I went to the café, a familiar independent near the flat, still fizzing and lightheaded. On autopilot, I had to sit down. The barista Zanna always asked me to flirt with waved at me as I came in. I breathlessly sat down and pulled my laptop from my bag and put it in front of me on the table, not even turning it on. What had I done? I’d jumped from a ledge, I’d taken the fucking red pill. Nothing was ever going to be the same again. God, I was high. Colours brighter, sounds louder, the light so bright. Everything and nothing whizzed through my head. I chewed my lip. I jumped out of my skin when the barista appeared, by my side.
“The usual?” he asked, a smile highlighting those rugged cheek lines.
“Yes, please,” I breathed.
“You good?”
He was always so cheerful.
“Oh yeah, swamped with work. Do you mind if I get through some of it here?”
“Mi casa, su casa,” he said, opening his arms out and winking. “Take as long as you need.”
I waited till I saw him, Shane, leaving the Tube station. Like I anticipated, he’d left the bodybuilding convention after receiving those texts, his heavy gym bag swinging from his shoulder with the momentum of his pace. I waited a while, but in the end, I couldn’t resist. I followed him. I wanted to be there, to see it all implode. Let’s see her talk her way out of this. I wanted to see Zanna’s life crumble like mine. Not to see it come to an end.
It was quiet in the flat. It wasn’t unusual for it to be, but in this circumstance I was not expecting silence. The peal of emptiness rings clear in my memory of that day now. Where I expected shouts, there was nothing at all. Not a sound.
What I found instead of a couple in meltdown, a breakup taking place soap-style. Shane, so pale his lips were practically purple, stood in the hallway, stock-still, petrified.
“I didn’t mean it,” he said. All at once it felt cold in the flat, shockingly cold. Like when clouds pass overhead on a summer day and the colours of the world fade, a moody Instagram filter of greys. I moved down the hall, elongated like a nightmare tunnel, slowly.
“Shane.” It wasn’t a whisper. I couldn’t breathe. “What is it?”
He sputtered, sudden, explosive, uncontrolled spittle and tears on his chin. He shook his head, eyes squeezed shut like a child. I think I knew what I would see. No, I knew. I knew the moment I saw Shane in the hall. Still, like that. Terrified, like that. He was never like that. Not even after he had shouted, lashed out, thrown something, broken something. That was embarrassment. That was contrition. This was pure fear, and nothing frightens more than that primal, gasping, muscle-tensing, hair-on-arm-erecting fear in someone else’s eyes.
I walked a couple of steps across the hall and opened the kitchen door. My brain carried on with its usual functioning as my stomach sank. When you see a dead body, you know instinctively exactly what it is or, at least, your body does. Deep down in a part of us kept separate from our intellect, older and far more powerful, fear and threat can stop you in your tracks as the beast seizes control of your circuitry. It takes a while for your brain to catch up.
On her back, Zanna looked like she’d been laid out there. So perfectly beautiful, even in this moment. It was hard to imagine anything about her wasn’t by design, difficult to reconcile anything about Zanna being outside of her control. Calm, almost composed, she could have been napping or sunbathing on a billionaire’s yacht. Except for the blood that seeped from her head, turning her hair into squid ink linguine. Snow White pale, with a glass case around her, she could have been waiting for true love’s kiss.
On legs not at all like mine, I moved over to Zanna. She wore her wishbone necklace, given to her by her mother. Symbolising luck, it still glinted in the sunlight, unaware of the irony, sitting innocently in the little hollow dip above where the collarbones meet. It took some time for it to feel real, to feel anything other than ice cold. All my faculties came back into play at once. My body tingled.
Shane breathed in a deep, shuddering breath, huge barrel chest in overdrive.
“Is she dead?” he asked.
“I think so,” I said.
At the sound of my voice, Zanna’s flickering eyes opened. She defied expectations once more. Her eyelids fluttered like bird hearts and her chest rose and fell, if unsteadily. She gurgled, her chest like a drain. She wheezed my name. Hardly audible. But I heard the “P” as her fading pink lips formed it, and the rasp of the vowel. For a moment, it was as though a patriarch called me to his bedside for the final time. I was compelled to step forward, closer, five steps with my numb feet. I stood above her. Deep brown eyes darker than ever, voids endless, wells without bottoms.
I stepped out of the way of any blood. She spoke to me.
“Paige,” she tried to say. Her eyes oozed tears, tinged pink by her blood. She smiled. Blood seeped between and around her teeth, her perfect white veneers. She must have bitten her tongue on the way down. She saw behind me and Shane, and tried to raise an arm to point. I shook my head.
“Zanna, don’t move. Don’t move.”
She dropped her hand. Closed her eyes and tried to breathe. She moved her mouth to form more words.
“What, Zanna?”
“Ambulance.”
I got it the second time, despite the hiss of her fragile breath and slurring, bleeding tongue.
Her jaw shuddered with cold; she was losing blood rapidly. Shane shook his head. Tears fell from his eyes as he struggled to take shuddering breaths. “Oh my God, oh my God,” he repeated to himself, under his breath. He held his arms around himself, using muscles for comfort now, wrapping his hands around himself for relief.
“What did you do?” I ask.
He sank to a crouch, his back against the wall, cowering in the dim hallway, out of the sunlight. His voice a crushed whine, he struggled to speak.
“I didn’t mean to,” he said. “I’m sorry. He spoke through huge, constricted breaths. “She said she didn’t. She said she would never. She lied. I showed her the pictures you sent me—” He paused here as his whole body shook. “And then—”
He let out a groan like an animal. Preverbal. His wet face turned inside out with sorrow. As grief cracked Shane in half, the multi-note sound he emitted a song of grief — but for Zanna or himself? It hit me like a kick in the gut, and my body responded. I put my hands to my face, and a sob came up like vomit. I wiped tears away and waited for Shane to catch his breath, which was getting away from him. He took little gasps of air where he could, coming up to breathe from dark water. When he’d regained a semblance of control, he squeezed out the words.
“She said she did, so I—”
He mimicked the pushing. The push that did this. How hard must it have been? Then he sobbed again, lost to the agony.
“Jesus, Shane,” I breathed, to no one.
Zanna held on to life. Her shivering intensified, lips bluer and bluer with each of those elongated, mutilated, freak of physics moments. So long and so short. So tangible, and yet they slipped through my fingers like glitter. In that way, this, the last moments, were like those early days of our friendship. Her breathing quickened and shallowed as she watched me, panicking. Her brow furrowed and her lips pulled down at the sides.
Her eyes said, Paige, what the fuck are you doing? Call me a fucking ambulance.
She said it again, this time with more force, defying her ebbing body.
“Ambulance.”
Even as she needed me, she looked at me like that. With a sort of incredulous, sneering frustration. Like I was an idiot, or a child doing something wrong. I rocked back on my heels and breathed. I could call an ambulance and save her. Or, save him. I looked at Shane. He looked back at me.
“You’ll go to prison,” I told him.
He shook his head. “I can’t, I can’t. Oh my God, Paige, I can’t.”
Zanna’s brown, endless, fathomless eyes. Her face. Her lips, all filled with Juvederm, so white; her tweaked nose, so small, almost juvenile; her sharp jaw, model-like. Her eyebrows, creasing at me. Her eyes narrowed. She realised what was happening, and those brown eyes flashed unconcealed hate. She wanted to fire me. She wanted me out of her life. And even if I saved her now, I would never get what I wanted. She would never, was never going to, give me any credit for the blog. Still, I looked between them. Zanna and Shane.
“Please,” he said. “Help me. Help me, Paige, I’ll do anything. Please.”
He came towards me, hands like a prayer. “Please.” He blinked, wet his flips, frowned, and then said: “I love you.”
My head spun. My heart fluttered. Tears came to my eyes.
I shook my head.
“I’m not calling an ambulance, Zanna.”
Her breathing picked up, as she panicked.
“I wish you’d been a better friend,” I said, gently, trying to be conciliatory in my tone, “We had some good times, though. I’ll always cherish the memories. I did love you.”
She laughed then. Blood sputtered from her mouth like a fountain, landing on her smooth cheeks, little red, wet freckles. Her laugh was still pretty, even as she wheezed and struggled. Shane gently wept.
“Fuck you, Paige,” she whispered. She bit her lip and chuckled. Then, she settled down again, her breathing slowed, slowed and slowed. She cried. Tears fell with abandon.
“I want my dad,” she whispered, squeezing her eyes shut, diamond globelike tears sparkling as she opened them. She said it once. Then again, a mutter, a murmur or a prayer. Then it was on her breath. Then her breath was gone, and so was she. Unmistakably dead. Zanna. Once my best friend. Now, gone.
We waited a few minutes. Then I licked the back of my hand and held it over her mouth. No cool breath. No movement. No time to lose.
Shane fixed his manic sight on me, calmed by my presence. I loved how he turned to me. I felt butterflies. He held his hands out to me like a child. Those big bear mittens were shaking. I grabbed them.
“Take your bags, go to your dad’s right now, fast. On the way, destroy your phone, smash it to pieces and distribute those pieces as you go, bit by bit. Till it’s gone. Say you left the bodybuilding convention to help your dad with the house, or something, something like that. Tell your dad, if he needs to, he has to lie.”
“What are you going to do?” he asked, afraid.
I said to him something I’ve said to him so many times since — and I’ve never broken my word.
“It’ll be okay. I’ll handle this.”
Thankfully, I remembered that last secret message on Zanna’s phone.
Okay, I’ll meet you. I want to see you. Come over tonight. Shane will be out.