All Eyes on Her

by L. E. Flynn

A separate set of boot prints near the mouth of the woods has been identified as belonging to Thomas Becker Rutherford III, 17, with whom Cousins had a previous romantic relationship. Rutherford’s lawyer could not be reached for comment.

  33

  KYLA DOVE

  SO YOU DON’T KNOW ME, or at least not well, which is fine. I’m not offended. Nobody knows me well. There’s really nothing that sets me apart from anyone else. My blond hair comes from a bottle and I wear a lot of makeup to cover up the fact that my skin breaks out on a regular basis. My body, I barely cover up, because the parts boys like distract them from seeing that my face isn’t beautiful.

  Anyway, this isn’t about how I look. For once, it’s about what I have to say.

  I don’t think she did it. Tabby. I’m sure she would be shocked I’m standing up for her, because I know she doesn’t like me. Every time we hung out as a foursome—me and Keegan, her and Mark—she barely acknowledged I was there, and I heard her call me desperate at one of Elle’s parties. And it makes me feel sad, because I think in another time and place we could have been friends. But not this time and place, because they pit girls against each other for all kinds of reasons, don’t they?

  They say we’re born with female intuition, but we’re great at ignoring stuff when we don’t want to deal with it. Tabby would hate that I’m lumping her with every other girl, but I strongly feel that she had no idea what was happening until it happened. You’re wondering how I know she didn’t do it.

  Because I know who did.

  34

  BRIDGET

  NOBODY KNOWS HOW TO ACT around Tabby anymore. It’s not house arrest, exactly—nobody is outside guarding her, unless you count the perimeter of news vans, and she doesn’t have an ankle bracelet monitoring her, like I’ve seen on TV—but our house has become her prison anyway. Last night I heard her arguing with Mom and Dad about being allowed to go back to school.

  “Can’t I just live a normal life?” she pleaded.

  “We think it’s best that you stay here until all this blows over.” That’s Dad—he always sounds like that when he argues. We this and we that. I’m not sure when he and Mom became this amorphous blob of we, but that’s how it is now.

  “Do you think I did it?”

  They don’t respond right away. Then Mom says, “Of course not, sweetie.”

  She’s lying. They’re afraid. Afraid that Tabby did something. It’s like we stop being little girls anymore and they stop knowing who we are. We’re under their roof, brushing our hair, letting them kiss us good night, but something is different. We aren’t candy sweet. We’re opaque where we used to be transparent. Our skin hints at a storm, so they stay away.

  My parents liked Mark. He was such a good guy. So polite. Of course, he was following Beck’s act, and Beck never had an act, so it was easy for Mark to look good. Beck never came for family dinners. He never shook Dad’s hand and promised to take care of his daughter.

  I find Tabby curled up on the couch watching a movie. I’m stretching against the wall and can see what she’s reading on Mom’s iPad. A new article. The same one on BuzzFeed that Laurel and Sydney were looking at after practice. It has a clickbait title: What this girl did after fighting with her boyfriend will shock you.

  Tabby’s lips are laced into a smile. She’s wearing lipstick—actually, a full face of makeup—even though she isn’t leaving the house.

  At least, she says she isn’t leaving the house. But it’s not like Mom and Dad are home to keep an eye on her. Mom is a teacher at the elementary school and Dad is an orthodontist, so they’re both gone all day. Dad even did Mark’s braces, back when he was a teenager, before he was ever part of our lives. Sometimes I picture how awkward that must have been when Mark first came to the door to pick up Tabby. Dad having all that knowledge of the inside of his mouth. Dad having tortured him by tightening wires and elastics. Dad having an understanding of how that smart mouth of Mark’s worked, but still eating up every single word that came out of it.

  “How can you possibly read that?” I snap. “Don’t even give that stupid website any more traffic. Do you actually want to know what they’re saying about you?”

  She rolls her head back to stick out her tongue at me. “Bridge, come on. It’s better to know what they’re saying than to wonder about it. Everyone else knows. Why shouldn’t I?”

  I guess she has a point. It’s her right to know. I’m a runner. I prepare for every race, every practice. She’s preparing, too. For the next time she’s at school. The so-called facts people will spew in her face. For the next time she’s at a party and some mean girl asks who she’s going to kill tonight. She wants to have all of the information, even though I’m not sure what she’s planning to do with it.

  “Maybe I’ll just run away,” she says suddenly, tossing the iPad aside. “That’ll give them something new to talk about. What’s here for me anymore?” She laughs, but her eyes well up.

  “You have me,” I say.

  “For how much longer?” she almost whispers. “You’ll turn on me, too.” Then she grabs the iPad and stalks upstairs, slamming her bedroom door loud enough to shake the house. I have this thought, I bet the reporters outside heard that. I bet they’re spinning it into whatever web of bullshit they’ve made, with my sister stuck in the middle. Their black widow.

  I text Elle when I can’t sleep because my brain keeps treading over all the things Tabby could do in her spiral. To other people. To herself.

  She broke down earlier. She threatened to run away. I think she might actually do it.

  Elle’s reply is almost immediate. She won’t. She has a court date. She has police to talk to. She knows it would just be trouble. Her words hold a certainty I lack, like she knows her version of Tabby better than I know mine.

  I have a feeling, I type, then pause before sending the rest. I think she’s going to do something bad.

  Bad how? Elle responds, but I put my phone down without answering, either because I don’t know what to say or just wish I didn’t.

  The next day, Mom confiscates the iPad. Tabby’s antsy without it, walking the loop through the kitchen and living room and down the front hall a thousand times, slippered feet shuffling. “They’re not going to find anything,” she tells me. “They think I have all these secrets.”

  “Do you?”

  She stops walking and grips my hand almost hard enough to hurt. She painted my nails earlier in a fit of boredom and they’re still slightly tacky. She insisted on black.

  “They know everything about me,” she hisses. “If they all put their dumb heads together, they’d have a whole person.”

  It’s the last thing she says to me before we both go to sleep. I wake up to noise and lights and the cold certainty that as bad as things have been, they’re about to get a lot worse.

  PART II

  Jack fell down and broke his crown

  THE COLDCLIFF TRIBUNE

  October 12, 2019

  Girlfriend in dead hiker case arrested, deemed a flight risk

  By Julie Kerr

  Tabitha Cousins, 17, was arrested last night and taken into police custody at a juvenile detention center in Colorado Springs. Cousins will be held in custody until her trial, which has been tentatively scheduled for late November.

  A Coldcliff resident who wishes to remain unidentified told the Tribune that Cousins had a packed bag at the time of her arrest and had been planning an escape for several days, maybe even weeks. “She knows they’ll find out what really happened, and she’ll spend her life behind bars,” the source said. “Being on the run would be a lot easier. And I don’t think she was planning on going alone.”

  Anyone with additional information has been asked to contact the police department’s tip line.

  1

  ELLE

  HERE’S WHAT HAPPENS when a girl gets arrested.

  The police come to her house. Maybe they look smug about it, because they never believed her story in the first place. Ma
ybe they’re rougher than they need to be when they put her in handcuffs, right in front of her parents and sister. They tell her she has the right to remain silent. As if they would hear her even if she screamed.

  They let her know the crime she’s being charged with: the murder of Mark Forrester. They notice she’s wearing tight jeans, that she has makeup on, even though it’s eleven o’clock at night. They see the packed bag and wonder where she planned to go. She thought she got away with it, the little brat. She thought she had everybody fooled with those big eyes and the story she came up with, the story that made her out to be totally innocent. We went for a hike. We wanted to see the view. He leaned over too far. We. We. He. Never me. She didn’t do anything wrong.

  This is what happens when a girl gets arrested. She gets questioned again, and again, and again, because they think they can wring the real story out of her. They know Mark didn’t fall. Mark was not the kind of guy who fell for anything.

  “You did it,” they say. “We know you did it. If you admit it, this will go a lot easier. We can make a deal. Do you want to spend the rest of your life in prison?”

  They wonder why she hasn’t cried. She must be a monster, devoid of emotion, running purely on instincts. It’s a good thing they arrested her, because who knows what she’s really capable of. They don’t know that she has cried, but only when nobody is around to see her do it. They don’t know that when she finally falls asleep at night, she has to flip over her pillow, because it is wet with tears.

  She’s seventeen, so she’s held at a juvenile detention center. She sleeps in a ward with other scared girls. She wonders why they’re here, if they have been accused of the same thing. She didn’t do it. She couldn’t do it.

  What she doesn’t tell the police: yes, she was angry at Mark on the hike. Yes, she walked behind him and for a second, maybe longer, she allowed herself to fantasize about what his sweaty back would feel like with her palms pressed against it, how she would feel being the one with the power. But she didn’t do it. She’s not capable of murder.

  “I’m scared,” she says, practically a whisper. “I’m scared I had something to do with it.”

  I know all of this because she’s allowed to have visitors.

  “Just tell me what happened,” I plead. “We’ll get through it together.”

  I’m not allowed to touch her, but I mentally touch her hand and hope she feels it.

  “I can’t,” she says. “It’s just, I didn’t want him to die, okay? I never thought he would.”

  I wanted to ask her what that meant, but our time was up.

  2

  BECK

  Coldcliff Police Station, October 15, 2:10 p.m.

  OFFICER OLDMAN: I’m sure you heard that Tabitha attempted to leave town last week, and now she’s being held in custody. If you have something to tell us, we need to know it. Was she on her way to meet you?

  BOBBY GOOD, BECK’S LAWYER: Go ahead and answer that.

  BECK: Why would she be?

  OFFICER OLDMAN: Seems to me that if someone tries to run, it means they have something to hide.

  BECK: Seems to me that if someone thinks everyone hates them, what else are they gonna goddamn do?

  BOBBY GOOD: My client was unaware of Miss Cousins’s whereabouts, as he has already asserted.

  OFFICER SCHULTZ: A resident on Shady Lane claims she saw a bike drive past around seven p.m. Says the sound of it made her look up from her game of cards. Did you drive your bike down Shady Lane the night Mark Forrester was killed?

  BECK: I have no reason to be on Shady Lane. I don’t ride my bike around rich people’s neighborhoods.

  OFFICER SCHULTZ: The entrance to the woods where your boot print was found is close to Shady Lane.

  BECK: Ever think Durango might have made more than one pair of boots? Maybe in a weird attempt to make money? Half the guys who hang out at Pacers wear these boots. Check into them.

  OFFICER SCHULTZ: I assure you we’re following all leads.

  OFFICER OLDMAN: Your girlfriend, Louisa, lives on Shady Crescent. But she said she didn’t see you that night.

  BECK: Yeah, because we didn’t see each other.

  OFFICER SCHULTZ: But you were supposed to make plans, isn’t that right? And you didn’t reply to her messages?

  BOBBY GOOD: This is irrelevant to the case at hand. You have no evidence tying my client to the scene.

  OFFICER OLDMAN: What about the text message Mark sent you?

  BECK: Yeah, I don’t even know how he got my phone number. Must have found it in Tabby’s phone. He seems like the kind of guy who’d look through his girlfriend’s shit.

  OFFICER OLDMAN: He told you to stay away from Tabitha. Is there a reason why he would have felt the need to say that?

  BECK: I don’t know. He was a possessive guy.

  OFFICER SCHULTZ: Did Tabitha tell you that?

  BECK: She didn’t have to. You could tell. Went to a few parties, and his arm was always around her.

  OFFICER OLDMAN: It seems like you paid a lot of attention to Tabitha.

  BECK: Well, she’s the kind of girl people pay attention to. The whole country is doing it now, right?

  BOBBY GOOD: What my client is trying to say is that he wasn’t the only person who noticed things.

  OFFICER OLDMAN: Tell us about what happened last homecoming weekend.

  BECK: That was so long ago, how am I supposed to remember?

  OFFICER SCHULTZ: So you didn’t meet up with Tabitha at a party that weekend?

  BECK: No, I didn’t even see her that weekend.

  OFFICER OLDMAN: We’ve heard from various sources that she left a party with a boy in a black leather jacket.

  BECK: Well, it wasn’t me.

  OFFICER SCHULTZ: It sounds like we hit a nerve. Are you still in love with Tabitha Cousins?

  BOBBY GOOD: That’s irrelevant. You’re investigating a boy who died. My client’s love life didn’t kill Mark Forrester.

  OFFICER OLDMAN: We’ll be the judge of that.

  BECK: Kind of hard to love a girl who only loves herself.

  3

  LOU

  IT’S LIKE A BLESSING in disguise, or whatever you want to call it. Tabby finally gets arrested, which is what she deserves. Obviously she wasn’t as clever as she thought. I should be happy about all this, but I’m not, because they’re dragging Beck into it even deeper, and now he’s all grumpy and quiet and doesn’t want to talk about any of it. He doesn’t even want to touch me, to be honest.

  “A lot of people own those boots,” I say when I see him at school today.

  “I know, sweetheart,” he says, brushing my hair off my face—I love it when he does that, especially in public. “But nobody wants to believe me.”

  The boots—they’re clunky black ones. Durangos. I’ve never seen him wear anything else.

  “You don’t even go into the woods,” I say. He’s super quiet, his hand balled up on my shoulder. So quiet that I’m not even sure he’s breathing.

  “You don’t even go into the woods,” I repeat. Then, “Do you?”

  “No,” he says. “I’m not much for hiking and shit.”

  I have no idea why it takes him so long to answer, and why his answer just sounds like what I want to hear. Maybe I’ve been spending too much time online.

  4

  BRIDGET

  TABBY COMPLAINED ABOUT Louisa a few times. Basically stuff like, Why does she hate me so much? I’ve never done anything to her. And I’m not sure, but I think it was less about what Lou had against her and more about what stood between them. Who stood between them. Beck. From what I’ve heard, Lou thinks my sister hooked up with Beck after they started dating, or something like that.

  (Don’t ask me about what’s happening with Beck, as if I’m supposed to know. He’s just a guy my sister used to sneak out to meet. I don’t have any inside knowledge of him. I know as much about him as you do, which is probably very little. When Tabby and Beck were “together”—whatever that even
means—he didn’t feel the need to even acknowledge I existed. At least there was some honesty to that, unlike Mark, who tried on that “cool older brother” act at first. It didn’t work.)

  Anyway, Lou started all of this about my sister. If she hadn’t posted that video of Tabby shoving Lance, would any of this be happening? Maybe it would have happened anyway. Maybe there was no way a girl like Tabby could sneak through unscathed. But the video didn’t help. The video was what made people feel entitled, its comments section the first battlefield. If the situation were reversed and I was the one who had gotten taken away by the police, I know my sister wouldn’t be skulking through the halls like a shadow.

  So today I find Louisa Chamberlain.

  I have to wait to get her alone, because she’s always surrounded by these same girls—I think their names are all variations of Kaylie or Kacie or Kylie, all of them in pastels, like sidewalk chalk lined up in a row. They must be really vapid to have Louisa as their leader. I have to wait until the end of the day, when Louisa is walking to her car in the parking lot—an Audi, which makes me smile, because Tabby once said only assholes drive Audis.

  I’m supposed to be at practice. We’re going into the woods, doing repeats of Salt Hill, short and steep, but I don’t want to be in the woods right now. Not because Mark died there. Maybe I’m morbid, but that part doesn’t bother me. It’s Tabby’s death that bothers me more, the way she gets murdered a little more every single day. Every comment on every article a new knife wound, a fresh stab.

  And I need to blame somebody, so today I blame Louisa.

  I trail her until she’s almost at her car door. I’m good at that—coming up from behind. It’s a skill I’ve honed through all my years spent running. I don’t have a flashy style. I rarely lead from the start, choosing to tuck myself behind the leaders, staring at their backs until I notice the signs of them getting tired. Hunched shoulders, shorter strides, shallow breaths. Then I make my move. That’s why freshman year, my teammates started calling me the Silent Knife.