Give Me Your Hand

by Megan Abbott

  But I loved the play. There were so many parts that sang darkly in my brain. You would seem to know my stops, Hamlet tells his backstabbing friends. You would pluck out the heart of my mystery.

  Sitting in class, looking at that line, I thought of Diane. Diane and the things that had happened to her and how much I knew, yet how little. Was that what I was doing with her, circling closer, trying to pluck the heart of her mystery?

  “So, let’s turn to Hamlet’s treacherous uncle,” Ms. Cameron said. “What do we learn of Claudius in act three?”

  “That he did do it,” I said. “That he killed Hamlet’s dad.”

  Diane’s head was bobbing a little. She hadn’t said a word since class began, her book still closed on her desk.

  “That’s right, Kit,” Ms. Cameron said, eyes now on Diane. “And how do we know?”

  Next to me, Diane pressed her fingers to her temples. Her face looked soft and waxy under the fluorescent lights. Almost like an apple gone bad.

  “He talks about the whole thing,” piped up Tim Streeter from the back. “I don’t get why villains always do that. Like in Batman—”

  “Is Claudius the villain here?” Ms. Cameron replied, looking first at Tim, slack-mouthed at the question itself.

  “He has no conscience,” I said. “That’s what he says. He confesses everything.”

  “Yeah,” Tim shouts out, nodding his head vigorously. “He’s a psycho.”

  I sneak another glance at Diane, her face almost greenish now, and a knot in her brow.

  “Well, let’s look at what he says,” Ms. Cameron said. “Page sixty-two.”

  A grunting whir of pages, spines cracking.

  Ms. Cameron looked at Diane, who sat motionless, her spine curled.

  “Open your book,” I whispered, nudging it.

  Diane turned and looked at me, eyes glassy and black.

  “Diane,” Ms. Cameron said, walking closer to us now, “how about you read Claudius’s soliloquy for us?”

  Diane’s head lifted, then fell again. “I don’t…”

  “Come on, Diane,” Ms. Cameron said, walking to Diane’s desk, rapping her knuckles on the laminate top. “Let’s hear the confession.”

  “Ms. Cameron,” she whispered, “I…”

  “Confess! Confess!” shouted Tim, playfully pounding his fist on his desk.

  Diane’s head darted around, and the black look she gave him made him nearly jump back.

  “I can do it,” I volunteered, a queasy feeling rising in me.

  But Diane opened her book, her hands looking damp. Her familiar leather bookmark on the exact right page.

  “O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven,” she read, her voice high and not her own. “It hath the primal eldest curse upon ’t.”

  For a second, that voice quavering, I thought she might be about to cry. But Diane never cried. Her face white, and lips white too, like a vampire in a movie, she kept going.

  “Diane,” Ms. Cameron started, “are you—”

  But Diane talked right over her, her voice drowning her out, pitching suddenly loud and strong and throaty. Then she rose to her feet, as we were supposed to when we read, and all of us watched, heads twisting, craning, to see.

  “What if this cursèd hand were thicker than itself with brother’s blood?” she read. “Is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens to wash it white as snow?”

  She read it all. Each word like a hard blow, and everything sounding so much darker and more dire on the page.

  “But, O, what form of prayer can serve my turn?” Diane read. “‘Forgive me my foul murder’?”

  Beneath the desk, her legs trembled, an ankle turned against itself. And that hand at her side, her fingers pushing together, pressing into her leg.

  By the time she reached the end—“My words fly up, my thoughts remain below”—she wasn’t looking at the page at all and her face, tilted high, caught the light, eyes shut like a church-window angel: “Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”

  None of us knew what we were seeing and I was just as blank and dumb as all the rest.

  That night was the night. Diane came over to study, Hamlet in hand, bookmark hanging like a dark tongue.

  “I wasn’t sure you’d come,” I said. “You were so strange in class.”

  She looked at me, her winter scarf bundled around her neck as she shivered in the doorway.

  It felt like she saw a hunger in me, but there was a hunger in her too. I felt it.

  “Kit, do you think I could sleep over?”

  I said yes without even asking my mom.

  As soon as we settled in my room, she called to get permission.

  “Is it okay?” I asked when she hung up. I still hadn’t met her grandfather, but my mom said she’d heard from a nurse who volunteered at the rescue clinic that he was sick.

  “He’s glad,” she said. “He worries I work too hard. He thinks we’re going to, I don’t know, do our nails and watch music videos.”

  It wasn’t until then that she tugged off her gloves, unfurled her scarf, neck and hands ruddy and angry-looking. She turned to me, solemn and serious, and suggested we get started.

  But she didn’t really seem to want to get started. She kept fanning the pages of the Signet Hamlet in her hand, as if looking for something she never found.

  “Diane,” I finally said, “is this about what happened in class today?”

  But she insisted nothing happened, except it was clear that it had, and was still happening because finally she looked at me and said, “Did you mean what you said in class today? About Claudius having no conscience?”

  “Sure,” I said. “He kills his own blood to get what he wants. Which means he just has no morals.”

  She looked down at the book, palm pressing the gloomy-faced man on the paperback cover.

  I waited, and that was when it happened. A click of her jaw, like a pit bull’s or cobra’s unlocking, and she asked me, “Kit, do you think it could happen in real life?”

  “What?” We were talking about Hamlet, except we weren’t.

  “For someone to have no conscience.”

  “Yes,” I said, quickly. Because I did. But also because it felt like she was going to tell me something, a secret. Diane’s secret at last (as if any of us had only one).

  I remembered what she’d said that night after Barrelz and Bootz. All her talk about sex and scaring herself.

  “Diane,” I said, “what is it?” I paused. “Did someone do something to you? Did someone hurt you?”

  I would regret saying this, asking this, more than anything else in my whole cramped life.

  Her head turned to the side; she glanced at me, showing me only the white of her left eye, gleaming like a pearl. Her hand wrapped about the locket, chain pressing against her neck.

  The first thought that came to me was her dad. That phantom with the mustache, the dad-khakis. The awkward arm around his daughter’s tense shoulder. Everything that had seemed earnest and sad turned ugly. Molesting, or incest, an even uglier word. Is that why she never talked about him? Had he done something?

  But she shook her head. “No one did anything to me. I’m talking about something I did. I’m talking about myself.”

  There’s a churning in me, like there’s no going back now, but why had I pushed myself here in the first place?

  “What did you do?” I said.

  “I can’t say it out loud. I’ve never said it.”

  “Did you dent your granddad’s truck?”

  “No.”

  I paused. “Are you pregnant?”

  “No.” She looked at me and, voice even, said, “It’s so much worse.”

  I didn’t say anything at all.

  “I killed him,” she said. “I killed my dad.”

  NOW

  “Diane,” I say, “it’s time for you to go.”

  Other than Alex, no one’s ever been in this apartment before. I haven’t had a single guest in two years. And the
se intimate encounters, it’s like they’re not just in my apartment but in my brain, whispering demands.

  “But I came to tell you something,” Diane says, straightening. “It’s about the lab. I’m going to be on the PMDD team. I’m one of the two.”

  And there it is. I nod, hide the wince expertly. Hide everything, my face still, and still hungover.

  “Well, good for you,” I say. “That’s goddamned wonderful for you. You always land on your feet, don’t you, Diane? On floors paved with gold.”

  “And you,” she says. “The other one is you.”

  She blinks twice. My, does she flash those doe eyes at me.

  “That’s not true,” I say.

  “It’s you,” she repeats, a hint of a smile there. As close as Diane gets. “It’s both of us.”

  I don’t say anything.

  “Now do you see what I mean about fate?”

  I stand in the kitchenette, waiting for the water to boil in the dented kettle. I’ve never made tea in my life, but the last tenant left a faded box of Red Rose in the cupboard and I need time. I need to breathe.

  “So Severin told you this,” I say, returning to her with clinking mugs. “She just decided to tell you before anyone else. That it’s you and me.”

  Diane nods, taking the mug. “She told me I’d be on the team when she offered me the job in the lab.”

  Of course. An incentive. An enticement, to lure Diane from a very prestigious lab to ours.

  “Did she say anything about the others? Maxim or Alex?”

  “Alex? The slippery one with the expensive watch?” Diane sets her mug on the table. The way she holds herself, so carefully. Like someone who always sees herself at the same time as she sees everything else. Who always thinks, Careful, careful.

  “Yes. I mean, I guess.” My fingers lift to my temples. “Slippery?”

  Diane shrugs. “She never mentioned him.”

  “Oh.” And I admit, in that moment, the fast-diminishing Alex, the Alex with the secret family connection he concealed from me, diminishes even more.

  “But Diane, why is…why are you and Dr. Severin…”

  “What matters is this: she wants you.”

  I don’t let that sit with me, don’t let myself be flattered by it. It feels like a trick.

  “What makes you think I’d ever work with you?” I ask, my mug clattering against the sofa’s rattan arm, the tea spattering red on me, on her.

  “If you’re the Kit I know,” she says, “nothing would stop you.”

  “What does that mean?” I say, my voice hard.

  She looks at me. “It means you’re strong.”

  We’re quiet for a moment. Her gaze wanders to the fat stack of papers on the coffee table. The case studies I’d been reading.

  “Do you think it’s true?” Diane asks.

  “What?”

  She nods toward the case studies. “That PMDD made these women do those things? Drive into light poles, shake their babies, throw kitchen knives at their husbands.”

  “We don’t know yet,” I say. “But maybe. Some of it. Some of them.” I pause again. “Do you?”

  She looks at me and something in her face—I feel a flash of something old, a memory of an ancient nightmare, Diane under my bed, shaking it by the springs.

  “No,” she says, turning away from me. “I used to but not anymore.

  “There’s so many things,” she adds, “we don’t understand, even about ourselves.”

  “Especially ourselves,” I say.

  There’s another long pause. A standoff of sorts.

  My brain is doing dances. What is this really about? I wonder. Because you never know with Diane until it hits you in the face.

  “This isn’t how I wanted this to go,” she says, rising. “I thought you’d be glad. I thought this is what we always wanted.”

  What we always wanted; there’s a hoary, uncomfortable truth to it.

  That’s when a snaky, swampy thought comes to me.

  “You did this,” I say. “You made it happen so that I wouldn’t tell. So Dr. Severin—so no one will ever know.”

  Her eyebrows lift.

  “You won’t tell.” Her voice low as a man’s.

  “I don’t owe you anything,” I say.

  She slides on her coat, still wet and carapace-dark.

  “I had nothing to do with Dr. Severin’s decision,” she says, reaching for her shoes, which are sitting in a near lagoon on my carpet. “But I know you would never tell for a lot of reasons.”

  “I don’t owe you anything,” I say, louder this time. “Not a goddamned thing.”

  But Diane only nods, as if crossing off an item on a to-do list or recording a final measurement in her lab notebook.

  “I guess you’re afraid,” she says.

  “Afraid?” I say, moving toward her now, following her to the door. “I’m not afraid. Afraid of what?”

  Buttoning her coat, she doesn’t answer for a long moment, letting me wonder into those endless eyes of hers, making me remember all kinds of things. I can smell Diane’s shampoo, like strawberries and dew, and I can feel her close and remember things.

  I shut my eyes for a second and picture myself lying on the carpet, my mouth open, my head jerking, crying out without making a sound.

  “Afraid of me,” she says, finally, moving to the door. There’s an unspeakably sad look on her face that I don’t know what to do with.

  “I’m not afraid of you,” I say, my voice suddenly rough, hangover hoarse, “but maybe you should be afraid of me. I’m the one who knows what you are. You should be afraid of me.”

  But she has already opened the door, crossed the threshold. I stand in the doorway, bare feet curled. I call out after that swaying black raincoat, like a snake’s tail.

  “What could you do?” I shout after her. “What could you possibly do?”

  She turns, pauses at the stairwell door.

  “Nothing,” she says, a look enigmatic and impossible, just like she is. “Bye, Kit.”

  The rest of the night, lying uselessly on my sheet-stripped bed, the smell of strawberry everywhere now, I can do nothing but think.

  In the lab, everything is separable. Extraction, distillation, centrifugation, crystallization, decantation. Leaching. A funnel, filter paper, a flask, the vacuum outlet under the hood. Feeling for the suction at the end of the tube. The solvent passing through the paper. Whatever is left behind is what counts. Let’s pretend it’s gold. It couldn’t be gold—gold doesn’t work like that—but let’s say it is. In this moment, for me, the PMDD slot is the gold. I want to feel it in my hand. I don’t want to think about that dirty slurry of sand, salt, chalk left on the bottom. I only want to think about that gold—flake, nugget, or flour, raw and heavy.

  I want that gold.

  I’ve been waiting so long. I’m not like my old man with his lottery tickets and his Herbalife franchise, the Diabetes Solution Kit bought from the man on the TV. I’ve worked for it, neck forever crooked now, eyestrain, fingers numb from pipetting, wrist ache.

  I’ve been working for this forever, for a decade anyway, and finally it’s happening: I’m on the PMDD team. Me. I’m one of the two. She picked me. She picked me, as she picked me a dozen years ago, choosing me from a thousand applicants. Dr. Lena Severin, mouth like a razor, brain like a god’s, an ion pump where her heart should be. She picked me.

  Does it matter if Diane helped make it happen? Does it matter if I’d have to work side by side with her, shoulders nudged close? Elbow-deep in the purple marrow of the PMDD study?

  I try to imagine Diane and Dr. Severin and me in a sturdy dinghy amid the hormonal sea of PMDD, hurling lifesavers, raising breakwaters. Waving from jetties, promising rescue.

  So long working, toiling, living monkishly in strip-mall apartments, eating old salad from Styrofoam boxes, English muffin pizzas in the toaster oven, my dad’s famous mayonnaise sandwiches—all to get a chance to be a part of the Thing.

  I
f I’m honest, who deserves it more?

  Not Alex, who all his life has had anything he ever wanted and a hundred things he never thought to want.

  I want that gold.

  So give it to me.

  But, Alex said, that familiar sickly look on his face, the one I once wore, maybe still wore. But you told me something really big and I…

  Alex, looming and lurching and knowing.

  He could ruin everything, couldn’t he? But would he?

  I think about what Serge said. And Diane: Alex, the slippery one.

  But what could happen even if he did tell? That just opens up another slot. She wouldn’t unpick me because of Diane, would she? Guilt by association?

  Scandal is bad for science, Kit. We have enough controversy. This study is controversial enough.

  Or: Kit, you are faithless. A lab depends on loyalty. We have no space for a Benedict Arnold.

  Or: Kit, you are a coward. I do not want cowards working for me.

  Let’s be honest: there are many, many reasons she would no longer want me.

  At one a.m., the texts come:

  Listen, the text from Alex reads. Then two more:

  I’ve been thinking a lot about it and I have to tell Dr. Severin.

  ASAP.

  They come like that, in three sharp thrusts.

  Tell her what? I type, fingers tight. You don’t know anything.

  I’ll be clear that it’s secondhand. Don’t worry, I won’t name you.

  You CANNOT do this, saying the words as I type them. I was drunk. You’ve got it wrong.

  He doesn’t reply. After ten minutes, I call him directly, but it goes straight to voice mail.

  “Alex, I was lying,” I say into his voice mail.

  “I was drunk and I made it up. I was jealous of her. I always have been.”