All Eyes on Her

by L. E. Flynn

  I didn’t see her audition—they’re private, just in front of Mr. Mancini, who directed the play, and Mrs. McDougall, who just kind of, like, bosses people around. But when they announced the parts, my name wasn’t beside Blanche. Hers was. I was Stella.

  So I got a bit pissed off and told a few people she must have done something for Mr. Mancini to get the role. That rumor gained traction for a while, and the infuriating part was that Tabitha never even denied it. I think she liked it.

  (By the way, she sucked as Blanche. She barely showed up for rehearsals. It was like she only wanted it because I did. She only ever wants what other people have. And to this day, the name Stella makes me want to scream.)

  Anyway, when we were getting our stage makeup done on closing night, Tabby leaned over and whispered something: “I heard there’s some kind of scout in the audience.”

  That made me snap to attention. “Scout? How do you know?”

  Tabby smiled, like she really enjoyed having a piece of information I didn’t. “I heard her talking to Mancini. She has bright red hair. You can’t miss her.”

  My whole body basically thundered. I never get nervous when I act—it wasn’t like that. I was electrified. I knew I had to give my best performance yet, even though I wasn’t Blanche. I needed to be the one everybody saw first.

  Oh my God, I acted the hell out of that role. I was Stella. And I don’t know if it was the adrenaline or heightened emotions or just pure bravery, but after the show, when I saw a red-haired woman with Mr. Mancini backstage, I went up and introduced myself.

  “I’m Louisa Chamberlain,” I said. “I hope you liked the play.”

  “You were terrific,” she said, clutching her program. “I was just telling Bruce how wonderful the entire show was.”

  I could have just moved on and left it at that, but I’m not a girl who just leaves an opportunity. So I gave her my biggest smile. “I really believe acting is my future. If you have the time, I’d love to talk to you about what that might look like.”

  It was super bold, but it just felt right. Until she looked at me, then at Mr. Mancini, with this totally confused expression. Ugh—I still see it so clearly. It’s, like, permanent decor in my brain. A shameful throw rug.

  “Um—” she started, but Mr. Mancini cut in, placing his hand over hers.

  “Louisa,” he said. “This is my wife, Melinda.”

  His wife. His wife. And if that’s not horrifying enough for you, picture the rest of the cast scattered around, within earshot, trying really hard not to laugh. And picture Tabby, beaming.

  “You told me she was a scout,” I hissed later, when Tabby was sitting on a bench, pulling on her Docs.

  “Sorry,” she said. “It was a different red-haired woman I saw. She must have left.”

  What a little liar! Bravo, Tabby. That was your best performance. Until now.

  “That was beyond embarrassing,” I said. “Everyone thinks I’m a joke.” Closing night was supposed to be a celebration—we always went out and partied. But I wasn’t going anywhere but home. Tabby took away what I had achieved and replaced it with the hot burn of humiliation.

  “Oh, come on,” she said. “It wasn’t so bad. Besides, there are worse things than people talking about you.”

  “Like what?” I put my foot on the bench, resisting the urge to kick her with it.

  “Like when they aren’t.” She stood up so we were face-to-face. Then she actually winked.

  I suppose I played right into her trap, and I should have known better. No matter how ugly the rumor is, she doesn’t care, as long as people are talking about her.

  Maybe you think karma caught up with me. Maybe you think I’m the bitch, or the petty one. I’m not denying I’m a bit of both. But Tabitha is something worse. She’s a taker. And something to know about takers is that they never have enough.

  12

  BRIDGET

  TABBY YANKS A BRUSH through my hair. “I didn’t do anything wrong. This is so fucking typical. Everyone always believes the guy. I hate living in this world.”

  As if there was another option.

  I’m going to school today—it’s the second week back, and the first day of cross-country practice—so Tabby got up early to put my hair in two French braids, the same way she did it last year, when I was a freshman. I’m superstitious like that, especially since last year was my big moment. She has so much potential, Coach Taylor told Dad at my first meet—I won a silver medal I barely had to work for. She could go far. I wasn’t used to the attention, but I liked it.

  She liked the attention. Some anonymous classmate said that about my sister. The video ripped through the internet like wildfire. Reporters have been calling our landline—I have no idea how they got the phone number, but they want to talk to Tabby. At least, they say they want to talk to Tabby, but really they just want to talk about her. About her temper, suddenly legendary.

  “I’m sorry,” I say as her fingers work methodically in my hair. “This isn’t fair.”

  “Life’s never fair for us.” She yanks just hard enough to hurt. “You’ll tell me what they say, right?”

  Tabby got a three-day suspension for pushing Lance Peterson in the hall, then my parents decided it would be best if she didn’t go back to school until things settle down. Detectives have been poking around, stealing Tabby away to talk, leaving cold half cups of coffee on our granite countertop. Mom and Dad seem sure that things will settle down, that life will go back to normal. I’m not so sure.

  I have this feeling it will only get worse.

  “I’ll tell you what they say, but don’t listen. They’re losers.”

  I don’t even know why she wants to hear it, why she’s desperate for every word, like it’s her new sustenance. I guess she’s bored, sitting at home. I don’t know what she does all day.

  Now she loops her arms around my neck and hugs me from behind. In the bathroom mirror, I look at our faces pressed together, similar but so different. Tabby’s electric eyes, the freckles summer brought out on her nose. Her hair is naturally reddish like mine, but she has been dyeing it black since we came to Coldcliff. Raven, the color is called. It comes from a box.

  “What are you going to do today?” I ask.

  She rolls her eyes, her cheek still adhered to mine. “I don’t know. Elle’s bringing my homework over later. I guess I’ll find some way to entertain myself.”

  For some reason, I don’t like the thought of Tabby at home alone.

  I’m not denying that she has a temper. I’m her sister—I’ve probably seen it more than anyone. When we were kids, she once cut the hair off all our Barbies because I had the one she wanted and wouldn’t trade. After she and Beck broke up she went into the backyard and screamed at the top of her lungs. Just screamed at the sky, like it made any difference, being loud. Maybe it did. I mean, if you’re a girl, too, you know what it’s like to basically be told on a daily basis to be quiet.

  “Go out there and kill it today,” she says. “Show them exactly who you are.”

  Kill it. Not exactly a great choice of words. But that’s something I love about my sister—she doesn’t sift her thoughts, trying to find the perfect words for any given situation. She says what’s on her mind and thinks about the consequences later. It’s an honest quality, and one that most people don’t have anymore.

  When I get home from practice, French braids still intact—I did kill it, I didn’t spend the summer running every day not to—Tabby is at the kitchen table, cross-legged on a chair. She’s not alone.

  There’s a cop with her.

  Obviously the cops already questioned Tabby. And like I said—they’ve been around, the cops and detectives. She told them everything about that night. What else could they possibly have to ask her?

  “Hey, Bridge,” she says, turning around. “This is Stewart.” She sounds almost bored.

  I fiddle with the zipper on my shirt. I imagine zipping myself up. Stuffing away all the things I thought about
Mark. The things I said to him.

  The thing I did.

  “It’s Detective Stewart,” he says. He’s pissed off. He doesn’t like my sister. She told me that when she got home from being questioned the first time, her eyes red and bleary. That cop hates me, Bridge.

  “What’s he doing here?” As soon as I say it, I realize how wrong it sounds. I’m talking about him like he isn’t in the same room. “I just—I thought he already talked to you a bunch of times.”

  “I did,” Stewart—Detective Stewart—says. “I’m here to talk to you, Bridget.”

  DAILY CAMERA LENS

  September 12, 2019

  Hiker’s girlfriend suspected in murder after backpack found

  By Bryce Jules

  Nearly four weeks after Princeton student Mark Forrester, 20, was found dead in Coldcliff’s Claymore Creek, police divers have retrieved a backpack from the creek, filled with rocks, which they believe Forrester had on his back when he plunged into the water from the Split, nearly forty feet above him.

  Records from the Boulder REI store show that Forrester’s girlfriend, Tabitha Cousins, 17, purchased the backpack for him as a birthday gift in late July. Cousins has been under scrutiny since Forrester’s death, with a video of her assaulting a male classmate going viral last week.

  Cousins did not return our request for comments.

  13

  KEEGEN

  “WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING AT?” Kyla asks. She comes up behind me when I’m sitting on my old corduroy couch and wraps her arms around my neck. A Kyla necklace, she once called it. Feels more like a noose.

  “Nothing.” I shut my laptop.

  (I was watching the video, again. It keeps popping up on different sites. And yeah, that’s the real her. I’m so glad somebody had the balls to post it. I guess it was some chick at Tabby’s school. I wonder what Tabby did to piss her off.)

  Let me guess. You fell for it. You thought Tabby had nothing to do with what happened to Mark. I guess I can’t be that hard on you. I mean, lots of people fell for it. There’s this Facebook group, the Tabby Cats, all about how she’s getting shit on in the media. I think it’s mostly horny guys hoping to have a chance with her. I bet they’ll write her letters in prison if she ends up there.

  I sure as hell hope she does.

  I can tell a very different story about Tabby Cousins, from the day they met to the day Mark died. That day, Mark knew something was up. He fucking knew.

  I can show you the last text he ever sent me, before they left on that hike. I already showed the police, even though I knew it wouldn’t prove shit. He didn’t mention Tabby, but he didn’t have to.

  How is that not fucking ominous?

  Tabby didn’t even like doing anything outdoors, unless it was smoking up outside at a party. Then all of a sudden she wanted to go for a hike. Even suggested the Mayflower Trail, which is long and steep and leads up to this lookout point. Mark told me when she first mentioned it, rolling his eyes like he knew it was never going to happen, just like it never happened when Tabby said she would stop drinking or stop being jealous of every girl Mark looked at.

  “We should go out or something,” Kyla says. She always wants to go out. I mean, I used to like that about her—she’s outgoing, and yeah, she’s blond and tanned and I’m sure a lot of guys have liked that about her. But she seems to conveniently forget that I work at a grocery store and can’t exactly afford to take her on dates. Besides, there’s nowhere for us to go in Coldcliff. Just a sketchy eastside bar where bikers hang out and some downtown restaurants that cost way too much.

  I should be focusing on my own relationship here, but whatever. Somebody has to tell the truth about Tabby, so I’m your guy.

  I never liked her. It’s not a secret. She was a bad idea. I figured she was something Mark had to get out of his system. And yeah, I understood the appeal. High school girls, you get to be a man around them. You get to be their college guy fantasy. Don’t crucify me for saying that either, because you know you were thinking the same thing. And honestly, we didn’t even know she was in high school at first, because that was one of her very first lies. Her and Elle, barely wearing any clothes, but covered in a shit ton of makeup. Who dresses like that for mini golf? Mark and Tabby argued all night. I knew he was turned on. Mark was on the rebound, fresh out of a relationship with this chick Sasha who never had anything to say. Mark wanted a fight.

  The end of the night—Mark and Tabby in the back of my shitty Civic, practically clawing each other’s skin off. Me and Elle sitting in the front seats like the parental chaperones. I could almost hear Mark in my ear, telling me to put a move on Elle, and normally I would have because she was there, and she probably would have gone for it, but I just had this feeling that if I did, it would end badly. So I kept my hands to myself.

  Mark didn’t. He was always touching Tabby. His hands on her shoulders, cupping her ass, tilting her head back to kiss her. “Dude, she might actually be the one,” he told me when he was drunk.

  I’ve talked to the cops twice. There are at least two of them on the case—Detective Stewart is the one I trust. He’s the one who knows Tabby did it. He keeps asking me questions about their relationship, and the more I talk, the more I realize how fucked up it really was.

  They were always fighting, constantly on the verge of breaking up. It was their thing. You know that couple you never want to hang out with, because you know they’re going to be at each other’s throats all night? Well, that was Tabby and Mark. She’d yell at him and he’d make some comment he knew would get her all riled up, usually something about all these big plans he had for when he graduated from college, and they’d get into it, right in front of everyone.

  “You’re a fucking dumbass,” she said once. “You think you know everything. Well, you don’t.”

  Mark stayed silent, which pissed her off even more.

  “Just wait,” she spat. “Something’s going to happen that you didn’t see coming.”

  Looking back, everything she said was a thinly veiled threat. Mark made it sound like the hike was pretty spontaneous, but I know she had been planning the whole thing, probably for way longer than anyone could have suspected.

  You’re wondering why I didn’t say anything, if I knew Tabby was going to do something like that. But it went the other way, too. When they didn’t want to rip out each other’s throats, they wanted to rip off each other’s clothes. It was like whatever fueled their relationship was dialed up to the max. They didn’t know how else to be except extreme.

  “Why don’t you just end it?” I said to Mark more than once. He always had the same answer.

  “I can’t just get rid of that girl. You don’t understand.”

  I hated that last part. You don’t understand. Like Mark felt something deeper than I ever had, or maybe ever would.

  Stewart asked me what that text really meant, the last one Mark ever sent. “Was Mark planning on breaking up with Tabitha?” Those were his exact words, like an awkward parent probing for information about your relationship.

  “I don’t know,” I told him. “He said he was a couple weeks ago. Then he changed his mind. It was hard to keep track.”

  Mark really did say he was going to do it. At a party, the week before he died.

  “She’s a lot to handle,” he told me at the end of the night, when Tabby was crying in the bathroom. “I think I should just break up with her. Start the year without any baggage.”

  Then he didn’t bring it up again. Maybe he thought they could fix it. Mark was big on fixing shit that other people would have just thrown out. When we first got our driver’s licenses, he liked to cruise around looking for the shit people put out at the curb on garbage day. Tables missing legs and old dishwashers and stained armchairs that looked like they’d been punched in the overstuffed gut. I’d help him load up the back of his dad’s truck, and when we got back to his house, we’d lug everything into the basement, where he’d make magic happen. One day he wanted
to turn it into a side business. You know, when he wasn’t busy being a hotshot lawyer.

  So it’s no wonder he thought he could fix Tabby, fix whatever they had that was so deep and so worth saving. He was too blinded by whatever power she had over him that he couldn’t see what the rest of us already knew. That the girl is broken.

  His cause of death was drowning, and now there’s a backpack. The fall didn’t kill him, but that stupid creek did. It doesn’t make any sense. Mark was a champion swimmer, and he never would have drowned. Something else killed him. Someone.

  “I’m bored,” Kyla says in the pouty voice she uses that she thinks is cute. “Come play with me.”

  I don’t want to play with her. But I also don’t want her getting too far away.

  14

  BRIDGET

  YOU WANT TO KNOW WHAT Stewart and I talked about, and I’m not going to tell you. I’m not supposed to talk about it, and I won’t. At least, not yet.

  What I will talk about is the backpack, because it’s not at all what people think.

  Here’s what really happened. Tabby asked me to go shopping with her for Mark’s birthday gift. She wanted to get him something special.

  “I’m not going to be helpful,” I told her. “I have no idea what guys his age like.” I don’t know what guys any age like, except that they don’t like me. Or they just don’t notice me, not in the ways they notice Tabby. I am fifteen but look closer to twelve. I’m so cute and adorable and my friend Laurel’s mom even called me precious once, which made me want to die. I am supposed to be sexy by now. Boys started noticing Tabby when she was still in middle school, her new curves changing the way her clothes fit. Changing the way she fit.

  “You always have good ideas. Come on, don’t make me beg.”

  I didn’t. I let Tabby grab my hand at the outlet mall, pulling me into the REI in Boulder, a store I didn’t think she would ever set foot in. It was for outdoor people, the kind who liked breaking a sweat.