Behind her, in the Zoom video of herself, a woman stands in her bedroom.

Kit turns, arms up, expecting hands like the hands playing those instruments in that video to explode out, to grab her face, to crush it.

“Kit,” Mom says.

“Oh, shit,” Kit says. “Oh my God. You scared me.”

“Listen,” Mom says. “The police wanna talk to you girls. The team.”

“What? Why?”

“Because…” She hesitates. “Because you were Tammy’s friends.”

“Right…Okay.”

She’s hot. Too hot.

“They wanna know if you guys knew of anyone who might’ve known her. A boyfriend. Something like that.”

“Is there more, Mom? You’re acting like there’s more.”

“Yeah,” Mom says. Because she doesn’t lie. Can’t.

She steps farther into the room. Places a hand on Kit’s shoulder.

“What?”

“Tammy had a team photo in a frame on her wall. It’s not there anymore. The police think the person who murdered her stole it.”

Kit feels heavier, colder, farther from that desk drawer.

“I’m sorry,” Mom says.

“I don’t understand. What’s happening?”

“Dad is talking to the police about security for tonight. It looks like they’re sending someone. You’re going to be fine.”

“Why would the photo be missing?”

Is her voice shaking? Are her hands?

She feels like she might not survive tonight.

“I really don’t know, Kit.”

“I’m freaking out, Mom.”

“I know. I am too. A terrible thing happened tonight. In our city. To a friend.” Then: “Sleep with us tonight.”

“I don’t know if I can sleep at all.”

“Then stay awake in our room. I don’t want you out of my sight until they catch this sick fuck.”

Sick fuck.

It brings to mind a gibbering, unshaven man. But Kit instinctively resists this idea. Instead, she pictures a tall woman, dead behind the wheel of her car, asphyxiated by the fumes in a closed garage.

She imagines Daphne’s eyes opening. Gray holes in a blue face.

Will Daphne kill me?

The song she just heard, KISS, plays in her head as she takes her mom’s hand, as she nods, saying, Yes, yeah, I’d like to sleep with you and Dad tonight, every night, until they catch the sick fuck who killed Tammy Jones, because I can’t stop thinking of her, Mom, I can’t stop thinking of the one person I’m not supposed to think about.

“Hurry up, then,” Mom says. “Get your stuff and meet me in there. We’ll put a movie on.”

“I don’t wanna watch a movie.”

“I don’t either.”

They hold each other’s eyes a beat before Mom exits Kit’s bedroom to the sound of Dad fuming downstairs into the phone. The music has long gone quiet below. But the streets are coming to life with distant sirens. Police arriving at each of the ballers’ homes.

Kit opens her desk drawer. The bottle is right there. Looks harmless. A little piece of plastic. Yet it harbors such dilemmas.

She doesn’t let herself think on it any longer. Tammy Jones is dead. Killed.

Kit opens the bottle, quickly pulls out the cotton, finds the blue Xanax, sets it aside, just as Mom calls out from down the hall, but close: “Come on, Kit.”