We’ll start the game. I will wait. I’ll find someplace to hide to make sure I don’t get killed too early. I’ll cheat. I’ll hide someplace out-of-bounds: Margo’s wing, which I’m sure she’ll make off-limits. I’ll wait until the game is past the point of fun, when it’s dead serious. When everyone is tired and hazy. I’ll find a way to separate Demi from the pack, tempt her out to the garden maybe, tell her Graham is looking for her, waiting for her, wants her.
I won’t use Simunition. I’ll load my gun with a real bullet. I can google how to “shoot to kill.” There’ll be so many guns, so much chaos. No one will see. No one will know. Until the cleanup crew arrives the next morning.
Margo will cover it up. She’ll have to. It’s her party, her house. But they’ll know it was me. They’ll know I won. I consider, for a moment, that Margo could try to pin it on me—the murder I commit—but that’s not how Margo works. She’ll be appeased. Graham will be entertained. They’ll congratulate me on a plan well executed, emphasis on “executed.”
Could I kill another person? It’s a question worth considering. I could if I had to. If it is down to her or me. I’m not killing her; I’m saving myself. I think of Elvira, like Ophelia in the fountain. She killed. She killed the most important person in her life: herself.
All I need to do is tell myself it’s not real, convince myself that it’s all part of the game. That it’s her or me. I can do it. I can win. I know I can. It’s just a game, Graham’s birthday game.
The guests will arrive.
We’ll eat cake, sip champagne. Then I’ll give him his present.
LYLA
Step one, make sure Demi comes to the party.
I wake up the next morning stinking with resolve. The mechanical shutters have been programmed to rise at exactly 6:05, and I watch as the house reveals itself in pieces, as the sunrise turns our modern furniture yolk yellow.
Graham flings off his covers. “I couldn’t sleep all night,” he says, rubbing his eyes, “thinking about that damn dog.”
I remember. “It’s still in the shed. We can’t leave it there.”
“I’ll take care of it.” He swings his legs over his side of the bed. The shutter rises, caressing him with light. “I’d like to mount it on a stake as a warning to whoever fucked with my mother’s dog.”
“I don’t think Margo would like that.” I don’t think many people would. Graham sometimes seems to think he lives in an ancient world or else he wishes he did.
“She’s going to be . . . distraught,” he says like that isn’t a word for it. Like there isn’t a word for it. “You don’t know. When Muffin died, she was apoplectic. She had this woman give her shock treatments. Then she paid someone into the millions to make a clone. Turns out, they can’t do that.” He pauses. “Or they wouldn’t.”
He shoves himself off the bed and toward the bathroom. I follow him. “That’s exactly why we can’t tell her.”
“I think she’s going to figure it out, darling.” Graham has the least extensive beauty regime of anyone I know. He wakes up. He pees. He washes his hands. He looks in the mirror. He’s perfect.
I sit on the chair next to the bathtub while he pees. “I mean that it was at our house. Maybe we should just leave the body somewhere. Out on the street.”
He flushes the toilet and goes to wash his hands. “We shouldn’t have called the police. There’ll be a record now.”
I feel cold. “But that was your idea.”
“Hmm . . .” He muses like it might not have been. He regards himself in the mirror, adjusts a single tendril of hair. Graham has so convinced me that he doesn’t make mistakes that it’s hard to believe this is one. That it wasn’t intentional, a way to set me up.
He starts toward the closet. I chase after him. “Can’t we, like, erase it? Take it off the record?”
He flicks through his shirts, debating. They all look the same, which makes it harder to choose. “It’s only going to be a problem if Margo calls the police.”
“Won’t she?”
He shrugs, selects his shirt. “Probably.”
“But what can we do?”
He changes out of his pajamas efficiently. “There’s really not a lot we can do generally, darling. We just have to let the chips fall how they may.” First, he told me not everything is a game; now he is championing some laissez-faire philosophy? What the fuck is happening to my husband?