by Megan Abbott
I had to get out, go somewhere. My hair full of dried shampoo and my legs hairy, like the down on a baby pig; what did I care?
I looped the collars on Grimm and Fudge, even though it was sure to rain, the sky so heavy it seemed nearly to touch my back. We walked all the way to the highway before it started, slow splotches, warm and thick. Grimm never wavered, the thick hunks of fur on his back glistening, but Fudge yanked free and ran straight for the nearest overhang, the old arcade where my dad once broke his hand playing air hockey.
“Is that Scott’s cuz?” a voice came. A tall guy in a Klassic Pinballz T-shirt unloading warm crates of Faygo in the alley.
“Yep,” I said, thinking how the rain made my tank top pucker from my chest and what he might see.
“The smart one, right?” he said, petting Fudge with his enormous long-fingered hand. “Wanna have some beers?”
I did, taking a fat little pony of Miller High Life.
He said his name was Lou and he used to play drums for Scott’s sometime-band. He’d been delivering slick cans and Slim Jims and vending-machine condoms all day with his friend Jimmy, the friendly fella sitting on the upturned trash can, and wouldn’t it be fun to sit in the back on these empty kegs and have a few?
So we did. Lou turned the radio up on his truck, bass-thick grooves and old metal. And we all took turns throwing an old tennis ball to Fudge, and Jimmy showed me the hard white pads on his thumbs from his decade of pinball devotionals. At some point, Jimmy’s girlfriend appeared and danced alongside the back fence, doing whirling snake-charmer things with her long dark arms that ended in sharp manicured points studded with blue crystals.
Soon, I was dancing with her, and we were talking of getting our tongues pierced with the piercing kit she’d bought earlier that day from a place called HottyBodyJewlz. Her fingers on my face, she told me I had the prettiest eyes she’d ever seen and kissed me flush on the mouth.
Watching us, Lou and Jimmy kicked the kegs with their sneakers and cheered and hooted as Grimm let out a howl and Fudge was somewhere by the trash cans, licking up foam in long, snaky gulps. And then the piercing kit got torn open and Jimmy brought the needle close to me, Lou holding a cork and dirty cubes from the ice machine. Punching both our tongues and the blood filling our mouths with metal and grit. We couldn’t get enough.
The dark swallowed the sky and someone brought over chicken on a stick from the Chevron and I had long since stopped drinking but the pony bottles became a magnificent monument in Jimmy’s hands, an objet, his girlfriend kept saying, and she studied art at City Tech, which is how she could see that my eyes were so beautiful that Lou better kiss me before she beat him to it again.
And he did. Lou.
Lou kissed me, his big hands folding around my face, my blood-thick chin. My tongue numb and bold and the strangest kissing I’d ever had or ever would have. Sticky dust on his fingertips, and a whisper in my ear that said, You, you, smart girl, look at you. Look at you go.
Oh, it was the warmest place to be.
“I’d like to know, little girl,” my mom said when I stalked in at two a.m., my shorts on backward and both dogs shuddering from rain and beer and rain again. A scatter of bottle glass in Grimm’s mane from when the monument fell.
The boy Lou had wanted to drive me, but I’d scuttled away crabwise when no one was looking, when Jimmy and his girl were trying to find a broom, or maybe some cigarettes, and Lou was trying to start his car, an angry grinding, and his belt buckle still loose from what we’d been up to.
The walk home had been spooky, and once I thought I’d seen Grandpa Fleming’s truck, Diane’s halo of hair as she sat behind the wheel, her eyes darting for me.
What would she want from me?
Everything.
“I’d like to know,” my mom kept saying, “where you got the idea you could behave like this.”
“I love our dogs,” I said, still drunk. “I’m sorry.”
That’s when I started crying, which upset my poor mom a lot. She rubbed me and Grimm and Fudge with rough towels until our skin burned to dry us and clean off all the sooty rain.
She made me drink four Tupperware cups full of water, which is the worst way to drink water unless you like plastic. Then, trying to get my jellies off my blackened feet, I finally said it. Finally asked it.
Nothing could have stopped the words from stumbling perilously from my waterlogged mouth.
“Mom,” I said, “what if you had this friend who told you something they’d done. Something really bad. It’s so bad, Mom.”
She looked at me, dipping a dishrag into a tub of Vaseline, working out a piece of tar caught in Fudge’s paw pads. “What did you do, Katherine Ann?”
“Nothing. It’s a friend.”
“Katherine Ann, you need to tell me,” she said, motionless, Fudge’s paw pads curled in her palm. “Just tell me what you did.”
“I didn’t do anything,” I said. “I know about someone who did, and it’s bad. Am I supposed to tell someone?”
She wouldn’t quite look in me in the eye. I knew she had to guess it was Diane. I knew she’d had a feeling about Diane.
“It depends,” she said. “Would telling make it better?”
I didn’t say anything for a second, my eyes on Fudge. His eyes looked fearful, his paws clamped between my mother’s red fingers.
“I don’t know if it would make it better, but Mom”—I looked at her—“it’s so heavy.”
As I said the word, I felt my voice go high. Don’t start crying again, I thought, you’ll scare her.
She set the dishrag down. “Is someone in trouble or in some kind of danger?”
“No.”
“Is someone going to get hurt if you don’t tell?”
I thought for a second. “No. But someone will if I do tell.”
“Then don’t,” she said, grabbing for the dishrag again, Fudge squeaking. “Everybody screws up. And everyone has their reasons.”
“I guess,” I said.
“You’re a good friend, honey,” she said, stroking Fudge’s puny body, her fingers slick with the Vaseline, her face tired. “And if she needs your help to make it right, you’ll give it.”
“Okay.”
“Kit, you can’t fix other people’s problems,” she said, slapping the dishrag on the table, Fudge yelping desolately, shaking under my hand. “You can’t fix other people.”
NOW
It’s amazing—well, alarming, really—what you can do when you have to. When you’re cornered like a rat.
“Look at us. Bright and early on a weekend,” I’m saying. My voice is jolly and jaunty, not my own. “Serge, let me introduce you to Diane Fleming.”
We’re all standing in a circle in front of the lab building, my eyes darting once, twice past the security camera mounted above the door, its red light blinking.
“We have met,” Serge says, nodding at Diane.
“Oh, right, right,” I say, my mouth unable to stop moving. “Diane, have you experienced Serge’s famous multi-hour animal-protocol orientation yet?”
Diane shakes her head.
“We will have to make a date for that,” Serge says. “When she has time.”
“I’m taking Diane around town,” I say. “She hasn’t seen much. You know, like the Walmart, the Chicken Ranch and Bunco Parlor, all the important sights.”
“Really?” Serge says, his eyes lively, roaming everywhere—Diane, me, the lab coat, my bleachy shoes.
“I didn’t know the techs had to work weekends,” Diane says, a faint briskness to her tone.
Serge’s eyebrows lift. “I will not be here Monday,” he says. “I like to be sure everything is in place before I leave.”
“He’s the one who keeps the vivarium humming,” I say, turning to Diane, who is looking at me like I need to shut up, which I do. But I can’t. “The mice love him.”
I don’t know what I’m saying or why I’m talking so much, so promiscuously. My right eyelid keeps st
icking and I think there might be blood there.
“I hope the mice will love Diane too,” Serge says, looking at her again. There’s something in his eyes I can’t figure out and my heart is thrumming wildly, my feet cold and my legs quilled.
“Kit,” Diane says, “should we take my car?”
I nod, grateful for the cue.
“Good luck in the dentist chair,” I say to Serge. “Don’t forget about the milk shakes.”
“I will not forget,” Serge says, but he’s not smiling. He’s looking at Diane. I turn too and see it, a flash of red, the biohazard bag she’s tucked so nimbly inside her backpack, out of sight, appearing like a flare.
“Oh my,” Serge is saying, and I can feel a coldness rack me, “what has happened?”
Diane looks down, trying to cover the bag with her long fingers.
“Ceiling mice again,” I blurt. “More casualties from the leaky tiles.”
He looks puzzled. “Maintenance promised to tape off that room until they repair the ceiling,” he says. His eyes are on the bulging bag.
Diane is quick. “I stumbled in there accidentally, and they welcomed me. A nest of them.”
I jump in. “More guests from Panda Garden, I guess. Probably drawn in by the smell of MSG in Zell’s lo mein.” But Serge is looking only at Diane, both of them so tall and dignified, and there I stand, legs bare, blood in my eye.
“You should not carry them out of the building,” he says. “No, no.”
“We were just about to toss it in the bins,” I say.
“I will call pest control,” Serge says, shaking his head, nearly tut-tutting. His eyes return to the bag, stuffed full of bloody Kimwipes, red-stained gloves.
“I may have overdone it, Serge,” Diane says, the briskness gone from her tone. Softer now, a slight helplessness, her wrist bending under the bag’s handles. “I think I quadruple-bagged them.”
“You should not have touched them,” he says. “But you are new.”
Lifting her head, Diane looks him straight in the eye. “You’re right. That must be it.”
“Here,” he says, reaching out for the bag. “Let me.”
I watch as Diane helplessly passes the bag to Serge. Her hand ever so slightly touches his.
“We are breaking all the rules now,” he says, smiling faintly. “No gloves. Like prowlers in the night.”
I look at both of them, trying to understand the strange energy between them. Is he flirting with her? I wonder. Or something?
Diane smiles back at him, as much as Diane ever can. “Well, we’re all off the clock.”
“Come,” he says, beckoning her, “I show.”
He escorts us toward the loading dock. I see the row of red bins every day, but today they look different, like little stumps. A gummy mouth knocked loose of teeth. Dr. Severin’s nails tapping on the conference-room table.
Serge presses his foot on the pedal of the one marked BIOHAZARD; the top lifts and he tosses the bag inside.
Both Diane and I inhale, quick and hard.
The lid snaps shut.
“I hope Kit shows you the prettiest sights,” he says to Diane, eyes dancing. “Sights far prettier than this.” A grin.
NOW
In the car, we don’t speak. She drives carefully. Stopping at all the yellow lights. Every time she turns a corner, her key chain smacks the ignition panel. One of those furry key chains kids used to have swinging from their backpacks. Soft and perfectly white and I find myself wanting to touch it, hold it. Or—smack, smack—hurl it out the window.
Her face looms above me once more.
“Kit, you better wake up,” she says, her eyes big and grave. “We need to figure things out.”
We’re in my apartment, Diane’s car parked in the lot.
The drive from the lab took less than five minutes, but I threw up once, then twice, into a folded newspaper in Diane’s front seat.
“Did I fall asleep again?” I ask. I don’t even remembering lying down on the sofa.
“It’s the chloroform. Does your head hurt?”
“Like a sack of rocks. Wet rocks.” I try to sit up, stomach bending. “Did anyone call?”
“No,” she says.
I rub my eyes, look at the light coming in the window.
“Did it happen?” I ask. “Did that really happen?”
She looks at me. “Yes.”
What did we do, what did I do?
“He turned up the pressure too high,” I say. “The glass already had a crack and I guess it just blew. A piece caught him in the throat. The carotid.”
Diane nods. “Jugular. The carotid, you die much faster.”
“Jugular,” I repeat, something twitching in my own throat. “It didn’t spray. The jugular.”
Cut the carotid artery, you might die in less than a minute, but cut the jugular, you could make it six, seven, eight minutes with enough pressure. With help.
I’ve taken dozens of science courses—biology, human anatomy, physiology, systems anatomy, neurophysiology. I’ve dissected fetal pigs and kitty cats and oily minks. I’ve stood before cow ovaries and sheep brains. Human spinal cords and brain stems and hearts.
And yet when a body was splayed before me, open on my lap, no microscope needed, no scalpels or probes or forceps or heavy wooden mallets, I hadn’t been able to do anything other than, ultimately, pass out.
From the fog of thought, Diane’s voice comes like a careening arrow.
“What matters now,” she says, “is we need to keep our stories straight.”
The way she’s looking at me, how close she sits, I feel a chill.
“I shouldn’t have listened to you,” I say, my face hot. “I should have called the police. Called 911.”
“But you didn’t,” she says. “And that was the right thing.”
The right thing, which, I realize now, means the smart thing to Diane.
I can’t do the moral math, not yet. Not for myself.
“Why did you tell him, Kit?” she asks. And for the first time since Diane blazed back into my life, her voice wobbles. “About me.”
I pinch the skin between my eyes. “I was drinking. We were drinking.”
“Oh,” she says, pulling back. “Were you two involved?”
“No,” I say quickly, my hand falling to my lap. “Once. Only once.”
“Oh.”
“What? You’re surprised?”
She pauses a second. “No,” she says. “I don’t know that side of you well.”
“What side?” I say.
“Never mind. It doesn’t matter.”
I look at her. “Diane, it slipped out.”
“Okay.”
“I don’t owe you anything,” I say.
“No,” she says, “you don’t.” She pauses. “So you went there and you wanted to make sure he didn’t tell your secret.”
“Yes,” I say. “I mean, to ask him if he wouldn’t.”
“I heard you fighting,” she says. “I couldn’t hear what you were saying. And then what?”
“And then it happened.”
She looks at me. Pauses. There’s a glimmer of something in her face; does she not believe me?
“Well,” she says, “he can never tell now.”
We’ve taken turns in the shower, Diane’s shorn scalp glistening. The floor mat from her car is hanging wetly from the shower bar. Diane’s lab coat sits in pink bathwater in the tub, salt and peroxide doing their work. Our OxiCleaned shoes, now marbled white, dry on a bath mat.
“Someone could find him any minute,” she says, beside me on the sofa like we are back in Lanister, droop-eyed Grimm on Mom’s shag carpet staring up at us. “We need to have our story ready. We saw Alex in the lab, said hello, but we didn’t stay.”
“After the mice infestation, you were spooked. You wanted to leave.”
She looks at me as if doubting anyone would believe she would be spooked by dead mice or anything at all. “You offered to take me on a tour of the
area,” she says.
“So we left. The cameras show us leaving. We left.”
“Today or tomorrow or Monday morning, someone finds him. Runs over to the body, or doesn’t. Calls 911 or the campus police: There’s been an accident at the lab.”
“The police will wonder how Alex could turn off the nitrogen with a piece of glass in his neck,” I say. My brain has returned, full force, and I can think of a thousand ways to get caught.
“It probably has an automatic shutoff. No one’s going to think about that anyway,” Diane says. I’m not sure either of us believes it.
“Our access cards—”
“Our access cards show we left together,” she says. “Your Russian friend saw us. The cameras saw us.”
“What about our shoes, your lab coat?”
“We’re going to dump them. I’ll take them. There’s some deep storm drains by my place.”
“What if they find them? I read once where they found a baby in a storm drain. They’ll match my shoe prints—”
“The shoe prints are gone. The blood covered them. The OxiClean will take care of any spots we might have missed and—”
“And it’ll interfere with luminol,” I finish. Such smart women, we did manage to do a few smart things.
I pause, thinking of G-21. The things we did.
“But Diane, it didn’t…” She must know. “It didn’t look…natural.”
“There’s nothing natural,” Diane says, “about any of it.”
I close my mouth, bite my lip. She’s looking at the bathroom’s open door. Her scarlet lab coat hanging now, dripping dry.
“Are you worried about the Russian?” she says abruptly.
“Serge?” I blink, startled. We’re in a spy novel now. I picture Diane with a pistol disguised as a lipstick tube in her hand. “No. Serge is a good guy.”
“Do you think he’ll go back later?”
“If he does, probably only to the animal unit. The cage-wash room or the vivarium. He doesn’t like Zell, some of the others. He thinks they’re slobs.” I pause. “I don’t think he liked Alex.”
He is the political animal, Serge said. He is the one.