WE STOPPED BEING A FOURSOME pretty shortly after Mark’s birthday party, which Tabby convinced me to host at my house so everyone could use the pool. Keegan—who wasn’t even at the party—suddenly had this blond girl hanging all over him on Instagram, and they started hanging out with Tabby and Mark, and I got boxed out. Four’s company, five’s a crowd. Which meant instead of seeing Tabby almost every day, I barely saw her at all.
Keegan gave me a parting gift, though. I went to the Stop & Shop and ended up in his checkout lane since it was the only one open. I was content to act like strangers, but he had another idea.
“They need to break up,” he said. “They’re toxic. I’ve tried. Tell her you saw him kissing another girl at your last party. Just tell her, and she’ll believe you.”
My last party. Mark’s birthday. I wondered if Keegan was absent for a different reason than just avoiding me.
“I’m not going to lie to her.” I crossed my arms. “It’s a lie, right?”
He didn’t answer, just told me I owed eleven seventy-six and asked how I’d be paying.
I don’t know what went on between the four of them, if they went on double dates, or stayed home and watched movies, or retreated to different rooms to make out. I didn’t know if I cared. I saw the monogrammed wedding napkins in my head. Keegan and Kyla. I wondered how long they knew each other before his hand went to her bare leg, drawn to all that flesh like some kind of magnet.
It’s pathetic to admit, but I wanted school to start again. I wanted Mark to go back to Princeton and Keegan to disappear from our lives, because they came as a package deal. I wanted it to be me and Tabby again. I’d have the real Tabby, not the phony version who took her place. The last few times I saw her, she was acting totally weird, like she was being programmed to say certain things. We did this and we did that. She never had time for me.
Mark was leaving for Princeton on August twenty-sixth. I marked—no pun intended—it in my calendar, a countdown, like I used to do for Christmas as a kid. It wasn’t him leaving that I needed so much as Tabby returning.
There were three weeks to go in the countdown when my phone started vibrating in the middle of the night. I always kept it adjacent to my pillow when I slept, like it was my pet or something. I guess I didn’t want to miss anything important.
With sleep-blurred eyes, I swiped the screen. I figured it was a text. Nobody ever called me. Even Tabby barely texted anymore, preferring to Snap, preferring that all of our conversations vanish. But it was a call, and it was from her, and when I picked up, her voice was desperate and panicked.
“Hey,” she said. “I really need to see you, okay? Everything’s just so messed up and I don’t know what to do.”
“Slow down,” I said. “Where are you? What happened?”
“I’m in your front yard. Can you come down and let me in?”
I crept down the stairs and into the foyer. As soon as I unlocked the door she was inside, breathing heavy, eyes and hair wild. She had been crying.
“What happened?” I whispered. “What did he do?”
She shook her head, clung to me, buried her face in the shoulder of my T-shirt. “What didn’t he do?”
I led her upstairs, as if she hadn’t been here before, and the two of us got into my bed, just like we did when we were younger and had sleepovers, even though Tabby used to bring a sleeping bag and roll it onto the floor. She always got cold. She always needed to be close.
“What happened tonight?” I said again when we were tucked under the duvet, her cigarette-and-alcohol smell sharp. “Tell me everything.”
She stared at the ceiling with glassy eyes. “We talked about this summer,” she said, and it was as if those words dried up her tears, because her voice stopped being broken. “We talked about being together. Everything’s just so messed up, and I don’t know what to do.”
“Break up with him,” I said. The words I had been dying to say for weeks, months, shooting off my tongue like darts. “He doesn’t deserve you.”
She laughed, a crescendo sound that I was afraid would wake up my parents. “Break up with him. We’re not even together.”
Mark’s social media. How her face was barely on it. How it was like she ceased to exist in his public life. Tabby, his dirty little secret, the place his dick camped out for the summer. He was going back to parties and nameless girls in college classrooms who cheered at his swim meets and followed him to bars with their fake IDs. He didn’t need Tabby anymore.
“I need to tell you something,” I blurted out, not even sure exactly how I was going to say it. “I saw Mark. Kissing a girl at his birthday party. I don’t even know who she was. I wanted to tell you, but I didn’t know how.”
“It’s not true,” she said. “He wouldn’t do that to me.”
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “But you can find someone who really loves you.”
She rolled away from me, curled into a ball, and I thought she was asleep, but I know what I heard next. I already have. I stared at her back, at the white curve of her neck, and she didn’t look breakable anymore, not like porcelain but something that wouldn’t shatter. And the next morning when I woke up, she was gone, and I wondered if I made the whole night up.
Excerpt from Tabby’s Diary
August 6, 2019
It’s like all of my worst nightmares are coming true. I trust Elle, and she told me she saw Mark kissing another girl. He couldn’t even wait to leave the party to do it. She thinks I should break up with him, but it’s not that easy. It never is.
SHARP EDGES CRIME—
CUT TO THE TRUTH!
November 12, 2019
Cheaters never prosper …
By Oberon Halton
… but they don’t deserve to die either.
So apparently there’s proof out there that Mark was a cheater. It’s in some Instagram photos that have since been deleted (although somebody was wise enough to take some screenshots before the account was taken down—thank you, friend)! I’ve seen the photos, and I must say, he does look awfully cozy, not just with the Madeleine girl everyone is pouncing on, but some other girls, too. And this was posted out there for everybody to see. Almost like he was daring Tabby to notice and do something about it. Now Tabby is being made out to be a girl with a serious jealous streak, on top of everything else.
One of our readers wrote in privately in response to my last article. He or she asked to remain nameless, but suggested that Tabby might have been so aggressively on Mark about cheating because she was doing the same thing to him, and it was an attempt to save face.
Readers, weigh in—how far have you gone to avenge a cheating boyfriend or girlfriend? What’s the punishment they really deserve?
COMMENTS
DarkRoastCoffee: Tabby was definitely cheating on Mark. The question isn’t whether or not she was. The question is with how many guys, because I don’t think it was just with Beck.