by Andrea Bartz
Memories like flashbulbs:
That conversation right here in the living room, when I’d first shown Tessa the video. How she’d confidently recited all their names, Alex, Sarah, Edie; how after one viewing, she’d looked up and asked, “Where’s Kevin?” even though I hadn’t told her that the dark-haired guy was Alex.
Jenna, I thought wildly. Mysterious, dissipated-into-the-dust Jenna.
No. Absolutely not. But now the memories were strobing of their own accord:
The gun was in Edie’s right hand, but she was a lefty like you.
Damien’s little frown when he told me he’d cleaned up the audio so easily.
The deftness with which she’d hacked into my old email; the grave proclamation that the IP address was mine.
Six years back, the night I first met her, tipsy in a bookstore: You look so familiar to me!
With shaking hands, I typed four words into Google: Jenna Smith, plus Teresa Hoppert. The first result was a wedding announcement on the alumni page of an all-boys high school in Ohio: William Eric Hoppert (’02) to Jenna Teresa Smith.
She’d barely even bothered to conceal her former name.
I heard a clang behind me and turned around in time to see the deadbolt flop to the left. I thought about running across the room, moving at supersonic speed to throw my weight against the door, but before I could stand, the doorframe filled with the hallway’s light.
Chapter 17
I wake up to the day I am going to die.
It narrates itself in my head like an audio file, Today is the day you are going to die, in a bit of a sing-song, “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”
I blink a few times before the brown line in front of me organizes itself into a floor. Then I detect pressure on my back and legs and realize I’m on it—I’m on the floor. The vibrations running directly into my left ear are footfalls. They must be hers. Man, my head hurts. If I could just roll my head back a little more, then I could…
Wait, what was I just thinking about?
Rolling over to see better.
No, before that.
It’s gone, a weird little fish hook in my brain. Some black sideways lines sort themselves into table legs. A thought blinks on: empty Thai food containers way up on the top of this table. And something else on the table. I think like I’m pushing against my skull, like I’m trying to birth this memory. Finally it appears, a release: my laptop, open to something important.
Footsteps getting louder, coming closer. Instinctively, I squeeze my eyes shut. Play dead. Tessa squats in front of me, inspecting.
“You’re fine,” she says, then stands up. “Quit being so dramatic.”
I discover both arms move if I tell them to, and I push myself up to a sitting position. I’m scared of her, though I can’t remember why.
I try my vocal cords next. “What happened?”
“You killed your best friend, that’s what happened,” she calls from the kitchen.
My brain in a wormhole, warp speed: Edie bleeding, the video, my clumsy hand pushing open the door to 4G. Alex. Mrs. Iredale. Kooky, cryptic Lloyd, who was only maybe real. Greg. Greg’s photo. Jenna.
“You did,” I call back, like a petulant toddler. She doesn’t respond and I try to stand up, my legs making a slow, delayed scuffle to get under me.
“Oh, don’t bother,” she says, walking back toward me. “You won’t be able to stand.”
“How did you…?” I stop, puzzled. Another epic gap in my memory. Have I been drinking?
“White Lotus!” She perches on the couch a few feet away from me. “I know you always order the same thing.”
“You…you drugged me?” The thought rises, spins like a dreidel, topples over.
She sighs, then stands and crosses to the table. “I thought I had to. Picked up your order and then paid a guy on the street twenty bucks to run it upstairs. But, sweetie, it looks like you also went ahead and drugged yourself. And here I thought I was going to have to draft up a suicide note. If I’d just left well enough alone, you’d have taken care of everything.” She’s quiet, her eyes sliding across the screen, rereading it.
With all my effort, I push my thoughts into a funnel. “Tessa, I don’t know what you’re talking about, but you don’t have to hurt me.”
She clicks the mouse a few times, then leans over the table and smiles down at me. “Isn’t this like a goddamn slapstick comedy? Here I come over to stage a suicide and totally interrupt you doing it for real.” She shakes the nearby bottle of Tofranil. “Seventeen pills, huh? Seems low.”
She knows it’s seventeen. She can read my mind. No, she just saw the search on my screen. My screen. Help, I need to call for help. My laptop is in front of her. My watch is somewhere in my room. My phone is…fuck.
“Oh, it feels good to be able to open up to you,” she says, plopping onto the kitchen stool. “All this time I couldn’t discuss it with anyone, but now I can talk to you!” She presses her hands together. “With your memory not recording anymore. Again.”
I feel the tears before I even realize I’m crying.
Her face falls. “Linds, I didn’t mean for it to end like this,” she says. “I thought you’d just put two and two together and figure out that the evidence points to you having killed her, and then you’d come to terms with that and move on. Like I did.” Her chin drops. “But now I don’t really have a choice.”
She’s insane. For some reason this doesn’t feel any more surprising than any of the other random facts I’ve uncovered over the last few weeks.
“I knew it was a mistake to become friends with you,” she muses. “It was always sort of nuts. The one person in the world who could be a witness for the prosecution, if you ever realized what you’d seen.”
I flail around for something to say, as if the possible responses are butterflies circling my head.
“So why did you befriend me?” I manage.
She shrugs. “I was keeping tabs on you, watching your Instagram and Twitter and stuff and kind of obsessing. At first it was just to keep an eye on you in case you ever talked about it…in case anything started to come back.”
“And then?”
She smiles again. “Then I started to feel like I was getting to know you, Linds. Through the articles you were writing, and following your career as you worked at different magazines. And…and then one time you mentioned you were going to a reading and I decided to go, just to see you in person all those years later. Once I looked different enough, thanks to the hair and the nose job…and when I was sure you didn’t remember anything.”
A nose job! This feels wrong, a dirty trick.
“And maybe you could tell how much I wanted you to talk to me or something, because you came right up to me! You remember, you were there.” She chuckles. “I was so fascinated by everything you had to say.”
“I remember that,” I offer. “It was fun! And then we got lunch.”
“Fraunces Tavern on a weekday. It was fun.” She rests her chin on her palm. “There was also this weird feeling that as long as I was there with you, I had a better shot at staying hidden. I could keep closer tabs on what you knew, right?”
Has the friendship really been that one-sided, me blathering away, her taking it in like a drain? “So the way we became friends is kind of crazy,” I say, “but I still wouldn’t trade it for anything. You’re my best friend, Tessa.”
She stares at me, then breaks into a little smile, and then starts to giggle. “I never liked having to go by my middle name, you know,” she says. “You don’t even know my name, Lindsay.”
I don’t know what to say, so what comes out is, “Well you don’t know my real name, either,” which isn’t true and doesn’t make any sense, but it does shut her up.
“Sorry this is taking so long,” she says, like she’s
a hostess at a restaurant, like the table should be ready by now. “I just don’t really wanna…I can’t think this through until you’re out. For good, not for two minutes like before.”
I focus all my attention, thinkthinkthinkthinkthink, then remember a question.
I signal toward the computer with my chin. “You look pretty happy in that photo with Edie,” I say, because I’m wily, Wile E. Coyote, oh shit that’s why that’s his name. “You were roommates, right?”
She gazes at it. Finally, a nod. “I knew her before that, through Sarah,” she says. “Sarah and I were roommates first, with these two other girls. Then one moved out and Edie moved in.” She whips her head toward me. “I was pretty happy with Sarah being several states away. I was not thrilled to hear that she’d moved back.”
I work on it like a knot until it comes loose: that old apartment in Calhoun, the one pre-SAKE, with Sarah and Edie and two other women in it. One of them here in front of me.
“And you guys were friends?”
“I thought she was so cool, with her pretty hair and that gap in her teeth.” I meant Sarah, so it takes me a minute to realize she’s referring to Edie. “Out of everyone in the apartment, she and I were closest,” Tessa is saying. “We’d stay up late at night after everyone else had gone to bed, drinking and talking. It was like a sleepover all the time.”
“So what happened?” I prompt.
“We…I fucked up.” Tessa’s hand floats up to touch her collar, her eyebrows, her words finally slithering out from between her fingers. “She started dating that loser, Greg. Did you know she met him on Craigslist?” She waits for me to respond and I shake my head, shooting my eyebrows up like I’m astonished. “He was, like, ten years older than her and basically this sugar daddy, buying her nice stuff and taking her out for nice meals and never wanting to hang out with us—never wanting her to hang out with us. She just acted so different around him, so on edge. She was so busy trying to impress him that she stopped going to school, which is about the dumbest thing I’d ever heard. And he never made any effort to get to know us. Like Calhoun was this disgusting cesspool and we were these stupid little pieces of shit living inside it, weighing Edie down.”
“And you hated her for picking him?” I offer.
“I didn’t hate her,” she says, like I’m an idiot. “I hated how he treated her.”
“So you tried to break them up?”
“In the sense that I tried to help Edie realize how lame he was, sure. But you know how she was.” She nods knowingly, conspiratorially, like we’re war buddies gossiping about our commanding officer. I imagine distant gunfire, the two of us mud-smeared in a trench. “Super charming when she wanted to be—good at working people.”
Another thought skates off like a water bug: my best friend Tessa, apparently jealous, apparently wanting her best friend, Edie, all to herself. My being single all the time I’ve known her, unable to get a romantic anything off the ground. I’m close to connecting this when all the pieces fall apart in my hands.
Wait, what were we talking about?
“The really funny thing is that I never thought to just introduce her to someone new. And then we met that idiot Alex at a stupid Calhoun party and she couldn’t stop gushing about him. She’d barely even talked to him; I went up to him, let him know I could get him Molly if he was interested, and I had no idea that that asshat would be the thing that finally broke up her and Greg, months after she’d stopped talking to me.”
Why am I on the ground again? Am I dreaming?
“She’d suspected I didn’t like Greg, so she put on a whole I’m-not-sure-if-he’s-right-for-me dog and pony show, all leading up to her getting me alone and asking me point-blank: What do you think of Greg? And I told her in the kindest way possible, I—I thought she wanted to hear this and was thinking it herself, like, if someone just put it into words for her, it’d be crystal clear what she had to do next.”
Her sentences are bouncing around like balls in a bingo cage.
“I told her, ‘Honestly, I think you’re too good for him. It seems like Greg puts a damper on all of your best qualities.’ And her eyes went red. I’d never seen her look that way; the scary, quiet kind of furious, you know?”
She’s speaking slowly, like this is the billionth time she’s gone over it in her mind.
“And of course I immediately backpedaled, I didn’t mean it, what do I know about their relationship, and I’m sure I’m reading everything so wrong, but she’s not hearing it. She got up—god, I can picture it so clearly—she stood up from the couch, picked up both of our mugs of tea, walked into the kitchen and dumped them both into the sink, then walked into her room and closed the door, not slamming it, just, done. And that was it. She was done with me.” She pauses to blow her nose as the tears drip on. “After that, it was like I didn’t exist. We’d literally be sitting around in a group and I’d count how many times she acknowledged me, and it was always zero. I’d say something and it was like I hadn’t opened my mouth; when she talked she’d bounce her eyes around between the other people there…and it caught on, she was so, like, alpha that everyone picked up the habit and would just cut me out of conversations. She unfriended me on Facebook and detagged every photo of us together. And all her little minions did the same. I felt like a ghost.”
Her voice grows wavery and my gut contracts like a fist; I know how this feels, the full-body burn of trying to pierce yourself into a conversation and failing, nearby but separate, as if you’re behind a sheet of glass.
“This went on for months. She even broke up with Greg and started sleeping with that loser Alex and it didn’t even matter, I was still dead to her. I remember that winter, I got sick—like really sick,” she says. “I was throwing up and couldn’t get any food down for an entire week. Edie was barely even around—she was staying at Alex’s apartment most nights, I overheard her saying something to Kylie or Sarah about me making the place a cesspool of germs. I was so weak that I fell once trying to climb back into my loft and just, like, lay on the floor, half in my room and half out, until Kylie found me and took me to the hospital.”
I wish suddenly that Edie were here to defend herself, to tell her side of the story, one where Tessa was less of a beatific victim and more of an instigator.
“Then what?” I say.
Tessa wipes her tears angrily. “So she moved out,” she continues, “she moved out and she had you as a best friend and she never looked back. It was awful.” I realize I’m pushing my back against the bottom of the couch to disappear, to see if it’ll swallow me whole. It scoots back six inches, all at once, making a weird monkey sound.
Tessa doesn’t notice. “And I moved in with some other people in the building and tried…tried to move on. And I actually bumped into Edie at Hope Lounge shortly after she’d moved in with Alex. We literally ran into each other, so she couldn’t ignore me. So I acted friendly, and then as we were talking, she grabbed this lanky guy who was walking by and asked if she knew him from somewhere. At first I was annoyed—she was obviously just trying to get away from me again—but he said he knew Alex, and the way she was nodding and smiling at him, it was too easy. ‘Oh my god, Edie, did you see the way he was looking at you?’ ” she mocks in a falsetto. “ ‘He is so into you. Yes, really. You should go over and talk to him some more, he’s basically starry-eyed.’ ” She looks at me, puffed-up. “Moth to the flame.”
I realize she means Lloyd, that she was the friend Lloyd had been describing when I spoke to him, that she’d manipulated Edie into pursuing him, and it’s like a pinhole in the darkness, a little slit in a sheet of black construction paper. What’s going on?
“I was glad to not be living with her,” she continues. “That’s also when I started selling.”
My hands are batting around in the dust-bunny-infested earth I’ve uncovered by pushing the couch and they hit somethin
g, something I immediately recognize without even looking because of the thousands of times I’ve dug around in my purse for it, seeing with my fingertips. It’s not in an alley behind a club in Ridgewood. It made it home.
“You started selling?” I say without comprehending it, because I need to keep her talking, because the easiest way is to be Pete the Repeat Parrot.
She nods, wipes her tears. “I always knew who to get stuff from, I had my guy in Calhoun, and I was always sending people his way. I’m not much of a drinker, as you know, but pot…relaxed me, I guess? Made me feel a little less anxious about living with strangers and having to still occasionally see all these people who’d betrayed me. Edie and Sarah and all their new friends. Like you.”
I’ve lost what I’m supposed to say next; I’m onstage and there’s a new line, but it’s gone from me, flew out of my brain like a bird. A parrot.
“But then you started selling?” I repeat, and almost melt with relief when she nods like it’s a good question. I’ve got my fingers around the case now and I’m inching it toward my lap, easy, easy.
“Yeah. My guy left New York and I figured out that stuff was coming from Anthony. I guess he figured either he could deal to his building or someone else would. So he needed a new middleman. That was also when we started hooking up.” She pauses to glare at me. “And yes, I’m aware of the irony of hating Greg but being fine with fucking Anthony.”
I don’t follow. I feel two names rising out of the water like icon paintings, but I can’t make them come into focus at the same time.
“Anyway, I started taking Molly regularly, which I liked a lot. It really…This sounds weird, but it really helped with the loneliness element. Like when I took it, that emotion just disappeared. Anthony asked if I’d be interested in selling for him, since he had to keep a low profile and only deal with a few people, you know, directly. It was pretty stupid. We all do stupid things when we’re younger, I suppose. We feel so invincible.”
An idea like a lightning bolt. “Edie used Molly that night.”