by L. E. Flynn
“You’re unassuming, until you’re not,” Laurel told me.
Now, I’m not.
“Why did you do it?” I call to Louisa’s back. I hate her hair—it’s always so precise, these precious ringlets that obviously didn’t come from nature.
She whips around. “Excuse me?”
I stand my ground. “Why did you take the video? And why did you post it? Are you so jealous of my sister that you have to try to ruin her life? You realize this isn’t just some feud over a guy, right? She’s in juvie. She might actually go to prison.”
I’m no good at confrontation. My voice has already started to become thin, like the tread of shoes that have run too many paths. I think about the Nikes Tabby wore in the woods that day—my brain keeps coming back to them, like they’re supposed to mean something.
“I wasn’t the only one who took a video.” Louisa drums her nails on her arm. “It’s not like she tried to keep it a secret. If she didn’t want people to see, she shouldn’t have acted psycho in front of everyone.”
“She’s not psycho. She was angry. Do you even know what Lance said to her?”
“The question is, do you?” Lou says. “Look, maybe you don’t know her as well as you think. I saw what I saw. And that wasn’t the first time I’ve seen Tabby mad. I don’t know. If she gets that mad when she knows people are watching, imagine what she’s like with nobody around.”
I know what she’s getting at. Tabby has a temper, and now everybody remembers every outburst she has ever had. If Tabby were a quiet girl, this might be a different situation. Because somewhere along the line, we decided to equate quiet with good, which means loud became bad by default. In the world we live in—our girl world, bordered by our bodies, trespassers violated accordingly—everything is an extreme.
“Lance didn’t say anything. He was just making a comment about the swim team missing Mark. He didn’t mean anything by it.”
I clench my jaw. I’m supposed to be the quiet one. The innocent one. But just because there are things I haven’t done doesn’t mean I haven’t thought about them. Right now, I’m thinking about my fist making contact with Louisa’s skin. The satisfying crack my knuckles would make on her cheekbone.
But I’m not going to do it. Because it won’t be me Louisa comes after. It’ll be Tabby. My violence will be her fault. I must have seen that rage somewhere. I was always such a nice girl. Something must have happened for me to shed that skin and pull a heavier, angrier one around me. I’m not myself anymore as much as I am an extension of Tabby, another limb. When I bruise, she does. If I break, she does, too. So I have to stay intact, for both of us.
“Just stop spreading rumors about my sister.” I turn away. I hope she hears the venom in my voice and knows it isn’t just for show. Because quiet girls might be the most dangerous type.
5
ELLE
MAYBE YOU’RE WONDERING who Dallas is, and how he fits into this. He shouldn’t fit into this at all, but I listened to Tabby, so now the three of us are part of it.
Dallas is a year younger than us—a junior—but you wouldn’t know it by looking at him. He’s tall and rangy, long-legged. Actually, everything about him is long.
(Wait, I didn’t mean that in a dirty way. If Tabby were here, she would have laughed. A sexual innuendo never goes over her head. I wish she was here.)
Anyway, the other thing about him is he’s nice. There was a bird with a broken wing in our backyard, and I took it in a shoebox to the animal sanctuary over on Waverly. Dallas volunteers there. He somehow fixed the bird, then found me at school and asked if I wanted to be there when he set it free.
I’m sure there’s some kind of metaphor here. A boy and a girl and a broken bird that had to relearn how to fly. But if there’s a meaning, I can’t find it. Because of the three of us, the bird was the only one who came out healed.
“Elle. Elle, hey. Can you please talk to me?” He catches up with me in the parking lot as I’m walking to Mom’s car.
“I have nothing to say. You made it clear exactly what you think of me.”
“I was pissed off, okay? But you didn’t even give me a chance to explain.”
I spin around to face him. “Why should I give you the chance to explain anything? You weren’t there.”
“Yeah, because you wouldn’t let me be. Elle, you know I like you, right? I still like you. But you shut me out.”
It’s always the people you don’t care about hearing from who have all the right words. The ones you need. It’s like life designed them to come from the wrong mouths. Life designed everything wrong to come from my mouth.
“Just leave me alone,” I say, turning away, my eyes blurry. He’s wearing his Nirvana T-shirt, the one I teased him about, because I don’t think he can name a single Nirvana song.
“I know you’re going through a lot,” he says. “With Tabby in juvie and everything—”
And everything.
Mark died. Tabby got arrested.
If I had stayed closed, none of it would have happened.
PEOPLE.COM
October 16, 2019
Was there another woman in the Blue-Eyed Boyfriend Killer case?
By Talia Sims
Multiple sources allege that Tabitha Cousins, 17, had a bitter vendetta against her boyfriend, former Princeton student and champion swimmer Mark Forrester, who died on August 16 under suspicious circumstances. Cousins is currently being held in police custody at a juvenile detention center.
Several sources state that while Forrester was at Princeton and Tabby was attending Coldcliff Heights High School, she suspected that he was cheating on her. One student, who wishes to remain nameless, said that Cousins even made a special trip to Princeton to catch Forrester in the act.
“She crashed this party he was at and pulled him away. It was super awkward,” the student states. “And Mark was just friends with that girl.”
That girl, according to Forrester’s now-deleted Instagram, was Madeleine Swanson, 20, a junior at Princeton. Swanson could not be reached for comment. One of Forrester’s friends, who reached out to us anonymously, said Cousins was jealous of every girl Mark ever talked to.
“He didn’t cheat,” the friend said. “He treated her like gold. But she never believed that. She hated all those other girls. She used to talk about things happening to them. Bad things.”
Since this speculation started up, Swanson’s roommate, Gloria Wheaton, said Swanson has received death threats from Cousins’s legion of fans, known on social media as the Tabby Cats.
“They need to leave Maddie alone,” Wheaton said when reached by phone. “She didn’t do anything wrong. If Mark did cheat with someone, it wasn’t Maddie.”
The story continues to develop as Cousins’s trial has been slated for early December. If tried as an adult, she faces life in prison.
Excerpt from Tabby’s Diary
November 5, 2018
I thought my boyfriend would be happy that I surprised him, but he was just fuming. He didn’t even want to touch me. All I want him to do is love me the way I love him. He accused me of keeping tabs on him. The truth is, sometimes I feel like I’m being watched. Like Mark has eyes here somehow.
6
ELLE
THE PRINCETON TRIP. I knew it was going to come up. So here’s how it went down.
We took Tabby’s mom’s car. We left on Friday afternoon, right from school. Tabby had told her mom she was sleeping over at my place that weekend, and I pulled the same lie with my parents. Mom told me to have fun, but I could tell she was disappointed we were going to Tabby’s house instead of staying at ours. She loves having both me and Tabby under our roof, bringing us snacks and asking Tabby about her homework and her boyfriends and her life. Tabby indulges her in a way I never do. The way Mom interacts with her—Tabby is the daughter she really wanted, the beautiful and charismatic one. In Mom’s eyes, Tabby can do no wrong.
Tabby told me Mark invited her. That he knew we were c
oming. “I can’t believe we haven’t done this already,” she said. She was driving too fast, and it was cold out, but her window was open, the air coming in and slashing our skin.
It was absolutely insane, driving halfway across the country—it would take us an entire day just to get there. I struggled to stay awake when it was my turn to drive, chugging coffee that settled in my stomach like acid. I didn’t want to go to a party. But Tabby and I stopped at a shitty rest stop and did our makeup in the bathroom. I watched her apply her signature black eyeliner, even though she was already wearing a ton of it. I let her put bronzer on my cheeks after she said I looked pale.
“Where exactly is the party?” I asked when we were finally off the highway, ensconced in city traffic.
“Some guy’s apartment,” Tabby said. We were at an intersection and she pulled out her phone, where Mark’s Instagram was already up on the screen. That was when I first doubted that we had been invited anywhere. “It should be right around here.”
To this day, I have no idea how she found out where “some guy’s apartment” actually was. Later, I searched Mark’s Instagram for the same clues she had to work with. There was a picture of him and some other guys who must have been his college friends, plus one girl with dark hair. The photo was posted the day before we arrived. Someone had commented on the photo: Can’t wait to see you assholes tomorrow!
Someone else had posted Igor’s parties are the best parties.
That was all she had to go on. The name Igor. If you pull up his Instagram, you’ll see a picture from September of an apartment building, and a guy standing in front of it who must be Igor. First grownup digs, it was captioned, with the hashtag #adulting.
I didn’t know this at the time, when we pulled up in front of the building. You needed a buzzer to get in. Tabby searched the directory, probably for Igor’s name, but it was the kind of directory without names. She looked at me, shrugged.
“Why don’t you call Mark?” I said.
“I want to surprise him.” She touched her lips.
“So he doesn’t know we’re coming.”
She broke into a big smile, as if I’d be happy about being lied to. “Well, not exactly. I knew you’d think it was crazy. But I need to do something to get his attention.”
His attention. I hated that attention was all we ever wanted, and it was the hardest thing to get. If people just gave it to us from the start, maybe we wouldn’t do such wild things to get noticed.
I bit the inside of my cheeks. I was nauseous—the inside of the building smelled sour, like body odor and stale perfume.
“What’s your plan, exactly?” I asked, just as her plan strolled through the lobby. A guy, probably midtwenties, who was leaving and held the door open for us. Tabby flashed him a smile.
“We just follow the noise,” she said.
Except there wasn’t any noise. This wasn’t a high school party, one that ricocheted through the neighborhood, the kind I had somehow become synonymous with because Mom wanted to be cool and let me get away with it. The only reason we found Igor’s apartment at all, after taking the elevator from floor to floor, was because a girl got in the elevator with us and Tabby asked her.
“Do you mind letting me know Igor’s apartment number? I’m such a space cadet.”
The girl laughed. “Yeah, no worries. It’s four-eleven.” She went down, and we went up.
What happened next was embarrassing. We opened the door to Igor’s apartment and let ourselves in, me following behind Tabby like a shadow. People were standing in clumps, talking, some of them dancing, and they stopped to stare at us. Mostly everyone was in jeans and sweaters. Tabby and I stood out, in our short skirts and ripped tights, cleavage everywhere. I wished I had never come.
“Can I help you?” a guy in a thick wool turtleneck asked. Later, I would recognize him on Instagram as Igor.
“We’re looking for Mark Forrester,” Tabby said. “Is he here?”
Something like confusion passed over Igor’s face, then he rebounded with a nod. “Yeah. He’s here. Not sure where, though. Who are you guys?”
“I’m Elle,” I started to say, but Tabby cut me off. “I’m his girlfriend.”
It was obvious from Igor’s face that Mark had never mentioned a girlfriend. In that moment I hurt for Tabby. She must have been mortified.
Igor started to say something else, but Tabby pushed past him, into the apartment. She didn’t bother taking her boots off, even though everyone else was in socks, shoes piled by the door. I took mine off. I just wanted to sit down, or lie down and go to sleep.
“Elle,” someone said, and it was Keegan, a beer in his hand. “What are you guys doing here?”
“I don’t know,” I said, because I couldn’t think of something better to say. “Tabby’s looking for Mark.”
Tabby stomped back a few minutes later, brushing tears from her cheek. “Let’s go,” she said.
“Go where?” I said. When she looked at me, I noticed how red her eyes were. Then she saw Keegan sitting behind me.
“What are you doing here?” she spat.
“I was invited,” he said. “I’ve been here since Thursday. I have the weekend off.”
Mark showed up maybe a minute later, followed by a girl. The dark-haired girl in his Instagram photo. He tried to put his hand on Tabby’s shoulder, but she shook it off and sat down, practically on Keegan’s lap. She took his beer out of his hand and held it to her lips.
We didn’t go. Tabby got increasingly drunk, flirted with Keegan to piss Mark off, to make him pay for whatever he was doing with that girl when she arrived. I let somebody hand me a cup of something, but I didn’t drink it. I watched it all unspool, whatever was happening between Tabby and Mark, the flickering of eyes, Tabby’s narrowed and Mark’s pleading. By the end of the night, they disappeared together, and the dark-haired girl was nowhere to be seen.
Keegan seemed as annoyed as I was. “She shouldn’t have showed up. Things were fine without her.”
“Who was the girl?” I asked.
Keegan shrugged, but he liked the question. I could tell. Maybe it felt good for him to see that Mark wasn’t perfect. “I don’t know that one’s name.”
I ended up crashing on a couch in Igor’s apartment, the one adjacent to Keegan. When I woke up the next morning, it was still dark out, and I had no idea where I was. I stumbled to the bathroom, where I hovered by the toilet, thinking I needed to throw up, even though nothing came out.
Tabby and Mark must have been in the hall outside, because their voices came into focus. Mark saying We were just talking. She’s having a hard time with her boyfriend right now.
Tabby. I don’t care. You’re my boyfriend. Don’t forget it.
On the drive home, I told her what Keegan told me. I don’t know that one’s name. Tabby needed to know what that meant. That there were others.
“We talked about it,” Tabby said. “We’re good now. I believe him that nothing happened.”
Except she didn’t, and I didn’t believe it either.
7
MADELEINE SWANSON
MARK FORRESTER WAS A GOOD GUY. I have no idea how I got drawn into this. I saw some stuff online—my roommate reads all the celebrity gossip—she showed me some post about “the other woman” in the Blue-Eyed Boyfriend Killer case. She said, “Maddie, isn’t that the back of your head?”
It’s a picture of me and Mark at a party. I think the party was last November. That’s when Jason and I were fighting a lot. I met Mark in my Stats class freshman year, and we stayed friends. Sometimes we’d grab a drink on a random weeknight and catch up. Jason went to Brown and things were hard, but I never considered cheating on him with Mark. It wasn’t like that with us. But I did talk to Mark about Jason. I asked his opinion. For Mark, it always came down to being honest, even though it’s damn hard to do.
I do remember that party now, because it’s the night Tabby showed up. Mark never mentioned a girlfriend to me—probably because it wa
s always me talking about my drama, and that’s really embarrassing to admit. I didn’t go to Princeton to become a girl who cries over boys. I came here because I’m smart. But Jason made me doubt myself. Right before that party, he told me he wanted to take a break.
“What do you mean?” I’d asked.
“Exactly what you think,” he said. “This isn’t working for me.” Then I heard someone laugh in the background, and realized he wasn’t alone, that he was dumping me over the phone in front of people. It’s still the most humiliating moment of my life.
Of course, I didn’t want to go to the party after that. I wanted to stay in my room and put my pajamas on and cry over sappy movies. But my roommate dragged me out. “It’ll be fun,” she said. “Don’t let that asshole ruin one night, let alone your year.”
So I went. It was at a guy named Igor’s apartment. My roommate had been flirting with him for weeks. She liked that he lived off-campus, even though the apartment itself wasn’t anything special. I was feeling okay when we got there. I was doing fine, thinking I could rock the single life without Jason’s deadweight. Then that fucking song came on. The one Jason and I danced to at our senior prom. “This is our song,” he had whispered in my ear, his hand low on my back. “I’ll love you forever.”
I had believed it.
I knew I was going to cry, so I tried to get into the bathroom and do it in private, but the door was locked. Mark saw me standing there, rubbing my eyes, and it was like I couldn’t hold the tears in anymore. He just folded me into a big hug and asked if I wanted to go somewhere quiet to talk. We ended up in what must have been Igor’s bedroom. I poured it all out to him. The breakup over the phone. The song. I’m sure he thought I was a mess, but he just listened. He told me some things I needed to hear, things that I knew were true but somehow meant more coming from another guy. That I was a catch. That I had a lot going for me. That I didn’t need to waste my time with somebody who wasn’t totally sure about me.