by L. E. Flynn
So today, when she’s in the shower, I sneak into her home office. Well, I don’t even have to sneak, because she leaves the door open and her laptop is on, and she has these documents up on the screen. It takes me a couple minutes to figure out that I’m reading a patient’s file, a real-life person. Somebody seriously fucked up, I might add. Someone’s life in sections: HISTORY, MENTAL STATUS, DIAGNOSES, RECOMMENDATIONS. History of trouble with boys. Quick to anger. Quick to defend herself. Resistant to therapy. Likes to talk to me about my life, as if we’re friends. Has not wavered in recollection of events on August 16. Known history of manipulation.
When I don’t hear the shower anymore, I click the screen back to where it was and get out of the room. There’s a picture of us on her desk, me and her and my dad, from Before. Maybe everyone’s life is split into Before and After. Before one person goes and ruins everything. Before my mom cheated, she told me things, and I told her things. After, she’s this big mess of secrets.
The name on that file. T. Cousins. How long has my mom been seeing Tabitha? And what are her recommendations for a girl like that?
I pull on my coat and leave the house before I have to talk to her or hear any more of her bullshit. I’m never going to figure out anything by asking my mom. She’ll say something about patient confidentiality, but maybe it’s just in her genetic code to protect another fuckup, another girl who will probably grow into somebody just like her.
Maybe I’m wrong, and Tabby isn’t the problem. Maybe everyone else around her is. Maybe Beck is. (Okay, he definitely is, because he broke up with me. Ugh.) And as much as he’s an asshole, I can’t forget how scared he looked that day on my porch. He genuinely thinks he could go to jail, and I might be the only person who can figure out the truth in time to stop that from happening. Except I can’t do it alone.
Keegan’s at the Stop & Shop, just like I knew he would be. I’m hoping he’s not one of those lifer types, then I realize I don’t actually care. He’s not my problem. None of this is. But I’m making it my problem anyway, because I need to know.
“Keegan Leach,” I say. He kind of eyes me up and down, totally slimy. I wonder if he thinks I’m hot. I’m definitely not his usual party type.
“What do you want?” he says.
“Same thing as you,” I say. “I want her to get what she deserves.”
30
ELLE
WE STOPPED BEING A FOURSOME pretty shortly after Mark’s birthday party, which Tabby convinced me to host at my house so everyone could use the pool. Keegan—who wasn’t even at the party—suddenly had this blond girl hanging all over him on Instagram, and they started hanging out with Tabby and Mark, and I got boxed out. Four’s company, five’s a crowd. Which meant instead of seeing Tabby almost every day, I barely saw her at all.
Keegan gave me a parting gift, though. I went to the Stop & Shop and ended up in his checkout lane since it was the only one open. I was content to act like strangers, but he had another idea.
“They need to break up,” he said. “They’re toxic. I’ve tried. Tell her you saw him kissing another girl at your last party. Just tell her, and she’ll believe you.”
My last party. Mark’s birthday. I wondered if Keegan was absent for a different reason than just avoiding me.
“I’m not going to lie to her.” I crossed my arms. “It’s a lie, right?”
He didn’t answer, just told me I owed eleven seventy-six and asked how I’d be paying.
I don’t know what went on between the four of them, if they went on double dates, or stayed home and watched movies, or retreated to different rooms to make out. I didn’t know if I cared. I saw the monogrammed wedding napkins in my head. Keegan and Kyla. I wondered how long they knew each other before his hand went to her bare leg, drawn to all that flesh like some kind of magnet.
It’s pathetic to admit, but I wanted school to start again. I wanted Mark to go back to Princeton and Keegan to disappear from our lives, because they came as a package deal. I wanted it to be me and Tabby again. I’d have the real Tabby, not the phony version who took her place. The last few times I saw her, she was acting totally weird, like she was being programmed to say certain things. We did this and we did that. She never had time for me.
Mark was leaving for Princeton on August twenty-sixth. I marked—no pun intended—it in my calendar, a countdown, like I used to do for Christmas as a kid. It wasn’t him leaving that I needed so much as Tabby returning.
There were three weeks to go in the countdown when my phone started vibrating in the middle of the night. I always kept it adjacent to my pillow when I slept, like it was my pet or something. I guess I didn’t want to miss anything important.
With sleep-blurred eyes, I swiped the screen. I figured it was a text. Nobody ever called me. Even Tabby barely texted anymore, preferring to Snap, preferring that all of our conversations vanish. But it was a call, and it was from her, and when I picked up, her voice was desperate and panicked.
“Hey,” she said. “I really need to see you, okay? Everything’s just so messed up and I don’t know what to do.”
“Slow down,” I said. “Where are you? What happened?”
“I’m in your front yard. Can you come down and let me in?”
I crept down the stairs and into the foyer. As soon as I unlocked the door she was inside, breathing heavy, eyes and hair wild. She had been crying.
“What happened?” I whispered. “What did he do?”
She shook her head, clung to me, buried her face in the shoulder of my T-shirt. “What didn’t he do?”
I led her upstairs, as if she hadn’t been here before, and the two of us got into my bed, just like we did when we were younger and had sleepovers, even though Tabby used to bring a sleeping bag and roll it onto the floor. She always got cold. She always needed to be close.
“What happened tonight?” I said again when we were tucked under the duvet, her cigarette-and-alcohol smell sharp. “Tell me everything.”
She stared at the ceiling with glassy eyes. “We talked about this summer,” she said, and it was as if those words dried up her tears, because her voice stopped being broken. “We talked about being together. Everything’s just so messed up, and I don’t know what to do.”
“Break up with him,” I said. The words I had been dying to say for weeks, months, shooting off my tongue like darts. “He doesn’t deserve you.”
She laughed, a crescendo sound that I was afraid would wake up my parents. “Break up with him. We’re not even together.”
Mark’s social media. How her face was barely on it. How it was like she ceased to exist in his public life. Tabby, his dirty little secret, the place his dick camped out for the summer. He was going back to parties and nameless girls in college classrooms who cheered at his swim meets and followed him to bars with their fake IDs. He didn’t need Tabby anymore.
“I need to tell you something,” I blurted out, not even sure exactly how I was going to say it. “I saw Mark. Kissing a girl at his birthday party. I don’t even know who she was. I wanted to tell you, but I didn’t know how.”
“It’s not true,” she said. “He wouldn’t do that to me.”
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “But you can find someone who really loves you.”
She rolled away from me, curled into a ball, and I thought she was asleep, but I know what I heard next. I already have. I stared at her back, at the white curve of her neck, and she didn’t look breakable anymore, not like porcelain but something that wouldn’t shatter. And the next morning when I woke up, she was gone, and I wondered if I made the whole night up.
Excerpt from Tabby’s Diary
August 6, 2019
It’s like all of my worst nightmares are coming true. I trust Elle, and she told me she saw Mark kissing another girl. He couldn’t even wait to leave the party to do it. She thinks I should break up with him, but it’s not that easy. It never is.
SHARP EDGES CRIME—
CUT TO THE TR
UTH!
November 12, 2019
Cheaters never prosper …
By Oberon Halton
… but they don’t deserve to die either.
So apparently there’s proof out there that Mark was a cheater. It’s in some Instagram photos that have since been deleted (although somebody was wise enough to take some screenshots before the account was taken down—thank you, friend)! I’ve seen the photos, and I must say, he does look awfully cozy, not just with the Madeleine girl everyone is pouncing on, but some other girls, too. And this was posted out there for everybody to see. Almost like he was daring Tabby to notice and do something about it. Now Tabby is being made out to be a girl with a serious jealous streak, on top of everything else.
One of our readers wrote in privately in response to my last article. He or she asked to remain nameless, but suggested that Tabby might have been so aggressively on Mark about cheating because she was doing the same thing to him, and it was an attempt to save face.
Readers, weigh in—how far have you gone to avenge a cheating boyfriend or girlfriend? What’s the punishment they really deserve?
COMMENTS
DarkRoastCoffee: Tabby was definitely cheating on Mark. The question isn’t whether or not she was. The question is with how many guys, because I don’t think it was just with Beck.
31
BRIDGET
I GUESS I SHOULD MENTION what I said to Mark the last time I saw him, because that’s what Stewart wanted to talk to me about. Let me clarify: I don’t feel bad about what I said. But I think it’s important, what he said back to me.
It was the day we all went to the beach. I don’t even know why I was invited, or why I went along. I was supposed to do ten miles, then head to the playground near the woods for chin-ups on the bars there and triceps dips. I was convinced it was my arms holding me back. If I could make them stronger, I would dominate cross-country season. Everyone thinks running is in your legs, but it’s even more in your arms, because they dictate what the rest of your body does. They make the decisions.
But there was Tabby, smelling like sunscreen, floppy hat on, dark circles under her eyes. I heard her sneak in again last night. It seemed like she didn’t need any sleep at all that summer, like she was running on something else entirely. Driving to the beach, things felt normal. We sang along to Taylor Swift and ate Swedish Fish and I stuck my feet up on the dashboard, which Mom never let us do. If you get in an accident, your leg will end up going through your body, she used to say, except she didn’t know that Tabby and I were untouchable.
We were the first ones there, spreading out our towels, burying our feet in the sand.
“There are the boys,” Tabby said, waving them over. Mark and Keegan, shiny chests, matching navy swim trunks, almost like they had planned it. Mark looked better in his, more chiseled, as if he had spent his whole summer at the pool.
They sat down next to us, Tabby and Mark exchanging a kiss that lasted too long to be in public. I suddenly felt out of place, juvenile and babyish, a kid sitting with a bunch of adults. Tabby’s body filled out her bikini, and there was the tail of her ivy tattoo, the one she got freshman year that our parents still somehow didn’t know about, creeping up her back. I was flat-chested and skinny, hard like leather, hair limp and face plain.
“There’s Kyla,” Keegan said, and he jumped up, shielding his face against the sun as a blond girl headed our way. She broke into a run as she got closer, leaped into his arms, her legs hooked around him as he held her. Why am I here? I wanted to ask Tabby. Why am I on your double date?
“We should go in the water,” Mark said. “Come on, Tabby.”
“I’m not hot yet,” she said. “I need to get hot first.” She stretched out, fanning her hands over her stomach.
I looked around us. You hear beach and think of this glamorous place, tight bodies and Frisbees flying around and waves coming in, but Crest Beach is a joke. A tiny strip of sand, a rocky shoreline, crushed beer cans left behind. I hated that I gave up my workout to be here, that I let myself get derailed for a day. Maybe that was how Mark felt about my sister, and for just a second, I felt sorry for him for meeting her.
“Come on,” Mark said, hovering over my sister’s face. “You could use the exercise, babe.”
Then I didn’t feel sorry for him anymore.
“Give her a break,” Keegan said. “Look at the waves, dude. They’re too big for swimming today.”
It had stormed last night, hard rain beating against the roof. The water was the color of mud and the waves were churning against the shoreline, pulling rocks back out with them.
“They’re not big,” Mark said, cocky, so sure of himself. “They’re baby waves. I’m gonna go on my own.” He stood up, kicked off his flip-flops.
“If you start drowning, don’t expect anyone to save you,” I said.
They all heard it. My eyes were locked on Mark, but I felt their heads turn. Tabby laughed, a weak sound, and then so did everyone else, because that’s what it was, a joke. Except it wasn’t a joke, and I didn’t mean it to be funny at all.
Mark knew it wasn’t a joke. He didn’t laugh, but he smiled, and standing there in the sun, his perfect white teeth suddenly looked like fangs. He could rip her apart, I realized. In a thousand ways, and hide all the pieces, so that we’d never find her again. I was already having trouble finding her, even though she was sitting right next to me, one of her sandy feet touching my elbow.
“You know I had four scholarship offers for swimming, right? You know I’ve spent more of my summer in the pool than out of it? That’s the last way I would go.” He looked at all of us, then honed in on me. “Be careful of the undertow. It can really pull you out.” Then he was gone, jogging toward the water line, all pumping muscles.
“Bridge,” Tabby said when he was gone. “What the hell was that?”
“He threatened me. Did you not hear that? Be careful of the undertow. It can really pull you out. Is that not menacing?”
Keegan and Kyla weren’t listening anymore. She was rubbing sunscreen into his back like a mother does to a little kid. Tabby turned toward me, so close that our faces were almost touching under her floppy hat. “He was just telling you to be careful. He used to work as a lifeguard in high school, so he just doesn’t want to see you get hurt.”
“You’re always defending him. Don’t you get sick of it?”
It was like a hush fell over the whole beach. Everyone could hear us. But I needed to know the answer, even if I should have asked a long time ago.
Tabby’s fingers were twitching. She needed a cigarette. I didn’t know where that bad habit came from, because I at least knew it didn’t come from Mark, Mr. Wholesome, Mr. Lean Protein and Vegetables. She was hunting around in her head for a lie, not just any lie, but one that could shut me up. I searched around my own brain for a rebuttal, but it turned out, I didn’t need one.
“Yeah,” she said softly, for my ears alone. “I guess sometimes I do.”
Whatever I was about to say next died on my tongue. I watched Mark power through the water, his arms moving like he was part of a machine, legs a blur of churned brown water. I wished an undertow would find him, like a self-fulfilling prophecy. The swimming champion, drowned in a muddy lake. It had a kind of poetic justice to it. People would call it a waste, like they always did when a boy died. But when a girl does it, there’s always blame spliced in with the mourning, reasons why it was her fault. She drank too much. She was trying to show off. I willed the lake to swallow Mark, the same lake where we learned to water ski when we were kids.
The lake didn’t listen. It brought Mark back safely to shore. But that was one of the last times I would ever see him alive.
32
ELLE
I GUESS IT WAS ONLY a matter of time until Dallas showed up at my house. And here he is, sitting on the porch, holding flowers. It’s not the flowers that make me want to curl into a ball and cry. It’s his face, open and earnest, more than I deserv
e after I’ve been anything but.
“Sorry to be a stalker,” he says. “But you wouldn’t talk to me. I’m not mad about—you know, Elle. I’m just—I wish you would have let me be there for you.” He stands up.
He wasn’t there, because he didn’t know about it. But Tabby knew, and she was there. The morning of, she met me at my house after Mom left for work. She noticed me shivering and took off her own sweatshirt—Mark’s Princeton one—and slipped it over my tank top, pulling my arms through the sleeves like I was a small child. I felt as lost and helpless as one.
When we got to the clinic, I pulled up the hood.
It’s me in the photo, the dark-haired girl in the Princeton sweatshirt. Tabby let me out and went to park the car, since traffic made us late, and it was an appointment I didn’t want to miss. I have no idea who took that photo, but everyone assumed it was Tabby, hair spilling out of the orange hood. And when the photo appeared online—it was her idea to let everyone believe that.
“Let them judge me,” she said. “Let them think whatever they want about me. You deserve better.”
So it became Tabby’s baby. Tabby’s abortion. Tabby’s judgment. She was a martyr, all in the name of our friendship. I should have been grateful. I should still be grateful. But a tiny splinter of me resents her, because it’s always all about Tabby. She has this way of making everything about herself, even a problem that wasn’t hers to solve.
But Dallas—he knew it was me the whole time. That first text he sent—I’d recognize you anywhere, why didn’t you let me be there? I was angry. He made it all about him, just like Tabby made it about her. And it was about me. My body, which suddenly felt foreign to me.
I shouldn’t have let Tabby step into my life and lie for me. She was upset that I didn’t tell her about Dallas—she thought we made out sometimes, but that I was still a virgin. Why didn’t you tell me? That was the first thing she said, all hurt—do you see, how she makes things all about her?