NOBODY KNOWS HOW TO ACT around Tabby anymore. It’s not house arrest, exactly—nobody is outside guarding her, unless you count the perimeter of news vans, and she doesn’t have an ankle bracelet monitoring her, like I’ve seen on TV—but our house has become her prison anyway. Last night I heard her arguing with Mom and Dad about being allowed to go back to school.
“Can’t I just live a normal life?” she pleaded.
“We think it’s best that you stay here until all this blows over.” That’s Dad—he always sounds like that when he argues. We this and we that. I’m not sure when he and Mom became this amorphous blob of we, but that’s how it is now.
“Do you think I did it?”
They don’t respond right away. Then Mom says, “Of course not, sweetie.”
She’s lying. They’re afraid. Afraid that Tabby did something. It’s like we stop being little girls anymore and they stop knowing who we are. We’re under their roof, brushing our hair, letting them kiss us good night, but something is different. We aren’t candy sweet. We’re opaque where we used to be transparent. Our skin hints at a storm, so they stay away.
My parents liked Mark. He was such a good guy. So polite. Of course, he was following Beck’s act, and Beck never had an act, so it was easy for Mark to look good. Beck never came for family dinners. He never shook Dad’s hand and promised to take care of his daughter.
I find Tabby curled up on the couch watching a movie. I’m stretching against the wall and can see what she’s reading on Mom’s iPad. A new article. The same one on BuzzFeed that Laurel and Sydney were looking at after practice. It has a clickbait title: What this girl did after fighting with her boyfriend will shock you.
Tabby’s lips are laced into a smile. She’s wearing lipstick—actually, a full face of makeup—even though she isn’t leaving the house.
At least, she says she isn’t leaving the house. But it’s not like Mom and Dad are home to keep an eye on her. Mom is a teacher at the elementary school and Dad is an orthodontist, so they’re both gone all day. Dad even did Mark’s braces, back when he was a teenager, before he was ever part of our lives. Sometimes I picture how awkward that must have been when Mark first came to the door to pick up Tabby. Dad having all that knowledge of the inside of his mouth. Dad having tortured him by tightening wires and elastics. Dad having an understanding of how that smart mouth of Mark’s worked, but still eating up every single word that came out of it.
“How can you possibly read that?” I snap. “Don’t even give that stupid website any more traffic. Do you actually want to know what they’re saying about you?”
She rolls her head back to stick out her tongue at me. “Bridge, come on. It’s better to know what they’re saying than to wonder about it. Everyone else knows. Why shouldn’t I?”
I guess she has a point. It’s her right to know. I’m a runner. I prepare for every race, every practice. She’s preparing, too. For the next time she’s at school. The so-called facts people will spew in her face. For the next time she’s at a party and some mean girl asks who she’s going to kill tonight. She wants to have all of the information, even though I’m not sure what she’s planning to do with it.
“Maybe I’ll just run away,” she says suddenly, tossing the iPad aside. “That’ll give them something new to talk about. What’s here for me anymore?” She laughs, but her eyes well up.
“You have me,” I say.
“For how much longer?” she almost whispers. “You’ll turn on me, too.” Then she grabs the iPad and stalks upstairs, slamming her bedroom door loud enough to shake the house. I have this thought, I bet the reporters outside heard that. I bet they’re spinning it into whatever web of bullshit they’ve made, with my sister stuck in the middle. Their black widow.
I text Elle when I can’t sleep because my brain keeps treading over all the things Tabby could do in her spiral. To other people. To herself.
She broke down earlier. She threatened to run away. I think she might actually do it.
Elle’s reply is almost immediate. She won’t. She has a court date. She has police to talk to. She knows it would just be trouble. Her words hold a certainty I lack, like she knows her version of Tabby better than I know mine.
I have a feeling, I type, then pause before sending the rest. I think she’s going to do something bad.
Bad how? Elle responds, but I put my phone down without answering, either because I don’t know what to say or just wish I didn’t.
The next day, Mom confiscates the iPad. Tabby’s antsy without it, walking the loop through the kitchen and living room and down the front hall a thousand times, slippered feet shuffling. “They’re not going to find anything,” she tells me. “They think I have all these secrets.”
“Do you?”
She stops walking and grips my hand almost hard enough to hurt. She painted my nails earlier in a fit of boredom and they’re still slightly tacky. She insisted on black.
“They know everything about me,” she hisses. “If they all put their dumb heads together, they’d have a whole person.”
It’s the last thing she says to me before we both go to sleep. I wake up to noise and lights and the cold certainty that as bad as things have been, they’re about to get a lot worse.