Erin took one of the newly empty stools beside me. “We need to talk.”
“Sometimes, Erin, I think you’re the coolest person I’ve ever met. And sometimes, I can’t believe I even allow myself to talk to you.” I guess talking to the bartender ripped something open in me. A new confidence, maybe. Whatever it was, I was riding it as far as it would take me. “You betrayed me. You lied to me all this time since you’ve been back from Dublin. You could’ve talked to me. I would’ve listened.”
“But you wouldn’t have changed your mind about the boys,” Erin said. “You probably would’ve judged me for sleeping with Rupert X.”
I didn’t say anything right away. I wanted to deny it, but I got this twinge in my gut that maybe she was right. Maybe I would’ve done the unmentionable thing—maybe I wouldn’t have believed her, or worse: Maybe I would’ve slut-shamed my best friend over my love for a boy band.
“I would have believed you,” I said, hoping that saying it would make it true.
“Whatever,” Erin said. “That’s not what I wanted to talk to you about.”
“I know what you want to talk about,” I said. “He’s sitting unblinking in our hotel room.”
“We need to—”
“Come play, you said. The water’s nice, you said. And now a person is dead!” My voice had risen a bit, and we both looked around to see if anyone had heard me. But no one was paying any attention to the two teenage girls sitting at the bar. “Kill the boy band—those were your exact words.”
“I didn’t mean literally,” she hissed. “You … you don’t actually think I had something to do with his death, do you?”
She looked even worse than she had up in the room. Her hair seemed impossibly limp, and no matter how many times she put her hands through it, it wouldn’t cooperate, like even her golden strands were sick of her bullshit. She pushed it back, a nuisance. It didn’t look very fashionable. Even the red in her lipstick had faded. I’d never seen the perfect Erin so … imperfect.
“No,” I said. “No, it was an accident, remember? He did it to himself.”
“That’s the thing I wanted to talk to you about,” she said. “I don’t think that he did.”
“What do you mean?”
“I called my dad.”
“You what?” My first reaction was to be scared. But then the more I let it sink in, the more relieved I felt. It made me long for grown-ups in a way I thought I’d grown out of. I wanted an adult to swoop in and help us, take care of everything, clean up our mess and tell us it would be okay. I knew it wouldn’t be that easy, but I allowed myself to live in that one second when I hoped it would be. It was warm and safe.
“I didn’t tell him anything. I just asked him—hypothetically—if someone could kill themselves through strangulation.” Erin’s father was a cardiologist. He and Erin didn’t speak very much unless Erin needed some urgent medical advice about periods or STDs “for her friends.” He was always happy to impart his knowledge to her if it got the two of them to talk, it seemed. “He said probably not.”
“Probably not is not no.”
“He said the victim would pass out first before they’d ever get close enough to actually kill themselves.”
“But the tights.”
“Rupert P. would’ve passed out long before he could pull them tight enough to actually die.”
“But … there’s still a chance he did this to himself, right? I mean … It can’t … We didn’t …”
“I don’t know,” Erin said. She wiped her hands over her face. Another thing I’d never seen her do. Erin could go a whole day without touching her face just so that her makeup stayed meticulously in place. “I don’t know anything anymore. I just think we have to entertain the possibility that someone did kill him.”
“You mean one of us.”
She nodded.
“Girls!”
Erin and I turned because, well, we were the only girls in the bar. Michelle Hornsbury rushed to us, all out of breath and unfairly beautiful. She wrapped her arms around Erin first and then me, air-kissing our cheeks once on each side.
To say it was weird was an understatement.
I couldn’t remember if we’d returned her purse. I think we just left it on the table. Had someone else brought it up to the bar and relayed the message that it was actually me and Erin who’d found and returned it? It was the only explanation for her sudden turnaround regarding fangirls.
“You don’t know how happy I am to see some familiar faces!” she said in her lilting English accent.
“Um, is everything okay?” I asked her.
The happiness vanished from her face, and she looked at me like I was an idiot. “Of course it’s not okay. Haven’t you heard the news?”
That Rupert P. was dead?