Page 79 of Every Sweet Thing Is Bitter

“What’s it worth to me?”

“My dad has a lot of medical bills from when your dad shot him.” She wrings her hands. “I’m tired of watching him buy groceries with spare change.”

“You’d rat Grace out to me for money?”

Karishma rakes a hand through her bangs. Her fingers snag on a tangle, but she yanks them through anyway, the follicles ripping from her scalp like Velcro. “I’m telling you what you want to know, aren’t I?”

I want to warn Grace that her best friend may not be who she thinks she is. Her best friend’s loyalty has a price. In a less dire situation, this would be a teachable moment, a lesson for a teenage girl experiencing her first real betrayal. But is it a betrayal to put flesh and blood over her friend? Is it a betrayal to love your parent so much? No. I wish I was so devoted to my father. Such dedication is exactly what nature intends.Honor thy mother. Honor thy father.

“How about a grand?” I ask.

I know from the way her eyes pop she would have taken a couple hundred, but if her intention truly is to make a dent in Mitesh’s medical bills, giving her less seems insulting—and if she’s fleecing me, so be it. There are nobler hills to die on.

I take the money from my purse to prove I’m good for it. “Tell me and it’s yours.”

She stares into her lap, willing herself to find the courage to speak. “We took Harmony’s car. Stole it, technically, I guess.”

“Why?”

“There’s an abortion clinic in Casper. It’s the closest one.”

“For you or for her?”

“For Grace.” Karishma is relieved that I didn’t clutch my pearls and launch into a moralizing screed. She loosens up the tiniest bit. “But you can’t—”

“I would never tell. I swear on my life, Karishma.”

Her face darkens with shame when she looks at the money again. “It was a whole ordeal to get out there. And I mean—she was too scared to even look up clinics. I did it for her. She was scared of your dad, but I was scared of the government. I worried I’d wake up and find out abortion was suddenly illegal and we’d be hauled off to … well, you know. York. I figured we’d have to go to Denver or Omaha, but the one in Casper was new, and we could get there and back in a day.”

“So you stole the car.”

Her story is breathless. “First she got a fake ID so she could say she was over eighteen—don’t ask me how she got that or the money—and then yeah, we stole the car. Harmony knew it was us. We’ve done it before because we know where she keeps her keys. It was the day your mom went missing. We ditched school and told our dads we were hanging out together after, and then we drove to Wyoming. The procedure was outpatient, really fast, but on the way back, I hit a deer. It was … God, it was awful, the sound.” Karishma forces the words through clenched teeth. She is remembering every noise the animal made. “But the point is, we damaged the front of the car. So when we brought the car back that night, it had a big dent, one might say ahuman-sizeddent, and Harmony must have thought … She never asked. Sheneverasked. She dumped the car. If Grace knew she was going to confess, she would have told Harmony where we were. I know she would have. She would have stopped it before it went this far.”

“Harmony wanted to protect Grace,” I say, more to myself than to her.Honor thy sister.

“Harmony never could keep a secret.” She relegates Harmony to the past tense with ease, the way you write out a minorcharacter who has ceased to be relevant to the story. “She got drunk once and told your dad about Grace’s boyfriend. He was so angry that—”

“Don’t finish your sentence.”

“Grace insisted on not telling Harmony,” Karishma says. “She didn’t trust her to keep it a secret.”

“And if my dad found out, he’d hurt her.”

“That’s why I never said anything, not until right now.”

“The police never questioned Grace’s alibi?”

“I was her alibi,” she says. “I said she was with me.”

“Harmony is going to prison for a very long time for something she didn’t do.”

Karishma pinches her nose until the skin blanches white. “We didn’t make her confess! She’s the one who made the decision! The lie is too big now. There’s no undoing it.”

The ultimate act of selflessness collides with the ultimate act of selfishness. Harmony falls on her sword, and with her own neck on the line, Grace lets her. She is a liar, but she is no murderer. What Karishma said is true. The lie is too big. A house of cards. Move one and the rest will fall. Grace and Karishma are both guilty of very real crimes—obstruction at the very least, more for Grace with the fake ID, even more depending on how she got the money. With the local attention my mother’s death has brought, they would certainly go to jail, maybe prison. And all of this is to say nothing about my father’s wrath. He would hurt her if he found out she had an abortion. I believe it in my soul. I think he would even kill her.

I hand her the money. “So if Harmony didn’t do it, and you and Grace didn’t do it, who did?”

“I have no clue,” she whispers. “I—I think it was just a random act of violence and now we’ve all made a fucking mess of it.”

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