Chapter Which brings me . . .
Which brings me to this moment. My wedding day. My Real-Life existential crisis, wondering what it is that Gabe hasn’t told me.
In the honeymoon suite, awash in capital-P Production, I finish my bottle of water. Maggie moves one of the embroidered throw pillows to join me on the divan. It smells like it’s just out of the box. Chemically, wrong.
I brace myself to ask her all my burning questions about Gabe. Was their relationship always more complex than he let on? Was I wrong in assuming that Maggie had lied to me?
But before I can speak, she beats me to it.
“When we were ten, you were so mean to me,” Maggie says. “You really messed me up there, for a while.”
Excuse me? I blink, and then I tell her, “We were nine.”
“No,” Maggie shakes her head. “Ten. Don’t you remember?”
“Yeah, I do, and it was third grade,” I say. “That was a big year for me, unfortunately. A colossal, shitty year, and I was nine.”
“That’s not when I’m talking about.” Maggie fiddles with the pillow’s embroidery, which is already unraveling. “I don’t mean when we were in third grade. I mean when you were back at your old school.”
I don’t know when, after that year, I would have seen her. We didn’t go back to Youngstown once my mom finished her first year of nursing school. I have absolutely no clue what Maggie is talking about. Surely if she wanted to rehash some childhood angst, she could have picked a better time.
“I wanted you to like me so badly,” Maggie continues. “I worked so hard to make you want to be my friend.”
“What are you talking about?” This is not what I imagined when I told myself I had to talk to Maggie.
I suddenly want off this divan, out of this room. This is wrong. This is the wrong story.
“You didn’t need anyone,” she continues.
“You were cool. You had no interest in making friends, joining clubs, doing dance class. I was so jealous. I wanted to be you. I mean, I basically didn’t exist to even myself unless someone was watching me perform, and there you were, just . . . independent.”
“Well, yeah.” I swallow. “My dad had just walked out on me.”
“And your mom was awesome.” Maggie ignores me. “And, of course, you had Dede. And that cute brother. Anyway, I felt anointed that you chose me.”
“Chose you?”
“To be friends.” Maggie laughs a bit, remembering something about me that I’m not privy to. It’s a bitter laugh, a lonely one. I have no recollection of being Maggie’s friend. Not then, not now. Or do I?
This must be why I couldn’t bring myself to ruin her. Some buried memory, squeezed tight into the box of my early-childhood trauma, seeping out to cement loyalty to Maggie. Had we really been friends?
“Anyway, I was devastated when you stopped writing me.”
“Writing you?” I am a parrot; I can’t help myself.
“Cassidy. We were pen pals for, like, a year.” Maggie blinks at me, then blows away her bangs.
“You were mean about my T-shirt,” I say, as if hauling out my one full recollection will somehow bring me up to speed.
“Your T-shirt?” Maggie shakes her head. “I don’t think so.”
“Yeah, I had that Girls Can Be Anything T-shirt, and you laughed at it and said it was dumb.”
“Cassidy.” Maggie raises her toothpick eyebrows. “That was my shirt.”
“No,” I say.
“I wore that shirt to my Tiger Crew audition. My mom has a picture of me in it that’s been framed by her fireplace for years.”
Could it have been Maggie’s shirt? That day has always been so clear to me. Her parted pigtails, snub nose looking down at me from on top of the monkey bars. Am I wearing the shirt, or is she?
Why can’t the world ever stay put within the boundaries I make for it?
“But I remember it,” I say, my voice plaintive even to my own ears. “I was going to be a firefighter, and you told me that I couldn’t.”
“I don’t know.” Maggie shrugs. “Maybe I said that. You’d be a terrible firefighter. You’re not very good under stress. But that was definitely my T-shirt.”
I stand, running my fingers along the closed velvet curtain. Not looking at her. “We weren’t friends.” It’s almost a whisper.
“Well, not after you sent me the world’s nastiest friend-breakup letter.” Maggie’s tone remains unchanged, slightly sardonic, above it all. “‘Never write to me again.’”
I suddenly remember the purple pen, the state-flower stationery my mother bought me as a present. I remember being angry in Philly, lonely in our new apartment, with only after-school TV as a companion.
Just because I don’t remember it all happening the way Maggie remembers it happening doesn’t mean that she’s wrong.
If I close my eyes, I can picture myself—Full House or A Different World playing in the background, an open bag of off-brand cheese puffs, that tea-colored stain on the ceiling that looked like the Blob—writing the letter that would break my heart before Maggie McKee could do it for me.
Even if it wasn’t exactly like this, it was like this. Even if this new memory isn’t the truth, it is still true.
Because that’s me. I’m realizing now that’s who I play in this whole story: the quick trigger, the fool. Pushing the pieces so far and so quickly that they fall off the board.
I told myself I needed to know if Gabe had been with Maggie, but I’ve known it all along.
The question was never how far he’d gone, but how far Maggie would go to protect herself.
I dig my thumbnail into the pad of my finger, and I turn to her.
I want her to admit what she’s done to me.
I might have been a bitchy ten-year-old, but she’s no angel.
She’s a killer. A liar. “He didn’t actually do it, did he? ”
“What?” Maggie looks confused. “Oh,” she says then, nodding slowly. “You mean Jason. I don’t know for sure, but he probably did.”
I blink at her. “I mean Gabe. Gabe wasn’t dating you behind my back. He didn’t help you kill Sally Ann.”
Maggie laughs. It’s not the evil cackle of the villain exposed, nor is it the disdain of your average high school mean girl.
I feel unmoored, unsure of the series of events that have led to me standing here with Maggie McKee in a honeymoon suite on the morning of my televised wedding.
“Oh my god,” she says. “Oh my god, Cassidy. I totally forgot about that!”
I played out this conversation all night long, then again in the morning. In no imagined scenario was this Maggie’s response. Is she messing with me for forgetting our childhood drama? “How could you possibly forget about a murder?”
“You actually think Gabe—the Gabe you’re walking down the aisle with in, like, three hours—planned out a murder? And you’re still going to marry him?” Maggie looks sorry for me, although she was the one who practically told me Gabe had been her accomplice.
Maggie sighs, settling back into seriousness. “Okay, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have lashed out. I shouldn’t have let you keep thinking that.”
“So you admit you made it up. Gabe didn’t help you kill Sally Ann?” It seems ridiculous, but I have to yank the full root of the weed. “You’re officially telling me Gabe is innocent and this whole time it was just you.”
“Cassidy.” One corner of Maggie’s unpainted mouth curls up in what plays out as disbelief, tinged with a touch of patronizing pity. “I didn’t kill Sally Ann. Nobody killed her. Sally Ann’s death was an accident.”
An accident? Nothing is an accident in television. Everything is outlined and then acted, filmed and then edited. I’ve already cut the Sally Ann episode, and in it, Maggie is clearly at fault.
I shake my head, but she continues. “You were there, weren’t you?
You think I planned to kill my friend and then suddenly changed my mind and tried to save her?
I’m going to be reliving those last minutes for the rest of my life, wondering what might have happened if I got the epinephrine in her thirty seconds sooner. ”
“But she was sleeping with your husband.”
“That didn’t mean she should die.”
My fingers clench around the PA’s sticky note. “But you said you were the one—”
“Well, yeah, I ran with what you said. I was pissed that Gabe told you about Jason’s accident, worried you were going to blab it everywhere and that would be the end of my marriage.
And I was mad at you in general, for barely remembering me.
Sending me that letter. Not to mention I was pissed you were with Gabe, and trying to mess with things between you. ” Maggie bites her lip.
“But it was the end of—”
“My marriage, I know. It all imploded anyway. Turns out you can’t protect your partner from failure. Even when you set it all up perfectly, your husband might not hit his beats. Real life isn’t TV. It served me right.”
I close my eyes before she’s finished speaking. Maggie didn’t kill Sally Ann. The knowledge settles like slow-falling snow.
I’ve been angry with Maggie, and that anger has absolved me. I could forgive my part in things if there was someone else to take the blame for Sally Ann’s death. So much of what I thought was about Maggie has always only ever been about my own self-preservation.
It strikes me suddenly that Maggie McKee knows herself—the good and the bad. She owns it. Can I say the same?
I’ve spent years of my life agonizing over total bullshit.
Maggie has played me, and played me well.
But more than that, my training to look for the story, to find the fissures and intuit how someone edited the episode, has made me blind to the enduring fact that life is not Reality TV.
Not everything is a conspiracy. Not everything is about building clout.
Sometimes accidents happen. Sometimes people say I love you and they mean it.
There was a mailbox down the block from our old Philly apartment. I can remember spraying my mother’s perfume samples on stationery, peeling off neon smiley face stickers. The loopy LYLAS—love you like a sister.
Sometimes the person you think that you are, the character you’ve made yourself out to be in your own head, is no realer than the mask of a TV celebrity.