got so hopeful when I saw you were calling.” I was eating the last of my noodles. Tonight they tasted kind of lame. “Thanks for trying, though.”
There was a beat. “Well, I have other news,” she said. “My coworker helped me trace the IP address on that email.”
“The one from Edie?”
“Right, the one from her address. I’m not—Lindsay, I’m not sure how to say this.”
“What is it? Just tell me.”
“Well, that’s the thing, it’s not—”
“Who sent it?”
“Okay, I don’t…I’m not sure what this means, but the email…it came from you.”
Static fizzed in my ears, the volume high. My insides all jolted in closer to my spine.
“What?”
“The IP address is yours. It shows that the email—”
“Like from my building? Someone was nearby?”
“Not nearby—from you. The same…An IP address is like your fingerprint. It’s your coordinates on the internet. It identifies you by your specific computer, your laptop alone.”
The room twisted; I grabbed onto the table for support.
“So what are you saying?”
“Lindsay, I don’t know what else to tell you.”
“You’re saying I sent it?”
“You did send it.”
“You’re lying.” She wasn’t lying. I was the liar. I was the fucking crazy lunatic liar.
Her voice warning, rich with annoyance: “Linds.”
“You’re insane! I ask you to be on my fucking side for once, and instead you’re trying to manipulate me.” I was falling apart; I was a shack tearing to pieces in the wind. I was spinning so fast I didn’t have time to stop and ask if any of this made sense. “Admit it, Tessa.”
There was a silence, so long and sharp and quivering that the world zoomed in on itself until it was the size of the speaker on the underside of my watch.
“You know what, Lindsay, I’m done,” she said, and hung up.
Chapter 15
ALEX
The apartment kind of sucked.
The Craigslist ad made it sound like there’d be high ceilings and tons of artists and a steady stream of music and partying and pussy. But this was, like, pretty fucking gross. The bedroom was smaller than my college dorm room. The kitchen was shitty and looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in years. One of my new roommates had taken a kitten in off the street that was cute but kinda nasty, with matted hair and little bits of god-knows-what that caught in your fingers when you tried to pet it. She named it Animal. This was nothing like the house Lance and I had sublet over the summer in Philly.
But the part about people partying a lot, that was pretty true. My roommates seemed to have drugs tucked all over the place, so the good news was that they were constantly offering me something and the bad news was that they were all high pretty much all the time, lying around on the gross crusty sofa and staring at all my boxes with these freakity doll eyes. Kevin, the only roommate of the three who seemed to actually care about making music, would sometimes sit at his drum kit and jam with me, and the other kids would get up and dance like jerky strung-out puppets on the rug in front of them.
But it’d only been five days, maybe things would change. It was in the hottest part of the summer and we’d all just dragged ourselves here from various boring corners of America—Syracuse, Santa Fe, Cincinnati, Atlanta—so maybe we were just exhausted and trying to get our hometowns out of our systems before we started doing what we were all here to do, which was obviously to make decent art in our respective fields. Show our parents up for rolling their eyes at our BFAs and nagging us all the damn time to get the minor in computer science, just as a backup, “you were always so good on the computer back home.” Well, Calhoun had once been home to the lead guitarist in The Sinks. So fuck you, Mom and Dad.
Except that Mom was coming to visit the next day and that was pretty sick. She’d look horrified and make a lot of disgusted noises, but then she’d know how to fit all my gear in my room, away from my weirdo roommates, and she’d probably drive me to IKEA to get a desk way less shitty than the one the dude before me left here, with its stash of expired condoms leaking and gross in the back of the second drawer. Sorry you couldn’t get laid, brother.
It was almost late afternoon and Kevin and I were just hanging