Page 5

“Please just tell me what’s wrong.”
“It’s Lisa Milner,” Coop says.
“What about her?”
“She’s dead, Quincy.”
The news sucks the air out of my chest. I think I gasp. I’m not sure, because I’m too distracted by the watery echo of her voice in my memory.
I want to help you, Quincy. I want to teach you how to be a Final Girl.
And I had let her. At least for a little while. I assumed she knew best.
Now she’s gone.
Now there are only two of us.
2.
Lisa Milner’s version of Pine Cottage was a sorority house in Indiana. One long-ago February night, a man named Stephen Leibman knocked on the front door. He was a college dropout who lived with his dad. Portly. Had a face as jiggly and jaundiced as chicken fat.
The sorority sister who answered the door found him on the front steps holding a hunting knife. One minute later, she was dead. Leibman dragged the body inside, locked all the doors, and cut the lights and phone line. What followed was roughly an hour of carnage that brought an end to nine young women.
Lisa Milner had come close to making it an even ten.
During the slaughter, she took refuge in the bedroom of a sorority sister, cowering alone inside a closet, hugging clothes that weren’t hers and praying the madman wouldn’t find her.
Eventually, he did.
Lisa laid eyes on Stephen Leibman when he ripped open the closet door. She saw first the knife, then his face, both dripping blood. After a stab to the shoulder, she managed to knee him in the groin and flee the room. She had reached the first floor and was making her way to the front door when Leibman caught up to her, knife jabbing.
She took four stab wounds to her chest and stomach, plus a five-inch slice down the arm she had raised to defend herself. One more thrust of the blade would have finished her off. But Lisa, screaming in pain and dizzy from blood loss, somehow grabbed Leibman’s ankle.He fell. The knife skittered. Lisa grabbed it and shoved it hilt-deep into his gut. Stephen Leibman bled out lying next to her on the floor.
Details. They flow freely when they’re not yours.
I was seven when it happened. It’s my first memory of actually noticing something on the news. I couldn’t help it. Not with my mother standing before the console television, a hand over her mouth, repeating the same two words:Sweet Jesus. Sweet Jesus.
What I saw on that TV scared and confused and upset me. The weeping bystanders. The convoy of tarp-covered stretchers slipping beneath yellow tape crisscrossing the door. The splash of blood, bright against the Indiana snow. It was the moment I realized that bad things could happen, that evil existed in the world.
When I began to cry, my father scooped me up and carried me into the kitchen. As my tears dried to salt, he placed a menagerie of bowls on the counter and filled them with flour, sugar, butter, and eggs. He gave me a spoon and let me mix them all together. My first baking lesson.
There’s such a thing as too much sweetness, Quincy, he told me.All the best bakers know this. There needs to be a counterpoint. Something dark. Or bitter. Or sour. Unsweetened chocolate. Cardamom and cinnamon. Lemon and lime. They cut through all the sugar, taming it just enough so that when you do taste the sweetness, you appreciate it all the more.
Now the only taste in my mouth is a dry sourness. I dump more sugar into my tea and drain the cup. It doesn’t help. The sugar rush only counteracts the Xanax, which is finally starting to work its magic. They clash deep inside me, making me antsy.
“When did it happen?” I ask Coop, once my initial shock reduces to a simmering sense of disbelief. “Howdid it happen?”
“Last night. Muncie PD discovered her body around midnight. She had killed herself.”
“Sweet Jesus.”
I say it loud enough to get the attention of my au pair look-alike seated a table away. She glances up from her iPhone, head tilted like a cocker spaniel’s.
“Suicide?” I say, the word bitter on my tongue. “I thought she was happy. I mean, sheseemedhappy.”
Lisa’s voice is still in my head.
You can’t change what’s happened. The only thing you can control is how you deal with it.