MAYBE YOU’RE WONDERING who Dallas is, and how he fits into this. He shouldn’t fit into this at all, but I listened to Tabby, so now the three of us are part of it.
Dallas is a year younger than us—a junior—but you wouldn’t know it by looking at him. He’s tall and rangy, long-legged. Actually, everything about him is long.
(Wait, I didn’t mean that in a dirty way. If Tabby were here, she would have laughed. A sexual innuendo never goes over her head. I wish she was here.)
Anyway, the other thing about him is he’s nice. There was a bird with a broken wing in our backyard, and I took it in a shoebox to the animal sanctuary over on Waverly. Dallas volunteers there. He somehow fixed the bird, then found me at school and asked if I wanted to be there when he set it free.
I’m sure there’s some kind of metaphor here. A boy and a girl and a broken bird that had to relearn how to fly. But if there’s a meaning, I can’t find it. Because of the three of us, the bird was the only one who came out healed.
“Elle. Elle, hey. Can you please talk to me?” He catches up with me in the parking lot as I’m walking to Mom’s car.
“I have nothing to say. You made it clear exactly what you think of me.”
“I was pissed off, okay? But you didn’t even give me a chance to explain.”
I spin around to face him. “Why should I give you the chance to explain anything? You weren’t there.”
“Yeah, because you wouldn’t let me be. Elle, you know I like you, right? I still like you. But you shut me out.”
It’s always the people you don’t care about hearing from who have all the right words. The ones you need. It’s like life designed them to come from the wrong mouths. Life designed everything wrong to come from my mouth.
“Just leave me alone,” I say, turning away, my eyes blurry. He’s wearing his Nirvana T-shirt, the one I teased him about, because I don’t think he can name a single Nirvana song.
“I know you’re going through a lot,” he says. “With Tabby in juvie and everything—”
And everything.
Mark died. Tabby got arrested.
If I had stayed closed, none of it would have happened.
PEOPLE.COM
October 16, 2019
Was there another woman in the Blue-Eyed Boyfriend Killer case?
By Talia Sims
Multiple sources allege that Tabitha Cousins, 17, had a bitter vendetta against her boyfriend, former Princeton student and champion swimmer Mark Forrester, who died on August 16 under suspicious circumstances. Cousins is currently being held in police custody at a juvenile detention center.
Several sources state that while Forrester was at Princeton and Tabby was attending Coldcliff Heights High School, she suspected that he was cheating on her. One student, who wishes to remain nameless, said that Cousins even made a special trip to Princeton to catch Forrester in the act.
“She crashed this party he was at and pulled him away. It was super awkward,” the student states. “And Mark was just friends with that girl.”
That girl, according to Forrester’s now-deleted Instagram, was Madeleine Swanson, 20, a junior at Princeton. Swanson could not be reached for comment. One of Forrester’s friends, who reached out to us anonymously, said Cousins was jealous of every girl Mark ever talked to.
“He didn’t cheat,” the friend said. “He treated her like gold. But she never believed that. She hated all those other girls. She used to talk about things happening to them. Bad things.”
Since this speculation started up, Swanson’s roommate, Gloria Wheaton, said Swanson has received death threats from Cousins’s legion of fans, known on social media as the Tabby Cats.
“They need to leave Maddie alone,” Wheaton said when reached by phone. “She didn’t do anything wrong. If Mark did cheat with someone, it wasn’t Maddie.”
The story continues to develop as Cousins’s trial has been slated for early December. If tried as an adult, she faces life in prison.
Excerpt from Tabby’s Diary
November 5, 2018
I thought my boyfriend would be happy that I surprised him, but he was just fuming. He didn’t even want to touch me. All I want him to do is love me the way I love him. He accused me of keeping tabs on him. The truth is, sometimes I feel like I’m being watched. Like Mark has eyes here somehow.