The Herd(88)

“Don’t tell anyone, but I was actually pretty proud of how I pulled it all off.” She leaned against the wall. “I knew Eleanor wouldn’t like it, but I didn’t think it would really throw her off her game. She hates the word so much. Cunt. Why give it all that power? It’s just a word. Don’t be cunty.”

I grinned conspiratorially, as if all of this were logical—nay, brilliant. “I love that. Reclaiming the word. Did you spray-paint it yourself?”

“In the West Village, yeah. It was easy; there were security cameras in the elevator, but not the stairs. Obviously I wasn’t in San Francisco or Fort Greene—I had friends do it there. I was hoping to have a whole collection of collages done by the end of the year. And I figured out the name for it: It’ll be WOMEN, but with the W in white and ‘OMEN’ in red.” She flourished her palm, as if seeing it on a wall.

“Great title. Very ominous.”

She nodded. “It was gonna be a representation of just how fucked women are in society. It’s like, women unfairly can’t own up to their shit because they’re punished so harshly for not being perfect. Men can fuck up and move on, but not women. If you’re a woman, you’re always one mistake away from being worthless again. You go through life waiting for everything to be taken away, bending over backward trying to prove your worth, driving yourself crazy trying to get everyone to like and respect you. We do it in jobs, we even do it in our extracurricular lives—fuck, look at the Herd, women begging for the opportunity to spend three hundred dollars a month on a membership to a female-only space where you’re still expected to dress up and put on makeup and smile and mingle, and you have to slit your wrists if you smear your lipstick or say the wrong thing or fart in the bathroom.” Her voice was rising, growing, hurtling out like a mushroom cloud. “And the one way to win, the one fucking way to be a woman and do well in this world is to stomp on other women’s backs. Like Eleanor did to me.”

My voice was a small and shaky Chihuahua: “What did Eleanor do?”

She ignored me, stared thoughtfully at the photo scrap on the bed. “I thought she’d eventually see WOMEN, but she never got the chance. And now I’m not sure I can ever show it. It was just art, but I don’t want to be accused of murder. I mean, the whole thing was fucked once some rando stole her phone and tried to spread photos of our work—that was never my intention.”

“The police thought it was all linked,” I said. “The graffiti, the stolen phone, and then the murder.” On journalist autopilot, I was keeping the conversation flowing, but my brain kept replaying Mikki’s mysterious rant: How had Eleanor stomped on Mikki’s back?

“I had nothing to do with that. Her phone probably fell out of her bag in a cab, and then some asshole accessed the photos and tried to make a buck.” She shrugged. “I was glad that didn’t happen. I wanted my collages to be the first time people saw it.”

“So the police were wrong. None of it was connected.”

“Guess not. The graffiti was me. The phone was a petty thief. And the murder…” She looked away, blinking back tears. “Just Cameron confronting Eleanor about what she did to Jinny.” She shook her head. “He must have known she was about ready to leave. It’s all so…wrong. She almost got away with running off to Mexico. He almost got away with killing her. What the fuck was his plan with the body? Just leave it on the roof forever and hope no one ever noticed him driving in and out of Manhattan? It’s all so…messy. So deluded.”

A tear slid down her cheek and I took a step toward her. “Mikki, I haven’t told you how sorry I am. About everything, but especially about Cameron. I barely knew him, obviously, and I had no idea you two were so close. It’s…a lot.” I reached my arms out for a hug and her shoulders jumped reflexively, one hand jerking toward the big orange lamp on her desk. I looked at it and her fingers retreated; stiffly, she let me hug her.

“I’m gonna go call a car, okay?” I said, and she stared blankly for a moment before nodding. She didn’t move, so I turned toward the door. A few steps later my eyes fell on the craft organizer hanging from her closet door. I saw them all clustered in one pocket, like a deadly bouquet—shiny and sharp, the same tool I’d often seen in her overstuffed backpack on account of all the careful photo cutting she was doing. My chest turned to cold steel, and before I knew what I was doing, I reached out and touched the cap of one, the X-Acto knife’s blade glistening below it.

“Oh my God,” I said. “It was never a scalpel.”

Behind me, a heavy scraping sound. “You don’t understand. If you’d been there you’d understand.”

Scorching heat on the back of my head, then a plummeting sensation. My legs gave out and the floor rammed my kneecaps.

I twisted around and Mikki was murky, swirling, something huge in her hands, round and orange as a pumpkin. I was moving in slow motion, my head drifting backward like I was doing a trust fall.

“I didn’t know it was in my hand,” she was saying. “We were the last ones there, and—and she’d told me about the acquisition and I couldn’t stand it any longer, I said, ‘You know you stole the idea from me.’ And she said, ‘But Mikki, it doesn’t matter. Because I’m the founder, and you’re not.’?”