“You can kill someone who’s seventeen.”
He grinned. There was something in him, standing there in the kitchen with his elbow propped on the microwave, his head set at a slight angle, a little stinky from his run, that was very clearly not miserable. Something had changed over the last few weeks. He had ownership over himself; he was the master of his fate; he had resolve. The darkened left lens in his glasses was an afterthought.
She’d hardly talked to him in at least a week. What was the point? Perhaps the miserable Evan would have understood what was happening to her. But this Evan, this banana-swallowing, Under-Armoured Evan, would be little help. He was not her safe space anymore. She’d woken and heard him hitting down in the garage and understood at once that that was his place now. He had his place, and she had hers, and they did not overlap. He was abruptly so gone that she didn’t even miss him.
?
She had stopped waiting for Jules and Kristy at the corner of the parking lot. Jules and Kristy, it needed to be said, had become more than a little bit irritating, Jules with her pathetic insistence that she did not want to be popular while simultaneously doing everything she possibly could to be popular, and Kristy with her whiny, sixth grade–holdover insecurity. Plus it was just easier to be with Lisa’s friends. They weren’t her friends, not exactly, but they were nice enough, and the distance between them and the bathroom where Lisa waited for her was infinitesimal, no more than a blink. With Jules and Kristy there was history, and baggage, and expectation. With Lisa’s friends, the only expectation was that she mourn the absence of their friend.
She went straight into the building and to her locker as soon as she arrived at school. There were still little green ribbons covering Lisa’s locker, but every morning some would have fallen down overnight, scattered like tiny leaves, and she would pick them up and toss them into the bottom of her own locker. How long would they let that locker, 64C, sit there, unused? How long did missing-person ribbons stay up? Was there an expiration date, some point where they officially became irrelevant, a day when the fall of Lisa Bellow became the winter of someone else, as Evan had predicted from the start? She imagined Mr. Fulton brushing the ribbons away with a few heavy swipes of his large hand. Yes, maybe after Christmas they’d give the locker to a new kid, some guy from far away who transferred in and was none the wiser, who would fill the back of the locker door with his own life.
Or maybe not. Maybe in a week Lisa would be standing at her locker again, found, freed, the criminal arrested, the mystery solved. Maybe everything would revert to the way it had been. And if Lisa were beside her here in this hall, would Lisa be ignoring her? In some ways this thought was as troubling as Lisa’s continued absence.
“Return to basic rules,” like in Fluxx, the game they’d played endlessly that one summer. Her father’s favorite card. She and Evan, and even her mom, were always making things crazier—draw four, play your whole hand, switch hands with the player across from you, take six cards randomly from the discard pile—but her dad, god, the look of relief on his face when he drew it: “Return to basic rules.” They all laughed at him. Not in a mean way. Just in that way you were allowed to laugh at your father because you knew he would laugh along with you.
Something was thrust in front of her face.
“Look. At. This.” It was Amanda Hammels. The thing in front of her face was a catalog. The page in the catalog showed a silver chain bracelet, ten or twelve ovals looped together to make the whole.
“It’s like the chain of life. Like the chain of friends. Like the chain of support.”
“Cool,” Meredith said.
“It’s perfect,” Amanda said. “Abby is freaking out, it’s so perfect. Her mom already emailed the company and they can get them special order, like super fast, so we can have them at the Halloween party.”
“That’s great,” Meredith said.
“It’s the chain of giving,” Amanda said. “It’s the chain of love. The love chain. Or is that weird? Maybe that’s too kinky. We don’t want it to be all sexed up or anything. Oh my god, that would be really bad.” She snorted out a laugh. “Lisa would think that was funny.”
“It’s probably not a great idea, calling it that,” Meredith agreed.
“Yeah. We’ll work on it. We’ll figure it out at lunch. I just wanted everybody to see it ASAP. Have you seen Becca?”
“No. I just got here.”
“Okay. I’ll find her.”
She skipped off. Amanda had never been as mean as Lisa, always been a background giggler, not smart enough to come up with a comment or facial expression that could actually wound you. You got the feeling that you could turn Amanda in any direction and push the go button and she would go in a straight line until someone thought to turn her in another direction, or until she bumped into a wall and just kept butting into it for eternity, a wind-up toy with no off switch.
?
“It’s not like we don’t know what you think of us,” Lisa said.
“Who?” she asked. “What?”
“You and your smarty friends. It’s not like we don’t know what you’re saying about us behind our backs.”
“That’s pretty hilarious, coming from you.”
“I’m not actually any meaner than you,” Lisa said. “I’m just way more popular.”
“That right there is meaner than anything I would say.”
“It’s not mean,” Lisa said. “It’s just the truth.”
Meredith thought about the awful thing Lisa had said in seventh grade, about her butt hanging off the chair in the cafeteria, but she was too embarrassed that she even remembered it to mention it now.
“She is stupid,” Lisa said. “Amanda. I mean, you’re right. But she has a lot of good qualities. Have you ever seen her braid? She’s like some kind of braiding genius.”
“Well it’s good she has that to fall back on,” Meredith said.
“See?” Lisa said. “You’re a bitch. Just like me. See?”
Lisa slipped a Sharpie out from under her leg and wrote BITCH on the tile wall of the shower in big, thick green letters. Meredith gasped.
“Where’d you get that?”
“What?”
“That marker.”
“It was in the bedroom,” Lisa said. “In a drawer. I stole it. I thought I might need it.”
“For what?”