Everyone Who Can Forgive Me Is Dead by Jenny Hollander

Author:Jenny Hollander [Hollander, Jenny]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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Steph did an interview with a women’s magazine last year, one of those Spend the Day with Me! stories with a brand quietly woven in, a vitamin-infused water or some shit. 10 A.M.: I take a five-minute walk around the block with my Litewater™. I use this time to center myself, to remind myself why I do this work and what I’m grateful for. How you count your blessings smack in the middle of Times Square I don’t know, but at ten A.M. on Monday I’m there anyway, perched by the window of a Starbucks opposite KBC, waiting for her.

I left Tripp and Liv and Freddy at the town house, pleading a work emergency. There are no emergencies when your corporation has suspended your email and forbidden you from contacting your team, but they don’t know about that part. (I’m going to tell them. Obviously. I just need more time.) I can breathe better, being on my own. Being miles from Tripp, who slept with his arms wrapped tight around me, who cooked a full English breakfast for everybody and kissed me for so long that Freddy wolf whistled—

There she is.

Steph is dressed in her This Evening with Stephanie Anderson best, a plum skirt suit with scarlet-bottomed heels. A couple of guys leaning up against construction snap to attention—they’re photographers, I realize suddenly, older guys with those long-lens cameras—and she waves politely as they snap a couple of shots. I slip out of the Starbucks and hover on the other side of the street, twenty or thirty feet away, my baseball cap pulled low. These streets are so choked with tourists, they won’t see me.

I keep pace with Steph as she “centers herself,” which looks an awful lot like tossing her hair for the cameras. People turn and point as she sashays past, probably less because she’s Stephanie quote-unquote Anderson than because she’s clearly Important enough to be followed by paparazzi. They’re tourists, they won’t watch the show. Maybe that’s why she doesn’t bother to engage with them, instead finding a reason to twist her head every few feet so that the photographers can get a good shot of her profile. Click. Click.

I needed to see her. To make sure I can do this.

There’s something so passive about allowing her body to turn on her. The polar opposite of how active it all was—the blood, the screams, the knife—up there on the eleventh floor. By comparison, letting Steph’s throat close up, allowing Darwinism to run its course …

Darwinism? I catch myself. For God’s sake. I am not this person. I will not bullshit my way through this with supremacist crap. Steph doesn’t deserve this. It is not nature taking its course. It is straight-up murder.

It’s just that it would also, maybe, be the only way.

If the film goes away—if Steph goes away—so does the rest of it. The rabid excitement, permissible this time because it’s been so long. The steady stream of new stories. The Reckoning. The team of lackeys gorging themselves on FOIA requests.

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