SOMETIMES I’M HAUNTED by Mark’s final scream. How it might have sounded, the last noise from the guy who thought the world was in his hands. A lot of these nights I wake up disgustingly sweaty, hearing him in my head, all the different versions of him. Happy Mark at parties, the guy everyone talked to. Sad Mark, when he had a sluggish day in the pool. Even drunk Mark, the good-time guy, belting lyrics to old bands I had never heard of. He knew the words to practically every song.
I wonder what he was thinking in those final moments, before he put the backpack on. Before she hugged him, kissed him, and shoved him over the edge.
Maybe he didn’t scream at all. Maybe he was too shocked to make a sound. I have no idea how long that fall would take, but the Split is high up. I went there once when I was a kid, the summer my stepdad tried to get us to become active. My legs were rubber and I got queasy looking down and I was too shit-scared to stand that close to the edge. I’m still scared of heights.
I wonder if his head made a sound when it hit the rocks. I wonder a lot of morbid shit. Mostly how Tabby looked staring down at what she had done. Her face when she realized he was still alive.
I should have been a better friend to Mark. I let that girl get in the middle of us, just like she was trying to do. She had a birthday party for him and didn’t even tell me about it. Who does something like that? She was doing everything she could to distance him from the people who actually cared, but he didn’t see it at all.
It bugged Mark that Tabby and I didn’t get along. “I don’t expect you to be best friends,” he said. “But can you at least try? She’ll be around for a while.”
He said that over Christmas break, I think, and literally a week later, when he was back at school, Tabby was in the Stop & Shop, wearing leggings and those weird slipper boots girls wear, makeup perfectly done. She didn’t bring her regular shit to the counter. No diet soda or candy or tampons. She brought a box of condoms. Magnums, if we’re keeping score.
Mark wasn’t due back from Princeton until the end of April.
She was totally daring me to say something as I rang her up, but I didn’t. She wanted to get a rise out of me, and I wasn’t giving it to her. I stuffed the condoms in a plastic bag and made sure to charge her the extra five cents for buying a bag. Sometimes I let the hot chicks get away without paying for one.
“Any plans tonight?” she said. She was baiting me. She didn’t give a shit about my plans.
“Yeah, and they’re none of your business,” I said.
“You don’t like me,” she said, then laughed. “That sucks, because he’s going to pick me every time.”
“I don’t give a shit one way or another,” I said. “Sixteen seventy-five.”
She traced her belly button through her shirt, stuck her debit card in the machine. I wondered what she looked like under all the shit she always wore, if that makeup was hiding a hideous monster underneath.
I stuck my middle finger at her back as she walked away. She looked back and winked at me. It was all a game to her. Life. Mark. Even me.
I texted Mark as soon as she left. Your gf was just here buying a giant box of condoms
He wrote back a couple hours later, when I was home. He never used to take so long to respond. I know he always wrote back to Tabby right away, always called her exactly when he said he would. If you looked up boyfriend in the dictionary, Mark’s picture would be right there.
She likes to be prepared, can’t complain about that;)
He had such a gigantic blind spot when it came to that girl. It was less a blind spot and more a goddamn eclipse.
I scrolled through my texts with girls I’d hooked up with recently. Most of them were one-night stands who insisted on swapping numbers because this was fun. I never had a reason to text them again. I was done with girlfriends, but I was also bored as hell and needed something to do.
Then there was a knock on my door, and I didn’t have to text anyone after all.
THE COLDCLIFF TRIBUNE
October 10, 2019
DNA found near dead hiker a match for girlfriend
By Julie Kerr
DNA found near the body of Mark Forrester, 20, has been positively linked to his former girlfriend, Tabitha Cousins, police indicated in a statement released yesterday. This evidence, along with a half footprint matching Cousins’s Nike shoes, near the creek bed where Forrester was found, is enough for police to formally charge Cousins.
A separate set of boot prints near the mouth of the woods has been identified as belonging to Thomas Becker Rutherford III, 17, with whom Cousins had a previous romantic relationship. Rutherford’s lawyer could not be reached for comment.