The Lost Night (Page 53)

I’m crying now, stupid useless passive Lindsay with her conviction that everything was her fault and now it’s Tessa’s but mine, too.

“Oh, enough,” Tessa says. “Here, you can sit on the couch. Help me.” She grabs me under my armpits and waits until I shuffle my feet under me and then she plops me on the couch with a “Hup!” and then I’m sitting with terrible posture, sitting can kill you it’s the new smoking, and she sits beside me, and it’s just like a normal night when she comes to hang out with me except she’s going to kill me.

“Linds, shhh, maybe this isn’t so bad,” she coos. “Hey, you were always so unhappy. Right? Glorifying your twenties, saying you don’t feel like an adult, that nobody ever wants to be with you. Maybe this’ll be better. I’ll be right here with you.”

I’m not listening though because I see something on the side table behind her, and I can’t stare because then she’ll notice and turn and see it, too, but it’s there, and I can almost feel its smoothness in my fingers, and it’s standing upright like it means business, like someone set it there carefully, and I don’t know when, or how, or who, but probably Edie, dead Edie, Deedie, because there it is, directly behind Tessa. And I know she might be about to kill me, and I know that she might get away with it, but I also know that she hurt Edie, that’s a fact, someone should tell Sarah and Kevin they were right all along. And so I pull together all of my strength, I gather it like coffee beans that just spilled all over the floor, and I lunge at her, I jump like a fish and turn halfway in the air, and it’s balletic, I’m just like an Alvin Ailey dancer, the small one who looks like Edie.

I land with my head in her lap and look up at her and say as sweetly as I can, “I trust you, Tessa. I love you and I trust you and I know you know better than me.”

And my gamble is right and she doesn’t like this at all; she makes a face and wriggles out from me and I can’t see where she goes, but this is my chance, so I whip one arm behind me like I’m doing the backstroke, and my fingers find it, and it’s in my lap, and she’s still talking, and her voice gets a little quieter, which means she’s moving away.

And because it’s from an era when we didn’t want options options options, things were what they were and we didn’t fault them for not being four hundred other things, too, and I know I can easily make it work, so I feel around with my fingers and then push it deep down into the couch cushions.

Remember this, I scream at myself. Remember this remember this remember this.

“Tessa,” I call. “What happened after you started selling? What happened with Edie?”

She wanders back in. I hear her sit at the table, and I loll my head her way.

“Lindsay, there isn’t much of a point. In an hour I’ll once again be the only person who knows.”

“Then you have nothing to lose,” I announce, like I’m in a movie and it’s go time.

“Fine,” she says. I hear the crisp hiss of a La Croix opening, tsst. “It’s been bottled up for fucking forever, so it’s time you hear it. Since you have no idea despite being there.” She glugs, exhales. “August 21, 2009.

“I was in my apartment alone. On a Friday night, as usual. I’d just toked up and taken some Molly, so I was in a weird sort of swirly mood. And someone banged on the door. So I open it and Edie is standing there with tears on her cheeks. I would see her around every now and then, but we’d been avoiding each other, obviously. I’m so surprised to see her and I think maybe she’s going to hug me or apologize or something, but instead she looks at me and goes, ‘Jenna, you have drugs, right?’ ”

She swallows hard, then takes another sip of seltzer. “And I…I was like, ‘Sure, I have whatever you want,’ and she was like—I remember this word for word—she said: ‘I wanna forget. I wanna climb out of my life and feel good for a few hours.’ ” A heavy metallic sound; she’s rolling the bottom edge of the can on the table. “So I suggested Molly, since it makes people feel happy and not overthink-y like pot.” Her voice gets even smaller. “And also maybe because I know it makes you feel…connected to the people around you. I actually thought…I thought maybe we’d go back to being friends.

“So I gave her one and took another myself. And guess what, it worked like a fucking charm. Once it kicked in, she was super happy and peppy and excited to be hanging out with me. And she announced that she wanted to go out, she wanted to dress up and go find a party and dance and prove to everyone that she didn’t give a fuck, so she was stripping, flinging clothes off around my apartment.

“And she…she sort of suddenly looked around and yelled, ‘Fuck, I don’t have any clothes here!’ And we both just laughed and laughed and laughed. Just falling on the ground laughing. So she wanted to run into her apartment and change, and I was trying to get her to put some clothes on, but she was like, ‘It’s fine, it’s fine, no one will see us, come on!’ And she grabbed my hand and her clothes and took off running. It was so silly, like we were in a spy movie—she’d stop at every corner and look around it very carefully, she opened the door to the stairwell all, you know, mock covert—we were laughing so hard the entire way.”

“Then what?” I say. Making my vocal cords vibrate is beginning to feel like a chore, like when you’re too high and those muscles want to go to sleep.

She drums her fingers on the can. “So we went to her apartment. It was empty; apparently you guys were all getting wasted on the roof. She got out her laptop to show me something and then got distracted and went into the kitchen and announced that she was going to make us a snack. She was acting really weird, and I was especially confused because, like, I’d taken some stuff, too. But then before she could even pull any food out, she went back into the living room and was like, ‘You have to see this,’ and held out a gun she’d pulled out of god-knows-where.”

The last line croaks up into a sob. She pushes back her stool and stands to rummage in her purse. She sets something on the table, but I can’t turn my head to look. I don’t want to hear the rest. I want to pause the story, maybe switch to a nice Pixar movie instead.

“She picked up the gun and kinda stared at it, and then she said, ‘Kevin showed us how to use this, isn’t it gorgeous?’ And she clicked the safety off and then on again, kind of playing with it, and goes, ‘Don’t you love that sound?’ And I…I was like, ‘Hey, be careful, you should put that down.’ But I was still trying to be nice because…well, I guess ’cause I didn’t want to, like, yell at her when she’d just started acknowledging me again.”

Tessa is pathetic. Suddenly I know this with certainty, like someone’s just read it to me from a book.

“And then the door opens and you fucking stumble in.”

My heart clenches.

“Drunk off your ass, barely able to walk, you stagger right in and ask if we know where your other friends are and blink at us stupidly, and Edie puts the gun down and walks right over to you and gives you a big hug and goes, ‘Ohh, Lindsay, I’m so sorry we’ve been fighting!’ ” She’s using a nasal voice that doesn’t sound like Edie’s at all. “And she gives you some little speech about how she loves you and knows you’re a good person and shit. And you try to tell us to come to the concert with you, but I point out that Edie is undressed, and off you go, stumbling back into the night like a wasted mess.”

I know there’s a stepping-stone in logic here, a leap from that to whatever came next, but I can’t make it. This was nice. Why did this make Tessa so mad?

“So like a moron, I turn to Edie and expect her to make amends with me, too, but instead she turns to me and goes, ‘Thanks for the Molly, but I don’t think you’re a good person.’ ”

Right, because you’re a lunatic, I think, but I don’t say it out loud.

“Such a fucking cunt.” Her voice is small now, small and shaky like a Chihuahua. “And I felt this flash of rage and I grabbed the gun and lifted it, just to scare her, just to show her she’s not the queen of everything, and then, right when I was about to drop it down…”

She scrapes back the stool and sits down again. She cries loudly for a few minutes, the kind of cry you have in private, hoping the neighbors can’t hear you.

“You know, in eighth grade I took this geography class,” she says weakly, “and the teacher passed around this, like, little ancient carving she’d gotten in Djibouti or some shit. And when it got to me I just—I couldn’t help it, I pressed it just the littlest bit, and it snapped in two. And she was so crestfallen. It was like that. I just…squeezed.”

“I don’t believe it,” I say, with effort. “You’ve rewritten it.”

She snarls. “Oh fuck, what does it even matter. I can make the whole thing skewed in my favor if you want. She was threatening me, she said she hated me, she forced me to kill her in self-defense. Is that what you want to hear? It doesn’t matter, you won’t be around to weigh in tomorrow.”