She turned to look at me and ran a hand over my shoulder. “I know you’ll make it work like you always do. What’s it like living with girls? Any cute ones?”
I wondered what she’d seen that’d tipped her off—maybe something in the bathroom. “Just one, and she has a boyfriend,” I lied. “And I’m not really thinking about that. I want to focus on my music.”
“Good for you,” she said. A new song came on the radio and she turned it up using buttons on the steering wheel. I didn’t notice her doing it right away and it was like the song magically swelled to swallow up the awkwardness.
At IKEA she went into Nazi shopping mode, whipping the cart one way or another when she had a new idea or saw something neither of us realized I needed. She tried to talk me into decorative pillowcases—shams, I think they were called?—even as I insisted I’d never be making my bed when it was lofted above my head.
“Oh come on, you don’t want girls to be totally turned off by your room, do you?”
“Oh my god, Mom. That’s so weird.” It was so weird. It was so weird that it became the only thought I had for the next fifteen minutes. Mom. You. Are. So. Weird.
Afterward, she took me and Kevin out to dinner at this brick-oven pizza place, the only restaurant I knew about, and dropped us off on her way back to the hotel. Kevin got out a joint before we’d even gone into the building, when my mom hadn’t even turned the corner. Inside, he told me that he’d heard that some hair metal band was having their debut or final or reunion or something show—can’t remember—and he’d heard there’d be a ton of free booze and drugs.
We took a few shots and then followed the migration up two floors and a hallway over. There were dudes wearing Lycra and singing in big swoopy harmonies. There were girls in neon wigs. One chick was wearing a full fairy costume, a totally cheesy thing with wings that someone probably made for Halloween some year. I took a lollipop out of her basket and the girl next to me did the same.
She waved her lollipop at me and smiled. She had a big thick sheet of black hair. “Yellow ones are the worst,” she said when the song had ended. “You hope it’s going to be pineapple or something, but it’s lemon.”
I offered her my orange one. She smiled wide.
Fuck the real world, I thought right then. Fuck clean apartments and boring roommates and perfectly groomed cats.
Calhoun Lofts was my best decision yet, I decided. And I was right.
Chapter 16
LINDSAY
I stared at my watch, where Tessa’s voice had been a moment ago. The news was having the strangest effect on me. I was stone sober, but I felt the long, downward brushstrokes I associated with the beginning of a pot high. Limbs loosening, spine turning to lead.
So I’d sent it, then. I’d sent it in my sleep or scheduled it inside a gap in my memory, my brain and mind operating on two different timelines. And my last stand, the cross on which I’d hung the belief that it could be somebody else, someone crazier than me, this whole paranoid delusion that a menacing other was threatening me for blowing on the embers of Edie’s decade-old departure—it evaporated all at once. I’d sent the email, just as I’d tried to hurt Josh, just as I’d succeeded with Edie. This silly final scamper toward someone named Jenna felt embarrassing, gauche. It was just me, alone in my apartment with a steady pulsing sensation wafting downward from my skull.
It was just me, alone in SAKE with a dead body at my feet. The pistol shaking as my entire arm trembled. And then the only person who knew the real Lindsay, the monster, was gone for good.
I thought of the violence with my mother, with Lloyd, with Josh. At Warsaw. The anger, the graphic fantasies.
I needed to see the email from Edie again. I opened my computer and what popped up first was a document, the cursor blinking at the top.
Dear Edie,
I’ve spent the entire day wishing I had some powerful depressants on hand so I could knock myself out for a while, but it wouldn’t even matter because then I’d wake up tomorrow or in the wee hours of tonight and still be me.