Free Killing Britney by Sean Olin Page A

passing. They’d never even spoken to each other.
    Adam, trying to imagine what her face would look like without her glasses on, had to force himself to stop staring.
    “Hi, uh, Melissa.”
    As Adam pushed the button to shut out the cold and began climbing back over the monitors, Bobby yelled over to the two of them. “Adam was just asking me about Britney. He wants to know what I did to her.”
    Melissa laughed. “Bobby didn’t do anything to Britney. Britney broke his heart.”
    She made it back to the work area before Adam, and sitting down in the metal folding chair he had been using, she said to Bobby, “But that doesn’t excuse you from not making it yesterday. What was up? You told me you’d be there.”
    “I was at the funeral; you just didn’t see me.”
    “Well, you weren’t at the reception.”
    “I wasn’t invited.”
    “When have you ever waited for an invitation?”
    Bobby shot her a pained look. He glancing at Adam, who had finally found his way back, and said, “There are more folding chairs over there by the servers.”
    Adam gazed out into the dark back corner of the room. He could see the folding chairs, but he couldn’t see any way to reach them.
    Melissa scooted to one side of her chair. When she smiled at him, he noticed she had a dimple on her right cheek. She patted the seat next to her and said, “Don’t even try it. You’ll kill yourself trying to climb over all that junk. Here. I stole your chair to begin with. Let’s share.”
    God, was she beautiful. Her beauty was embedded in that dimple; it was soaked into the husky edge of her voice; it was deeper than fashion, deeper than skin. Adam found that he was suddenly hoarse. His voice cracked and he blushed as he said, “I don’t think Britney’d be happy to hear about us sharing a chair.”
    “There are lots of things I do that Britney wouldn’t be happy to hear about,” she said, winking at him. “So Bobby, do tell. Why weren’t you there?”
    Bobby glanced skeptically at Adam again, and then he shrugged. If he was trying to be subtle, he was doing a terrible job.
    “Oh, don’t worry about Adam. He’s one of us,” said Melissa.
    Though he wasn’t sure what she meant by this, it felt nice to hear Melissa say it. Since he’d arrived in Madison, he hadn’t felt like he belonged, really, anywhere.
    Reluctantly, Bobby began to explain. “That funeral sort of freaked me out. I mean … Didn’t it freak you out?”
    “You mean that weird clapping after Britney’s speech?”
    “No, that was just some lughead asshole. I mean the way Britney was acting. She didn’t seem jittery to you?”
    “She always seems jittery.”
    “I don’t know, Melissa.” Bobby glanced at Adam again. “I thought I saw that look in her eyes.”
    “What look?”
    “That look.”
    “Well, obviously, she had that look again,” Melissa said. “She’s falling apart. That’s why I wish you had been at the reception.”
    Adam broke in. “What are you guys talking about?”
    Melissa turned to Adam. “Sometimes Britney can go to some pretty dark places. I mean dark places. Pitch-black places.”
    Bobby jumped in to elaborate. “And the harder she tries to act like her life is perfect, the more you can bet that she’s breaking apart.”
    They went on like this for almost an hour, explaining all kinds of things Adam had never noticed: That when she was especially tense, Britney had a way of rapidly, repeatedly cracking her jaw. That she used to hate the hockey thugs and their silly wives as much as Bobby and Melissa did, but after her mother died, she had become obsessed with them and made it her mission to become best friends with them. That her mother’s body had never been discovered. The assumption was that it had been pulled into the rapids and smashed on the rocks below Waukesha Falls.
    “Jeez,” said Adam. “My folks told me she’d been having a hard time, but I had no idea any of this was going on.” He felt horrible. If