Bad Girls Go To Heaven ✔

10/ vicious tongues

ADORA - PRESENT DAY

The police either don't care about the poster emerging in front of Widener Library or they're too old to use TikTok. Either way, the poster doesn't seem to have any serious consequences for now, if you exclude my reputation, which is going down the drain.

Katie sits two seats away from me and looks uncomfortable whenever someone enters the Oleana restaurant in Cambridge. It's no one we know, we're far enough from Harvard, but she's doing it to prove a point. I'm not good enough to be in her company anymore.

It's a good I never liked being in her company in the first place.

We're in the garden covered by a green roof. Sunshine casts its rays on the leaves, colouring everything light green. It's an Eastern Mediterranean restaurant. The interior is warm and inviting, the garden is small and secluded. No one can see us here.

Mark sits on the opposite side of me. Katie is closer to him than she is to me. Melissa, a tall redhead with way less makeup than Katie, sits glued to her boyfriend Jimmy, a smug jock who eats steroids for lunch and looks the part.

I don't even know why I'm here, aside from the delicious lamb moussaka I've just devoured.

"So," Jimmy pours himself another glass of Sauvignon Blanc, "I heard Graham's funeral is postponed. They have to examine the body."

"Eww, Jimmy, not during lunch!" Melissa lets out a fake, inappropriate laugh, her small nose wrinkles and she washes her disgust down with some fine white.

"What? It's not like I said what they're gonna do to him!" Jimmy shouts.

They're my least favourite people on campus. Melissa is an empty-headed bimbo and Jimmy is way too loud. But they're Mark's friends. My opinion doesn't matter.

"Poor guy." Katie whines and pouts. "He must have been going through so much."

"I don't think he did it to himself, you know?" Jimmy chugs the wine. He tends to forget he's not in a bar from time to time.

"Me neither." Mark murmurs. "It's, like, we would have noticed something was wrong."

He looks at his plate as he speaks. Things are tense between us. But Mark doesn't really like solving problems, he's better at avoiding them.

So, he hasn't talked to me since someone put up that damn poster.

"What do you think, Adora?"

"Hmm?" I glance up.

"About Graham." Katie squints. "Our friend who's been murdered."

"We don't know that, Katie." Mark says.

"Well, we don't know that he killed himself either." Jimmy takes Melissa's plate and eats her leftovers.

I sip my wine, "I think we can never know what goes on in someone's head."

"So, you think he did kill himself?" Katie pushes me.

She hates me. It doesn't bother me much, since she's irrelevant to my existence and I'm not particularly fond of her either, but I could never understand why. Is she jealous? Is she into Mark?

"I think there are competent people out there who will determine what happened that night." The wine slides down my throat; slightly too acidic, but it might have been my words that added the flavour. "If he killed himself, the only person who knows for real what happened is Graham and he can't tell us anymore. Our theories are unnecessary."

"He wouldn't do it, man." Jimmy shakes his head and calls for the waiter. "He didn't even believe in depression."

"What if someone killed him and made it look like a suicide?" Melissa's eyes widen.