Follow Me Back (15 page)

I
CAN’T BREATHE
. I’m sitting on the bottom step and my head is in my hands and my mind is still back in the Rec car park on a night at the end of June. And I keep thinking. I keep thinking.

What if?

I sat on this step the morning after that too. That was as far as Mum let me get. It was Kevin who picked me up from the hospital, who asked me if I was okay and listened to me list my fractured
knuckle, my chipped tooth, my concussion. Kevin who took in my black eye and my fat lip in silence and led me out to the car and he didn’t ask, but he listened as the words came spilling out of me anyway – I’ve hurt someone I care about; I don’t think she’ll forgive me; I took it out on Deacon. Kevin who put a hand on my shoulder and told me that it would be okay, that he’d make sure it was okay.

He dropped me outside the house, sped off in his car. Leaving me and Mum to it – giving us our space. The worst of it was, I knew I should feel worried, knew I should feel bad, scared of what was coming. And I did. But not about Mum. Not about Deacon. Not about the fact that Selby had been at the hospital and had told Kevin, apologetically, practically tearfully, that the school would have to
investigate, that we could both have our sixth form places rescinded.

All I could think about was Lizzie.

I let myself in and Mum was there, in the kitchen doorway, in her dressing gown, arms folded, face bare. Face furious.

‘I’m sorry,’ I tried, taking a step towards her, but she put up a hand so sharply I shrank back, sank down onto the stairs.

‘How could you do this to me again?’ she
said, and then she started crying.

The crying was the worst.

I look up now at the empty hallway, at the place in the doorway where she stood. I remember later, hearing her crying to Kevin while I was in my room, calling Lizzie. Calling Lizzie and calling and calling and calling. I threw up, at one point.

I think I might throw up now.

She called me, in the end. Two days of me phoning, leaving
voicemails, texts, Facebook messages. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. And then, at 11a.m. on the first Monday after the ball, she called.

‘I’m not pregnant,’ she said, and her voice was small and hard. ‘You can stop calling me.’

I want to say that I felt relieved, because that might be normal. I want to say that I felt sad, because that also might be normal. But I can’t remember.

I’m
scared that I didn’t feel anything.

‘What?’ I said, just like I did on the steps, because I’m an idiot, because I’m useless.

‘I made a mistake,’ she said, and she hung up.

And now I’m wondering if the mistake she meant was telling me.

The doorbell rings and I jump, the hairs on the back of my neck shooting up. Just for an instant, a sick instant, I
know
it’s Lizzie out there.

But it
isn’t. Of course it isn’t.

It’s Marnie.

She raises an eyebrow as she takes in my bruised face. ‘Can I come in?’

I stand aside to let her past, too exhausted, too caught up in thoughts and memories, to say no. She heads for the kitchen, clicks on the kettle. I sink onto one of the black and chrome bar stools Kevin bought on his last trip to Stockholm.

‘What was all that about?’ she asks,
looking through the cupboards for mugs. ‘With Deacon?’

I shrug. ‘He hates me. He always has.’

‘Aiden.’ She turns round to look at me while the kettle burbles its expensive whisper. ‘You looked like you wanted to kill him. You looked…
possessed
.’

I feel possessed. My whole body is pulsing with an energy that isn’t mine, isn’t me.

‘He pushed me,’ I say. ‘I let him get to me.’

‘What happened
with Lauren? Everyone’s saying you started on her.’

I roll my eyes. ‘Of course they are. I just yelled at her.’

‘Because of the show.’

‘Yeah. Kind of.’

‘What did you say?’

I think back, and at least have the grace to feel ashamed. ‘Nothing smart. Called her a bitch and a slag.’

The kettle clicks off and she turns her back to me and starts making the tea.

‘I don’t like that word,’
she says, still not looking at me.

‘I didn’t mean it as a compliment,’ I say, kind of sulkily.

‘I heard what you said to Deacon, too,’ she says, bringing a mug over to me. ‘About Lauren sleeping around. It’s not okay to talk about girls like that, Aiden.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I was just so mad.’ I feel about two inches tall again.

She takes a seat at the third bar stool, leaving one between
us. ‘Yeah, but it’s the way you use that as an insult. It pisses me off.’ She glances at me and then looks away and sighs. ‘It’s just – in the summer, people saying stuff like that about Lizzie. Like it made her a bad person, just because she was seeing guys. And now, in the papers, they’re making out like she had it coming, and I
hate
that. That’s not right.’

I didn’t think it was possible,
but I feel instantly worse. It’s all flooding back again, over and over, the waves crashing down. Lizzie. The photo. Prom.

‘Marnie,’ I say. ‘On prom night, where did you and Lizzie go?’

She frowns. ‘When?’

‘I don’t know, sometime in the middle. After the dinner. You guys disappeared for a bit.’

She shrugs. ‘We went outside for a while. It was too hot in there.’ She smiles a small smile
to herself, one which instantly dissolves. ‘Lizzie stole a glass of wine from Selby’s table so we shared that.’

I try to picture them out in the car park, laughing, their silky shiny dresses against the gravel.

‘You left her,’ I say softly. ‘Why did you leave her?’

She looks at me in surprise. ‘She said you were coming out to meet her. She wanted to talk to you.’

I see Lizzie on the
steps looking down at me, and my stomach lurches.

‘Did she tell you about what?’

She shakes her head, looks at me more closely. ‘Is that what this is all about? What did she say to you?’

I shake my head. ‘No. Nothing.’ My hand twitches instinctively towards my phone. ‘I got in that fight with Deacon in the car park, didn’t I?’

‘Funny how history repeats itself,’ she says, darkly, and takes
a sip of her tea.

‘So, did you just come round to have a go at me?’ I get up and take my untouched cup to the sink.

‘
No
,’ she says, irritated. She gets up too and gets her phone out. ‘I need to show you something.’

My heart skips in my chest. ‘What?’

She looks up at me, and for a second it looks like she’s reconsidering showing me whatever it is.

‘I was annoyed about Lauren, too,’
she says, lowering her phone for a second. ‘Like
really
annoyed. I mean,
I
know how to control my feelings, unlike some of us –’

I let this pass without comment.

‘– but I was mad about it. And I wanted to know who’d agreed for her to be on the show. Without even, you know, checking if she
actually
was
“Lizzie’s best friend”.’ She makes exaggerated quote marks in the air, and if it wasn’t for
the situation, I could almost laugh. She’s
jealous
.

‘I couldn’t believe my dad would okay that. So I broke into his office.’

‘Seriously?’ I’m reminded suddenly of that first time I saw Marnie and Lizzie by the lockers, Marnie yelling about her sexist science teacher.

She waves a hand distractedly. ‘Just his office at home. Not, like, the actual
Spoilt in the Suburbs
office.’

‘Oh, right,’
I say sarcastically. ‘Right, well, that’s fine then.’

She picks the phone up, and again I see a flicker of something cross her face. ‘The thing is,’ she says, ‘my dad’s the exec producer, so he gets cc-ed on everything.’

‘Right…’

She sighs. ‘And when I was looking through his emails, I found this.’

I have to actually hold my hand out before she finally turns the phone round and gives it
to me.

I frown. It’s a photo of a screen, so the quality isn’t great, and I have to zoom to read the email. It’s from a woman – Olive Garner – and the subject line reads
CHESKA
SUMMERSALL
–
CONTRACT
EXTENSION
.

‘Olive’s one of the producers,’ Marnie says. ‘She’s a total bitch.’ I think of the woman with the shiny bob and the clipboard.

The email is short.

I glance at Marnie. ‘So?’

‘Scroll down.’

I do, and I realise that there’s part of an email from Cheska left at the bottom.

My heart starts thumping. ‘She’s surely not talking about Lizzie?’

Marnie’s face is grim. ‘She must be. What else has got her more airtime?’

‘But she sounds so
excited
.’

‘That’s not the worst bit.’

I raise an eyebrow at her over the top of the phone.

‘Scroll back up. Check the date.’

I do, and my stomach lurches. The email was sent
on the first of October.

‘That’s –’

‘A week before,’ Marnie finishes for me. ‘A week
before
Lizzie went missing.’

‘
S
O, WHAT ARE
we saying here?’ I ask. ‘That Cheska knew Lizzie would go missing?’

Marnie looks at me without saying anything.

‘That she had something
to do with it
?’ The words feel surreal leaving my mouth.

Marnie swallows carefully. ‘I don’t know. But it doesn’t look great, does it?’

We both look down at the phone.

‘Okay, put it this way,’ Marnie says. ‘Cheska needs a new storyline,
and she knows Lizzie’s acting out, spending a lot of time online… So she makes up the Hal Paterson profile, and lures Lizzie to London –’

‘And
what
?’ I say. ‘She does what with her? With her
sister
? Come on, Marnie… I know Cheska’s awful but even she wouldn’t do that just to get more time on TV, would she?’

We look at each other and neither of us say anything, because neither of us are sure
just how far Cheska
would
go to get more airtime. I think of the way she sat me down on the war memorial and tried to talk me into going on the show.
They’d pay you
. The way the producer said,
We’ll do a scene with Aimee, instead
. I think Cheska would do pretty much anything to stay on TV.

‘Come on,’ Marnie says softly. ‘Let’s clean up your face.’

I watch her run warm water into a bowl. She
searches in the cupboards and finds a clean, soft cloth, and all the time I’m thinking of Cheska and Lauren on screen. Crying together. Comforting each other. Fake, fake, fake.

My face stings as Marnie dabs at it, water trickling down the neck of my top.

‘We need to go to the police,’ I say, her hair brushing across my collarbone.

‘I know,’ she says, her face close to mine, and before I
know what I’m doing, I kiss her.

Her lips are full and soft, and as soon as mine touch them, I realise what I’ve done. I pull away, but she’s faster.

‘What are you
doing
?’ She takes a few steps back, her face furious.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I say, panicking. ‘I wasn’t thinking, I didn’t mean to – everything’s just… I just…’

‘Jesus, Aiden.’ She turns on her heel.

My head’s spinning.
What the
hell did I just do?
‘I’m so sorry,’ I say, as she pulls on her coat and stuffs her feet in her shoes. ‘You were just – and I was thinking of –’

She spins round. ‘Don’t finish that sentence.’

‘Marnie –’

She wrenches the door open.

‘Marnie, Cheska’s email… the police…’

She glances back over her shoulder. ‘Forget it. I’ll take care of it, okay?’

And just like that, she’s gone.

I
SIT ALONE
in the kitchen, my phone in front of me. In those ten minutes with Marnie, I’d forgotten about Autumn Thomas and the photo. The photo of baby clothes.
I know what really happened
. My heart bangs against my chest like a trapped bird, and I can’t quite catch my breath.
Everything’s falling apart
. My hands shake as I type.

The reply is fast, almost instant.

Oh my god
. She was. Of course she was. I can hear Gerber now, calling her name out. And I’ve forgotten, or I haven’t bothered remembering, just because Autumn was nice to me, because I wanted someone to be nice to me.

The panic in my chest becomes
something more like rage again.

It’s like someone’s dropped a bucket of icy water over me.

My heart’s hammering so hard I’m sure I can hear it. It echoes through the empty house like a drumbeat.

And then, the last instruction:

T
HE NEWSPAPER ARTICLE
spreads over two pages and is written by someone called Jennifer Liao.

I read it carefully, desperate for anything that will keep me in some way distracted on the forty-five minute train journey to London from King’s Lyme.

I lean my head back against the seat and close my eyes as the train rocks through one of the little villages south of King’s Lyme. All I can picture is Lizzie, on this train, heading to meet someone who is not the person she thinks they are.

And here I am, doing the same.

The thought doesn’t come to me straight away; it isn’t a lightbulb moment, not like
you see in films. I’m staring out of the window, wondering who Lizzie might have trusted with the truth about us, and then I glance down at the paper again and the first thing to catch my eye is, as usual, Lizzie. My eyes flick over the photograph and its caption.

But then I look again.

Summersall.

Summer.

Autumn.

A new name for a new season – for a new Lizzie? Instantly, a part of
me tries to reject it. She wouldn’t. She
wouldn’t
. But the rest of me keeps thinking. The rest of me keeps seeing.

She’d want to hurt me. I can’t blame her for that.

Then I think of Evie, and Lizzie’s parents. Could she do this to them? Put them through this? The Lizzie I know wouldn’t do that.

But then she’s not the Lizzie I know, is she? That’s what I keep hearing, that’s what I’ve seen
for myself on her Instagram, on her AskMe.

Her AskMe. That’s the thing that’s been bugging me about the article, too, the mention of that site. Every time it comes up, it doesn’t sit right with me. I just don’t understand why Lizzie would use it, why she would continue to let people abuse her through it. There’s got to be something there. Something I’m missing. I get out my phone and look at
the page again, look at Lizzie’s answers.

And this time, they don’t seem random. They seem deliberate, specific.

Maybe I’m crazy, but they seem like messages.

Maybe I’m being paranoid, but it feels as if they’re taunting me. Lizzie telling the world that she is other people, that she can play a part, can mislead. Right here, where anyone could see if they only knew where to look. I think
of that lesson in Gerber’s classroom, the lesson about
An Inspector Calls
. Lizzie, so serious.
He made her love him. And that’s where it all went wrong
. There’s a quote from the play here, too, the second question down, after someone’s asked her ‘Why are you even on here? Are you like 12?’:

She had to go away and be quiet
. That sounds horribly like a confession. My stomach twists as I remember that in
An Inspector Calls
the dead girl uses two names: she’s Daisy Renton and she’s Eva Smith. Lizzie Summersall. Autumn Thomas.

Is it going to be Lizzie who meets
me? Am I going to get off this train and see her, finally?

The train announcer’s voice, soft and gentle. ‘We will shortly be arriving at London King’s Cross, where this train terminates.’

I guess I’m about to find out.