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