TABBY IS A MESS. Her face is puffy and her eyes are red, and she looks smaller, somehow, sitting across from me at the detention center, her shoulders hunched under lank hair. Maybe it’s the absence of me that makes her smaller. Her shadow doesn’t take up as much space without me by her side.
“Has anyone else come to see you?” I ask. I know the answer before finishing the question. I had to get approved to come for a visit, and driving up to the complex of buildings, squat like trolls, made me want to turn around and head home. Getting past security and marching down a narrow corridor, shoes squeaking, made me feel like a criminal, as if the walls themselves were breathing in my secrets. People would rather hide behind their computers than make that walk.
She laughs dryly. “My parents. Bridge. Who else would come? I don’t have anyone.”
That’s the irony. She doesn’t have anyone, but she has the whole world on her back, bending her in half under the weight of its collective suspicion.
“Are you okay? Like, actually okay? I think about you—” I cut myself off before I make it worse. Of course she’s not okay. And it’s partly my fault.
“I’m fine,” she says. “I like to pretend I’m just living in a shithole apartment with a bunch of bitchy wannabe actresses.” She sucks in a breath of stale air. “Home sweet home.”
She wants me to laugh—she needs me to laugh, to know she’s okay, and I do, even though it’s not funny. This room is gray and windowless and the girls in it, dotted at other tables across from their own visitors, are all wary eyes and drawn faces, blending into the somberness. Maybe after enough time, this place will soak Tabby in like another one of its stains. I can’t let that happen.
“What are they saying about me?” She pulls her hair over her shoulder. “I need to know. Tell me everything.”
“Nothing,” I say. “I mean, everyone has their own stuff to worry about. They’re not talking as much as they used to.”
“You’re lying,” she says, bringing her hands together in a knot. “I could always tell.”
Not always.
“They think Beck had something to do with it. I don’t know. This is all going to blow over, you know, right? Obviously Beck won’t say anything.”
She arches an eyebrow. “Say anything about what? I thought there was nothing to talk about.”
I hold her eye contact for two seconds, three. Those eyes, always bright, always unnatural. I’m the one who looks away first.
“You’ll be out soon, Tabby. Fuck everyone. They just have nothing better to talk about.”
Suddenly she leans across the table and grabs my wrists, almost hard enough to hurt. We’re not supposed to touch—one of the guards is coming over now. They see everything.
“Make it stop,” she says. “Do something to make it stop.”
I can’t, I want to say. It’s only when I’m watching her retreating, as she’s dragged back to wherever she came from, that I realize maybe there is something I can do.