Now she thought he just looked stupid. “With the gun,” he said finally.
For the first time, Heather became aware of the object on the table, around which everyone had gathered. Her breath froze in her throat, became a hard block. She couldn’t swallow.
Not a pack of cards: a gun.
The gun—the one Heather had stolen from Trigger-Happy Jack’s place.
But no, that was impossible. She was losing it. Bishop had taken the gun and locked it away in his glove box. Heather wasn’t sure she could tell the difference between guns, anyway. They all looked the same: like horrible metal fingers, pointing the way to something evil.
She remembered, suddenly, listening as a small child while Krista was drinking with the neighbors in the kitchen. “Now Heather’s father . . . he was a mess. Offed himself right after the baby came along. Came home and found his brain splattered on the wall.” Pause. “Can’t say I blame him, sometimes.”
“Please? Just for a minute?” Matt had come even closer. He was staring at Heather with his big cow eyes, pleading; she belatedly registered that he had asked her whether they could talk. He lowered his voice. “Outside?”
“No.” Everything Heather thought was taking a long time to turn into words, into action.
“What?” Matt looked momentarily confused. He probably wasn’t used to having Heather stand up for herself. Probably Delaney always said yes to him too.
“If you want to talk, you can talk to me here.” Heather was aware that Nat was doing her best to pretend she wasn’t listening. Vivian, on the other hand, was still staring at her.
Matt coughed. He blushed again. “Look, I just wanted to tell you . . . I’m sorry. For the way everything happened between us. The Delaney thing . . .” He looked away. He was doing his best to seem apologetic, but Heather knew that he was gloating, just a little bit, to be in the position of having to apologize. He was in control. He shrugged. “You have to believe, it just kind of . . . happened.”
She felt a rush of hatred for him. How had she ever believed she was in love with him? He was a dolt, just like Nat said. At the same time, an image of Bishop rose up in her mind: Bishop in his stupid sweatpants and flip-flops, grinning at her; sharing an iced coffee, sharing the same straw, mindless of backwash and the fact that Heather always chewed her straws to bits; lying side by side on the hood of his car, surrounded by crushed cans, which Bishop said would make the aliens more likely to abduct them. Saying, Please, please, take me away from here, alien friends! And laughing.
“Why are you telling me this now?” Heather said.
Matt looked startled, as though he’d expected her to thank him. “I’m telling you now because you don’t have to do this. You don’t have to go through with it. Look, I know you, Heather. And this isn’t you.”
She felt like she’d been socked in the stomach. “You think this is about you? About what happened?”
Matt sighed. She could tell he thought she was being difficult. “I’m just saying you don’t have to prove anything.”
A vibration went through Heather—tiny electrical pulses of anger. “Fuck off, Matt,” she said. By now, the people in the room were no longer pretending not to be listening. But she didn’t care.
“Heather—” He reached for her arm as she started to move past him.
She shook him off. “This was never about you.” That wasn’t, she realized, 100 percent true. She had entered—at least, she thought she had—out of a sense of desperation, a sense that her life was over when he dumped her. But she was playing for herself now, for herself and Lily; she was playing because she had made it this far; she was playing because if she won, it would be the first and only time she had ever won something in her life. “And you don’t know me. You never did.”
She was hoping he would leave, now that he had come to say what he had to say, but he didn’t. He crossed his arms and leaned against the bathroom door, or the sheet of graffiti-printed plywood where the bathroom door should have been—the plumbing lines hadn’t been connected. Just for a second, she saw Matt Hepley and Ray Hanrahan exchange a glance. Almost imperceptibly, Matt gestured to him. Like, I did what I could.
She felt a twin surge of disgust and triumph. So now Ray was enlisting Matt’s help to get Heather to drop out. It was probably Ray who’d sent her that text in June telling her to quit Panic. He obviously thought she was a real threat.
And that made her feel powerful.
“What is this?” she said, gesturing with her chin to the gun. Her voice was overloud, and she was aware that everyone was watching her—Matt, Ray, Nat, Vivian, and all the rest of them. It was like a painting; and at the center, framed in light, was the gun.