Sharp_Objects

back down into their beers. The bartender poured me my bourbon without a word. A Carole King song droned from the speakers. On my second round, the bartender motioned behind me and asked, “You lookin’ for him?”
    John Keene sat slumped over a drink in the bar’s only booth, picking at the splintered edge of the table. His white skin was mottled pink with liquor, and from his wet lips and the way he smacked his tongue, I guessed he’d vomited once already. I grabbed my drink and sat across from him, said nothing. He smiled at me, reached his hand to mine across the table.
    “Hi Camille. How’re you doing? You look so nice and clean.” He looked around. “It’s…it’s so dirty here.”
    “I’m doing okay, I guess, John. You okay?”
    “Oh sure, I’m great. My sister’s murdered, I’m about to be arrested, and my girlfriend who’s stuck to me like glue since I moved to this rotten town is starting to realize I’m not the prize anymore. Not that I care that much. She’s nice but not…”
    “Not surprising,” I offered.
    “Yeah. Yeah. I was about to break up with her before Natalie. Now I can’t.”
    Such a move would be dissected by the whole town—Richard, too. What does it mean? How does it prove his guilt?
    “I will not go back to my parents’ house,” he muttered. “I will go to the fucking woods and kill myself before I go back to all of Natalie’s things staring at me.”
    “I don’t blame you.”
    He picked up the salt shaker, began twirling it around the table.
    “You’re the only person who understands, I think,” he said. “What it’s like to lose a sister and be expected to just deal. Just move on. Have you gotten over it ?” He said the words so bitterly I expected his tongue to turn yellow.
    “You’ll never get over it,” I said. “It infects you. It ruined me.” It felt good to say it out loud.
    “Why does everyone think it’s so strange that I should mourn Natalie?” John toppled the shaker and it clattered to the floor. The bartender sent over a disgruntled look. I picked it up, set it on my side of the table, threw a pinch of salt over my shoulder for both of us.
    “I guess when you’re young, people expect you to accept things more easily,” I said. “And you’re a guy. Guys don’t have soft feelings.”
    He snorted. “My parents got me this book on dealing with death: Male in Mourning. It said that sometimes you need to drop out, to just deny. That denial can be good for men. So I tried to take an hour and pretend like I didn’t care. And for a little bit, I really didn’t. I sat in my room at Meredith’s and I thought about…bullshit. I just stared out the window at this little square of blue sky and kept saying, It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay. Like I was a kid again. And when I was done, I knew for sure nothing would ever be okay again. Even if they caught who did it, it wouldn’t be okay. I don’t know why everyone keeps saying we’ll feel better once someone’s arrested. Now it looks like the someone who’s going to be arrested is me.” He laughed in a grunt and shook his head. “It’s just fucking insane.” And then, abruptly: “You want another drink? Will you have another drink with me?”
    He was smashed, swaying heavily, but I would never steer a fellow sufferer from the relief of a blackout. Sometimes that’s the most logical route. I’ve always believed clear-eyed sobriety was for the harder hearted. I had a shot at the bar to catch up, then came back with two bourbons. Mine a double.
    “It’s like they picked the two girls in Wind Gap who had minds of their own and killed them off,” John said. He took a sip of bourbon. “Do you think your sister and my sister would have been friends?”
    In that imaginary place where they were both alive, where Marian had never aged.
    “No,” I said, and laughed suddenly. He laughed, too.
    “So your dead sister is too good for my dead sister?” he blurted. We both laughed again, and then quickly soured and turned back to our drinks. I was already feeling dazed.
    “I didn’t kill Natalie,” he whispered.
    “I know.”
    He picked up my hand, wrapped it around his.
    “Her fingernails were painted. When they found her. Someone painted her fingernails,” he mumbled.
    “Maybe she did.”
    “Natalie hated that kind of thing. Barely even allowed a brush through her hair.”
    Silence for several minutes. Carole King had given way to Carly Simon. Feminine folksy voices in