“Here,” she said. “I always carry extra.”
I didn’t want to tell her that it was my first time bleeding, a moment I knew Mom would want to celebrate with me when I got home from school. I had no idea how to use a tampon, but it was too embarrassing to admit that to Tabby. I somehow didn’t have to.
“The first time I got mine, I was at a pool party. Wearing a white bikini. That was when I knew there was no God.” She laughed, which was more like a bark. “These ones have plastic applicators. As far as I’m concerned, there is no other kind. Just kind of squat and push it in. I’m here if you need help.”
I really fucking hoped I didn’t, and luckily, it only took me a couple minutes of trying in the stall before it went in without much resistance. By the time I came out and washed my hands, Tabby had shrugged out of her oversized plaid shirt, which she proceeded to tie around my waist.
“There. Now nobody will ever know what happened. Plus, your outfit looks cooler now.”
I laughed, and so did she. I wanted to hug her, but I didn’t. I spent the entire night totally paranoid that she had told everyone about me and my period, about the mess she covered up. The next day, I figured it would be awkward to see her in the halls, but it wasn’t. She came over to my locker and started talking to me, and after that, we never really stopped talking. She meant it when she said nobody would ever know what had happened.
Tabby and I have things in common. We were both named after our grandmothers—Tabitha and Eleanor—and we both hate our names, so when high school started, we ditched them for the nicknames they had the decency to lend themselves to. She became Tabby and I became Elle, and we became different with the loss of those extra letters, girls who wanted to lose more.
We both like to be the center of attention. Sometimes it’s like we’re fighting for a spotlight that doesn’t even exist. I’m not content to orbit her sun, nor she mine. Usually with girls there’s one friend who is okay with being behind the scenes, propping the other one up, always the sidekick, loyal and a bit shy. We’re unbalanced that way, both outspoken, clamoring to get everyone else to notice us. Sometimes they notice too much.
We both like Real Housewives and karaoke and jalapeños. We love Halloween because it means we can dress up without being judged for wanting to show skin (at least, not as much). We spend too much time on Snapchat, filtering the shit out of our faces. We want to travel somewhere together after high school is over, even though we never did agree where. Tabby says Australia, and I say Thailand. Somewhere we can work as waitresses and live in hostels and chew through boys like candy.
And then there’s the other thing we have in common: Beck Rutherford. But I’ll tell you more about him later. I don’t want you to hate me right away.
Text message from Tabitha Cousins to Mark Forrester,
July 23, 2018 10:18pm
7
BRIDGET
I CHANGED MY MORNING ROUTE. Not to avoid Mark’s parents’ house, but to purposely run past it. I know his brother is still in town, and there’s a shrine on the porch with all sorts of candles and flowers. The flowers are browning with each passing day. I know this because I’m here, the house a blur in my vision as I run by. It’s my own vigil, although I’m not sure why.
Maybe I’m afraid of what they’ll find out, if they know where to look.
My friends keep asking me about Tabby. Do you think she was involved? Honestly, I’m tired of talking about my sister. I’ve been talking about her my entire life. Literally. Mom loves to tell people that my first word was Tabby. Not Mama or Dada like other babies. I wasn’t attached to either of the parental units, but I was attached to my sister, grabbing on to one of her chubby legs, pulling on the back of her T-shirt, tugging on her braids.
If you’ve heard about me before now and didn’t think of me as Tabby Cousins’s little sister (you’d be in the minority), you know me as the runner. The Silent Knife. When we lived in Rochester, my parents tried to shove me into the same group sports they made Tabby do: soccer and baseball and basketball. Being involved in sports is good for young girls was adopted as their mantra. It gives you self-confidence. They made confidence sound like something that just appeared, a gift sent in the mail from a relative you saw once a year.
Anyway, I sucked at sports. I couldn’t kick a ball into a net. I couldn’t hit a ball or sink one into a basket. But I was fast and I didn’t seem to get tired, so it was decided that I would become a distance runner. This was around the same time Tabby started behaving badly, so I glommed on to my newfound calling, grateful to it for setting me apart, giving me something my sister didn’t have. Suddenly my parents took an interest in me. Dad came to all my cross-country meets with his stopwatch. He’d be there at the start of the course, then halfway through, then again at the end, red-faced and screaming. I’m pretty sure he ran as many miles as I did.
You’re wondering what all this has to do with Tabby, and specifically with Tabby and Mark. I’m getting there.
Tabby and I have turned on each other so many times that we’ve spent the equivalent of years back-to-back with our arms crossed. We’ve had big fights and little fights and fights about nothing and fights about something. The same eleven-year-old sister who once chopped my hair off while I was sleeping also punched Teresa Morgan, who had bullied me about my newly shorn hair, in the stomach at recess and got suspended. Tabby was allowed to do bad things to me, but nobody else was. It was some kind of sister code.
Nothing can stop Tabby when she wants something. I think that’s part of her problem. She doesn’t know how to not want too much.
Tabby has a work ethic. “Bridge, my best advice is to make it look like you’re not trying,” she once said when she put my hair in French braids before one of my meets. “Because it’s when you try that people can break into you.” She made it sound like we were some kind of bank that could be robbed, a vault with weak defenses.
What I will give you is this. I can’t say with total certainty that Tabby would never hurt anyone, because I’ve seen her do it. Mostly it’s a joke to her, but I’ve been around for the times it wasn’t. And those times all had something in common. She was doing it for somebody else. Tabby is a lot of things: impulsive, vain, moody, proud, sarcastic, fun. But she’s also loyal. It’s her trademark, if you really know her. Yes, she sucks up the sunshine, but she’ll find a way to warm you with it.
“Did you go to the woods today?” Tabby asks when I’m back from my run. She’s standing in the kitchen with a mug of coffee, her hair impossibly shiny down her back.
“Yeah,” I say. “The caution tape is still there.”
She nods, like she isn’t surprised. I don’t know what the cops expect to find.
I’m sure of one thing. If Tabby hurt Mark, it was because he did something to really deserve it.
Anonymous tip to police hotline
September 4, 2019, 10:02 a.m.
“Hello? Yeah, I just wanted to report something I saw. That story about the guy and girl in the woods—the guy who died. I was coming out of the woods on a different trail, the Cider Creek one, when they were going in. So anyway, he was yelling at her to hurry up, which I thought was really rude, you know? She was lugging this picnic basket, and it looked like it weighed about a hundred pounds. Then he kind of walked ahead of her like he was irate. She had to run to catch up. And she kept saying ‘I don’t know about this, I really don’t know,’ and he told her to shut up and follow him.