday before he died, and we were at the Brody Community Pool. I have a pool in my backyard, but my dad hates taking care of it, so we always end up at Brody instead. I like it better there anyway. More opportunities to see and be seen.
“Does Mark know you? That’s hilarious. What did you tell him?”
She spread her towel onto a lounger. “I told him I didn’t have hiking shoes.”
I sat down beside Tabby and kicked off my flip-flops. “And then what?”
“Then he said don’t worry about it. That I could just wear a pair of Bridge’s running shoes. I should take an interest in his hobbies, right? He says his coach is on him to do some cross-training outside of the pool. Like, work on his leg strength or whatever.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But does he take an interest in yours?”
I couldn’t see Tabby’s eyes behind her sunglasses, but I imagined she was rolling them. “What, he should support all the reality TV we watch? It’s not like I’m on a sports team. Or ever will be.”
I knew I wasn’t going to win this argument. I didn’t want to have an argument. Tabby and I barely ever fought, but when we did, we were two opposing storm fronts, both hurtling too fast to turn back first. Besides, we were still in the frosty aftermath of my confession from last week, because Tabby wanted to pretend I never told her the things I’d whispered in the dark. It was easier that way.
I saw him with another girl. It was dark. I couldn’t tell if they were kissing but their heads were really close—
“Oh, great,” Tabby said, stretching out her legs. “We’re being watched.”
I sucked in a breath when I saw who was watching us. Lou. She was wearing a high-waisted polka dot bikini, a knockoff of something I remembered seeing Taylor Swift wear in her Kennedy phase. Basically everything about Lou was an imitation of somebody else.
“Just ignore her,” I said, grabbing my water bottle, wishing it was filled with something stronger.
“I’m surprised she went anywhere without her boyfriend,” Tabby said, making the word sound hideous.
“She didn’t,” I mumbled. Because there was Beck, ridiculously out of place somewhere bright and loud like this. He was in profile and staring through the chain-link fence that surrounded the pool.
Tabby laughed. “I guess he doesn’t own swim trunks.”
I thought of what was underneath Beck’s T-shirt. The tattoos. Somebody who was willing to put so many things on his skin wouldn’t be like every other boy. Unwilling to commit to anything more than a blow job at a party.
But I was wrong about Beck. I imagined him being tamed by some mysterious powers I never had. I felt his hand covering mine, his hair falling onto my face as he fused kisses to my forehead. Maybe his silence was my favorite thing about him, his ability to be quiet when everyone else was loud. I filled in that silence with what I wanted to hear. I liked my own fiction more than the reality of who he really is. And I let my own fiction ruin everything.
“So you’re actually going on this hike?” I ventured, because anything was better than thinking about Beck.
Tabby stared up at the sky. At first I thought she was ignoring me, then her words landed with a thud. “I’d do anything for him, Elle. Like, anything at all. Sometimes it scares me.”
Tabby is a romantic—that’s something most people don’t know about her. If you’ve ever been in a class with her, you probably think she doesn’t pay attention, because she never puts her hand up to answer any questions. She makes fun of girls who love romantic comedies, girls who ditch their friends when they get a boyfriend, but she’s one of them. She wants the great love story.
I suspected Mark didn’t want the same thing. But I never knew what he wanted instead, or what he expected Tabby to do in the woods with him that day. Or what he tried to do when she wouldn’t do it.
Now Lou isn’t paying attention to me anymore—she’s staring at her face in a Sephora makeup mirror. “Maybe he did deserve it,” I say as the bell rings, my voice drowned out by the din. “Maybe he deserved worse.”
