Follow Me Back (12 page)

W
E WERE THE
leads. Me and Lizzie, in the drama department’s production of
A Streetcar Named Desire
. I never expected to get Stanley, and when I saw my name on the cast sheet pinned up outside the studio, I wasn’t that excited, to be honest. The rehearsals plus football training plus revision time meant a lot of hours I didn’t really have. And, well, he isn’t the nicest character to play. He’s
cruel and a bully and the person who gets the brunt of that for the whole play is the other main character, his sister-in-law, Blanche. Lizzie. I didn’t know if I could be convincingly horrible to Lizzie for an entire play.

But Lizzie. Oh my god, Lizzie. She was all anyone could talk about. At school she was practically invisible, or at least she tried to be, trying to avoid the latest Cheska
storm. She kept quiet, kept her hand down in class, and the only person who could bring her out of it was Mrs Gerber. We were still doing
Twelfth Night
in English, and Gerber always asked Lizzie to read Viola.
Viola suited her; she’s young and smart and witty. But Blanche DuBois… I didn’t think she could do it. Blanche is broken and manic and a fantasist; nothing at all like Lizzie. I didn’t see
how she could play her.

But she did. In rehearsals and on the night, on all three nights, Lizzie
was
Blanche. She was perfect. She said the lines in this high, haughty, quivering Southern Belle voice and the audience hung off every single one. She moved around the stage and even her steps were different, the way she moved her hands, the way she sighed. She had become someone else, she had gone
somewhere else, and it was horrible and haunting and incredible.

And the, I don’t know, the energy between us – it was crazy. She made me feel like I
was
Stanley. She stood in front of me and she stuck her chin in the air, defiant, and I grabbed her wrist and I could feel everyone believe it. Because of her. Because she was so good.

She
was
Blanche. She was broken and she was manic and she
was perfect. Lizzie was Blanche and I was Stanley, and she was afraid of me.

That’s the part I remember most, now.

I
MAKE MYSELF
invisible on chat, because I don’t want to talk to Autumn or Marnie or Cheska or even Scobie right now. What I
really
want is to talk to some of my old friends from London, but none of them are online, and every time I start to draft a text or a message, I can’t find the right words.

Instead, I find myself clicking idly through the bookmarks at the top of my screen. The football
homepage on the BBC. The Norwich City message boards. My email inbox; my other email inbox – both full of junk mail and things I haven’t bothered unsubscribing from. Facebook. An article about core strength exercises. An essay about
A Streetcar Named Desire
I bookmarked during the rehearsals. That role was everything to me for those few months. I might’ve bitched about the rehearsal times, but
something changed each time I got on that stage. I realised that I was
good
at it; that, like my mum said, Lizzie and I were good together. I realised the play could actually really work, and I saw how much Lizzie cared about it so I spent hours online, reading reviews of different productions, watching clips of different actors playing Stanley. I said my lines to myself in the mirror. I said
them to Lizzie in the warm blue light of the balcony over the pool.

It meant something to me, and then it scared me. And even the thought of being on stage now, of not having Lizzie to rehearse lines with, not having Lizzie’s face to look into while the audience disappears, makes me feel sick. I delete the article.

The next couple of tabs are more random links – a boxset I wanted to buy Mum
for her birthday, a
Doctor Who
t-shirt I wanted to get for Scobie. My Twitter account, which I never use. Then my Instagram profile.

I glance through the photos – I haven’t updated it in a while. I find the whole site kind of annoying, because it’s mostly just pictures people take of their own faces or their dinner. And it’s covered in hashtags, which are kind of my pet hate. Why not just have
a photo of a sunset, without screaming ‘#sunset #beach #holidays #yes’ all over it? The photos on mine are mainly of the crowds at matches I’ve gone to watch, and, yeah, even I’m guilty of it, a couple of dinner shots from a fancy restaurant that Kevin took us to for Mum’s birthday. But here, right at the bottom of the page, is a photo of Lizzie, backstage in her Blanche costume. She’s dressed
in white with her hair in old-fashioned curls tucked behind her ears, which have pearl studs in them. And she’s looking right at me, her phone held up in front of her face, the camera flashing. I’ve tagged it with her username, @lizbethsums and, for once, I’ve used a hashtag: #blancheandstan. I click on it, and there are only two photos that come up. One is mine, and the other is the counterpart,
the one Lizzie was taking on her phone. It’s me, in my Stanley costume: a shirt with the sleeves rolled up, braces, my hair slicked back. And half my face is covered by my phone, its camera flashing too. The half you can see is smiling.

I miss that smile.

I click on Lizzie’s username and her profile loads. It’s much fuller than mine, rows and rows of photos, right up until a couple of weeks
ago. I look at the most recent ones and it’s a shock to see Lizzie like that, to actually see her face. They’re all selfies, mostly her phone outstretched to take a picture of her face, one or two of her in her bedroom mirror. This isn’t the Lizzie I know. This is Lizzie in lipstick, pouting; Lizzie with her hand on one hip. Lizzie in the toilets at a club in town, one that’s pretty famous for letting
underage kids in. All from a month or so ago.

I look further back, even though I’ve got a crawling feeling in my stomach. There are pictures of the summer: Lizzie’s feet in flipflops on bright green grass; one of a cloudless blue sky. They feel more authentic, they feel more like
her
, and I’m relieved. But then there are more of the selfies, more pouts, more tight, small dresses. There’s a
picture of her and Lauren, faces pressed together to fit in the frame, both blowing kisses. And one of Lizzie with a group of guys I recognise from the Abbots Grey football team, all holding cans and jeering at the camera. It’s dark and they’re in someone’s back garden. Lizzie looks drunk. I don’t know who’s taking the picture. She’s hashtagged all of these photos with ‘#goodtimes’ and I wonder if
they were. I wonder if Lizzie was happy, if she enjoyed letting loose and getting drunk and having boys flirt with her, finally, instead of Cheska getting all the attention.

I wonder if she thought about me.

I flick back, and this time, I notice that under some of the photos there are more quotes.

On the one of her in the club toilets, her hair all hairsprayed and big, her pouting lips red,
she’s written:

And on the following one, posing in her bedroom mirror in a pair of tiny shorts and a vest top:

Under another, the one with her flip-flopped feet against the green grass:

I recognise that one. It’s from
To Kill a Mockingbird
, and it makes me feel like yelling at her:
We’re all trying to understand! Why are you making it so hard?
But the next photo takes my anger away instantly. It’s another pouty one, but underneath, she’s written:

That’s a Blanche line.
I can remember her saying it in that strange, other voice, her eyes bright and soft.

I flick through the rest and there are a few more selfies she’s hashtagged as ‘#icareformyself’, and one – one of the most recent ones – where she’s used another quote I recognise: ‘I am not what I am.’ It takes me a minute to realise that I’ve seen it on her AskMe profile, but this time, I remember where the
line’s
originally
from. It’s one of Viola’s, from
Twelfth Night
. Ophelia, Viola, Blanche. The women Lizzie’s been, the parts she’s played. I wonder which one she feels closest too. I see the photo of myself as Stanley again, and a chill runs through me.

My Facebook bleeps at me, and I see I’ve got a new message. It’s Autumn, writing to me even though I’m supposedly offline.

I sit up straighter.
Game?

My heart is suddenly beating faster.

Oh come on, Aiden,
she writes. The truth about you and Lizzie

And I believe her.

O
KAY, SO
I
haven’t been totally honest. I haven’t told the whole truth, or anything like the truth. When I say that Lizzie and I were just friends, that isn’t true.

When I say nothing really happened between us, that isn’t true either.

But I guess you already knew that.

Our last exam was English, and after it, we met outside the Rec. We grinned at each other and then we hugged, her hair
hot from the patch of sunlight she’d been sitting in for the whole exam. She smelled clean; like sun cream and, faintly, strawberry. Fake strawberry, like strawberry sweets.

‘Let’s go,’ I said, and I shouldered my backpack.

We cut through the car park and into the Grove, the tree-lined footpath that follows the river. The trees are overgrown and the path was shaded, just occasional spirals
of sunlight breaking through. Everywhere smelled hot and green and we could hear the quiet shhhh of the river. After our other exams we’d analysed the questions, worried about our answers. But after this one we didn’t talk about it once. We didn’t talk much at all, actually, but it was a comfortable silence. We were so used to being with each other after
Streetcar
and all its rehearsals, after
the many afternoons we’d spent in the common room or in the Rec café revising together, that we just fitted with each other, without needing to talk.

About halfway down the Grove, the river narrows and there’s an ancient lock. We pushed through the trees, long grass scratching at Lizzie’s bare legs, and we climbed across the lock and into the meadow.

The meadow is actually rows and rows
of fields and it goes for miles; on one side is the river and beyond that Abbots Grey and then Kings Lyme, on the other are a few farms and, hidden from view, the motorway.

We walked along for a while, staying close to the riverbank where the grass was short, Lizzie trailing her hand through the long blades that bobbed alongside us. There wasn’t a sound coming from anywhere, and a faraway plane
cut a single white line through the bright blue sky.

Eventually we got to the perfect patch: a little flat circle that still had enough tall grass around it to hide us from view, no cows or sheep in the field, the sun in front of us and the river wide again. We sat down and I opened my backpack, which had two biros, one pencil and six bottles of cider inside. The purple, berry-flavoured cider
that was Lizzie’s favourite. Usually too sickly sweet for me, but that day? That day it seemed like the perfect thing.

‘We did it,’ Lizzie said, and I smiled.

‘I guess we did.’

‘It feels weird.’

‘I know.’

‘Like we’ve been working towards this for so long and now we’re here.’

And I knew what she meant but I wasn’t sure we were talking about exams any more. I leaned closer to her, nudged
her a little. ‘That’s a good thing, right?’

She looked up and smiled at me, and it was one of her full-beam smiles, the kind that dazzled you when you least expected it. ‘Definitely,’ she said.

We opened the ciders with a fridge magnet bottle opener that Lizzie had taken from her parents’ kitchen. It was warm but not too warm and it fizzed inside my mouth like static.

‘Cheska asked me about
you,’ she said, looking mischievous.

I lay back and raised an eyebrow. ‘What about me?’

‘She asked who I kept talking to all night. She could hear my laptop bleeping.’

I laughed. ‘Why don’t you turn the sound off?’

She looked down at her lap. She was wearing a pair of jeans she’d cut off into shorts and a pale blue t-shirt with the sleeves rolled up. ‘In case I fall asleep,’ she said,
and the words went through me warm and clear like the day. She wanted to stay awake to talk to me. She was afraid she’d miss a message, didn’t want the conversation to end. She felt the way I did.

I would’ve kissed her then – I was already moving closer to her, to the sun-warmed, strawberry smell of her – if it wasn’t for the dog that bounded into her lap; literally into her lap, a little thing,
long curly ears, white with reddish-gold patches. It was off the lead and its tail was wagging like mad, face turned up to Lizzie’s.

‘Hello!’ she said, ruffling its ears with both hands. ‘Hello, gorgeous.’

‘Sorry –’ A woman staggered up to us, red in the face, a lead in her hand. ‘He just loves people.’

‘That’s okay.’ Lizzie was still fussing over the dog, her face close to his. ‘He’s just
friendly, aren’t you, poppet?’

‘He likes you,’ the woman said, as the dog carried on licking Lizzie’s face and hands, his tail beating at the grass. She looked down at our bottles of cider and smiled. ‘Just finished exams?’

‘Yeah.’ We both grinned at her. She was nice. A lot of people in Abbots Grey would’ve had something to say about teenagers drinking in public in the middle of the day,
but she just told us ‘Well done’ and let Lizzie stroke the dog, who was lying on his back now with his paws up in the air, for a while longer, before she clipped his lead on and said goodbye. We watched them head off up the meadow and Lizzie said, ‘I wish I had a dog.’

‘Get one.’

She shook her head. ‘Not allowed.’

‘Parents don’t like them?’

‘Cheska’s allergic.’

‘All the more reason,’
I said, and she laughed and elbowed me.

‘Oh, the sun’s so nice,’ she said, sighing, leaning back on her hands and turning her face up to it.

‘We can do this all day now.’

She looked over and grinned at me. ‘Until drama school starts.’

‘
I
can do this all day now,’ I corrected myself. ‘Jealous?’

She closed her eyes again. ‘Totally.’

‘What’s on the menu at drama camp again?’

‘
A Winter’s
Tale
, I think. And
The Crucible
.’

‘Can totally see you as a Puritan,’ I said. ‘You burn those witches.’

‘I
am
a witch,’ she said. ‘Didn’t you know?’

‘Talk about stating the obvious.’

‘Speaking of witches and/or words that rhyme with them.’ Lizzie sat up a little, drank some more of her cider. ‘Did I tell you about Lauren Choosken messaging me?’

‘Again?’

‘She’s so obvious, it’s ridiculous.
Every time she speaks to me at school, it’s like she’s looking round for the cameras.’

‘Yeah, well, I heard a rumour that her and Deacon have been using cameras for something
very
different,’ I said, laughing.

‘You did
not
! Did you see it?’

‘Oh, yeah.’ I took another long pull of my cider. ‘Deacon showed it to me on one of our boys’ nights in. And then we hugged and played Xbox and had a
sleepover.’

She gave me a
ha ha
smile. ‘You know, sarcasm is the lowest form of wit.’

‘And yet you keep coming back for more.’

We sat like that for a long time, talking, the sun sinking slowly but always on us. And then, without really thinking, I did it; I leaned over and kissed her. It was a soft kiss, slow and long, and I let my hands get tangled in her hair. Her mouth was sticky with
cider; I guess mine was too.

I pulled back and she looked up at me and she smiled, a really small, soft smile, and I could see every detail of her face; the way her eyelashes got lighter near the top, the way the sun brought out freckles across her nose. I could smell the strawberry sweets smell of her and the green smell of the grass, and before I had time to think anything more, she leant
back up and kissed me, harder this time, much harder, her hands on my face holding me there, more insistent.

We ended up in the grass, Lizzie on her back, me half next to her, half over her. I ran my hands over her skin, let my fingers trail over her thighs. Her hands moved over my back, pushing my t-shirt up and tugging it over my head. There was no sound apart from the hardness of our breathing
and the soft rushing of the river. She pulled her own t-shirt off and I stopped and looked at her, at the way the sun made her skin glow. Her bra was white and plain and it just made her more golden. I kissed her shoulders, moved across her chest. I pushed the straps of her bra down and kissed the soft skin under them and I heard her moan.

When it happened, it was perfect. I’d like to say that
it was my first time, but it wasn’t. That had been the week before I moved to Abbots Grey, just after I turned fifteen, with a girl I hardly knew, at a party with some people I hardly knew either. That was what London Aiden was like. But if he could have known about Lizzie, and the river, and the last day of term, I think he would have waited. Waiting would have been so worth it.

I’d like to
say it was my first time, and maybe I do, maybe it is – because it felt like it. It felt like nothing else, in the green grass, the sun above us, looking down at Lizzie, Lizzie looking up at me, and everything glowing.

I don’t say it was my first time because I don’t say anything about it to anyone. It’s a secret, perfect moment that I’ve kept from my friends, and now from the police. It’s
something that only we know happened; me and Lizzie.

Me and Lizzie and Autumn.