IF YOU FEEL LIKE you’ve spent some time with me and still don’t know me very well—that’s fair. I keep people at a distance. Even Tabby. She doesn’t know everything, and it’s better that way.
I see her as often as I can. Today, I show up with powdered doughnuts from Milky’s Variety—her favorite. She has makeup on, even though she doesn’t leave her house. There’s a news van camped out by the curb. I shoot my middle finger at it before cutting through the gate and knocking on the glass patio doors.
“You’re the only one who visits,” Tabby whines, reaching down and taking a doughnut. “It’s like everyone forgot about me.”
I wonder if that’s true. Not that everyone forgot, because obviously nobody did, but whether I’m really the only one.
“You’re too good to me,” she says, brushing white powder from her lips. “I owe you big-time. The next time you’re a person of interest in a possible murder, I’ll bring you doughnuts, too.”
I smile, but the truth is, I’m the one who owes her.
I’m not ready to tell my truth. So I’ll keep telling Tabby’s.
The first time Tabby and Mark had sex was at my house. We were all downstairs playing video games, then she said she was going to get a drink, and he followed her. I was left with Keegan—sometimes I got left with Keegan when we hung out. I didn’t have a problem with him or anything, but it was like we were expected to hook up by default, and he really wasn’t my type.
So eventually I went upstairs to see where Tabby was. I called into the kitchen, but she wasn’t there. Then I heard a noise coming from my bedroom. I walked up and stopped abruptly. They hadn’t even bothered to fully close the door. Mark was on top of her, and her hands were wrapped around him, digging into his skin. He said something I couldn’t quite make out, but it sounded a lot like “You’re mine.”
They had known each other for five days.
It wasn’t that I was judging Tabby for having sex with a guy she didn’t know all that well. But that comment was super creepy and possessive. You’re mine. I knew Tabby would have seen it as romantic. It was an embrace. A promise. She wanted somebody who wanted her, needed somebody who needed her. She became a mirror for whoever she was with.
I closed the door. I went back downstairs to where Keegan was sitting. He had paused his video game, which was unheard of.
“What’s up?” he said.
“Nothing.” I sat down on the couch, leaving an entire cushion between us.
“Are they fucking?”
I stared at my jeans, feeling my cheeks turn red. “I don’t know.”
He laughed, but it wasn’t a nice laugh. “Yeah, you do. Get used to it. This is his pattern.”
I curled my legs underneath me, wanting to make myself as small as possible. Ever since I became aware of my body, I was always trying to take up less space. “What do you mean, his pattern?”
Keegan picked up the controller without looking at me. “He meets a girl. He gets obsessed with her. She messes up, and it all blows up.” Some kind of explosion happened on the TV screen, followed by two red words in the middle. Game over.
I wanted to tell Tabby everything he had said. It was something she needed to hear before she got invested and fell too hard for Mark. But later that night, when the boys were gone, I could tell I was too late. She had already fallen.
“He’s so amazing, Elle,” she said as we walked to Reid’s Ice Cream. A blanket of humidity hung in the air, making her hair curl around her ears. “You know when you meet someone, and he’s the one? Well, I think Mark might be the one.”
I don’t think so, I wanted to say. I was sure that Tabby was one in a string of girls that Mark liked to play with. Maybe he only went after her in the first place because he suspected she was in high school. That she didn’t know any better.
“Great,” I said instead. “I’m happy for you.” I reminded myself that Mark was a summer fling. He was going back to Princeton for his second year. He’d be in New Jersey, almost two thousand miles from Coldcliff, Colorado.
“We’re going to Skype every night,” Tabby told me at the end of the summer. “I even bought some new bras and stuff. You know, to keep it interesting.”
I could tell she was panicking inside. Her face did that thing where her eyes told a different story than her mouth. She was worried about the college girls. The ones at Mark’s swim meets, the ones sitting in front of him in class, the ones at parties, bra straps slipping down their bare shoulders as they chugged cheap beer. Mark had probably promised her she was the only girl for him. You’re mine.
Things would get better when Mark went back to school. Tabby would go back to normal. Maybe they would break up, and maybe they wouldn’t, but he wouldn’t be all she thought about.
“You’re my only friend, you know,” Tabby says now. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
I return her hug, hoping she doesn’t feel the tension coiled in my shoulders. Because I have a feeling that without me, things would be a whole lot easier for her.
SHARP EDGES CRIME—
CUT TO THE TRUTH!
September 24, 2019
Tabitha Cousins: Good girl gone bad?
By Oberon Halton
The internet is buzzing about Tabitha Cousins, the 17-year-old arrested for the murder of her boyfriend after a hiking accident. Now wherever you look, there’s someone saying something new about Tabby, as she’s known to family and friends. A source close to her revealed exclusively to me that Tabby was having doubts about her relationship, but didn’t know how to end it.
“She was scared of what he might do,” said the source, who asked not to be identified.
This presents an interesting dichotomy. Tabby’s case has proved especially polarizing in the media, gaining recent traction on big news sites. A Facebook group that now has nearly 40,000 members is called the Tabby Cats. But a rival group, Remember Mark Forrester, is full of people who claim Tabby wanted him dead. A lot of commenters are comparing Tabby’s case to that of Amanda Knox. On one website, she was given the nickname “Blue-Eyed Boyfriend Killer,” which seems to have stuck.
Readers have asked me what I think, and honestly, I’m torn here. I’m new to the scene and it means a lot that you trust my opinion. At first I looked at Tabby and thought: guilty, guilty, guilty. Then I started thinking more about it. Recent speculation that it may have been a suicide pact gone wrong actually holds weight with me. Maybe Mark went through with it, and she backed out. I definitely think she knows more than she’s saying, but maybe because she’s protecting him.
My DMs are open to discuss, and feel free to leave a comment or reach out to me if you know anything about this case.
COMMENTS
PenIsABitch Suicide pact? Hell yes. I said that from the start. It’s only a matter of time until they find her backpack.
Ares: She’s protecting somebody, but it’s not Mark. No way did that girl do it alone.