my hands, limp and folded in my lap like sleeping kittens. What are you two capable of?
“But we’re still here. And, Lindsay, it’s been ten years. Ten years. If Edie were sitting here right now, she would look all of us in the eye and tell us we should move the heck on.”
I felt rage rising within me, a steamy red spiral, but I fought it, moved my gaze back to the window and the people crisscrossing on the sidewalk outside. All consumed by their own little dramas.
“You’re right,” I said softly. “You’re so right. I’m sorry, Sarah. I’m sorry to bring this up.”
“It’s okay. I understand it’s—it’s not something you can talk about with a lot of people,” she said. She slapped a ten-dollar bill on the table, an odd, cinematic move, and said she’d better go. Alex and I slid out of the booth and gave her clumsy hugs. She was heading for the door when I remembered a final question.
“Sarah, wait.” She turned and peered at me, and I cleared my throat. “We had a little tiff that night, you and I, right? Right after we came down from the roof. About my wanting to go home and not come with you to the show?”
She nodded slowly. “That sounds right. I hate having to walk into stuff like that by myself.”
“Then where was Alex?” We both turned his way.
He raised his eyebrows. “Guys, I did a lot of coke back then. And I know you girls weren’t into it. Pretty sure I stopped on another floor to do a line and then met you at the show. I mean, right?”
We all looked at one another. Frustration swelled and my instinct, suddenly, was to cry.
“That sounds right,” Sarah said finally. “I remember finding you at the show. Well, see you later.” She headed for the exit.
Alex was looking at me oddly. “ ‘What you did to your mom’?” he said.
I shook my head, tears breaking free again, and walked past him toward the door. He called my name a couple of times, but I turned just long enough to say, “Alex, please don’t.” It was one of those silver days, overcast and still too bright, and when the door swung closed behind me, the air swallowed me right up.
* * *
On the subway ride home, I let this new horror unfold: Sarah knew. I couldn’t believe that Edie had told her, that all this time, another person knew what I’d done back in middle school. At the diner, I’d been too stunned to ask Sarah when Edie had shared it and why. Maybe Edie had gleefully gossiped about me, the same way she complained to me about Sarah; maybe she’d worked hard to keep both of us privately convinced we were in the number-one-friend spot. I felt a blast of nausea and tipped my sweaty forehead toward my knees.
Middle-school Lindsay. I’d spent two decades scraping away any signs that, deep down, I was a violent, dangerous creature. In fact, for years I’d felt secretly relieved that Edie, the only other person who might think that, was long dead.
I checked the case files as soon as I got home, but Edie’s diary wasn’t among them—another timeline lost, her brief life instead flattened into phone records, ER discharge papers, a bloodless autopsy report. I dug around under my bed until I found the bag I was looking for, a small stack of old sketchbooks and diaries slipped into a canvas tote, and pulled out the spiral-bound notebook I’d been picturing.
I’d journaled sporadically in middle and high school, bored and lonely and newly determined to hone my writing skills. The act soothed me, the way my clacking fingers turned my brain’s chatter into narrative, something finite, controllable. I would type up entries on the hulking computer in my room because I didn’t like my own handwriting. I still don’t: rushed and leaning this way and that, too often unreadable. Crazy-person handwriting. I’d fiddled with the page settings to get the margins right, so that I could slice the sides off with an X-ACTO knife and glue them into this notebook.
It’s funny, come to think of it, that my parents let me keep an X-ACTO knife in my room. Perhaps they didn’t know about it.
I opened the journal at random, to sometime early sophomore year. Printers were shittier then, strips of black missing in the middle of lines of texts. Read between the lines, my neurons fired at random.