by L. E. Flynn
What I will give you is this. I can’t say with total certainty that Tabby would never hurt anyone, because I’ve seen her do it. Mostly it’s a joke to her, but I’ve been around for the times it wasn’t. And those times all had something in common. She was doing it for somebody else. Tabby is a lot of things: impulsive, vain, moody, proud, sarcastic, fun. But she’s also loyal. It’s her trademark, if you really know her. Yes, she sucks up the sunshine, but she’ll find a way to warm you with it.
“Did you go to the woods today?” Tabby asks when I’m back from my run. She’s standing in the kitchen with a mug of coffee, her hair impossibly shiny down her back.
“Yeah,” I say. “The caution tape is still there.”
She nods, like she isn’t surprised. I don’t know what the cops expect to find.
I’m sure of one thing. If Tabby hurt Mark, it was because he did something to really deserve it.
Anonymous tip to police hotline
September 4, 2019, 10:02 a.m.
“Hello? Yeah, I just wanted to report something I saw. That story about the guy and girl in the woods—the guy who died. I was coming out of the woods on a different trail, the Cider Creek one, when they were going in. So anyway, he was yelling at her to hurry up, which I thought was really rude, you know? She was lugging this picnic basket, and it looked like it weighed about a hundred pounds. Then he kind of walked ahead of her like he was irate. She had to run to catch up. And she kept saying ‘I don’t know about this, I really don’t know,’ and he told her to shut up and follow him.
They never even looked up and probably had no idea I was there, but she just looked so upset, and he seemed really mean. And the other thing was his hands. They were clenched into fists. I don’t know; for some reason I just pictured him using them on her.
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to draw attention to myself. It wasn’t my place. I just got the hell out of there as fast as I could. But I kept thinking about that girl, and when I saw the headline a few days later—well, I was just surprised it wasn’t her body they found.
Anyway. I don’t know if any of this is important, but I couldn’t sleep at night until I said something to defend that poor girl. He looked dangerous, and she looked sad. And I know, well, I know from experience that sometimes sad is what you feel right before you finally fight back.”
8
BECK
Coldcliff Police Station, September 5, 2:18 p.m.
OFFICER OLDMAN: Thanks for coming to meet with us.
BECK: Well, you made me. It didn’t exactly sound like an invitation.
OFFICER OLDMAN: Beck Rutherford. Is Beck short for something?
BECK: It’s my name. Are you going to arrest me for something, or can I get back to school now?
OFFICER OLDMAN: Don’t lash out at me, son. We just want to ask you a few questions.
BECK: I’m not your son.
OFFICER OLDMAN: Sorry. Beck. We have a few questions we hope you can assist us with in the Mark Forrester case.
BECK: Case? I thought he fell off a cliff.
OFFICER OLDMAN: It’s not that simple. We’re still investigating, and we’d like your help.
BECK: I already told the last guy my statement. I don’t know anything about what happened. I heard about it the same as everyone else.
OFFICER OLDMAN: From your girlfriend, right? Louisa Chamberlain?
BECK: No, I saw it online. I guess she called me, but I didn’t pick up.
OFFICER OLDMAN: Why didn’t you pick up when your girlfriend called?
BECK: She’s not my girlfriend, okay? And do you pick up the phone every time your wife calls? I doubt it.
OFFICER OLDMAN: Where were you the evening Mark Forrester died?
BECK: I was riding my bike. I already told the last guy. Don’t you share notes?
OFFICER OLDMAN: So you were on your motorcycle. Were you alone?
BECK: Yeah, I was alone.
OFFICER OLDMAN: Where do you ride it?
BECK: Just around. Mostly the roads around town. Not a lot of traffic. Don’t worry, I don’t go over the speed limit.
OFFICER OLDMAN: Sounds dangerous, being on your own like that. What if something happened?
BECK: Something doesn’t.
OFFICER OLDMAN: Did you know that Tabitha and Mark were taking a hike that day?
BECK: Why would I know that? Tabitha and I don’t even talk anymore. I really don’t care about her weekend plans.
OFFICER OLDMAN: Anymore. You don’t talk anymore. But you used to. Looks like you used to do more than talk.
BECK: Yeah, we used to hang out. But not now. She has her life. I have mine.
OFFICER OLDMAN: So you weren’t with her the night of Eleanor Ross’s party on August tenth?
BECK: No, I wasn’t with her. I mean, I saw her there, but I also saw a hundred other people. That’s kind of what happens at parties.
OFFICER OLDMAN: Sources say they saw you with Tabitha. We have an account that you left the pool house together.
BECK: Sources. Okay. I seriously doubt it. I wasn’t in the pool house that night.
OFFICER OLDMAN: Another witness puts you in the kitchen the same night. Says that you had your arm around her and stuck something in the pocket of her jeans.
BECK: She wasn’t even wearing jeans. She had a skirt on.
OFFICER OLDMAN: You remember what Tabitha was wearing the night of a party that took place last month?
BECK: (pauses) I have a good memory.
OFFICER OLDMAN: So maybe you can remember what Tabitha told you about her plans with Mark.
BECK: I can’t tell you something I don’t know. Look, am I under arrest, or am I free to go now?
9
ELLE
TABBY KNOWS ABOUT DALLAS. She didn’t find out because I told her, but because of what came after. Dallas was supposed to be nothing serious, a good excuse to lose my virginity because he was there and willing. But he went and became a defining moment in my life anyway. It’s unfair, how I fail spectacularly at not taking something seriously. It’s like my body has other plans.
Maybe Tabby knows the feeling.
It’s the first day of school, so of course I’m seeing him today, and I won’t be able to avoid him like I did all summer. He’s a year younger than us—Tabby called me a cougar when she found out—so he won’t be in any of my classes, but he’ll be everywhere else. I’ve known him for years. His family lives three doors down from ours, and his mom sometimes comes over and drinks wine with Mom on our deck, their laughter puncturing the sky. Now, every time Mrs. Mackey comes over and says “Hi, Elle,” I wonder what she knows. Now, whenever she and Mom are half drunk, voices carrying into the night, I wonder what they’re really talking about. If they stumbled onto dangerous ground.
“You’re nervous,” Tabby says when she picks me up in her dad’s blue Camry. “Relax. You don’t owe him a goddamn thing, remember?”
Her voice is hard, unflinching. She’s back, the girl who had the ability to make me feel both seen and invisible. Mark had done something to her, made her less somehow, turned her from larger-than-life into something scared of its shadow. Her shadow is here now, longer than ever, covering both of us like a tent. I’m used to its shade.
“You’re right.” I take in what Tabby’s wearing, or the lack thereof. Shorts that have ridden up so high that I can’t see where they end and a low-cut tank top. It has been three weeks since Mark died, three weeks during which Tabby has vacillated from a state of disaffected calm to a waterlogged mess, shot through with bolts of laughter and girlishness that she apologized for, like she shouldn’t be allowed to be happy when he’s six feet under. But now here she is, looking more herself than she has in months. Mark never liked her showing too much skin, she told me. I argued that it didn’t stop him the night they met.
The truth is, Mark not being around has made things easier. She’s easier, looser, more like she used to be. Maybe you’re thinking it would have been like that anyway. He
doesn’t go to Coldcliff Heights. He’d be away at Princeton. But control makes distance evaporate. It shrinks people into specimens, easy to view under a microscope. And Mark’s eye was constantly on his microscope, studying Tabby.
I’m not sure how Tabby will act when we walk into the school. If she’ll reach for my hand or link her pinkie through mine, like I reached for her months ago, sure I was about to face my own reckoning. I’m not sure if she’s nervous, or if she’s scared to enter the real-life version of the online gossip minefield. But if she is feeling either, she hasn’t shown it. She isn’t shrunken anymore. She’s her full height, confidence sweeping behind her like the train of a wedding dress.
We shuffle down the hall, our flip-flops thwacking the ground. Pockets of girls are clustered by their lockers, staring. Tabby doesn’t seem phased.
“Apparently they have no lives of their own,” I say. “Isn’t there anything else to talk about?”
Ever since Lou linked to that article and the comments dogpiled underneath it, everyone has something to say about Tabby. Nobody thinks Mark’s death was an accident. There are too many indicators that it wasn’t.
SOMEBODY pushed him, one of the last comments said. If it wasn’t her, who was it?
That stuck with me. The image formed of somebody else there, on the Split, with Tabby and Mark.
Sometimes I picture it being me. My hands against his back. Sometimes I imagine how it would feel, his hot skin. How it would sound, his scream.
But that’s only sometimes, and I’d never admit that to anyone else. I see what the media does to girls. It drains them, a collective vampire sucking until its mouth is a ruby smear. It drains out every detail, everything they’ve ever done. It empties the blood and goes for the vital organs. For her lungs, until she can’t breathe. Her brain, until she can’t think. Her heart, until she can’t feel.
“That cop asked me to come in again today after school,” Tabby says, as casually as if we were talking about an annoying teacher. “Stewart. The one who hates me. I’ve already told him everything I know. I mean, whatever. I have nothing to hide.”
They haven’t gotten to her yet. Maybe they’ve feasted on a bit of her blood, but she can make more. Tabby has thick skin.
I don’t get a chance to respond, because a few guys from our grade stop in front of us. Connor Lawson and Brian Hull as well as Lance Peterson, who Tabby made out with during freshman year. He told all his friends that she gave him a blow job and didn’t know what she was doing. She shrugged off the rumors like a too-big coat, but a week later, Lance got suspended for having weed in his locker. I never asked Tabby if she was responsible for putting it there.
“There she is,” Connor says. “I just have to ask. Did you do it?”
We keep walking. I give him the middle finger. Tabby laughs.
“You don’t seem too torn up about it,” Brian shouts after us. “I saw you at his funeral. You were smiling the whole time.”
They don’t know Tabby, and I do. Tabby’s mouth betrays her in little ways—not even what she says but what she doesn’t say. Her perma-smirk, as I once called it. The way she laughs at inappropriate times. I’ve seen her do it when she gets in trouble with a teacher, when her mom says This isn’t funny, Tabitha Marie.
Tabby doesn’t dignify the comments with a response. It’s not until Lance jumps in that she stops walking.
“I guess we knew what she was capable of doing. She’s already lied and cheated. We knew she could be a killer.”
She whips around and puts her hand on his chest, pushing him backward. Her nails are painted purple. Most people would say Tabby isn’t a patient person. Her temper can be an animal, forever pulling on an invisible leash. But she’s patient when it comes to her personal grooming. Her nails are always the same length, always painted, never jagged and bitten like mine.
I focus on her nails. Connor calls her a crazy bitch. A crowd is drawing closer, eager for more. I grab Tabby’s hand to tug her down the hall, but she wiggles out of my grip.
“You want a show? Here I am. Instead of hiding behind your fucking computers, say it to my face. Tell me what a terrible person I am. And what a fucking perfect person he was.”
But nobody says anything. There are a few laughs. Most people are on their phones, probably taking pictures. They’re thinking, Look. She got mad. And we all know angry girls are mentally unhinged.
And there, standing behind everyone, is Dallas. He’s maybe the only person not looking at Tabby. He’s staring at me instead. Asking me a very different question than the one everyone was too afraid to ask Tabby before today.
10
BRIDGET
THE VIDEO HAS ALMOST two thousand views, and it has been up for only three hours. Two thousand views. Nowhere near two thousand students go to Coldcliff Heights, so obviously other people are interested. I’m not sure Tabby knows it exists, and I’m not going to tell her.
It makes her look really bad. That’s what my friend Laurel said after she watched it. Laurel immediately texted me in our group WhatsApp—Have you seen it? It makes her look really bad.
It does. Her teeth flash, her hair flies. She’s a live wire, all instincts. More animal than girl. Because that’s what it comes down to, isn’t it? They want to strip her down to her barest instincts.
I wish they would stop. They have no idea what they’re up against.
THE BUTTON—YOUR SOURCE FOR HOT STORIES!
September 6, 2019
Video of Coldcliff girl goes viral
By Michael Dixon
Rumors have been swirling since the hiking death of Mark Forrester, a 20-year-old Princeton student, in August. Now, a profanity-laced video of his girlfriend, Tabitha Cousins, losing her temper at a bunch of her classmates has gone viral, garnering sixty thousand views in less than 24 hours. In the video, posted to a YouTube channel owned by Louisa Chamberlain, another student at Coldcliff Heights High School, Cousins seems to invite people to accuse her of involvement in Forrester’s death.
“It was scary,” said a classmate who asked to remain anonymous. “It was like she just lost it. And it sounds bad, but she obviously liked the attention.”
Lance Peterson, a senior and the swim team captain, said that Cousins physically and verbally attacked him without any provocation. “She came at me. I didn’t say a word except that I was sorry about Mark. I mean, the whole swim team looked up to him. He’s a legend around here.”
Cousins wasn’t available for comment, but online chatter surrounding this video implies that there may have been more to her relationship with Forrester than meets the eye.
A link to the video can be found here.
11
LOU
YES, I’M THE ONE who posted the video. You probably think I’m a horrible person for posting it, right? But hear me out. I did it in the heat of the moment. She looked so violent. Tabitha has a temper—I mean, it’s no secret—she gets passionate about things, as Mr. Lowe, our junior year homeroom teacher, once said. (And the way she looked at him after he said it—gross. She was always flirting with him in these little ways, even though he’s, like, forty and married.)
Yeah, so I wanted to show everyone that mean side of Tabitha. Mostly she does a good job of keeping it in check. She disguises it as something else. Passion, I guess. But—you’ve seen the video, right? She’s, like, ugly. She’s outraged. That’s the real Tabitha.
Anyway, now I wish I had never posted the video, because suddenly not just everyone at our school has seen it, but everyone else, too, and some detective actually made me take it down. (If you still want to see it, I have it saved on my phone.) And it’s, like, I get the feeling this is what Tabitha wanted the whole time. For people to be talking about her. Maybe she knew someone was going to take a video and she played this perfectly, so that the media would glom on and make a martyr out of her. Or whatever she is.
I hate losing. I especially hate losing to Tabitha.
I suppose I should clarify somet
hing else, speaking of losing. Most people think I hate Tabitha because of Beck. Because there was this rumor he slept with her while he was dating me. But I don’t believe that crap, because Beck told me it wasn’t true. No, I hate Tabitha because of what happened sophomore year with the play.
(Not everything is about a boy, you know. We’re made up of more than the sum of their parts.)
It was A Streetcar Named Desire. Of course I was going to be Blanche—everyone knows I’m a good actress, and I’ve been the lead in, like, every play at Coldcliff Heights. It was important to me, being good at that. Pretty much everyone thinks I’ll do acting professionally someday, but I’m not so sure anymore.
So the auditions were on a Tuesday. The usual girls who tried out every year were there—Gina Forsyth and Julia Petersen and Tara Waters and Lexie Roth, who looks horrible with blond hair (I think she was trying to copy me, and just—honey, no). I overheard Tara saying she couldn’t remember the lines to her monologue, and Lexie telling her she was planning to “just wing it.” I had smiled because I knew none of them were any competition.
Then Tabitha showed up in the auditorium. She looked like white trash, all ripped tights and dark eyeliner and clunky Doc Martens, like she was from the nineties or something.
“What are you doing here?” I asked. Maybe I didn’t say it very nicely. Maybe I don’t care about being nice.
“Auditioning. My parents want me to get more involved.” She popped a bubble with her gum. “Hey, you’re always really good in these things. Any tips?”
These things. Like the plays were amateurish, not worthy of her time. She diminished me with those two words, whether she meant to or not. And I think she meant to.
I had prepared one of Blanche’s monologues—from Scene Four—He acts like an animal, has an animal’s habits! It was some of my best work. As soon as I got onstage, my confidence came back. Fuck Tabitha Cousins. She’ll never get a leading role, I thought.
