Page 61 of I Need You to Read This
“This time?” Lucy says tentatively, her eyes bouncing between them. “What do you mean? I thought you said that she was depressed. That she left a bloody mess in your apartment, and you never saw her again?”
Lucy hasn’t been trying to prove Alex’s guilt all this time, Alex realizes. She was trying to prove Brian’s innocence. All she wants is what Alex wanted all that time ago, for the person she loves to not be a monster.
“The only accident is that she made it out alive. She was going to fuck me over. Just like she’ll do to you if you give her half a chance. She’d been writing in to that advice columnist trying to get my reputation smeared.”
“No one would have known it was you,” Alex says quietly, the room spinning.
“You don’t think someone would have figured it out? And if you were telling some stranger, who’s to say you weren’t out spreading rumors about me to other people? I know you told Sam a bunch of lies about what a victim you were. I could see it the way he looked at me.”
“I never did. You had me way too scared of you to ever do that.” The room starts to tilt again.
“I would have lost everything, and for what reason? Because I was dating some young nobody who had some deluded fantasy of being better than she was.” He is close to Alex now, his face ruddy with anger.She can see the whites of his eyes crisscrossed with angry red threads. The scar is the least ugly part about him.
Brian turns toward Lucy. “Give me the gun,” he commands, holding his palm out. “You don’t know what to do with it.” Lucy looks down at it in her hands. She’s grown pale and quiet.
“No,” she says. The word sends a ripple of shock through the room.
“What?” Brian says as though he must have misheard her.
“Why did you lie to me?” She is crying now, her shoulders shaking, but the gun stays rigid in her hand.
“Lulu, what are you talking about? I was trying to protect you.”
Alex is losing consciousness now. Stars swoop and spin across her vision as she struggles to stay awake.
“No—no, you weren’t,” Lucy says. “I can’t believe I’ve been so stupid. You were trying to protectyou. You only ever cared about yourself.”
“Lulu,” Brian starts.
“No. Stay away from me.” The barrel of the gun swoops up away from Alex.
“What the fuck, Lu?” Brian says. “You stupid bitch. Give me the gun.”
“No.” She raises it and pulls the trigger.
There is a loud thump of a body hitting the floor. Alex strains to see what is happening, but her vision has gone dark. She hears screaming somewhere that fades into nothing.
FIFTY
The ceiling is the first thing Alex sees when her eyes flutter open. A grid of pockmarked gypsum panels interspersed with track lighting. Her head lolls to the side. She is in a bed. A stiff white sheet covers her up to her chest. There is a clock on the wall, old-fashioned, round like the clocks in her grade school. She squints at the glowing face of it: 10:47. She can’t see a window, so she doesn’t know if it is morning or night.
“Alex,” someone says. She tries to move her head in the other direction but she’s getting tired again. She can only make out the dark shape of someone sitting in a chair before her eyelids tug down again, her eyes closing involuntarily.
She goes like this in and out of consciousness for an untold amount of time. Machines beep periodically around her. Their little red lights flash reassuringly. She thinks Janice and Raymond are there with her once, but when she opens her eyes again, they are gone and there are no chairs there at all. Once she wakes up and there is a man in the doorway, his mantis-like limbs coming toward her. Her chest seizes. The image fades, disappearing behind her lids, and when she wakes again, she isn’t sure if he was ever there.
She doesn’t know if it has been days or only hours when she finally emerges from the fog of what happened. Finally, her eyes blink openand stay that way. She is in a hospital room. A woman in a doctor’s coat comes into the room and makes her look at a bright light.
“You had a significant head trauma, but you got here just in time to stop the bleeding. You’re going to be fine soon enough.” Alex glances down to where a tube sends a steady drip of something nice into her arm. Her wrist lies exposed to the air. She catches the nurse looking at it as she switches out the IV bag. She gives Alex a sympathetic squeeze on the shoulder. Alex’s eyes close again.
They open to the sound of a chair being dragged across the room. There is someone sitting next to her when she wakes again. A pair of pointy black shoes withPradastamped on the toes flash in her peripheral vision as two long legs crisscross impatiently next to her.
Her eyes finally focus on the woman the shoes belong to. The high cheekbones, the perfect outline of her nose, the precise rose-colored lipstick.
“Regina?” Alex’s voice cracks.
“Oh, good. You’re awake,” she says, in a voice colder than you’d expect from someone who has come to offer their sympathies.
“Am I?” Alex mumbles, trying to understand why Regina is here.
