I THINK IT WAS HOMECOMING when it all started to fall apart between Mark and Tabby. Yeah, like, three months in, that’s when relationships start to get tough. I’m not being sarcastic. This is why I don’t do girlfriends. Although now Kyla keeps asking me what we are, and I know what she wants to hear, but I just want to tell her we’re humans, and we’re basically another kind of animal.
But at homecoming, Mark had this whole thing planned for Tabby, this romantic dinner the night before the football game. Then a few hours later I got a text saying he wanted to go out, so I figured they had yet another fight. We went to some house party. He drank, but not as much as I did. When I asked him what happened to his big date, he just let out this giant sigh. “She’s not returning my texts. I have no idea who she is.” He slapped his head. “I mean, where she is.”
“Tons of girls here,” I said, gesturing around. It was the same old crew, mostly seniors from Coldcliff Heights and some leftovers like me, trapped between high school and the Real World that comes after it, but they’d be new to Mark, at least a body to keep him warm.
“But you don’t get it,” he said, sitting on the arm of a dingy brown couch. His arms were giant, like they were about to hulk out of his shirt. My body used to look like that, once upon a time, when I swam and worked out with Mark. Not anymore. “I don’t want tons of girls. I want her.”
But why, I wanted to ask. Sure, Tabby was hot, but so were most of the girls there. She must have been magic in bed or something. Maybe she could unhinge her jaw. Mark was too good a guy to ever talk about shit like that with me, not like the guys at the Stop & Shop. Tabby came in a lot to get random stuff. Diet soda, makeup remover, sometimes girl shit like tampons. She always wore the same tiny pajama shorts and tank top with no bra, almost like she was daring the poor guy cashing her out to picture what she looked like naked.
I tried telling Mark once, and he just laughed. “Typical Tabby. She hates getting dressed if she doesn’t have to. Come on, haven’t you ever left the house in your pajamas because you were too lazy to change?”
That was when I knew he had picked a side. That was when I knew there were sides to be taken at all.
I’m not gonna say what happened later that night. I mean, I was pretty wasted, and I lost track of Mark. I have no clue how he got home, and apparently I left the party without my shoes, because I woke up the next day with the soles of my feet black, my socks in a wrung-out clump on the carpet, two dirty snakes. There was a strange girl in my bed, and I didn’t think about Mark at all until he texted me later to say he was heading back to school early to get more time at the pool.
When I got around to responding, I asked him if he’d ever heard from Tabby, and he answered with one word. No.
I figured they were over. I hoped they were. I wanted Mark to go back to Princeton and find a girl his age, maybe one who was also super into sports and understood him. Mark wasn’t a guy who complained, but he’d told me a few times that Tabby just didn’t get it, all the hours he had to spend in the pool, at the gym.
“She wants to talk every single night,” he said. “She doesn’t get that I’m in bed by nine and up at four. I woke up today to seventeen missed calls from her, and a nasty text.”
I asked him to read me the text, so he did. It was long. Something along the lines of I know you’re out with another girl and that’s why you’re ignoring me, well if you’re gonna do that to me I can do that to you too, two can play that game, motherfucker. You think you’re so smart but I’m onto you.
“Just dump her,” I said. It was like talking to a kid, trying to explain the multiplication tables to somebody who just didn’t get it. “She’s crazy, dude.”
“But she’s not,” he said. “She’s just … had a rough past. Guys have lied to her a lot. And I love her. I just wish she trusted me.”
I knew—seriously, mark my words—I knew then that the rough past was bullshit. Tabby is the type of girl I know well. Basic upper-middle-class suburban white trash, made up of Starbucks cups and makeup and diet drinks and size-two dresses that are too short. She’s the type who likes to claim bad stuff has happened to her, but let’s face it, the so-called bad stuff—she’s the root of all of it. She’s the common denominator. And Mark fell for it. Weird, because usually I’m the one whose type is bad-news girls. He was new to it, didn’t know he was trapped, which was maybe why he didn’t even want to find a way out.
Now, they’re saying Tabby didn’t do this alone. That there was another guy, some poor sucker who was in on it with her. And I think I might know who it was.