and I could still feel the weight of her arm around my shoulders, the thrilling calm of owning half an imaginary BEST FRIENDS necklace.
I paused on one: It was the inevitable shot of our shoes, four pairs on the dirty train’s floor. The others were beat-up, but mine were still shiny new, Keds as white as fresh snow. I could sort of recall the point of these pictures: We were proud of how shabby our shoes got, evidence of all the dirty hipster spelunking we’d done. For a moment I peered at it, feeling the realization coming, a gushing sensation like ice on a frozen river fissuring and running free. Then I lunged at my laptop, pulled up Facebook, and began to search.
There it was, posted September 26, 2009, by a work friend I’d clung to after severing the SAKE crew: another foot shot, my shoes on a picnic blanket with strawberries and baby carrots and chips nearby. My white canvas sneakers were the worse for wear, scuffed and gray. But there were two unmistakable spots on my right toe, each the size of a pencil eraser. Rusty red and permanent.
Panicked, I clicked through more photos of myself, further and further back in time. When had the dots appeared? My stupid shoes were so often cut off, photos from the knee or waist or shoulders up, or most of my body obscured by buzzing throngs of other twentysomethings. Finally, one of me playing on Kevin’s skateboard in McCarren Park, arms out, wobbly terror in my eyes. August 8.
Heartburn rang out in my ribs. Two weeks before Edie’s untimely death, at least, the shoes. They were spotless.
* * *
I woke up to a text from Damien: “Who’s the baddest bitch? I’m the baddest bitch.”
I sent question marks back, but he didn’t answer, so I hightailed it into work and left my office door open for him. He burst in ten minutes past our normal call time, the bastard. He was grinning like the goddamn Cheshire cat.
“So it was surprisingly easy to clean up the audio,” he announced. “I ran it through this filtering app that factors out the effect of a mic being covered by fabric or wrapped up in your hand or whatever. Listen.”
He held his phone out as the familiar footage rolled: a moment’s focus on 4G, my hand opening the door. Then instead of “Heavy skies senile?” I heard my own voice in a surprised little chirrup: a gasp, then “Have you guys seen Alex?”
It took a moment for it to sink in. Damien was still grinning.
“See?” he said. “You didn’t come upon her all alone and goad her into killing herself. Alex, neither. She was already in there with someone else.”
Relief like a shower: Someone else was in the room, not Alex, someone else who must have done this. Someone else who could’ve picked up the gun. Alex was innocent. And my Keds—what a stupid notion—that was chocolate syrup or ketchup or barbecue sauce on them, just as I’d figured at the time.
Then fear buzzed in me: Someone else was in the room. Someone who may have killed Edie and gotten away with it. And he could very well know that I’d been poking around in the past.
I stared at the final frame, a blur of brown and black as I’d hit the button to stop recording.
Someone else was in the room when Edie died.
Chapter 10
KEVIN
When I was in my early twenties, things were pretty fucking good, and I knew it. Not great—I was aware of the big list of wants hovering on the other side of the greener-grass hedge, how cool it’d be to have more sex, more money, another six inches or so in height and wingspan, that kind of thing. But shit was pretty good. I had a cheap roof over my head, space for the entire drum kit, and not a soul in the building who’d complain if I got the urge to play at one in the morning, two o’clock, three o’clock (rock); a buddy, Alex, who was good at guitar and willing to jam with me pretty much whenever I wanted; girl roommates who were always finding fun shit for us to do on weekends, apple picking and weird-ass art exhibits and outdoor shows and whatnot; a stupid but manageable job making mochas and cleaning espresso machines with other equally bleary-eyed friends at a coffee shop within walking distance of my place.