How to Kill Your Best Friend

by Lexie Elliott

  “Don’t you wonder, though,” I start, then stop. Adam cocks his head. “Don’t you wonder how Scott’s dick got into Lissa’s hand?” Adam looks down. “Wouldn’t there have to be some kind of action first? It seems pretty late in the day to start an impassioned defense of the sisterhood when your hand is actually down his pants.”

  “That did cross my mind,” he admits, meeting my eye. “I’m guessing his version might describe it as entrapment.”

  “Yes, I would think it might.” Duncan and Georgie have reached the bar now; Dunc still has Georgie pulled against him. He’s a good man, to have offered the olive branch first. “If he hadn’t been such a shit—and a cheating shit—I might even feel sorry for him.”

  Adam’s lips twist briefly. “I wouldn’t. Good guys don’t lunge at their girlfriend’s friends, even if it’s offered on a plate.”

  “Now they don’t. I’m not sure even the good guys thought that way at twenty.” Especially if that friend was Lissa, who everyone wanted to screw. And then: Graeme lunged at me, and I wasn’t offering anything on a plate. But that was different. We were both struggling in our own relationships. Perhaps it was a way of weathering the storm.

  “Your faith in men is heartening,” Adam says dryly, but I notice he’s not arguing. “Shall we move to the sofas?”

  I follow him across to the area he chooses to commandeer, checking my phone en route. Still no bloody Wi-Fi. I flop into an armchair, and Adam takes the sofa opposite. I don’t know where Georgie has disappeared to, but Jem, Duncan and Steve are up at the broad counter, in conversation with the bartender. Jem is still drinking steadily; Duncan appears to be trying to keep up. And Adam is watching everything because that’s what Adam does. Which is really starting to irritate. “What on earth is up with Jem?” I ask him.

  “You mean besides his business falling apart?”

  I grimace. “Yeah, I get that, but why is he taking it out on Georgie?”

  “Well.” Adam shrugs. “Jealousy, I think.”

  “Jealousy?” I stare at him. He’s looking back at me calmly. Once again, I can’t tell what he’s thinking. Can Georgie? Or is that part of the attraction? “I don’t understand.”

  “He didn’t understand the dynamic between Georgie and Lissa.”

  “Nobody did.” I sound peevish. I feel peevish.

  Adam looks at me closely. “Even you?”

  “Even me.”

  He pauses as if thinking that over, then moves forward on the edge of the sofa, his elbows resting on his knees, his long forearms pointing toward me. “Well, anyway. He didn’t understand it, the intensity of it. Then there’s the story you’ve just heard, and then Duncan said something a few days ago, I don’t even know what exactly, but some throwaway comment that’s had him wondering if they were maybe—” He stops and replaces his words with a slight twitch of his fingers, and just as I’m starting to shake my head, to say I don’t get it, then suddenly I do. “I think all he can see is Georgie and Lissa, all tangled up in their schemes together.”

  I let that sink in for a moment. Georgie and Lissa. They used to talk late into the night and end up falling asleep in the same bed all the time, but I never saw anything specific—certainly nothing that couldn’t be explained away by just being the very closest of friends, with that sort of interest in them stemming from unbridled male fantasy, and yet . . . “Why doesn’t he just ask her?”

  “He can’t. And”—he spreads his hands wide, and his lips twist wryly—“it’s Georgie. Even if she deigned to answer, I’m not sure he would believe her.”

  “If she answered, she’d be telling the truth.” He nods in agreement. “Why don’t you ask her?”

  “It doesn’t feel like any of my business.” I blink. Really? I can’t imagine thinking that the sexuality of who I’m sleeping with isn’t my business. He cocks his head. “But just to warn you, Jem might ask you, though.”

  “Well, I’ll just say no. Regardless.” He goes oddly still at regardless, and I suddenly realize how he’s interpreting that. “Wait, I didn’t mean . . .” I stop and try to regroup, though there’s a slight perverse satisfaction in seeing that he’s not as buttoned-up as he’d like to be. “In all honesty, I don’t have an answer. I really don’t. But he needs to hear a solid no, so that’s what I’ll tell him.” Adam nods. “Though maybe that’s kind of worse for him, don’t you think?”

  “What do you mean?” His gleaming eyes are trained on my face.

  “Isn’t it simpler if you can explain away their connection as sexual? If it was something else, something deeper and more, I don’t know, more unfathomable—well, how could anyone ever compete with that?”

  Adam sits back on the sofa and throws an arm casually along the back of it. “But there is no competition. Lissa is dead.”

  I shake my head; his logic is flawed. “You’re looking at it the wrong—”

  But Duncan and Steve are joining us. “So I’ve been trying to work it out,” says Steve in a teasing tone. “Swimming is the connection between you all. So which of you lot is the best swimmer?”

  “Duncan,” Adam and I chorus together.

  “Well, no, it depends,” says Duncan, though I can see he’s flattered by our immediate response—and by the fact that Steve looks like it’s what he was expecting to hear. He settles next to Adam on the sofa, and Adam shifts up to give him space. “Pool swimming is different to open water. Lissa was the best at breaststroke; Bron was the best at two hundred meters butterfly.”

  “I’m really good up to, oh, all of ten meters, at head-up front crawl,” Adam tosses in, self-deprecatingly.

  Steve looks confused. “He’s really a water polo player. Played for England under eighteens,” explains Duncan. “Graeme, too.” Steve looks suitably impressed. I look at my phone. Still no reception; still no Wi-Fi.

  “And for the open water stuff?” Steve asks, transparently searching for a lighter topic than Graeme.

  “Duncan again,” I say. “And then Georgie. She’s always the fittest out of all of us.”

  “Training has always been like a religion for her,” Duncan says. “She didn’t have the easiest home life, our Georgie. She once said that without swimming she’d have never resurfaced after her sister died.”

  “She said that?” I ask, unable to hide my surprise. Duncan nods. “Wow. She literally never talks about Maddy.” I look around: where is Georgie anyway?

  “Well, she was drunk at the time.” He grimaces briefly as if to add, Plus ça change.

  “Maddy was her sister?” Steve is looking around expectantly, awaiting more.

  Duncan explains. “Maddy died when Georgie was about fifteen; she was much younger, only about five. Georgie adored her, apparently. Anyway, Georgie was out with friends, and Maddy had a seizure. Her parents didn’t even notice; they were pretty heavy on the . . .” He tilts his hand toward his mouth, miming drinking from a bottle. “Georgie found her when she got home.” Adam is looking across at Duncan, too, his face indecipherable, though I’m sure this can’t be news to him. Or can it? I’m never sure what men really tell one another.

  Steve puffs his cheeks and then blows out slowly. “Christ.”

  “Sorry,” Duncan says to Steve. “Didn’t mean to get so serious. Jem!” he says, catching sight of him approaching. “Come join us.” He hooks the armchair next to mine with his ankle, pulling it out for Jem.

  My phone is suddenly chiming. I scramble to grab it. “Wi-Fi! At last!”

  Adam’s eyebrows quirk up minutely. “I didn’t have you down as an avid Instagrammer,” he teases.

  “Hardly. I just need to check on something for Kitty’s school. Rob’s not on the email list.” I briefly debate disappearing off to a quiet corner, but that would look odd; why would I want to hide a school missive? Instead I stay where I am, in the large armchair opposite Adam, Duncan and Steve, with Jem on my left
now, while I Google the bank’s mobile site, wondering when I last logged on and whether I can remember the password. I probably haven’t done this since the accounts were first created; they’re not with the bank that holds Rob’s and my current accounts. These are the kids’ Child Trust Fund accounts, designed especially for tax-free savings—literally the only activity is that money is dripped into them each month, by way of the standing order I’ve set up; the money can’t even be withdrawn until the child turns eighteen. I’ve never bothered looking at the balances online; I just glance at the annual summaries when they arrive by post.

  It’s a damning testament to my poor password security—almost every online account has the same one—that I gain access on my first attempt. I find I’m holding my breath as the page loads. And suddenly there, on the account summary page, are the eight-digit numbers for Kitty and Jack’s accounts, in bold black.

  They match.

  It’s impossible, but they match. With scant concern for who is watching, I pull the scrap of paper out of my pocket to double-check. Two clicks take me to the account details page.

  They match.

  Every single digit; the sort code, too. They match. Just like I somehow always knew they would. From not breathing at all, I find I’m almost panting; I have to deliberately calm myself before anyone thinks I’m having a seizure. I glance around quickly, but the men are engaged in a conversation about US politics, and Georgie still hasn’t reappeared. I’m almost too afraid to click through to the account balances, but I force myself. The total on Kitty’s account is just a jumble of digits that is meaningless to me, until suddenly the position of the separator resolves into sense and I have to stifle a gasp. There’s tens of thousands more than there should be in there—and the same in Jack’s. Far more than the tax-free allowance—I find myself wondering if that jeopardizes the tax-free status of the allowable savings, and then realize with rising hysteria that that is the very least of my worries. There’s no question that it’s real now. There’s no question of it being an accident, either. Somebody did this. Somebody did this deliberately; somebody did this for a reason, targeting me with sly, malicious, targeted intent. Because this isn’t just a case of money laundering, of using these accounts as a temporary step in a layering process, part of an attempt to hide the origin of the cash. Nobody would steal money to put it in an account that they absolutely, positively couldn’t get it out of. Nobody would do that. And yet, there it is.

  I need to think. I need to take a moment and think this through.

  “Everything okay?” Adam asks, turning away from the group, and suddenly I hate him and his dark, watchful eyes with a passion beyond reason. I hate him, and I hate Duncan, and I hate Jem, and Georgie and everyone and anyone who could possibly be behind this. Because, whatever the reason, whatever the intent, surely it has to be someone who knows me. “Bron? What’s wrong?”

  “Lice,” I say brightly, scratching theatrically at my scalp. “There’s nits at the school again. Even just reading about it makes my head itch.” I cock my head. “Where’s Georgie? Shall I check on her?” And without waiting for an answer, I get up from the armchair and leave the bar.

  I get as far as two twists along the path before I have to throw myself into the dark foliage and bend double, my entire meal spewing from my mouth in one spasm of extraordinary force. Some of the vomit spatters back at me off the thick, unfamiliar leaves, gray-black in the darkness; I feel it pebble-dashing my bare legs and feet. I stand up shakily, tears leaking from the corners of my eyes, though I don’t even have the energy to screw my face into an accompanying grimace of misery. The wind has dropped since the sun went down, and the night is silent except for the odd chirping of some kind of cricket-like insect and a low undertone of music from the bar. My eyes are clearing now: I can see in sharp relief the vivid greens of the bushes where the low lighting of the path touches them every five meters or so down the pathway. My head is clearing, too. The acrid smell of vomit is crusted in my nose, around my mouth, and like a perverse kind of smelling salts, it provides unexpected clarity. I have nowhere to go, literally nowhere is safe. And if nowhere is safe, then any place is as good, or as bad, as any another. Which means that I may as well go to my room, since I have to clean myself up.

  And then, once I’ve done that, I’ll have to clean up whatever kind of mess I’m in.

  EIGHT

  GEORGIE

  I don’t think about where I’m going; I just go. It’s a trick I discovered as a teenager, when I had to find a way to get myself to all those early-morning swim sessions. A 5:30 a.m. wake-up is brutal; a 5:30 a.m. wake-up as a teenager without supportive parents to chivy you along is almost impossible. The trick I discovered, though, is beautiful in its simplicity: you just don’t think. No questioning, no internal debate, not a single moment allowed for contemplation: you simply get out of bed, dress, grab your bag and leave. Unthinking, unquestioning, uncaring. An automaton.

  The trick is easier at the crack of dawn, though, when one’s mind is not exactly primed for analysis. Here and now, at the other end of the day, my brain is suspicious; it doesn’t take long before it fears it’s being hoodwinked. But I manage to make it three-quarters of the way there before the internal debate hardens into solid thought. Not that there’s so very much to debate.

  This is stupid and pointless.

  Yes, but I’m going anyway.

  And then there’s no point at all in debating, because I’m there. Here. Kanu Cove, again. It is different at night; I knew it would be. There’s the same low, unobtrusive lighting that’s present along all the pathways in the rest of the resort, though somehow it seems even dimmer here. And it sounds different here, too: there are still faint noises from the rest of the resort, but they seem dampened, whereas the water itself sounds louder, more urgent; the waves run and race and crash on the small beach at the head of the cove. There are lights at either end of the narrow stone pier that runs for some meters along one side of the tongue of water, where I had my encounter with the local man previously. I find my way there again, though thankfully alone this time, sandals in one hand, bare toes flexing against the still-warm stone beneath them as I squint at the inky blackness of the water. I’m not sure if I’m seeing, or imagining, occasional white tips out in the center of the expanse of water. The only solid marker is a light on a buoy, perhaps the same buoy that marked the lobster pots. Is the serpent in this cove, slipping soundlessly in and out of the narrow mouth between the cliffs to wind itself around the metal chain that leads ever deeper, link by link, to secure the buoy to the seabed? Or does it sleep at night, coiled in a deep, dark cave somewhere—or stretched out on the ocean floor, moving gently like a standard in the deep currents? Or perhaps it hunts at night. Perhaps even now it’s preparing its next attack—not in the way that we humans do, out of malice or fear or driving anger, but with emotionless calculation, relentlessly driven by implacable animal instinct that cannot be appealed to or appeased.

  Kanu takes. Takes who wants taken. The ambiguity of those statements has been a stray thread for my mind to constantly worry at. It was surely just poor English, but still . . . Did he mean Kanu the cove, or Kanu the serpent? Did he actually mean to say that Kanu takes what it wants to take, or that it takes those who want to be taken?

  If I wanted to be taken, this would be the place. Not Horseshoe Bay, with its air of sanitized domesticity—no self-respecting serpent would haunt Horseshoe Bay. This cove, though, has a wildness to it, not just in the water, but also in the land, in its abrupt drop from cliff top to water’s edge, more fjord than bay. I was so sure at first, that Lissa didn’t want that, that she couldn’t have wanted that, but my subconscious has been tugging away at that loose thread nonetheless: sifting through every line of every email, every word of every conversation, over and over, constantly looking for the meaning that I missed the first time round, trying to see afresh from every angle. But after all of that endles
s mulling, all I can say is that I’m sure I don’t know. How can it be that I don’t know?

  I’ve been thinking, too, of the beginning: the beginning of Lissa and me. Perhaps that’s natural at the end of something, or perhaps it’s because of Jem’s questions about—how did he describe it?—our intensity. But Lissa was literally the first person who truly understood me; who would always be on my side. I don’t think either of us had forged strong friendships at school; in my case, most likely because I was so full of grief and anger, after Maddy’s death, that I was numbed to feeling anything else. There were plenty of people at school that I called friends, but none that I would have opened up to. Maddy’s death: that’s another thing that Lissa understood. I told her about it very early on, perhaps only a couple of weeks into the first term; that’s how instant our connection was, forged initially through us both quite clearly being not just the keenest on a party, but also having the stamina—nay, sheer determination—to keep the party going when others fell away. But it was the conversations we had when everyone else fell away that bound us together.

  Everyone kept saying it was just a terrible tragedy, I told her bitterly. And all I could think was, if I had just been there—I mean, I know it wasn’t my fault—

  God, no, she said, somehow clear-eyed despite it being long past midnight. Of course it wasn’t your fault. But everyone would have said that. It was what she said next that was important, the thing that nobody else would have said even if it did cross their mind: It was your parents’ fault. They’re the ones to blame.

  I bend to take off my sandals, thinking that I could sit on the edge of the pier again. I could dangle my bare feet into the black, secretive water, as surely she must have done. I could do that, maybe I need to do that, to put myself in her place—after all, it was what I intended to do in coming here—but now that I am here, I’m too scared. Because what if it works? What if I feel what she was feeling? What if, even if only for the briefest of moments, I find myself wanting to be taken, too? What do I have to stop me?