at her when she’d just started acknowledging me again.”
Tessa is pathetic. Suddenly I know this with certainty, like someone’s just read it to me from a book.
“And then the door opens and you fucking stumble in.”
My heart clenches.
“Drunk off your ass, barely able to walk, you stagger right in and ask if we know where your other friends are and blink at us stupidly, and Edie puts the gun down and walks right over to you and gives you a big hug and goes, ‘Ohh, Lindsay, I’m so sorry we’ve been fighting!’ ” She’s using a nasal voice that doesn’t sound like Edie’s at all. “And she gives you some little speech about how she loves you and knows you’re a good person and shit. And you try to tell us to come to the concert with you, but I point out that Edie is undressed, and off you go, stumbling back into the night like a wasted mess.”
I know there’s a stepping-stone in logic here, a leap from that to whatever came next, but I can’t make it. This was nice. Why did this make Tessa so mad?
“So like a moron, I turn to Edie and expect her to make amends with me, too, but instead she turns to me and goes, ‘Thanks for the Molly, but I don’t think you’re a good person.’ ”
Right, because you’re a lunatic, I think, but I don’t say it out loud.
“Such a fucking cunt.” Her voice is small now, small and shaky like a Chihuahua. “And I felt this flash of rage and I grabbed the gun and lifted it, just to scare her, just to show her she’s not the queen of everything, and then, right when I was about to drop it down…”
She scrapes back the stool and sits down again. She cries loudly for a few minutes, the kind of cry you have in private, hoping the neighbors can’t hear you.
“You know, in eighth grade I took this geography class,” she says weakly, “and the teacher passed around this, like, little ancient carving she’d gotten in Djibouti or some shit. And when it got to me I just—I couldn’t help it, I pressed it just the littlest bit, and it snapped in two. And she was so crestfallen. It was like that. I just…squeezed.”
“I don’t believe it,” I say, with effort. “You’ve rewritten it.”
She snarls. “Oh fuck, what does it even matter. I can make the whole thing skewed in my favor if you want. She was threatening me, she said she hated me, she forced me to kill her in self-defense. Is that what you want to hear? It doesn’t matter, you won’t be around to weigh in tomorrow.”
I moan. She’s quiet for a moment.
“And I squeezed it right as the band at the party hit this really loud note and…and the whole room shook, and for a second I thought it was just the music, but then Edie fell…she fell in slow motion and I saw the blood start to collect behind her and the song ended and it got so much quieter and I couldn’t move, I was just standing there with the gun still in my hand as the blood got closer and closer to my feet.”
She’s quiet and I realize tears are rolling down my jaw and neck.
“So then I texted Anthony.”
She pauses like it’s my turn to say a line, but I’m silent. What’s my line? Hello, prompter? Can we take it from the top? The whole audience leans forward, annoyed, the play can’t go on until I remember my—
“Anthony had—he had a rule that if I ever got into a jam while I was dealing for him, I could call his burner phone. So I put the chain on the door and texted him to come up. God, I was feeling so fucked up by that point. Like I was in this insane nightmare and just had to wake up. Lindsay?”
Should I play dead? No, then she might kill me. I can’t work out the logic of this, but I groan back anyway. “Mm-hmm?”
“Just checking. So I let Anthony in and he just keeps saying, ‘Jesus fuck. Jesus fuck.’ He told me to lock the door behind him, but not with my bare hands. So I used a tissue. And then he’s staring at the body and goes, ‘Pick up the gun.’ I was shaking and I said, ‘I can’t.’ He started yelling: ‘Pick up the fucking gun!’ and I was just