out at awkward angles. Suddenly all of the dancers but the doppelgänger bolted offstage, and the music switched to something mournful, deep, and soulful. The redhead slunk in and out of the spotlight, moving slowly and then crashing into odd contortions, hitting the stage so hard that we could hear the thud from our balcony seats. I glanced over at Damien and saw that he was riveted, too, then realized I was crying, unassuming tears leaking down my cheeks.
I cheered when it was over, hollering when the woman took her solo bow, letting the roar of applause cover up my sniffles as I pulled myself back together. At intermission, Damien and I stood among the throngs, sipping drinks.
“So that last one got to you, huh?”
I wasn’t sure he’d noticed. “Yeah, it was beautiful.”
“You seem quiet tonight.”
“Do I?”
“You can talk to me. You thinking about your friend?”
Goddammit, he’d invoked the secret code, the way to split me into a million sobbing pieces: He was nice to me.
“I—I’m sorry,” I said with a high-pitched laugh. The faucet of tears was on full blast.
“Whoa. Here, come here.” Damien led me away from the crowd, which had begun streaming back into the theater, and settled us on a sofa in a random recess.
“Babe, I didn’t realize this was bringing you down so much! You haven’t mentioned it in a while.”
I shook my head. “I can tell you and Tessa think I’m being compulsive or whatever. But…you know that feeling when a situation is just totally out of your control? It’s like that. Only it’s about this really horrible thing that already happened, and the reason I wasn’t in control was because I drank too much.” I groaned. “You saw the video—you heard how Alex and I were saying awful stuff about Edie that night, how we wanted her dead. And it’s just…it’s really upsetting to think that he or I could’ve…I don’t know. Said something awful. Or that he could have done something awful.” Or that I could have seen something awful, witnessed the two of them fighting, him posturing with Kevin’s gun. Or, or, or.
“Ohhh, girl.” He pulled me into a hug. “You know what they say about suicide: Nothing anyone says or does—”
“I know, I know.” I slid away from his arms. “But it’s still really disturbing that I went and talked to her. I’d always thought she was alone in her apartment the whole time. Nobody really saw her that night at all, after she parted with her dude of the moment.” Fucking Lloyd.
“So I have a confession,” he said. I raised my eyebrows. “I haven’t looked at your video. But I will! I’ll do it tonight. I’m a video editor, Linds. I can definitely find something you didn’t notice.”
I want to push her off this building, I’d screamed. Suddenly I wanted Damien to delete it, eliminate the record of Alex and me fantasizing about her death. Muffled music swelled from inside the auditorium, and I rested my head on the back of the sofa. “Focus on the last few minutes,” I told him, and he nodded.
* * *
At home, my eyes fell on a stack of glossy photos, piled like a brick on a side table, the old photo albums on the floor underneath. I picked up the snapshots and recognized the image on top: Kevin and Sarah on the subway, next to me and too close, so Kevin’s head was huge. On his other side, Sarah peered over, her mouth distorted a bit: midword.
I realized with a happy spritz that I remembered this day: It was a springtime outing when the five of us—no, four, Alex couldn’t make it for some reason—had made our way upstate from Grand Central, hungover and slow-moving and pausing too long to gaze at the station’s teal ceiling. The plan was to hike the hills around Cold Spring, though none of us had proper footwear. I’d bought two disposable cameras at a bodega that morning, and we’d had no choice but to develop the images.
I smiled as I flicked through them; Edie had had the brilliant idea of turning hiking into a drinking game, and every time someone spotted a trail marker, everyone else had to drink. She never beamed in photos like me, instead turning away or smirking sleepily, always so effortlessly cool. There was a selfie she’d taken of both of us where she was pretending to bite my hair (perhaps the wind had been flopping it onto her face?),