“She’s right,” Erin said. “It would’ve been impossible for Rupert P. to use the tights to kill himself. Someone killed him.”
“Oh, and now you think it was me too?” Isabel said. She turned to me. “Now I get it. Why you’re so eager to point fingers. It was you, wasn’t it?”
“What?”
“It all makes sense now.”
“You’re crazy,” I said.
“Am I? We have no idea where you were when Rupert P. died.”
“I told you, I was in the bar.”
“That’s not what Erin says.”
I turned to Erin, not even a little bit surprised that she’d talk to Isabel about me behind my back.
“You weren’t at the bar,” Erin said. Her voice slow and steady. Deliberate. “I know you weren’t at the bar because I was.”
The thing about lying is you can be really good at it and still get caught.
This just happened to be the worst possible lie to get caught in. Isabel was enjoying it. She was the bull, suddenly awake and pawing the ground. It was up to me to stand my ground or run with my tail between my legs.
“Okay, I wasn’t at the bar,” I said. “I was with Rupert K.”
Quiet. And not even like an awed quiet, more like an I-love-the-way-you-lie kind of quiet.
“What?” Erin said.
“I went up to the roof and he was there. We talked. When I came back down I found you all in the hallway, and that’s when we all walked into the room and found Rupert P. dead.”
“And let me guess,” Isabel said, “you were with him when Rupert P. quote-unquote jumped off the roof too.”
“Actually, yeah, I was.”
“You expect us to believe that?”
“This is exactly why I didn’t tell you in the first place. I know it sounds crazy, but it happened. He tweeted ‘Bright Lights, Big City’—it was something we’d talked about earlier, so I knew where to find him.”
Erin had her phone out instantly. “He didn’t tweet that,” she said.
“Yes, he did.”
“Erin’s right,” Apple said. “There’s no tweet like that on his feed.”
“Then he must have deleted it.”
“We all would’ve seen it, though,” Erin said.
“No, you guys were too busy listening to Michelle Hornsbury’s stories. I saw the tweet as soon it went out. He probably just deleted it like two seconds later.”
“You imagined it.”
Isabel. On her hind legs now and smiling. Her smile this time wasn’t one of a beast about to pounce, but of one who’d already devoured her prey, satisfied. All I was to her was something stuck between her teeth. “You imagined the tweet. Just like you imagined meeting Rupert K. You’re literally crazy.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Erin told me about the time you spent in that psych ward freshman year.”
I stared at Erin. A dagger through the heart, twisting.
“It wasn’t a psych ward,” I said in a low voice. It was after my breakdown, my moment of paralyzing fear after my dad’s death. My mom took me to her hospital, but I wasn’t even admitted. “It wasn’t a psych ward,” I said again. Erin was the only one I told. Everyone else just thought I’d been out sick for a couple of days. How could she tell Isabel? “You know nothing about that.”
“You know what else Erin told me? That you like to fantasize about Rupert K. You imagine he’s with you all the livelong day. Face it—all of your lies have facilitated your slow spiral into insanity.”
I was too embarrassed to be fully angry. “I’m not crazy.”
“Sure,” Isabel said. “And you also didn’t kill Rupert P.”
“I did meet Rupert K. He told me about his hobbies, he told me what direction he wants his music to go in …”
“Let me guess, video games and folk?” Isabel said. “It’s in all of his interviews.”
“Folk dubstep.”
“Doesn’t that sound made-up to you?”
My heart sped up, my breath trying to catch up.
Isabel was wrong.
Just because she spoke with authority didn’t make anything she said true. She didn’t know anything. “I did not kill Rupert P.”
“Girl, you’re being real messy right now. You’re consumed by your obsession,” Isabel said. “The rest of us—we know how to handle it, but you? You go insane.”
“I don’t—”
“You hallucinate.”
“Stop it.”
“And now it’s escalated to murder.”
“No!”
“I feel bad for you.” She walked up to me. “You’re full-stop psycho and you don’t even know it.”
My eyes found Erin’s, always finding her, but only for a second. She looked down. Even Apple was looking at me funny. I knew it wasn’t good when Apple of all people thought I was crazy. “Apple, Isabel’s just talking shit.”
Apple’s eyebrows knit together. “Okay,” she said. What she didn’t say was, I believe you. What she meant was, I’m afraid of you. “We’re all a little crazy right now,” she said, the most unconvincing giggle in the world pinned on the end of it. “I’m going to get my things.”
I turned to Erin, but she still wouldn’t look at me.
This wasn’t happening.
I did not imagine meeting Rupert K. on the roof both times.