account, and we fought on the phone. Do you remember that?”
I think about it. “I remember that phone call, yeah. But I don’t remember your coming over.”
She swallows. “I rang the buzzer and you didn’t answer, and someone else was coming out, so I went up to your floor. And I could hear really loud music, like late-naughts music I wouldn’t normally expect from you, and I tried calling but then remembered you lost your phone, so I tried banging on the door.” She lifts her hand to her hair; her fingers are shaking a bit. “And I just got…a terrible feeling. I mean, the kind of stuff you’ve been telling me lately, all the stuff with Edie…I just got really scared. I was, like, wailing on that door. And finally I remembered I had your keys on me, so I let myself in, and you were on the couch, not coherent at all.”
Her eyes glisten with tears, jewel-like. “And I ran over to you and you were saying all this stuff about how you were sure you’d…you’d killed Edie, and you just wanted to die, and I saw this empty bottle of pills out on the table and your laptop had a search up for how much it would take to kill yourself, and you were just totally, totally out of it.” She takes a sharp breath in. “I’ve never been so scared in my life, Lindsay. It was just…your eyes.” She shakes a hand in front of her own brow. “Wild-eyed. And I was like, ‘Hang on, hang on, help is coming,’ and you—”
She swings her chin away, tears dripping. A few breaths, steeling herself. “You pulled out a gun. It was just sitting there next to you. And you held it up to your head and told me you would shoot yourself if I called 911.”
A few loud sniffles; I’m frozen, riveted, unable to process what she’s saying. It’s the same tumbling sensation I felt when friends haltingly told me about Josh in the alley, about Lloyd’s bruised eye, about the Warsaw Incident. How did I get a gun?
“And I didn’t know what to do, I was so scared. So I waited until you relaxed your arm and then tried to grab it from you, and you somehow—” She peeks back up at my face, then looks down again. “It somehow went off. I’m fine, and the baby’s fine, it just went into my shoulder and they said it was the best possible way it could’ve hit me. You and I are both okay. That’s what’s important. We’re together, and we’re fine.”
She stares at me, then lunges in and wraps me in a one-armed hug, her tears forming a wet moon on my hospital gown. I hug her back, hard, scared of myself but also sinking into the warm bath of Tessa’s attention, how she loves me and cares for me despite my being a sad and savage mess.
“I’m sorry I’m such a fuckup,” I whisper, and she kind of coos.
* * *
It doesn’t strike me until several hours later, still waiting for my psych evaluation and watching daytime TV, the irony: I shot my best friend. And not for the first time.
* * *
The psychiatrist looks like a bird and speaks with a thick Staten Island accent. She hands me pamphlets and demands that I find a therapist. She asks me twenty times if I’m having suicidal thoughts, not even varying the language much, and I keep repeating myself: Nope, nope, nope. She asks if I have someone to take me home and I reply that my friend Tessa is waiting for me. She frowns and glances down at her notes, then tells me I can leave.
Tessa sets me up in her guest room, no questions asked, with a well-thought-out suitcase she’s put together from the mess of my apartment. She hands me my laptop the next day, wordlessly, and I notice there’s no activity on it from that night, no emails sent or received, no record of files opened or websites visited. It’s just as well—whatever I came across, whatever final nail I pounded into my own coffin, I probably don’t need to see again. The night is gone, snipped out of my timeline, scribbled out of my personal history. Lost.
And Tessa, who found me, cooks delicious dinners and watches old movies with me, dutifully looking up critics’ ratings and cueing trailers while I lie back and make the final call. She seems