“Apparently they have no lives of their own,” I say. “Isn’t there anything else to talk about?”
Ever since Lou linked to that article and the comments dogpiled underneath it, everyone has something to say about Tabby. Nobody thinks Mark’s death was an accident. There are too many indicators that it wasn’t.
SOMEBODY pushed him, one of the last comments said. If it wasn’t her, who was it?
That stuck with me. The image formed of somebody else there, on the Split, with Tabby and Mark.
Sometimes I picture it being me. My hands against his back. Sometimes I imagine how it would feel, his hot skin. How it would sound, his scream.
But that’s only sometimes, and I’d never admit that to anyone else. I see what the media does to girls. It drains them, a collective vampire sucking until its mouth is a ruby smear. It drains out every detail, everything they’ve ever done. It empties the blood and goes for the vital organs. For her lungs, until she can’t breathe. Her brain, until she can’t think. Her heart, until she can’t feel.
“That cop asked me to come in again today after school,” Tabby says, as casually as if we were talking about an annoying teacher. “Stewart. The one who hates me. I’ve already told him everything I know. I mean, whatever. I have nothing to hide.”
They haven’t gotten to her yet. Maybe they’ve feasted on a bit of her blood, but she can make more. Tabby has thick skin.
I don’t get a chance to respond, because a few guys from our grade stop in front of us. Connor Lawson and Brian Hull as well as Lance Peterson, who Tabby made out with during freshman year. He told all his friends that she gave him a blow job and didn’t know what she was doing. She shrugged off the rumors like a too-big coat, but a week later, Lance got suspended for having weed in his locker. I never asked Tabby if she was responsible for putting it there.
“There she is,” Connor says. “I just have to ask. Did you do it?”
We keep walking. I give him the middle finger. Tabby laughs.
“You don’t seem too torn up about it,” Brian shouts after us. “I saw you at his funeral. You were smiling the whole time.”
They don’t know Tabby, and I do. Tabby’s mouth betrays her in little ways—not even what she says but what she doesn’t say. Her perma-smirk, as I once called it. The way she laughs at inappropriate times. I’ve seen her do it when she gets in trouble with a teacher, when her mom says This isn’t funny, Tabitha Marie.
Tabby doesn’t dignify the comments with a response. It’s not until Lance jumps in that she stops walking.
“I guess we knew what she was capable of doing. She’s already lied and cheated. We knew she could be a killer.”
She whips around and puts her hand on his chest, pushing him backward. Her nails are painted purple. Most people would say Tabby isn’t a patient person. Her temper can be an animal, forever pulling on an invisible leash. But she’s patient when it comes to her personal grooming. Her nails are always the same length, always painted, never jagged and bitten like mine.
I focus on her nails. Connor calls her a crazy bitch. A crowd is drawing closer, eager for more. I grab Tabby’s hand to tug her down the hall, but she wiggles out of my grip.
“You want a show? Here I am. Instead of hiding behind your fucking computers, say it to my face. Tell me what a terrible person I am. And what a fucking perfect person he was.”
But nobody says anything. There are a few laughs. Most people are on their phones, probably taking pictures. They’re thinking, Look. She got mad. And we all know angry girls are mentally unhinged.
And there, standing behind everyone, is Dallas. He’s maybe the only person not looking at Tabby. He’s staring at me instead. Asking me a very different question than the one everyone was too afraid to ask Tabby before today.
10
BRIDGET
THE VIDEO HAS ALMOST two thousand views, and it has been up for only three hours. Two thousand views. Nowhere near two thousand students go to Coldcliff Heights, so obviously other people are interested. I’m not sure Tabby knows it exists, and I’m not going to tell her.
It makes her look really bad. That’s what my friend Laurel said after she watched it. Laurel immediately texted me in our group WhatsApp—Have you seen it? It makes her look really bad.
It does. Her teeth flash, her hair flies. She’s a live wire, all instincts. More animal than girl. Because that’s what it comes down to, isn’t it? They want to strip her down to her barest instincts.
I wish they would stop. They have no idea what they’re up against.
THE BUTTON—YOUR SOURCE FOR HOT STORIES!
September 6, 2019
Video of Coldcliff girl goes viral
By Michael Dixon
Rumors have been swirling since the hiking death of Mark Forrester, a 20-year-old Princeton student, in August. Now, a profanity-laced video of his girlfriend, Tabitha Cousins, losing her temper at a bunch of her classmates has gone viral, garnering sixty thousand views in less than 24 hours. In the video, posted to a YouTube channel owned by Louisa Chamberlain, another student at Coldcliff Heights High School, Cousins seems to invite people to accuse her of involvement in Forrester’s death.
“It was scary,” said a classmate who asked to remain anonymous. “It was like she just lost it. And it sounds bad, but she obviously liked the attention.”
Lance Peterson, a senior and the swim team captain, said that Cousins physically and verbally attacked him without any provocation. “She came at me. I didn’t say a word except that I was sorry about Mark. I mean, the whole swim team looked up to him. He’s a legend around here.”
Cousins wasn’t available for comment, but online chatter surrounding this video implies that there may have been more to her relationship with Forrester than meets the eye.
A link to the video can be found here.
11
LOU
YES, I’M THE ONE who posted the video. You probably think I’m a horrible person for posting it, right? But hear me out. I did it in the heat of the moment. She looked so violent. Tabitha has a temper—I mean, it’s no secret—she gets passionate about things, as Mr. Lowe, our junior year homeroom teacher, once said. (And the way she looked at him after he said it—gross. She was always flirting with him in these little ways, even though he’s, like, forty and married.)
Yeah, so I wanted to show everyone that mean side of Tabitha. Mostly she does a good job of keeping it in check. She disguises it as something else. Passion, I guess. But—you’ve seen the video, right? She’s, like, ugly. She’s outraged. That’s the real Tabitha.
Anyway, now I wish I had never posted the video, because suddenly not just everyone at our school has seen it, but everyone else, too, and some detective actually made me take it down. (If you still want to see it, I have it saved on my phone.) And it’s, like, I get the feeling this is what Tabitha wanted the whole time. For people to be talking about her. Maybe she knew someone was going to take a video and she played this perfectly, so that the media would glom on and make a martyr out of her. Or whatever she is.
I hate losing. I especially hate losing to Tabitha.