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 something, 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.”
She stops crying long enough to laugh. “Did she?”
I nod. The phone is close to my butt now and the thought comes into focus that she should not be staring at me, not good at all, nope. I speak before I lose it: “So you started selling for him?”
She doesn’t seem to notice that I’ve said the same thing three times like a goddamn wind-up doll. Maybe she’s on drugs now. Why am I on drugs again?
“I did. Free drugs for me. God, he was such a loser. I wasn’t sad to see him go.”