“There’s nothing to talk about.”
“Okay,” she says, drawing the word out. “But you pretending it never happened won’t make it go away.”
She’s wrong. I look the same as I did before—better now, actually. I’m fitter and tanned from the past couple weeks, from the time since Mark died, when Tabby and I have been going to Crest Beach almost every day. She claims that’s the only place she feels normal, staring at the water.
Tabby thinks she knows my whole story. And she knows most of it. But her version is missing a giant chapter, and I’ll make sure she never gets to read that chapter. Because it would destroy us.
When we’re in the food court having lunch—salad for me, no dressing—I can tell people are staring at us. No, not at us. At Tabby. That part isn’t unusual. She gets a lot of second looks—it’s her eyes, I think, how ridiculously blue they are. People stop and comment and ask if they’re real.
“Of course they’re real,” she always says. “They’re in my face, aren’t they?”
But this is different. Nobody comes up to us. They’re keeping their distance, whispering behind their hands. Judgmental, disapproving. I know that look well. I’ve been looked at like that myself very recently.
“Why is everyone staring?” I ask. “Is it because you’re the dead guy’s widow?”
You probably think that’s rude. Insensitive. Or maybe you just think I’m a bitch—that’s okay. People have thought worse about me. But I have nothing to hide. I wasn’t sad to see Mark go. I didn’t cry at his funeral. I went to his funeral only because Mom dragged me, and Mom dragged me only because she loves Tabby, thinks of her as a second daughter. Mom wanted us to be there for Tabby.
(I lied—I do have things to hide. But not about my feelings toward Mark. Everyone is mourning a guy who didn’t exist. I didn’t like the real version, and I’m really not sorry he’s gone.)
“Must be,” Tabby says between bites of her sandwich. Ever since Mark died, her appetite is back. When they were together, he was always on her about what she ate. Mark wants me to cut out junk food. Mark said I would tone up fast if I stopped eating sugar. Mark said hiking would be a great workout for my legs and ass.
Mark wanted. Mark said.
People keep staring the rest of the day. When Tabby drives us home, I give a gaggle of middle-aged women in cardigans the finger out the car window. They look familiar. They’ve judged me. Let them talk.
It’s when I log on to Facebook after dinner that I see it. A link to a Coldcliff Tribune article about Mark’s cause of death. Lou Chamberlain posted it. She hates Tabby.
Drowning. My chest constricts, like my skin is too small. Everyone assumed he was dead when he hit the rocks. There’s a horrible, twisted irony to it. Mark the Shark, felled by a shallow, muddy creek.
But it’s not the article that plucks at my skin, making goose bumps rise up. It’s the comments under it, the ones about Tabby.
Something isn’t adding up here—why wouldn’t she check if he was OK? That’s what Lou wrote.
They were fighting at Elle’s party—everyone saw it.
I bet she knew he was going to break up with her and she lost it. You know she has a temper right? She flipped off Mr. Mancini once.
They were arguing about their baby!!!
I stop reading. I don’t need to see any more. Maybe it was inevitable, and I knew this was going to happen. The world is choosing sides. Tabby was never just going to be Mark’s widow.
She would also be his executioner.
Excerpt from Tabby’s Diary
July 23, 2018
I met a boy, and I already love him. How is that even possible? I’m not even sure why I’m writing this down. I guess because I should be writing everything down if I want to become a writer someday. Most people don’t even know that about me—that I want to become a writer. It’s the kind of dream that’s too big to share.
Anyway, Mark Forrester. I know he loves me too. He might be the one. Elle told me it’s too soon to know, but she has never been in love, so she wouldn’t understand. Mark is everything the other boys weren’t. He’s not afraid to show me how much he cares. He actually brought me flowers on a date—these red roses. I’m going to dry one to show our kids one day.
I guess this is why I’m writing this down. Because it’s another dream that’s too big to share, and I need it to be real. I can’t describe it to anyone out loud. Nobody likes anyone this happy.
6
ELLE
IT’S IMPORTANT FOR ME to give you some context about Tabby. You need to know how she met Mark. It was because of me, so this is all partially my fault. I forced her to go mini-golfing last summer since my dad had a Groupon he didn’t want to waste.
“I hate mini golf,” Tabby said. “You have to wear those ugly shoes that a thousand people’s feet have been in.”
“That’s bowling. I promise that if you go with me, I’ll get you ice cream after.”
We never did get the ice cream, though. We took so long mini-golfing that the group behind us—a bunch of boys who looked a few years older—caught up. Tabby had grown frustrated at that point and went to kick the ball in with her foot.
One of the boys laughed. Tabby spun around. “Is something funny?”
“Your, uh, technique. It’s interesting.” He leaned on his golf club.
“And you can do better?”
He shrugged. “Well, I don’t need to use my foot.”
“What can I say? When there’s a problem, I fix it. I don’t need some guy to mansplain something to me.”
“Mansplain?” He was laughing, but she wasn’t.
“Yeah. When some asshole guy tells a girl how to do something better.”
And that was the start of them. Tabby was always obsessed with the idea of having someone to argue with. Her parents were still together, but they were more like placeholders than actual people. They didn’t bicker or disagree, because neither of them had any fight left.
Tabby loved Mark. He wasn’t a perfect boyfriend, and she wasn’t a perfect girlfriend. They hurt each other by accident. They hurt each other on purpose. Sometimes there’s such a fine line between the two that you barely notice it until you’re jamming the proverbial knife in deep enough to graze bone.
Now, here’s something about me and Tabby. We’ve been friends since the first week of eighth grade, and it was blood that brought us together. Specifically, I was bleeding, and she was there. Me, staring at my underwear in a school bathroom stall, frantically pinching the ruined pink of my skirt between a wad of toilet paper, willing the stain to disappear. I had waited until it was totally quiet before leaving the stall, where I tried pulling the skirt away from my ass and sticking it under the sink tap. That was how Tabby found me. She was the new girl, and stories had already circulated about her. How she came from New York, how her dad was a musician who had a big hit in the nineties, how she was a child model, how she wasn’t a virgin. How that big black cross necklace she sometimes wore was really filled with cocaine.
I knew I would cry when she laughed at me, standing there with my bloody underwear and wet skirt. I braced myself for the impact. But she just reached into her purse and pulled out a tampon.