Dead Girls

by Abigail Tarttelin

  Suddenly everyone turns to look at me, including Mrs. A. They have all gone silent. I wonder if they heard me. “Thera? Thera Wilde?”

  At the door there are two police officers, a man and a woman. They are wearing neon-yellow jackets over black uniforms, and both are holding their hats. The lady police officer is older and she has curly hair. The man is about Dad’s or Mrs. Adamson’s age (Dad is thirty-four) and he is saying my name like a question to Mrs. Adamson, but the woman is looking straight at me. I saw her on the road yesterday and she looked at me the same way, like a hawk, with golden eyes. When I look right at her now she blinks, and then nods at me. I look down quickly and remember Hattie on the phone last night: “There’s something you’re not telling me.”

  “Leave your work for now, Thera,” Mrs. Adamson says.

  “But it’s almost break time,” I say, not getting up.

  “I can pack everything into your reading folder and bring it to you.” She smiles at me sadly, her eyes watery. She cried earlier, while she was hugging Hattie. “Go on.”

  I stand up slowly. I make the mistake of looking across to Hattie’s table, where she is smirking at me and looking tearful at the same time. She looks away from me quickly and whispers something to Poppy. I tuck my chair in and walk over to the police. The man goes out the door first and I follow him, and then the lady is behind me, as if she is stopping me from running away. There is another policeman in the hallway. Mr. Kent is standing by the staffroom door, holding it open. He’s our headmaster. He speaks really softly, like Kaa the snake from The Jungle Book. He gives me and Billie the creeps.

  “Thera,” he says, and puts his hand on my back, then sits down next to me. He makes me feel worse, poorly in my tummy, because of his hand on my back and his stupid, weird smile.

  “Did…did you find Billie?” I say. It comes out a whisper.

  “Not yet,” the policewoman says. “Thera, I’m Detective Georgina Waters. You can call me Georgie. You are Thera Wilde?”

  I nod. “My name is Thera Leigh Wilde and I’m eleven years, three months, five days, seventeen hours and about thirty-two minutes old.”

  She sits down and leans in toward me. “And do you know Billie Brooke?”

  Do I know Billie Brooke? Do I know Billie? How am I supposed to answer that?

  Billie May Brooke and I have been best, true, forever friends since we were in the same prenatal class in our mums’ tummies when we were minus-six months old. We probably communicated in dot-dot-dot, dash-dash-dash (i.e. Morse code) through their womb walls. Billie’s mum and dad moved back to here from London before she was born because both her grandparents live here, in Eastcastle, and her parents thought they might help with babysitting. I was born a month earlier than Billie, on the first of April. Dad says because I was born on April Fool’s Day, they must have sent a joke baby, and one day they will send the real one, and I’ll have to go live on my own in a tent in the woods. He’s just kidding, though. He tickles me while he says this. Billie was born on the first of May. I arrived early and she arrived late. This still happens.

  For a few years after we were born, we didn’t see each other much, because tiny babies can’t really have friends because they don’t do anything. The first photo I have of us is from just after this time. It was Bonfire Night when we were three and a half, and I am standing up and looking into the camera, holding a toffee apple. Billie is crouching down on the left of the photo, picking up some snow, because it was a really cold November. It’s funny because, even though we are really little, we totally look like us, and our faces and expressions look the same. Billie is talking, saying something about what we are doing, absorbed in the task like she always is when we play games, with her mouth open and her eyes looking down. I am more aware of what is going on around us than Billie, which is still true. I have noticed someone is taking a picture of us, and I am looking at the camera, and my face is white because of the flash, and my eyes are big and round. We are both in Wellingtons and warm, colorful clothes and knit caps. I think I can remember this moment, because the toffee apple was sticky and stuck to my hands, and I’m sure we were talking about putting snowballs down people’s pants as we ran around the fireworks display, while everyone was looking up at the sky.

  When we were three, Billie’s mum and dad finally moved into their house now, which is a long 1950s bungalow with loads of light, in the middle of the fields on the outskirts of the village. In the living room, there is a glass wall and it goes up into a triangle at the top, and they have no attic, just the ceiling. Billie’s mum and dad are a lot older than mine. They met each other when they were already old, almost forty, and they had to get the doctor’s help to get pregnant with Billie. She’s their miracle baby. Then they both retired when they moved back here so they could spend as much time with Billie as possible. Her dad was an electrician and made megamoney when they lived in London, and her mum used to be an interior designer. She did loads of famous people’s houses, like Chris Evans’s from The Big Breakfast and Stephen Gately from Boyzone. She designed the inside of the house they have now, and the workers worked on it for almost three years while they lived in Eastcastle. The people who built it were from Yorkshire, and they had lost all their money in the eighties. They tore everything out of the house and sold all their things, and then they sold the house to a developer, but then that developer lost their money in a scam, so they left the house to ruin and it got all damp. Billie’s mum and dad got it cheap because it needed lots of work. I have only ever seen it when it has looked really cool. Everything in it is from the fifties, apart from the TV, Billie’s stuff, and all the rubbish in Billie’s mum and dad’s bedroom, which is a total mess. On Billie’s eighth birthday we played hide-and-seek, and Billie and I hid in there because Billie’s dad said it was impossible to find anything in there. No one found us and they were searching for ages. We made a tent out of a shirt (Billie’s dad is the tallest man I’ve ever met, and also quite wide) and ate Mini Rolls underneath it.

  Once they moved to the village, Billie’s mum and dad would leave Billie at my house when they went to the shops, and when my mum and dad went out they left me at Billie’s. Sometimes all our parents went out for meals together, and Billie’s nanny and granddad would come over to her house and babysit Billie and me, or my nanny would come to ours and babysit. Then Sam came along, and my mum stayed at home for a year because Dad and Mum had good enough jobs by then, and after that year Billie and I started at playgroup. That’s where we met Hattie and Poppy. At playgroup we liked to play a lot outside, in the big tractor tire, and pretend we were in a sinking ship and we had to bail out. We also played inside, in the little house that was made of big plastic bricks. I wet myself next to it once because I was too embarrassed to ask the teacher if I could go to the toilet. Billie also wet herself once at playgroup, but afterward she just stood there with her legs spread wide apart, laughing her head off. “Sploosh!” she kept saying, which was the noise it had made, and then laughing so hysterically that tears started to come down her cheeks, her legs gave way and she had to sit down in the puddle of her own pee, which she thought was even funnier.

  We played dolls in the brick house. We liked the black and the Asian baby dolls, because they were the prettiest. We made a plan that, when we grow up, Billie is going to adopt an Asian baby and I’m going to adopt a black one. We’re not going to have boyfriends, because boys are boring (apart from Sam) and just fart all the time (including Sam) or come up to us when we’re playing and kick us and run away laughing. Mrs. Adamson says this is because they fancy us (but I know she means they fancy Billie).

  Hattie was already mean in playgroup, but no matter how mean Hattie was to me, Billie would never join in. She would just say, “Come on, Thera, let’s go and tuck the children in,” like nothing bad was happening, and we would go and tuck in Denise and Melanie, which is what we called the dolls.

  I remember how, on the first da
y of primary school, Billie was so scared she hid behind her mum the whole morning, until her mum said, “Billie, this is getting ridiculous,” and left at lunchtime. Later, Billie made a joke out of it, but I was the only one who she admitted to that she actually had been scared, and I promised I’d never tell.

  I remember how she liked eating bees when she was about five, and you could see the little legs falling out the sides of her mouth, and her mum used to scream when she saw her do it, but she never got stung, not once.

  I remember when Ken and Paul got married and we left them in their honeymoon bed, and Billie’s mum found them, and Billie said, “What? They’re making a baby. You love babies.”

  I remember when we made our cookery show, Baking with Barbary Apes, because we had seen them on the television, and Billie couldn’t stop laughing because we had to pretend to be screaming monkeys and tell recipes to the video camera, like “Eeeee! Eeeee! Oo-oo-aa-aa!” meant “Weigh two hundred grams of sugar and add it to the butter,” and she had eaten loads of Victoria sponge cake batter and she had some in her mouth while she was screaming instructions about what temperature to preheat the oven to, and then she started choking on the batter because she was laughing so much, and then she stopped choking and was sick all down herself and still couldn’t stop laughing.

  I remember when we did our eleven-plus exams, which is the test you do to see whether you can go to the good school or the bad one, and she was so nervous she had to take three toilet breaks, and one of the questions was “Where on this chart does the fetus reach peak growth?” and Billie realized afterward she had written “No.”

  I remember when we went to see the big school (the good one, which we both got into even with all the toilet breaks), and a boy laughed at me (we still don’t know why), and even though he was like six feet tall, Billie turned back over her shoulder and yelled, “Hey! Why does your face look like a bum?” and then burst out laughing, and I had to grab her and pull her into a run, because otherwise he would have caught us and beaten us up, and probably they wouldn’t have let us go to the good school because they would think we were ruffians.

  We go over to each other’s houses at least once a week on school days and play together every weekend. Most weekends we also have a sleepover. We do art club and French club together, and we have been to see Tattershall Castle, Bolingbroke Castle, and the London Dungeon in the last year, and we have the same T-shirt from the London Dungeon (on that visit we decided to try to contact ghosts, but we didn’t successfully do it until the black dogs incident). Next term, when we are at the big school, we are going to do kung fu together in Eastcastle with a man called Gert, who Billie’s dad says is a black belt.

  Last year we both stabbed ourselves in the little finger so we could mush our blood together and be tied together for life. We agreed that, even if we had an infectious disease in our blood, it would be better if the both of us had it because then we would be shunned by society together. Billie likes angel pudding, Australian accents, the tiniest orange in the bowl, playing conkers, her red yo-yo better than the green one, Um Bongo, monkey nuts, monkeys, pandas, the Secret Seven series by Enid Blyton, poo jokes, limericks, brown sugar better than white sugar, and Opal Fruits better than Fruit Pastilles. Purple is her favorite color, she fancies Slater from Saved by the Bell and Randy from Home Improvement (I fancy Zack from Saved by the Bell and Brad from Home Improvement), her favorite book is Black Beauty, her favorite TV show is Ren & Stimpy (mine is Clarissa Explains It All), her favorite band is Hanson, and her favorite food is blue Smarties. Ask me anything. Ask me literally any question about Billie, and I will be able to answer it, and if you asked her if I was right, she would say I always would be.

  If I don’t know Billie May Brooke, no one ever will.

  I end up not talking for a few seconds while I’m thinking about this, and Georgie clears her throat. “Your mum and dad tell us you’re Billie’s best friend,” she says. “You remember you spoke about her to the police who came to see you on Saturday night?”

  “Best, true, forever friend. Hattie and Poppy are Billie’s best friends, but Billie and I are best, true, forever friends.”

  The policeman smiles like I am joking, but Georgie doesn’t.

  “How long have you been best, true, forever friends?” she asks.

  “Since we were babies.”

  “And what’s Billie like? How would you describe her personality?”

  I chew my lip and then blurt out, “Funny, bubbly, and happy-go-lucky.”

  “You must have lots of fun together. What does she like to do?”

  “Play pretend games and draw. And listen to music. We like the Spice Girls.”

  “Do you have any ideas about where she might be?”

  “We always said we would run away to London and start a pop group.”

  “You think she’s run away?”

  “Why else wouldn’t she come home?” I hesitate. “But…”

  “But what, Thera?”

  “Well…if she had run away, I don’t see why she would have run away without me. We do everything together. I could understand if she was mad at me, but…” I stutter. I feel like I have to convince Georgie that we weren’t arguing, she’s glaring at me so hard. “But we never fight, ever, and anyway, she was fine when I left her.”

  “Was she?”

  I nod. “Yeah, totally. We were laughing. We were playing with the predictor, and—”

  “What’s a predictor, Thera?”

  “Um. A bit of paper that tells you who you’re going to marry.”

  Georgie nods. “We read about that in your diary. Can you show us?”

  I pick up a piece of paper off the coffee table between us and tear it into a square, wetting the fold with spit. “Billie’s better at it,” I mumble, but I make her a predictor, folding the paper into a kite, then squishing it up into the right shape. “And then you write the numbers and names on here.”

  “Ah, yes,” she says quietly. “I remember those.”

  There are some quick footsteps outside the room. I hear a man’s voice. “Oh, Mrs—”

  “Where is Detective Waters? They told me she was here. She’s in charge of the search and rescue and she isn’t even out there fucking searching!”

  “She’s interviewing the girl who was with—”

  “Do you people understand an eleven-year-old has gone missing? Every hour, every minute, something could—”

  There are the sounds of footsteps dancing around other footsteps, and Billie’s mum opens the door of the office. “Georgina,” she says, looking at Georgie. Then Billie’s mum looks at me. Her eyes widen like her eyeballs might fall out of her head. “Thera!”

  Georgie immediately goes out the door, and Billie’s mum backs away, but the door is still open and I can hear what they are saying.

  “Why are you interviewing her? I thought you interviewed her the night Billie disappeared? Do you have new evidence?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say.”

  “Why?” Billie’s mum snaps. Then she says, as if she has suddenly thought of it, “The police at the quarry said you had her diary. Did you find anything in it?”

  “You shouldn’t have been told about that, now—”

  “I’m her mother!”

  “Mrs. Brooke”—Georgie’s voice becomes steely—“if you accost me like this, I can’t do my work, and as you pointed out, time is slipping away from us.”

  There is a silence.

  When Billie’s mum speaks again, she is just murmuring. I can barely hear her. “Are you asking her about that man?”

  “Rebecca,” Georgie says, calmer now too. “I’ll have to report anything you say in Thera’s presence to her parents—”

  “Billie is missing!” Billie’s mum snaps again, but this time it’s different. This time it’s more sad than angry. “My Billie has been m
issing for three nights. She is eleven years old. Do you think I care that you’ll report what I say to Frances? This investigation is…When you move to the middle of nowhere you think you’ll never need the police and then—oh God!” She starts gasping loudly, like she can’t breathe. “Oh God, help me. Billie. Where is my baby? Billie…” She moans. I look at Mr. Kent and the policeman. Billie’s mum is crying. They sit there. Why aren’t they doing anything? Billie’s mum is right. They are useless.

  “We’re doing everything we can,” Georgie says.

  “What did Thera say?” Billie’s mum says, and then she adds, “This could have happened to Thera, couldn’t it? They were there together. If she hadn’t dared my daughter…if she hadn’t made her go up to that man…”