She towered over me, us, even as she sat, and every time Natasha reminded the detective that a woman could’ve killed Tammy Jones, I wanted to turn and point to the bleachers and say

HER

It was HER

Jolly!

Daphne

there

Daphne

there

DAPHNE

THERE I wrote her name.

IT WAS DAPHNE!

I’m on edge, Jolly. Thee edge.

I’m scared.

We should be. All of us.

We’re in danger.

And that detective, McGowan, if she doesn’t solve this…who will?

And can she?

I’m going to crumple up this piece of paper and shoot it into the little garbage can in my bedroom. Okay? I’m gonna write down my question and I’m gonna ball this paper up and I’m gonna shoot and I’ll have my answer.

All right, you ready?

Because if you’re going to ask the questions, you gotta be ready for the answers.

The question:

Am I next?

And…

…the answer is…

Melanie stands before her bedroom mirror, taking out her braids. After the interrogation (it’s the word she uses, it’s how it made her feel), the girls got together and talked about Tammy Jones, talked about Detective McGowan too. There was a majority sense this was an isolated incident, a thing from Tammy’s past they know nothing about. That’s how it works, Melanie knows. The darknesses of other people’s lives. It’s always a little nice to hear other people have problems, big problems, but it’s downright shocking when those problems are bigger than your own.

Still, despite the talk about the detective (God, the woman seemed clueless) and Tammy’s family, Melanie can’t stop thinking about Natasha’s story.

She can’t stop thinking about Daphne.

Silly to worry, she knows. Insane in its way.

But there’s just something to the story, her name…

Melanie unbraids her hair.

Truth is, she’d heard of Daphne, and heard Daphne’s story, before. Only, she hadn’t thought of it since then. Kinda like when a friend tells you a dream, Melanie thinks. Yeah. How you might remember a sentence or two, but really, if it was all just a dream, where’s the weight? Where’s the part of it that matters?

Melanie thinks maybe the minds of people hold on to the stuff they think matters. And before Natasha’s story…Daphne simply did not matter.

“Quit thinking about this,” she tells her reflection. She’s good at talking to herself. Because, normally, she listens.

Daphne isn’t even as fictional as the tooth fairy. At least with that story you found some money under your pillow. But this one? The one she heard? At best it would’ve been a story meant to get kids to do something, feel something, brave something. Melanie thinks she first heard the name on the playground in elementary school. She recalls a vague unease at a name anyway. Still, at some point since then the quiet storms of memory took the name away. Daphne. When Natasha said it, Melanie almost said, Oh yeah! The way someone would if they remembered something from their youth, for the first time in a decade or more. But there was something else about it too: it was as if the name (and the story) were out of reach, and that she actually had been trying to recall it. Like, Natasha’s story did a little more than just remind Melanie: it suggested something had been stopping her from totally recalling the story, something outside of herself.