What a piece of shit building that Alto Plaza is! That’s what I said to this girl I was hitting on at the Purple Banana last week. Truthfully, I had never given Alto Plaza much thought before that, but she really seemed to hate it, and I was set on taking her home by then. Kind of gross, maybe, but my last breakup was three months ago at that point, and I desperately wanted to put myself out there again. Anyway, I didn’t end up taking her home, because a different girl, Alice, came up to me as soon as I pooh-poohed Alto Plaza. Walked all the way across the bar just to speak to me, which was a little strange, but I guess I was on my third drink by then, so I probably said it louder than I meant to. She wanted to hear my thoughts on Alto Plaza, and I obliged. Thinking about it consciously, I realized that it was, in fact, sort of a piece of shit. Explaining this to her, or trying to explain this to her through the beer haze, was difficult, but she seemed to like my reasoning. Too many ads on the exterior, that blue glass everything is built with now is so passé, the restaurants inside are too expensive… it went on and on, me rattling off thoughts, her nodding along. Then I got to the private equity thing, that Alto Plaza was yet another monument to Silver Creek and its dismantling of the city’s character for the highest bidder, and that’s when she said I had to bring her home. I was confused at first, and still annoyed that she interrupted my conversation with the first girl, but eventually I thought, okay, she seems like the pushy type, this could be pretty fun. And then when we got home, it turned out that she didn’t want to have sex with me at all, and she actually wanted to hide in my apartment after she bombed Alto Plaza over the weekend. I’m not even sure that she’s gay, honestly.

A week later, here I am, hiding her in my apartment, and she’s getting mad at me for trying to open the living room blinds.

“I told you, Judy, you can’t open the blinds while I’m here,” she says. “They’ll be able to see me through the window. See both of us.”

“It’s Judith, not Judy,” I reply. “And I thought you said you made it out clean. They haven’t named a suspect, as far as I know.”

“Well, Judith…” – she pauses here, trying to establish respect for my name, I think – “you know about the surveillance state. They’ll figure it out eventually.”

“You said you were good enough to not get caught.”

“In the moment, yes. But they’re going to be looking into me anyway. I’m sure my parents have noticed their little Alice is missing by now. They’ve probably told the cops about it already. They’ll look into my browser history, see all the fertilizer and diesel little Alice was buying, and then we’re going to have a problem if we haven’t covered our tracks.”

“Okay, we’ll keep them closed.”

Wait a minute.

“You ran away from your parents to be a domestic terrorist? Seriously?”

“I didn’t ‘run away,’ I’m 23. I was staying with them until I could find a job after college.”

That gets a chuckle out of me. “Guess that didn’t really work out, huh?”

“Shut up.”

Okay then.

“By the way,” Alice says, breaking the silence, “I should tell you not to look into this online too much. They’ll take notice if you do.”

“I haven’t been. Just checking the news twice a day, like I did before.”

I’ve been doing a good job keeping a low profile, I think. The browser thing is one part of it, and the rest is mostly just following my normal schedule, which is easy, because Alice isn’t very fun to talk to. She’s so focused on drilling proper procedure into me that I only know what she likes from what books she’s taken off my shelf. The difficult part is buying more groceries than usual without it being super obvious on my credit card bill. Lots of soup cans and ramen packages. It’s not too arduous overall, which is good for both of us. Alice is definitely getting life if she’s caught and I really don’t want to find out what the minimum sentence is for aiding and abetting.

If we are arrested, though, I’ve been thinking about how to respond to the interrogators, just to be safe. It’ll go something like this:

Q: Where did you first meet Alice Roe? (She hasn’t told me her last name.)

A: At a gay bar, last night. She was taking a while to leave this morning, and then you showed up talking about all this crazy bombing stuff.

Q: So you didn’t know about her involvement in the Alto Plaza bombing?

A: How are you so sure she’s involved? She seems normal to me.

Q: We have our ways of knowing, Ms. Sanders.

A: That isn’t a question.

Q: You think you’re smart, huh?

A: Reasonably, yes.

Q: Well, here’s a question for you. We’ve heard from some of your coworkers that you seem to get fidgety when the subject of Alto Plaza is brought up in conversation. Would you happen to know why that is?

That’s when I ask to speak to my lawyer.

✵✵✵✵✵

The next day at work, my coworker Jim drops the mop in the giraffe enclosure again. There’s kids from our summer classes touring the building today, and some of them laugh at him.

“I’m really sorry, Jude. I don’t know what’s gotten into me lately,” says Jim. “Well, I guess I do, but still.”

“Judith,” I correct. “I get it, though. The bombing has, uh, been hard for everybody. Especially with you having worked there and all.” How to get the conversation away from the building? “Um, how has your job search been going?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I look at Indeed, LinkedIn, all the other job boards, every few days. Submit a few applications, wait to hear back. I should probably be doing it more often, but I’m just so tired after eight hours of this every day, you know?” He stares at the floor for a bit. “But, I mean, it’s not like my landlord is going to be like, ‘Oh, you’re tired, okay, you don’t have to pay rent this month, haha.’”

 I don’t really know what to say to that. Poor kid. “I’m sorry,” I try anyway. “My offer for a reference still stands.”

“Thanks.” He reaches for the mop and starts cleaning again. “You know, I wish I knew anything about the bombing, other than ‘it happened.’ I heard the feds are offering ten grand for any info that helps them find the bomber. That would keep me going for a good few months.”

Ten grand, huh? And that’s just for information. Wonder how much they’d give me for the real thing.

Not that I’m looking to squeal on Alice. The money is kind of tempting, but zookeeping already pays my bills, even if there’s not a lot left over. And that building really was a piece of shit, anyway.

We finish up the cleaning, and then I head to my lunch break. Melissa is in the break room again today, unfortunately. She seemed the most upset about the bombing out of everyone I talked to yesterday. Hopefully she’s gotten it out of her system by now. I’ve been keeping cool so far, but the longer this goes on, the more anxious I get about it.

“Hi, Judith,” she says. “How’s it going?”

“Hey,” I respond, “pretty good, I guess. How about you?”

“Oh, better, I think. I’m still just so sad about the tragedy, you know? I mean, we all are, of course.”

God damn it. “Uh, yeah, I mean, it’s sad, yeah,” I mumble. I start eating my sandwich at an angle she can’t see my whole face from, just to hedge my bets a little.

“It was such an icon of the city! When people came here to visit, the first place they went was Alto Plaza. And now all we’re going to be known for is this disaster… not to mention the people that died, obviously.”

“Only two people died. It went off overnight. Pretty low death toll for this sort of thing.” I realize that I’m not sure Alice knows the bombing killed anyone. She set it off late on Saturday, when the building was locked, trying to minimize casualties, but there was still a janitor inside, and a guy on the street who got crushed by debris. She hasn’t been online to find out, obviously, and I keep forgetting to tell her. 

“They were still people, Judith!” Melissa says, jolting me out of my thoughts. “I don’t want to be rude, but that’s a little callous, don’t you think?”

I think a lot of things that I shouldn’t tell her. I think that Alto Plaza being the first place tourists went when they came here is exactly why it wasn’t “an icon of the city.” I think that I’ve lived here all my life, and Melissa just moved here last year, and that she doesn’t know shit about this city, and should stop acting like she does and shut up for once. I think of the way her face would contort if I told her I knew the bombing was going to happen, and I did nothing to stop it, and the bomber is hiding in my apartment as we speak, and there’s nothing she can do about it. I think… I think I need to tell Alice about the deaths tonight. 

Melissa keeps going. “Okay, so maybe Alto Plaza didn’t mean that much to you, for whatever reason, but empathize for a second, okay? I know how excited you’ve been for the new macaque enclosure to open. What if the bomber blew that up, too? Wouldn’t you be heartbroken?”

“I don’t think she’d do that,” I grunt back. I really do not have time for this right now. Lunch break notwithstanding.

“She?” 

✵✵✵✵✵

When I get home, Alice seems less withdrawn than usual. She’s still reading in the corner, but she’s moved over a chair to sit on, at least. There’s an incense candle burning on the table nearby, which is nice to see. The candles are the only thing she’s asked me to buy since she came here. “They’re good for relaxing,” she said. I was kind of worried I wasted the money until now.

My goal for this evening is to tell her about the bombing’s casualties, but I can’t figure out how to bring it up naturally. There has to be a way to make this less painful, right? Or maybe not… it is pretty upsetting news.

She looks up from her book and notices me before I have the chance to speak. “Hey,” she says, half-whispering. “How’s work?”

“Uh, fine,” I say. “Boring. Just training Jim more. We’re basically done now, though.”

She doesn’t respond. I hate when she does this, talking to me while reading, and then going back to just reading, making it so I can’t tell if she’s paying attention to me or not. Maybe she thinks what I said was stupid. Whatever it is, she isn’t fully here in this room. She rarely ever is, honestly.

Of course, I’m not really present, either. I could break the pause in conversation by bringing up the bombing, but it would still be quite abrupt. It doesn’t feel like the right time yet. The incense is making my nose itch.

I go on about the zoo instead. “The good thing is that the macaque enclosure opens on Friday, so we’re going to spend the next two days setting it up. I love macaques. They’re my favorite animals, probably. And the enclosure is really cool, too. They’ve designed it to look like an island, so the macaques can–”

“Is that why you have all those books on primates?” she interrupts. I guess she’s been looking around my bookshelves more than I thought. Hopefully she doesn’t think it’s weird to have that many macaque books. Though, she is reading Story of the Eye at the moment, so she probably has a different definition of “weird” than most people.

“Yeah, well, you know, it was just something I got into when I was in college.” My mind is torn in three directions now: wanting to talk about macaques, being too embarrassed to talk about macaques, and finding a way to tell her about the casualties without dropping it on her.

Oh, fuck it. It has to happen eventually.

“There’s something I should probably tell you, by the way. Not about macaques.”

“Yeah?” She looks up from her book again.

“I was talking to a coworker at lunch today, about the bombing, and I… I realized that you haven’t been checking online to see updates on the story. There were two people that died in it. A janitor and a guy on the street. I thought you should know.”

She puts her book down and stares at me for a bit. Or through me, maybe. It’s hard not to notice how heavy her eyebags are when she gets like this. She has to have been through some shit, if this is what she’s doing with her life.

Then again, my life has been fairly normal, but here I am, hiding a terrorist in my apartment. Most people would not do this. Why am I? The choice of target helped, of course. The skyline looks a lot better now that Alto Plaza isn’t shitting it up. And she is pretty, in a waifish sort of way, looking at her now. I’m not sure I would have gone along with this if she was less attractive, which I guess is my gross side showing again. It probably helped that we met at the Purple Banana, too. I started going there when I was struggling with college, and met a lot of people who helped me get through it. Hard not to extend the same help to a new girl in need.

“You shouldn’t be talking about this with anyone,” she finally says.

“Look, she’s been really pushy about it all week. It would’ve been more suspicious if I didn’t talk about it,” I say. “And is that really all you’re worried about?”

She looks a little tense now. “I figured a few people would probably die, no matter what. I just wanted to keep that number as low as possible. I just… I don’t know. I had to do it.”

“Why?”

“I told you why. I spent the last year wasting away with my parents, trying to find a job, and failing. I had no money to do anything, and I kept seeing news stories about Silver Creek, funding all these horrible buildings, funding all these shitheel right-wing activists, ruining everything about this city. Everybody knows about it, nobody can do anything about it. And I thought, ‘Somebody has to take a stand against this. Somebody has to take a stand against… everything.’ So I did.”

She said the same thing the last time she explained this. “Somebody has to take a stand against… everything.” I assumed she meant it figuratively at the time, but I’m less sure now. Looking at her blank stare, the one she wears so often, it does kind of seem like she had nothing before this.

I try to say something comforting, but I double over coughing instead. Is incense supposed to be this strong?

Alice watches me cough, then stands up and gets me a glass of water.

“Thanks,” I say.

She nods, and sits down on the couch. “We should probably talk about how I’m getting out of here.”

I join her. “Already? It’s only been three days.”

“I told my girlfriend I’d meet her on Friday. She has a place out in the country where I can hide out long-term.”

“Girlfriend?” So she is gay… “Why were you with your parents before this, then?”

“We wanted to find a place in the city together at first. And then we needed to not be together so she wouldn’t get investigated after this.”

“So,” she continues, “you’re going to take a vacation day on Friday, and then you’re going to rent a car. We’ll drive out to the town near my girlfriend’s place, you’ll drop me off, and I’ll wait for her to come get me. Then you can go relax at a cheap hotel for the weekend and head back to your normal life afterwards. Sound good?”

“Not really. The macaque enclosure is opening Friday. Everyone at work is going to be really confused if I take that day off.”

“Okay, well, you’ll call in sick then, I guess. Maybe you can drive to a hot spring or something?”

“No, you don’t understand. I’ve been waiting for this enclosure to open for years. Can’t we just go on Saturday instead?”

“Not really, sorry. I love my girlfriend, but she’s kind of a mess when she’s stressed. If I don’t show up on Friday, she’s going to freak out, and she might run her mouth and say something compromising on accident.”

She starts to look a little scared. “And, uh, you can always see the macaques after you get back, right?” she mutters.

Ugh, fine.

“Okay,” I say. “We can go on Friday.”

She puts her hand on my shoulder, suddenly. “Thanks so much,” she says, smiling. It’s the first time I’ve seen her smile since she came here. “You’ve been a really great host. I hope you know that.”

The candle is still burning behind her. The smell is bothering me less now. I guess you get used to it after a while.

✵✵✵✵✵

Melissa is telling Jim about the thing I made up to cover my ass yesterday.

“Really, I think it’s so brave of her to use female pronouns as her default,” she says. “The world needs more women like Judith, even if I disagree with some of her… beliefs.”

I didn’t realize she was such a principled feminist. Though she’s probably just doing this to annoy me, honestly. Whatever. She’ll never find out.

“What beliefs?” Jim says. He’s setting up one of the enrichment walls right now, so the macaques can keep their brains active in the enclosure.

“Well, we were talking about Alto Plaza yesterday, the disaster, and she just didn’t seem to care about it so much. She’s entitled to her opinion, of course, but it bothered me a little.” She walks a bit closer to Jim. “And you were working there, right? How do you feel about it?”

“I don’t know. I don’t have a second job now. But the actual job kind of sucked.”

“Well, I hope you can find another job, Jim! You’re a hard worker.”

It’s difficult to ignore this conversation. I just need to keep my mouth shut today and tomorrow, and then things will be fine. Focus on the enclosure instead. I’m on top of the island, sanitizing all its surfaces. When I’m finished, I’ll test the fake trees we’ve put up to make sure they can support the macaques. Then we’ll be done for the day. On Friday, they’ll finally be out here, after all these years. I’m really excited to see them, even if I have to wait a few days. This week has been really great.

Except for Melissa. She’s still talking to Jim about the bombing, loudly. At least she’s not bothering me, I guess.

“You know, I heard they increased the reward money to thirty thousand recently,” she says. “Are you still looking into that?”

Thirty thousand? They must be getting desperate. Heh.

“Not really,” Jim responds. “There’s easier ways to make money off of this. I put down two hundred on Polymarket to guess the bomber’s motive. Everyone thinks it was a false flag, but my money’s on them being hired by a rival firm to take out some Silver Creek property.”

“What?” I interject. “That’s ridiculous.” I know I shouldn’t be saying anything, but I can only handle so much of this crap.

“Oh?” Melissa says, turning towards me. “Well, what do you think happened, Judith?”

“There’s a lot of people who really hate Silver Creek, you know. Not surprising somebody did something about it eventually.” If I don’t mention my own thoughts, I should probably be fine.

“Oh, you might be right.” She walks towards me now, like she’s following stage directions. She should probably focus on her job more.

“But that just makes me so sad!” she says. “I mean, I know they have their controversies, with who they’re funding and all, but they’re doing so much to invest in this community as well. I know they helped fund Pride last year. You’re gay, right, Judith? That has to count for something. Everyone thinks so black and white these days, I swear.”

Listening to her go on like this is infuriating. I almost feel like she’s trying to get a reaction out of me. Well, she can have one.

“Who cares,” I say, through gritted teeth.

“Excuse me?”

“Who cares about Pride? I mean, I don’t. They put rainbow decorations on the bank branches while a homeless guy sleeps next to them. It’s bullshit. You go into a gay bar and ask the people there what they think about Pride, and they’ll tell you it’s bullshit, probably seven times out of ten. You don’t know anything about us, Melissa. Or about me. Stop acting like it.”

She’s shocked by this. Her face tells me so. It’s fun to see, though less fun than I imagined.

Strangely, she also looks like she expected this. She composes herself after a moment. “Well,” she says, slowly, “I still think you should be worried about what I was telling you yesterday. She might go for the macaques next. Could be one of those ecoterrorists.”

Is she threatening me? Weird way to do it, if so. I should probably fix up my interrogation script, just to be safe.

Q: Where did you first meet Alice Hancock?

A: At a gay bar, last night. She was taking a while to leave this morning, and then you showed up talking about all this crazy bombing stuff.

Q: So you didn’t know about her involvement in the Alto Plaza bombing?

A: How are you so sure she’s involved? She seems normal to me.

Q: We have our ways of knowing, Ms. Sanders.

A: Oh, you do, huh?

A: Well, do you know where she is now? What her next target is? That she even has a next target?

A: You don’t. I do. But I’m not telling.

That’s what I wish I could say, at least. I’m still working on the non-incriminating version.

✵✵✵✵✵

Alice isn’t that good at chess. I don’t know why, but I assumed she would kick my ass when she suggested we play. She seems like the type, I guess. We’re basically even right now, though. I’m down two pawns, a bishop, both knights, and a rook, and I’ve taken three pawns, two bishops, a knight, and a rook.

“I think you’d like it out where my girlfriend is,” Alice says, moving her queen across the board. “It’s pretty close to a national forest. There’s lots of beavers and deer that wander through the property. Moose, sometimes. You like any of those?”

I move my bishop to protect a pawn she’s threatening. “Moose are cool, yeah. How’d she get a place with that much land?”

“Inherited it. Her dad passed a few years back.” She moves her queen again. “Check.”

There’s only two squares I can move my king to. I’m not sure which one would be better. “Oh, I’m sorry,” I say, trying to figure it out.

“It’s okay. The land is useful, because… wait, I haven’t told you this yet, have I? I can’t believe I forgot last night.”

“What?” I decide on the square farther from her queen.

“Oh, you shouldn’t have done that,” she giggles, taking the pawn in front of my king with her rook. “Check again. You could have blocked me with your queen.” Damn.

“Anyway,” she goes on, “the land is useful, because it’s not just my girlfriend living there. There’s about five or six other people. They stay in the house, and we have some campsites out on the property in case things ever get too hot.”

“Huh.” This time I do block the rook with my queen. “So you’ve put a little cell together out there?”

“Uh, sort of? I’m not sure they’re as… dedicated as we are, but they’re good people. And the plan is to try and keep this from being a one and done thing. There’s a sort of sisterhood we have, I guess. It’s important for girls to watch each others’ backs, you know?”

“Yeah.” She moves her queen back to cover her rook. I think I have to sacrifice my queen to take the rook now… Well, we’re having fun, at least.

I wonder what it’s like out there. It sounds really nice, but it kind of hurts to hear about. In two days, it’ll be like I never met Alice at all. And that’s how it should be, too. If anyone finds out about us, we’ll both go to jail. I move my king out of the way of her queen again.

Alice moves her knight towards the centre of the board. “Maybe in a few months, if everything goes according to plan, you can come and see it,” she says.

“How?” That would be amazing. It almost feels like she just read my mind. I’m not really sure what move to make, so I bring one of my pawns up two spaces.

“Well, you’ll know where the nearby town is, so you can ride a bus up there first. We have a friend named Jenny who works at the bar there on Tuesdays. If you ask her for a screwdriver with extra rum, she’ll know where to take you.” She moves her knight closer to my king. “That’s mate in two, by the way.”

“Wait, really?” I study the board for a second, and it turns out she’s right. “Well, you win, then,” I say.

She chuckles a little again. “I’m sorry,” she says. “Was I distracting you?”

“Oh, no, I don’t mind. It’s a really generous offer. I’d love to take you up on it. I just need to hold down the fort for a bit first, right?”

“Yeah. You’ve still been keeping cool?”
I get up to go start making dinner. “Mostly. That coworker I mentioned, Melissa, sort of hates me now, I think, but nothing’s going to come of it. The most she can prove is that I don’t like Silver Creek, and neither does anyone else in this city. Except for her.”

She gets up and joins me in the kitchen, walking up next to me. “Honestly, if the others are okay with it, you could stay with us longer-term,” she says. “If you wanted.”

That would be… really great, actually. After I get to spend some time with the macaques, I don’t really have anything tying me down here. And Alice… it would be nice to not have to say goodbye to her.

“That would be great,” I tell her. “This last day has been wonderful.” We hug for a while, neither of us saying anything. We don’t need to.

I break the silence eventually. “Do you want to help me make dinner?”

“Oh, we could do that. I was planning on finishing Story of the Eye, but that can wait.”

“Alright. How are you liking that, by the way? Weird, right?”

“Yeah, but it’s super captivating. I’m glad your edition has all that analysis stuff in the back. I don’t think I’d really understand it otherwise.”

“Haha, yeah. I spent about a week just reading the analysis when I was in college.”

Alice pauses for a bit. Finally, she says, “And, uh, the part with Simone and the eggs she puts in her butt is kind of hot, right? Just between you and me.”

What? No it isn’t. That part’s not hot, it’s gross. The point of the whole book is that it’s gross. And why is she telling me this, anyway? I can’t imagine how anything we did last night would make her think I’m into that sort of thing. God, what we did last night, I…

“Sorry, should I not have said that?” she asks me, quietly. “We can talk about something else if you want. I won’t bring it up again.” Whatever. Too late now. I need a moment. Many moments, really. I head to my room, without answering her, and lock the door.

Why did I do all this? Why, why, why? I really thought she was pretty, Christ. Thinking about her now, all I can see is an egg. Lodged inside an asshole. Waiting to be shat out.

I don’t know how I’m going to get any sleep tonight. She has this whole plan laid out for me, but I have absolutely no idea what to do now.

✵✵✵✵✵

I figure it out by the time I get to work the next morning, and I see the detectives waiting for me in the break room.

Melissa is there, too, with a shit-eating grin on her face. She really thinks she’s got me now. I wonder if I should grin back. Probably not. That would make her stop too quickly. This needs to be as drawn-out as possible. Ideally, she’ll think that her scheme has worked until I come in to work again tomorrow, and that’s when she’ll realize that I facilitated the destruction of her precious stupid fucking Alto Plaza, and I’m going to get off scot free.

Before any of that, though, the detectives take me to a private room to ask me some questions. I am prepared to answer them.

Q: Thanks for taking the time out of your day to talk to us, Ms. Sanders. We’ve been told that you’ve had some crude things to say about the Alto Plaza bombing over the last few days. Is that true?

A: Yes, officers, I suppose it is.

Q: I see. And you understand that saying these things so soon after such a tragedy makes one seem a bit suspicious, yes?

A: Yes, officers, I suppose it does.

Q: So, Ms. Sanders, let’s keep this simple: were you involved in the bombing of Alto Plaza that occurred on Saturday?

A: Yes, officers, I was.

Q: I see. Did you commit this crime by yourself?
A: No, officers, I did not. I didn’t do the bombing part of it, actually. I was only involved after the fact.

Q: Are you willing to name the main conspirator or conspirators?

A: Yes, officers, I am.

Q: I thought you believed that it was important for girls to watch each others’ backs, Ms. Sanders?

A: Are you kidding? What if she goes after the macaque enclosure next?