Afterparty by Daryl Gregory Page A

tilting his head to fit under the roof. “Is she really dead?” he asked.
    “Francine?” I flashed on her body laid out sideways on the white tile, her arm and belly a coastline for a lake of blood. “I’m sorry. Yeah.”
    Luke tried to take this in. “It doesn’t make sense. She was so much better.”
    “She was despondent,” I said. “She said she had to pay for her sins.”
    “But she told me she felt forgiven! God had forgiven her.”
    “Well, evidently he changed his mind. She was calling for him to come back.” I leaned forward. “What did she feel so guilty about?”
    “It’s private,” Luke said. “She confided in me.”
    “But she was a teenager. It couldn’t have been that terrible.”
    “You’re provoking him,” Dr. G said. “Why don’t you just double-dog dare him to tell you?”
    I ignored her. “How bad could it be?” I asked.
    “Pretty bad,” Luke said. “Not the worst thing I’ve ever heard. But … yeah.”
    “You won’t shock me,” I said.
    He said nothing for a few moments, then said, “It happened a couple years ago. She was shacking up with this guy, a real asshole. He just wanted someone to live with him and take care of his grandmother. She had some kind of disease where she was getting more and more paralyzed every month, from like the feet up?”
    “ALS,” I said.
    “No, that wasn’t it.”
    “Lou Gehrig’s Disease.”
    “That one,” Luke said. Dr. G rolled her eyes. The boy said, “The old woman couldn’t walk anymore, and she could barely move her arms, and she had trouble swallowing? Frannie said that it was like feeding a baby—spitting up, choking, a real mess. And then the bathroom stuff! Frannie did all of it, wiped her ass, changed her diapers. She really took care of her.”
    “What did she get out of it?”
    “She got to sleep in a bed. And the old woman’s money paid for the drugs. The boyfriend, can’t remember his name, was a meth head. And Frannie liked to smoke, too, so it worked out.” He took a breath. “So one day the boyfriend has to go out to buy, says his friend has some new stuff, something from the States, and he’ll be right back. I’ll only be gone for an hour, he says.”
    “Uh-oh,” Dr. Gloria said.
    “So she’s there for an hour, two hours with the granny. Then it’s all afternoon. That night the boyfriend doesn’t come back. And by this time Frannie is pissed, because she knows what he’s doing; he’s getting high without her.”
    A car horn blared, and Hootan jerked the car to the right. The side of a bus like a silver wall appeared six inches from my face, then swept past.
    “Jesus Christ!” I yelled. “Are you blinking while driving? Take off those damn specs!”
    Hootan said something in an unknown language that I translated as “Fuck you.” The sunglasses stayed on.
    Luke said, “So now it’s morning, and the old woman is making noises like she has to go to the bathroom. Francine’s stuck in the house, and the asshole grandson is out there smoking. She thinks, this isn’t even my relative. I am not responsible for this person. So she leaves another message on the boyfriend’s phone and says, ‘Fuck you, I’m out of here.’ And she leaves.”
    Hootan said, “She did what?”
    “She grabbed her stuff and went back to her friends on the street,” Luke said. “And a couple days later she hears that the boyfriend got admitted to the hospital. He’d been there for days, an overdose maybe or some bad reaction.”
    Hootan said, “What happened to the grandmother?”
    Luke didn’t answer.
    “She just left her here?” Hootan said. “She left an old woman to choke and die?”
    “That’s what she told me,” Luke said.
    “Well, your friend deserved to die.”
    “ What? ” Luke said. “Fuck you!”
    Hootan slammed on the brakes. Behind us tires squealed, horns blared. He yanked off his glasses. “Say that to me again! Say ‘fuck you’ to me!”
    “Shut the fuck up!”
    Hootan lurched