Only, these are most definitely not the pictures I took. I don’t recognize them, and so they take on a sort of blurry, otherworldly quality. I spin through them with a flick of the thumb. Detective Ciccotelli positions himself over my shoulder and peers down at my screen. I don’t say not to because I don’t know what the rules are here. Not only that, but I am too paralyzed to do much of anything else.
“Wait a second,” he says. “Can I see that?”
Before I quite know what I’m doing, I’ve handed him my phone.
“That’s not—I don’t really know what that is,” I say, my voice distant, even to my own ears. It’s like I’m speaking to myself from someone else’s body.
But I do know, because I recognize the person in the middle of the frame.
It’s Madeline St. Clair—Queen Bitch of Belle Meade—and she is covered in blood.
Madeline hasn’t been killed; she’s been overkilled. I catch just enough of a glimpse of her destroyed face before the detective pulls the phone from my sight.
Naturally, I reach for it, an instinctive gesture that only heightens the impression that I have something to hide.
“Not exactly photos of a burglary,” he says, his voice even and calm.
“Someone—listen, I know this sounds batshit crazy, but someone has hijacked my phone somehow. It doesn’t—why would I just show you pictures of...”
I trail off. My mind gets commandeered by the images on my phone. I feel my past rushing back up to smack me across the jaw right here in the present.
It’s obvious—blatantly obvious—what’s happening, and I am powerless to stop it.
The detective snaps his fingers. “Stay with me,” he says. “This is—I’m sure we can figure this out, but I need you to calm down.”
It’s then I realize I'm hyperventilating. My breaths are coming in ragged, uneven pulses, and I suspect very soon I’m going to teeter over into catatonia.
Ciccotelli places me on the main couch—damn the evidence, I guess—and hurries out of the room. He comes back a few moments later with a glass of water.
“Drink this,” he says, but he’s also still holding my phone.
“I may need to hang onto this,” he says, holding it up.
I shake my head, all the while downing the tap water.
“No way,” I say when I’m done. “You can get what you need by issuing a warrant to my phone company. With the way things are going, there’s no way I’m giving up my phone.”
“I could—”
“But you won’t,” I say, my voice getting back to normal. “If you need my phone, you’re going to need some pretty stellar evidence to crack it, not that I’d ever allow that. I’ll be happy to cooperate, but not like this. I’m in shock. I’m in—”
My vision goes dim, and I have to fight to stay awake. The world is a series of flashes. The retro magazine rack. The scuff on the detective’s right shoe. The sunlight reflecting off the hinges of the entertainment center.
A moment of darkness—just a moment—and then I’m surging back toward reality.
I manage only a single, sonorous syllable. “Unnnnnh,” I say, pressing one hand against the spot on my temple just now beginning to ache.
“Almost lost you there,” he says, smiling generously. “Your phone is, um, on the table there. I think we’ve done enough spelunking into your digital folders for one day.”
He hangs around until he’s certain I’m going to survive, and then he performs his more trivial duties. Promising to contact me again. Getting me a line on some protective custody. And on and on.
I have to leave the house so the crime scene unit can turn over the scene, check for fingerprints and whatnot, but Ciccotelli says it like he doesn’t believe they’ll find anything.
But it seems, for now, that I’ve been extended the grace of being excluded as a suspect, even if it is a temporary distinction.
12
Headlights appear in the driveway. Gillian emerges from a Range Rover and hurries to meet me.
When we embrace in the driveway, I can’t help but ask her, “This is just the beginning, isn’t it? Does it just get worse from here?”
She nods into my shoulder, and I sigh.
It’s like a fault line has just shifted, and the resulting earthquake is going to bring everything down to dust.
Inside, the mood is no better.
“I wish I could say something like, ‘I just don’t know who would want to do this to her,’ but that’s just not the truth.”
Gillian nods solemnly and sips the not-insubstantial glass of cabernet I’ve poured for her. She seems to be looking for something to say but can’t quite find the words.
I decide to call her on it.
“This isn’t the time to hide anything,” I tell her, matter-of-factly. “One of us is gone, and you and I both know this is just the beginning. Plenty of people wanted Madeline dead in some passive way, but this wasn’t random.”
Gillian has never been one to mince words, so when she opens her mouth, I can’t help but hold my breath.
“There is something no one has ever told you,” she says. “It has to do with that night.”
She slowly spins her glass on the table, watching the way the liquid sloshes against the sides.
“After you...left—”
“You mean ‘was assaulted and kicked out,’” I interrupt.
“Either way,” she continues, keeping a steady, steely-eyed gaze, “we were in my room, the computer humming in the corner when Audrey came up with the idea.”
“What idea?”
“Like I said, we were just sitting there, kind of reeling from what we’d talked about in the chat room and also what had happened with you when she says it.”
“What does she say, Gillian?”
Gillian, not one for inherent dramatics, pauses long enough that I begin to question whether or not this is some far-flung hoax to drive me insane.
“Well,” she begins, and, thinking over her words, shifts uncomfortably in her seat. “I mean, I didn’t hear it—”
“Just say it,” I say insistently.
She nods this time, and the weight of the moment settles over the room. It’s like twenty years are being vacuumed right out of the room.
“Apparently, they went downstairs, and one of them said, ‘Let’s go watch it. Let’s go watch him die.’”
THEN
When Gillian closes the browser window, none of them can speak for at least a minute. They are like gymnasts manufacturing contentment for some unseen judges. There is a crackling pop to the energy in the room, even if there is no sound, and at last Madeline gives what she probably thinks is a demure smile.
“I think we did it,” she says. “I think it’s actually going to happen.”
All of them are possessed of a kind of exultant self-satisfaction. All but Mary Ellen, who is beginning to turn a very subtle shade of green.
“We need to tell someone,” she says, the tone of her voice high and insistent. She’s never heard these sounds emerge from her, but she thinks that if she is loud and frightening enough that she can somehow put an end to this.
“We did,” Madeline responds. “We told Everett. Isn’t that enough?”
“I’m serious, Mads,” Mary Ellen says. “This isn’t a joke.”
“And yet, M.E., I feel like laughing.”
And then she does, a risible, mocking sound. But it accomplishes its intended effect. It chills the rest of the room, and if either Audrey or Gillian was ever going to speak up, they certainly aren’t now. It’s all too late. Everything is too late. The wheels are set into motion, and they will carry this to the next horrid destination.
Mary Ellen stands, and Madeline stands with her.
“Where are you going?” she asks. “The night’s still young. We have plenty of cigarettes and vodka, and we plan on getting fucked up, so long as the mood isn’t killed off prematurely.”
With that, Audrey’s standing, her smile a detesta
ble and somewhat sinister leer. “And you wouldn’t dare do that, would you? Kill off the mood?”
Audrey’s been waiting for this moment. Up to now, she’s been a kamikaze pilot without a mission. That all changes when there’s a divide in the ranks. Mary Ellen’s defection provides her with a chance to go all-in for Madeline.
“This is murder,” Mary Ellen says, though her voice sounds distant and constricted.
Madeline mocks her by pretending to search the room. “I don’t see a gun in here. There are no knives or bombs or baseball bats, either.”
“No fucking bats,” Audrey repeats, her voice high and quavering. Gillian, meanwhile, just stares, half-lidded and contemplative. She looks like she’s taken a whole bar of Xanax.
“It’s not right,” Mary Ellen tries again. “Listen, you got what you wanted. You completely owned a human being, took everything from him. Isn’t that enough?”
Madeline steps forward, and she’s so close Mary Ellen can smell the stench of cigarettes and vodka on her.
“It won’t be enough until he’s underneath his headstone.”
Suddenly, none of this makes sense. She’s gone along to get along, but she cannot figure out what has brought them to this moment. “But why?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” Madeline responds. “But really, who cares? It could have been anybody. Turns out, it was him. So what?”
Again, the silence is almost too much for Mary Ellen. The other girls just stare. It’s as if they have some distant, burgeoning understanding of their actions, but they don’t want to actually recognize it. Their eyes are glassy and unfocused, all but Madeline’s, whose retinas burn with an anger Mary Ellen has never seen.
And, suddenly, she kicks her.
Just lifts a foot and kicks Mary Ellen right in the chest.
The backs of Mary Ellen legs hit the ottoman she’d been sitting on, and she rolls ass-over-teakettle back into the corner of the room.
Before she can gain a sense of what’s happening, the other girls are on her. It goes so smoothly, almost like a choreographed dance. Almost like they’d planned it. Audrey grabs her wrists, Gillian her feet. And Madeline, of course, sits on her chest, pinning her to the ground.
When she leans down, baring her teeth, Mary Ellen can smell the nicotine again, but there’s also something underneath that. Something more fundamental, more primal, like pheromones or hormones or pure adrenaline.
But nothing compares to the look in her eyes.
She actually sees death in them.
“What we are doing, that’s not killing someone,” she says.
And then her hands are on Mary Ellen’s throat, pressing down with a vise-like tension. Her fingernails dig into the soft flesh beneath the chin, and she squeezes until it feels like Mary Ellen’s windpipe will collapse.
“This would be killing someone,” she says. “This would be murder.”
Somehow, her grip tightens, displaying a strength Mary Ellen didn’t know existed in her pot-smoking, un-athletic friend. The air is gone, floating around her but giving her no succor. Her vision weakens, turning a few unsettling colors, and she thinks she’s going to pass out.
“I would kill you,” Audrey says, from just out of sight. “I would fucking gut you, if Madeline asked. Do you want me to gut you?”
But of course she can’t shake her head. She’s too busy focusing on a single point on the ceiling, trying desperately to stay awake and present, because she knows if they let her slip into unconsciousness, they won’t know how to bring her back.
So she just lets this happen. She just lets go. She focuses on the click in the back of her throat, the place where all of the tissue meets, praying for an opening that will allow even a sliver of oxygen in.
“What we are doing,” Madeline continues, loosening her grip just enough that the blackness isn’t quite so black, “is freeing him. We are giving him the out he so desperately deserves. We are in control of everything. We. Are. God.”
And even though it is the most ridiculous, grandiose thing Madeline’s ever said, to Mary Ellen, at least, it’s also the most terrifying. Because it is true. Only a madwoman would say such things, and only a fool would discredit Madeline St. Clair’s belief in herself.
When she finally lets go, Madeline pulls back and leans against the ottoman, an orgasmic expression slithering over her features. She moans just once, as Gillian and Audrey release Mary Ellen’s limbs.
It is transcendent. It is amazing. It places her on another plane of existence.
Or at least it looks that way.
But Mary Ellen does not give herself time to drink it all in. She is up and scrambling away from them, rushing for the door.
Audrey begins pursuit, but Madeline waves it off.
“Let her go,” she says. “She’s served her purpose.”
NOW AND THEN
“How do you know any of this?”
Gillian stares into her drink. A long time passes before she actually speaks.
“I didn’t find out for a long time, not until we were adults,” she says. “Not until they figured they could trust me with it, I guess.”
“And what did they say?”
She shrugs. “They just kind of...told me.”
And then she goes on to tell me.
***
Gillian enters the bar on Lower Broadway with a pit in her stomach. She hasn’t seen The Girls in a while, and the truth is, she doesn’t feel close enough to them to hang out anymore. The call from Audrey—ever the coordinator—came out of the blue, and if she didn’t know better, she’d think she is being set-up.
It’s the thing she thinks as she elbows her way past the cadre at the door and into the somber, darkened depths of this particular honky tonk.
She thinks it’s like something out of a grainy old mafia movie.
Gillian Meitner now sleeps with the fishes, she thinks.
At the very least, this could be some weird kind of sting.
Or blackmail.
Somewhere, she expects cameras, a whole surveillance system. Maybe one of them is wearing a wire. They’ve been quiet too long not to have something planned.
When she spots them, she glances around, checking her perimeter. There’s just something so...off about seeing Madeline and Audrey after all this time.
They used to be close. Used to go out drinking, partying until the wee hours of the morning, avoiding the old days like week-old sushi, unless it happened to be the general We went through some fucked-up shit, didn’t we variety.
As soon as she sits down, they are feeding her lines.
“It’s just been so long,” Audrey says.
“We’d have invited Mary Ellen, but—”
“She wouldn’t come,” Audrey says, finishing Madeline’s thought.
“What we mean is, she wouldn’t fly across the country.”
They struggle through the first drink, glancing around the bar and commenting on the tourists and new locals, before the hard edges begin to soften on the conversation.
“So,” Madeline says, being inquisitive, “what are you up to these days?”
Gillian goes through her usual spiel about her job, and because it’s kind of boring—and they look bored—she finishes before the band on-stage up front has finished their first song.
She rushes, in part, because she doesn’t give a shit about her job. Her job is boring. She likes the boring-ness of it. Her job consists of numbers, and numbers, even with their complex calculations, are predictable.
She likes predictable.
It’s not that she hates uncertainty. Uncertainty is welcome. Heisenberg had it down to a science, haha. She relishes when her job requires her to square a circle that seems impossible. That gives her a thrill, as much as she can be thrilled.
But unpredictable—Gillian wants none of that.
Her brain gets so far ahead of her, by the time she catches back up to the conversation, they’ve begun talking about something else entirely.
&nb
sp; Gillian has never been good at conversation.
If not for her dad’s relationship with Madeline’s dad—something about finances—the two of them would have never been friends.
As Madeline and Audrey prattle on about their very glamorous, very public lives, she withdraws into herself. She’s more comfortable like that, anyway. In her own mind. If the robots take over, and people are reduced to brains in jars, Gillian figures she will be just fine with that. She can spend all of eternity contemplating the spheres.
It isn’t until their third or fourth drink that she is knocked out of her shell. It’s when she hears something—a detail from their past—which is out of sync with the rest of what she knows about the whole Suicide Blondes situation.
Audrey is talking, and she gets halfway through a paragraph about that night—rehashing everything—before Madeline elbows her in the chest.
“What’d you say?” Gillian asks her.
Audrey laughs, her face a melting wax figure of drunkenness. “I said, ‘Ow, my tit!’”
Both of them fall into a red-faced fit of laughter, all while Gillian watches on in a kind of solitary horror.
She is not amused.
She is massaging the wound her two...accomplices have opened up with just an offhand remark. She feels now as though she’s been living a lie these past decades.
Gillian has a steel trap for a brain—it’s the one compliment she accepts without attributing it to other people’s obsequiousness—and so she is actively trying to recall every syllable uttered in the last minute, piecing it together into a mental tapestry.
“Oh, my God,” Audrey says, “it was just a joke.”
But Gillian doesn’t find it funny. She has a very specific sense of humor, and not included in her list of things she considers hilarious is watching a teenager die of his own hand. She has grown up in the last several years, and death in all forms has become taboo for her. She doesn’t even date musicians whose music focuses too heavily on death. (Her goth phase was short-lived.)
“Come on, Gil,” Madeline says, after a time. “We all did some messed-up stuff back then. If we can’t laugh about it now, then when can we laugh?”
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