Follow Me Back (8 page)

T
HE GYM IS
pretty deserted; Sunday lunchtime, everyone at home eating happily with their families, bitching happily about other people’s families. I feel a little bit guilty, actually, because I’ve left Mum essentially home alone; Kevin’s been holed up in his office all weekend working on a new project, door closed. When a new business comes along, we don’t see much of him, and when we do, he’s
totally distracted. You can practically hear the fans whirring in his brain as he processes everything, and even when he’s talking to you he’s pretty much looking through you half the time. When there’s a problem in front of him, that problem is the only thing that exists until it’s solved. And given that I’m feeling pretty distracted myself, I can imagine that the two of us aren’t exactly the most
fun people to share a house with right now.

But being out feels good, and being in the gym, with its purring machines and pumping dance music, feels even better. I run intervals on the treadmill until I feel like I’m about to throw up, pushing the speed up, making myself run an extra hundred metres each time. After the last one, I jump my feet onto the plastic sides of the treadmill, hit the
stop button and watch the belt chug to a stop, my breath coming in hard and ragged and hot in my chest.

The main room of the gym is long and thin, with rows of cardio equipment and the windows overlooking the café on one side, a mirrored wall on the other with mats and exercise balls stationed along it. There’s only me and three other people in there; two women of about Mum’s age, who have
cross-trainers next to each other and spend the entire time chatting away, and a girl I recognise from Year 13 power-walking on a treadmill at the opposite end of the row to me. Tucked off to one side is a weights room, and I head for it, rubbing at my face and neck with the rough strip of towel I keep in my kit bag.

The weights room is small and square, packed with equipment. It’s darker in
there; the windows that look over the car park are tinted so that the light they let in is blueish and dim. The music’s quieter in here too, and there’s the rhythmic clanking of someone doing reps on the chest press.

I’m still under strict instructions to keep working my injured leg, so I head for the leg curl, where I’ll have to sit and do a hundred hamstring stretches. It’ll be boring, and
I’m already flicking through my phone, looking for a podcast or something to fill the time, when I round a corner in the maze of machines and come face to face with the person at the chest press.

It’s Deacon. Of course it is.

He’s sweating, his tight grey t-shirt soaked through, lifting a stack of weights far heavier than anything I would attempt. Not because I’m weak; because I’m not an idiot.
He’s still wearing his diamond earrings, and his long, baggy shorts and neon Air Max look brand new. He looks up and clocks me just as I register that it’s him.

We look at each other. We don’t say anything.

I find the leg curl and sit at it, and of course, obviously, it’s directly opposite Deacon’s machine. He begins pulling his reps in earnest, letting out a grunt each time. I start on my
stretches, feeling – and hating the fact I’m feeling – kind of self-conscious. Deacon finishes with a clang, and stands up abruptly. I tense, waiting for him to come over, telling myself to keep calm, but instead he heads for one of the abs machines by the window and starts doing rapid crunches. I can’t tell if the silent treatment is because it’s no fun to pick a fight with me without an audience,
or if it’s something new he’s trying out, but I’ll take it. I settle into my stretches and try to forget that he’s even in the room.

After a couple of minutes, the girl from Year 13 – Emily, I think her name is – comes in and sits at one of the machines near mine. I see Deacon’s eyes flick over her long, tanned legs and up to her face, then he looks away again. I remember him getting out of
Cheska’s car, the way his hand tangled in her hair, and I smile. I glance up to find him looking at me, eyes narrowed. I look away. I don’t let the smirk off my face.

A phone starts ringing somewhere in the room, and Deacon gets off the machine and fishes his iPhone out of his pocket. As he answers, he turns his back to me, but that’s okay, because I’ve already turned my music off to hear him
better.

‘Oh yeah?’ he’s saying, and he stretches to look out of the window. ‘Cool, babe. Down in a sec.’

He hangs up and stoops to pick up his towel and water bottle from the floor. As he makes his way out, he passes just that bit too close to my machine and makes a quick, almost imperceptible gesture with his hand, one that’s meant just for me.
Wanker
.

I count to twenty, rushing through
my stretches, and then I get up and head for the window. I look out just in time to see Deacon coming out of the Rec’s doors below me, the sweat on his back like a dark bird, its wings outstretched. He pauses to tip water into his mouth, a long, showy stream, like he thinks he’s on the pitch, and then he jogs over to a car that’s idling in a space at the front of the car park.

If I’m expecting
– okay, hoping – to see Cheska’s yellow convertible, then I’m disappointed. It’s a pale blue Beetle, and although the driver is blonde, it’s not Cheska. It’s Lauren. So they’re back together… if they ever split up in the first place.

I go and collect my stuff, and I’m about to head back to the main room to do some core work, when I notice the girl from Year 13 smiling at me.

‘It’s Aiden, isn’t
it?’ she says, and I tug one of my earphones out.

‘Yeah. Hi.’

‘I’m Emily. I’m in the year above you?’

‘Yeah, sure.’

‘I worked on
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
with you.’

So that’s where I know her from. ‘I’m surprised you remember,’ I say. ‘I didn’t exactly have a big part.’

She laughs. ‘Well, I did the set design so I wasn’t the star of the show either. I came to see you guys the next
year though, you were great.’

I feel like I’m sinking, slowly, my heart heavy. ‘Thanks.’

‘Do you still act?’

I shake my head. No. I couldn’t. Not now.

‘That’s a shame. You’re really talented.’

‘I had a good co-star,’ I manage to say, and then I turn to go. ‘See you around.’

I can feel her watching me all the way out.

B
Y EIGHT THIRTY
, Scobie’s room is filled with half-empty plates and greasy wrappers. Half a giant pizza sits sweating in its box on the floor, along with a load of shiny bones, which are all that’s left to show for the ribs and chicken wings we’ve also munched our way through. If I didn’t play football, I would be clinically obese; I’ve got no idea how Scobie stays the same skinny shape he’s always
been.

Scobie has carefully selected and downloaded Shark Week’s highlights, and we’re halfway through a programme about tiger sharks in Hawaii, with his Mac’s screen swivelled round on the desk and a load of pillows lined up against the wall to turn his bed into a sofa. We’d usually be more than welcome to use the actual sofa downstairs, but Frank’s still awake and sharks make him cry. Plus
Liam’s got a girl round, so Jodie, Scobes’s mum, is on hyper-hostess alert.

‘Tiger vs tiger shark,’ Scobes says, through a mouth full of samosa, ‘who wins?’

‘In water or on land?’

He thinks while he swallows. ‘Shallow water.’

‘Tiger.’

‘Interesting.’ He slumps onto one side to look at me. ‘Why so?’

‘Tigers can swim. And in shallow water, the tiger shark’s gonna be all edgy and trapped.’

He shakes his head. ‘Tiger sharks love the shallows.’ As he says it, the screen shows the silhouette of a tiger shark moving stealthily towards a beach. ‘See?’

‘Nah, I still say tiger. Cos it can attack from above, like jump out of the water. And it has claws
and
teeth. It’s got all bases covered.’

He nods. ‘Good points, well made. I still say shark, though.’

‘Well, that’s up to you, Scobes.
You’re wrong, but that’s up to you.’

He picks up the plate next to him and offers it to me. ‘Last chicken skewer?’

‘Is it satay or tikka?’

‘Hard to tell.’

I take it, even though I feel like at this point I’m at least seventy-five per cent chicken. If Doug could see how far I’ve deviated from the healthy eating plan Norwich email us all each month, he’d throw one of his purple rages.

‘Liam said that sighting of Lizzie’s been confirmed. They’re going to put the CCTV on the news.’

I nod. ‘Hopefully that’ll help.’

‘Yeah, it might jog people’s memories, right?’ He looks hopeful. I
feel
hopeful. Maybe it will.

He glances sideways at me from behind his glasses. ‘I guess this is all pretty weird for you, isn’t it?’

I poke the sharp end of my now empty skewer against one of
my fingers, again and again. ‘I guess. We were close, and now all of this –’ I switch to the next finger, poke a little harder. ‘It’s kind of like I never really knew her.’

‘You guys didn’t hang out much this year, did you?’

‘No, not really. We kind of fell out.’

He glances at me. ‘After prom night, right?’

Suddenly I wish I hadn’t eaten so much pizza. ‘Kinda, I guess.’

‘Was all that
something to do with Lizzie?’

‘No,’ I say, but my heart is really thudding now. ‘Nah, that was just Honeycutt being a dick.’

Scobie looks at me and doesn’t say anything for a minute, and in that minute I’m sure he’s going to challenge me, ask me why I’m lying. But instead he just looks away, back at the screen, where the tiger shark is breaking open the shell of a giant turtle. ‘No change
there, then,’ he says.

I want to tell him that I saw Honeycutt kissing Cheska Summersall but I don’t. I don’t want to talk about Deacon Honeycutt.

Scobie changes the subject anyway. ‘Marnie Daniels still trying to find stuff out about that Facebook guy?’ he asks.

You’re so cute.
My stomach twists. ‘Yeah.’

‘How come she’s got you helping her?’

‘She asked me,’ I say, even though the question
makes me feel funny. ‘Could hardly say no, could I?’

He glances at me. ‘Have you found anything else?’

I shake my head. ‘Not really. Profile’s gone, hasn’t it?’

He taps his fingers against his plate thoughtfully. ‘Maybe not.’

‘Huh?’

He sits up suddenly, grabs his mouse and keyboard and clicks away the shark programme. ‘It only disappeared this week, right?’

I shrug. ‘Yeah.’

‘Facebook
are pretty slow about deleting data. There’ll still be a cached version.’ He’s busy typing, clicking through windows too fast for me to follow. ‘Here we go.’

He sits back so I have a proper view of the screen and, sure enough, there’s the Hal Paterson profile, the guy in sunglasses who is not called Hal Paterson staring back at me. I feel a wave of revulsion. How could she fall for it?

‘Let’s
take another look,’ Scobie says, and he can hardly disguise the excitement in his voice. He loves technology, loves this step-by-step solving of things. It’s like
CSI: Internet
to him. He scans down Hal Paterson’s wall, looks at all the app stuff again.

‘Red flags,’ Scobie says, tutting. ‘Total red flags. She should have noticed there was nothing personal on here.’

‘Yeah,’ I point out, ‘but
maybe he had it set to private. You can’t see the personal stuff on my wall unless you’re my friend.’

‘You’d be surprised,’ Scobie says, but he doesn’t elaborate.

‘How come you can still see all this?’ I ask, suddenly afraid to look at the screen. ‘He deleted it.’

‘Yeah, well that’s the thing about the internet. Hardly anything’s ever
really
deleted.’

That’s a scary thought.

Scobie’s
mouse hovers again over the location Marnie noticed on one of the posts. ‘So we know he – assuming it’s a he – was in or near King’s Lyme at the end of the summer. Would Lizzie have been?’

I feel another lurch of nausea. ‘Yeah. Her drama summer school thing was there.’

‘Right –’ He points at me, like Kevin does when someone says something smart or interesting in one of his presentations. ‘So
that’s something. That’s worth checking out.’ He thinks for a minute, scrolling up the page again. ‘Hey… Have you tried just Googling him?’

Before I can reply, he pulls up a new search window and types in Hal Paterson.

The computer takes 0.71 seconds to return nearly 700,000 results. Lots about Hals, lots about Patersons, a few Hal Pattersons; none of them what we’re looking for. Just that
same Facebook profile and nothing else.

“Hal Paterson” London, Scobie types.

Zero results.

“Hal Paterson” Kings Lyme, he tries.

Nothing.

‘Thought he might be using the name on other sites,’ Scobie says, after a minute. ‘Guess it was just that profile.’

He turns and sees the expression on my face. I’m guessing it looks pretty bad.

‘They’ll find something,’ he says. ‘Liam reckons
the police have got computer forensics guys in. They can do all kinds with signatures and IP addresses and stuff.’

‘Can Facebook find out who set up the profile?’ I ask, my fingers bunching themselves inwards to form fists.

‘He could have set up a fake email account to use,’ Scobie says, ‘but yeah, they’ll have stuff that’ll be useful. It’s tricky, though. Privacy laws and data protection
and all that. They’ll have to go through the courts.’

‘Even with something like this?’

He shrugs. ‘It’s complicated.’

Isn’t everything?

I look again at the face in the photo, the eyes hidden behind those mirrored sunglasses.
Talking to you. Always makes me smile
.

‘We’re assuming she went to meet him, but there’s nothing that says that anywhere. Can you honestly imagine Lizzie –
Lizzie
– doing that?’

Scobie considers this. ‘It’s just weird, isn’t it? The guy says he’s from London, Lizzie boards a train to London.’

I suddenly feel close to tears. I think of Marnie, sitting in Café Alice, her head in her hands.
I should’ve done something.
I think of Lizzie, smiling at me across the drama studio, the
Midsummer’s
set going up around us. ‘I should’ve done something,’ I say, quietly.

Scobie turns round to look at me. ‘Hey. What could you have done? Nobody knew. Nobody knew any of this stuff about her.’

I stare at the screen. Hal Paterson stares back. I feel a twist of hatred in my gut. ‘There must be something we can do,’ I say. ‘Somebody knows where she is.’

Scobie considers this, and then he briskly clicks away from Hal’s profile page and onto his own newsfeed. With
a couple more clicks, he’s opened a new window: Create Page.

F
IND
L
IZZIE
S
UMMERSALL,
he types in the title box, and then he pauses over the description.
H
AVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL?
he tries, and we both look at this and shake our heads.
M
ISSING,
he puts instead, and then he stops. ‘I’m no good at this,’ he says. ‘Words, you know – not really my thing.’

I’ve read enough of Scobie’s history coursework
to know that that’s not exactly true, but I know what he means – when something’s this important, this personal, the words just seem to dry up. I take the keyboard from him and I picture Lizzie catching my eye across the playground, her hair blown back by the wind. I start typing.

MISSING – Can you help?

Lizzie Summersall has been missing from her home in Abbots Grey, Hertfordshire, since
Saturday 8
th October. The last known sighting of her is of her boarding a train to London Kings Cross in neighbouring town, Kings Lyme.

Lizzie is a much loved sister, daughter and friend. She loves Harry Potter, roast potatoes, and every kind of sweet except orange ones. She is 5’5”, with long, blondeish hair, and green eyes.

If you have any information, please, please share!

Scobie reads
over my shoulder and when I’m done, he nods. ‘That’s good,’ he says. ‘That’s perfect.’

He takes the mouse and keyboard back from me and clicks ‘Create’. ‘Now we need to find a good photo of her,’ he says. ‘Do you have one?’

I shake my head.

‘That’s okay, we’ll just get one off her profile.’

He finds Lizzie’s Facebook, and I look at her beaming at me from the corner. He clicks through
her profile pictures until he finds one of just her, close-up, a shot of her at the fair that came to Kings Lyme last autumn. The sky is purple behind her and she’s holding a huge stick of candyfloss. Her hair is down and shining in the bright lights of the waltzers beside her, and I can almost hear her laughing.

‘That one,’ I say, but he’s already saving it.

After he’s uploaded the photo
to our page, we both sit and look at Lizzie, at the word MISSING that we’ve typed beside her.

‘Someone must know something,’ I say, and my voice is small and hopeless.

He gives me a sympathetic smile and an awkward kind of man-pat on the only part of me in reach: my socked foot. ‘Fingers crossed,’ he says. After a couple of minutes’ silence, he tries: ‘Distracting shark attack documentary?’

Somehow, I manage a smile. ‘Always.’

‘It’s got actual footage, not just reconstructions.’

‘Good times.’

He hits play and slides back into his own space.

‘Scobes?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Thanks.’

We sit and watch in comfortable silence. After a bit, we hear Jodie bring Frank to bed, even though he keeps telling her, in between yawns, that he’s ‘not tired yet!’ Near the end of the programme we
hear two sets of footsteps going into Liam’s room, the door closing quietly. I feel a sudden pang of jealousy.

‘Who goes swimming near a seal colony anyway?’ Scobie says, sitting up to grab some of the cold leftover party food. He considers the guy being interviewed on screen, the scarred outline of a shark’s jaw right across his side. ‘Idiot.’

But I’m not really listening; too busy idly
flipping through my phone. Trying to resist the urge to look at my messages with Lizzie again. ‘Hey, do you remember a girl called Autumn Thomas who was in our year for a bit?’

He thinks about it, tapping a spring roll against his plate. ‘Yeah, think so… redhead?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Never really spoke to her.’

‘She was in my English class. She friend-requested me the other day.’

He pushes his
glasses up his nose. ‘Oh right.’

‘She seems nice enough.’

He shrugs and takes a bite of the spring roll, attention returned to the grainy camcorder footage of a fin cutting through the water towards a canoe.

But then he frowns. ‘Are you sure –’ he starts, but before he can ask me whether it’s really a good idea to be talking to some new girl when all I’m
really
thinking about is Lizzie,
the lights – and Scobie’s Mac – go out.

‘Liam!’ Jodie yells from her room, at the same time as Liam calls out ‘Sorry!’ sheepishly.

‘Well, if they’d just
listen
to me and get the fuses actually fixed properly,’ Scobie says in a huff, getting up and heading downstairs.

‘I’ll take that as my cue to leave,’ I say, following him. ‘See you at school tomorrow, mate. Good luck with the electrics.’

‘Yeah, thanks.’ His hand finds my shoulder in the dark. ‘And look, don’t worry. This Lizzie thing. It’s all going to be okay. They’ll find her.’

I just wish I could be as certain.