Toxic

by Nicci Cloke

  Emily had told her friends she was going to the strip.

  Emily had gone missing.

  My friends had lied about where they were when it happened.

  My heart beating fast, I clicked onto the next photo. But it was of the four of us in the Red Lion on the last day, and I remembered Lucy taking it.

  And that was the last photo in the album. I flicked back to the two from that night, really searching them this time. Was that even the same colour hair as Emily’s? I opened the article I’d found about her going missing and tried to look at them side by side. It could have been her hair – but then it wasn’t as if it was a particularly unusual colour, not like blue or something really recognisable.

  Hardly damning evidence, I tried to tell myself. Isn’t it more likely they just lied because they wanted a night out without you?

  I closed my laptop and lay there until it got light.

  I DID TRY. Know that, if nothing else. The next morning, I pulled out my trainers and I jogged down to the park and I tried to feel something. Anything. My brain knew that the sun was on my face and the music was pounding in my ears, but it all felt so distant, like it was happening to someone else. When I got home, I stood in the shower and let the water wash over me for a long time.

  Back in my room, my phone was ringing. Steph.

  ‘Hey.’

  ‘Hey, cuz,’ I could hear her heels clicking along the pavement. ‘Just on my lunch, thought I’d give you a call. Wanted to congratulate you on your results.’

  My stomach twisted. ‘Oh. Thanks.’

  ‘Well, you sound happy about it. What’s up – secretly hoping for four As?’

  I tried to brighten my voice. ‘Nah, just tired.’

  ‘Out celebrating all week?’

  ‘Yeah, something like that.’ I sank down on the edge of the bed. ‘How are you, anyway?’

  ‘Ummm.’ I heard the beeping of a pedestrian crossing, her footsteps speeding up. ‘Yeah, I’m good. Knackered. But fine.’

  ‘Uncle D taking the pottery world by storm yet?’

  ‘Not exactly. He’s still trying to master the humble plate. The garden looks kind of like an archaeologist has uncovered the remains of a Roman dinner party or something.’

  I laughed. It felt strange.

  ‘Hey,’ she said. ‘I saw something on Twitter yesterday about Malia.’

  The knots in my stomach tightened. ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘Yeah, someone had retweeted something about a missing girl who was there in July. Kind of creepy, huh?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s horrible,’ I said.

  ‘Apparently she just went out one night and then didn’t show up at her hotel. No sign of her since.’

  ‘Wow.’ I didn’t know what else to say.

  ‘It really sucks being a girl, cuz,’ she said. ‘I’m telling you, half the time it feels like you’re always one step away from being a missing poster or an obituary.’

  I wondered what Steph would think of the way we’d all abandoned Hope on the beach. I didn’t have to wonder very hard.

  ‘OK, I’ve gotta head back into work,’ she said, interrupting that thought. ‘Speak soon, yeah?’

  ‘Yeah. Have a good day.’

  I was about to hang up when she said, ‘Logan?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘You sure you’re all right?’

  I was really glad that this was just a regular call, no FaceTime. ‘Yeah,’ I said, and I managed to lift my voice enough for it to sound convincing.

  After I hung up, I opened Facebook and went straight to Nate’s profile. The album was at the top of his page and I opened it, searching through the thumbnails to find the photo again.

  I blinked, checked again. I clicked on the last photo – the one of the four of us in the Red Lion, and then went backwards, to where the photo had been the day before. But the previous one in the album was the one on the beach at the island.

  I went backwards and forwards through every photo three or four times. But I wasn’t imagining it – those two photos of the three of them that night had disappeared. They’d been deleted.

  A COUPLE OF days later, I couldn’t pretend I was ill any more, not to Mum or Daisy. So when Daisy asked if I wanted to meet at the park, I said yes. I was just finishing getting dressed when my phone buzzed with a message from Dev.

  Dude check this out!

  There was a link pasted in and he’d followed it with a laughing emoji and a shocked one. I clicked and it took me through to a TV channel’s website, to their catch-up player. I scrolled down to the programme title. Sun, Sand and Secrets on Tour: Malia.

  I flipped open my laptop and opened the website on there instead, so that I could see it properly.

  In the final episode of the series, the Sun, Sand and Secrets team hit the Greek island of Crete to check out legendary party destination Malia. We follow a group of young thrill-seekers as the fishbowls flow … but what happens on tour doesn’t always stay on tour …

  I picked up my phone and messaged Dev back.

  Are we on this?

  Mate watch it!

  I reached out and clicked play on my laptop, my stomach churning. I hadn’t seen any cameras filming us, I tried to reason with myself. It wasn’t as if a camera crew could have followed Zack and me down that alley – and even if they had, Dev would hardly have sent it to me with a laughing face.

  Would he?

  ‘Tonight on Sun, Sand and Secrets …’ the voiceover woman was saying. She had a friendly, familiar Scottish accent – she was off a soap or something, but I couldn’t concentrate enough to remember which one. I was too busy watching the clips they were playing. Packed bars and people cheering at the camera, a girl standing in the middle of the strip downing a fishbowl while half of it spilled over her. Two boys fighting outside a bar – my heart dropped in my chest, but it wasn’t us – and then a couple snogging up against a police car.

  It made me feel wrong. Anxious, hungover – like my brain was remembering all of the bad stuff and none of the good. They showed a clip of someone throwing up on the road, and I thought I was going to heave too.

  When the programme started properly, it introduced two sets of friends – two boys from Newcastle and a group of four girls from London. I didn’t recognise any of them and my stomach started to settle, just a bit. The screen showed both groups getting ready for their first night out and then them venturing onto the strip, and their excitement started to bring back some of the good feeling I’d had on our first night. I remembered what it was like, taking in all the colours and the lights and the music, this feeling like all the adults had gone away and left us kids to play. Rides and shots and glow sticks and everyone trying to get your attention, everyone trying to help you have a good time.

  I got so lost in the memory of it that I even started looking for us whenever they showed footage of a bar or club or crowded bits of the strip. I started looking out for anyone I recognised – and then I remembered Emily, and the good feeling went away.

  The girls got up on the bar in one place and started dancing, people passing them shot after shot. One of them fell off and twisted her ankle, and the camera crew followed them as one of her friends give her a piggyback to the 24-hour walk-in clinic right in the middle of the strip. The resigned-looking guy there bandaged it up and took her insurance details, while her mates sat outside eating chips.

  They cut to the guys then, who were hanging around a bar and trying to get chatting to girls – any girls; they didn’t seem that picky. ‘He’s gonna watch and learn,’ one of them said to the camera, looking hammered already and pointing to his mate, ‘because tonight I’m gonna show him how to take the trash out.’

  I tapped the trackpad to see how much of the programme was left – I was almost halfway through and there was no sign of any of us. Maybe Dev had just sent it because it had given him that happy first-night feeling too. Maybe he just wanted me to remember how we’d all been instead of focusing on the mess we were in now.<
br />
  But then I saw Nate. The edge of his face, just passing the camera as it filmed the two guys throwing some dodgy shapes on the dance floor.

  It was enough though. I knew that this was the same week. I knew that we were there too.

  I didn’t have to wait long. After a couple of clips of the groups hungover on the beach and of one of the girls panicking that she’d lost her passport, there was another night out.

  I recognised the bar right away. Rodeo. My eyes kept trying to go to the part of the room we’d been in, but the camera was facing the wrong way. It was an agonising couple of minutes before one of the girls persuaded another that they should go on the buckin’ bronco and the camera panned through the crowd to follow them.

  And there we were. All of us, with our two fishbowls, bouncing a bit to the music and watching people around us. We were drunk, I could tell, although we weren’t doing anything embarrassing. JB leaned in to say something to Dev, arm round him, and I turned to Nate, and then, just like that, the camera was past us and we were gone.

  I dragged the slider back and watched the scene again. Hope laughing at something with Zack, Dev going in for another swig of fishbowl before JB leaned in to tell him whatever it was he was telling him.

  I watched it again. I don’t know what I was looking for.

  Even though I’d been afraid before, now I couldn’t stop looking for us, wanting to see us. I wanted to climb back through that screen and into my body – to tell JB not to be scared about telling us who he liked and who he didn’t, and to make Zack understand that it wasn’t a big deal. I wanted to grab Dev by the face and tell him that it was OK to still miss Mollie, that he didn’t have to prove anything by pulling anyone who’d have him. And Hope … I wanted to tell Hope how good it was that we were mates. I wanted to stop myself flirting with her just because me and Daisy had had a stupid row, because Hope deserved better than that.

  But all I could do was watch.

  Watch and rewatch and wonder.

  The two Geordie boys made friends with a group from Liverpool and rented mopeds. I was surprised Zack hadn’t thought of that. They were shown driving down the strip just as the sun was setting, whooping and revving their engines as the lights stuttered on and the chairs were set out.

  The show cut back to the girls, the voiceover lady explaining that the missing passport had been found and everything was OK. They were getting ready for their last night out and I tensed, wondering where it’d be. Where we would be. What if they’d managed to film me and Hope sitting out on the steps? Would it look bad?

  But the girls were in a club I didn’t recognise, and when they cut to the boys, they were in Guys and Dolls, the massive super-club which cost twenty euros to get into and which we’d heard was crap.

  I checked the scrub bar – only a couple of minutes left of the episode. One of the girls was being sick outside while another held her hair back and the others sang a Rihanna song. And the boys were celebrating one of them getting off with one of the Liverpudlian girls that he liked by buying kebabs.

  ‘And so another night on the strip draws to a close,’ the voiceover woman said. ‘And it looks like not everyone’s had such a great time …’

  There were more clips of people being sick and the two boys they’d shown in the introduction fighting, plus a girl crying on the steps of a club, her make-up running down her face. And then a girl lying …

  A girl lying on the beach.

  Alone.

  Skirt up round her waist.

  My hand was shaking as I scrolled back a couple of seconds and watched again. I had to pause it – it was only a split second of footage, before they moved on to three guys pissing up against a McDonalds – but I knew it was her. Her face was turned away from the camera but it was her. It was Hope.

  They’d filmed her and they’d left her there.

  I slammed the lid of my laptop down and grabbed my phone.

  ‘You think that’s funny?’ I yelled, when Dev answered. ‘That was your fault!’

  ‘Huh?’ Through my rage I registered that Dev sounded genuinely bewildered. ‘Logan, what are you talking about?’

  ‘Hope,’ I said, through gritted teeth. ‘You think it’s a joke now?’

  ‘No, of course not, mate. I just thought it was cool, seeing us all on telly, all of us getting on, you know –’

  ‘You thought it was cool to see our friend passed the fuck out where we all left her – on some TV show where the whole world can also see it?’

  There was a silence. ‘Logan, I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

  ‘At the end! Right at the end! They filmed her! On that night. On the beach.’

  ‘What?!’ I could hear him typing something in the background, and then I heard the theme music of the show. ‘Oh my God. I didn’t see that, Logan, I swear. I just saw the six of us in Rodeo.’

  ‘Yeah, well, watch it to the end,’ I said, and I hung up on him.

  I was going to be late to meet Daisy, but I couldn’t stop myself opening the laptop again. It felt wrong watching the footage – I knew Hope wouldn’t want me to, and I wondered if I should even tell her it existed. That someone had not only seen her there, all on her own, but had switched on their camera and filmed her.

  I grabbed my phone and left, just as Dev sent me a message.

  Shit. That’s messed up. I didn’t see it 1st time, I swear

  I didn’t bother replying.

  I couldn’t trust him. Any of them. And Emily Simpson was still missing.

  I ACTUALLY GOT to the park before Daisy. The sun had disappeared behind a massive cloud, but it was warm enough for people to be out in force, so most of the scrappy grass was colonised already. I found a spot near the duck pond and texted Daisy to tell her.

  ‘Hey,’ she said, a few minutes later, dropping her bag and flopping down beside it. ‘Sorry, I had to wait for Mum’s birthday present to be delivered. I missed it the other day and they took it to the sorting office in frigging Huntstable.’

  ‘No worries,’ I said, and then I leaned over, realising we hadn’t kissed yet.

  ‘So,’ she said, after pecking me, ‘you feeling better?’

  ‘Yeah.’ I couldn’t quite meet her eye. ‘I missed you.’

  She smiled. ‘Good. About feeling better, I mean. Missing me is a bonus though.’ She reached for her bag. ‘Hey, I brought processed meat products.’

  I laughed and took a Peperami. ‘I do love my processed meat.’

  ‘I know! I’m such a good girlfriend.’ She tossed a chicken bite into her mouth and grinned at me, and even though the sun was still stubbornly behind a cloud, I felt the truth dawn on me all over again. I would never be good enough for her. I would never be the person she deserved. I was a guy who beat up other guys in alleyways, two against one. I was a guy who left his friend – his ex-girlfriend – passed out on a beach. I was a guy who spent whole days and whole nights in bed because I couldn’t bring myself to even swing one leg out and onto the floor. I was a guy who couldn’t even get a job in a shitty sandwich place or collecting glasses in a bar. Daisy deserved more and she always would.

  ‘Logan?’ Daisy was looking over the top of her sunglasses – round, John Lennon-style ones today, that she’d found in the charity shop in town – at me. ‘You OK?’

  I swallowed, trying to push the thought away. ‘Yeah. Sorry. Not sure I was quite ready for Peperami action just yet.’

  ‘You’re not gonna puke on me, are you?’

  ‘Ha! No, you’re safe for now.’

  I slid my own sunglasses on because that felt better. Daisy knew me too well; she could see that I was hiding something. A tiny, hopeful voice inside me was pushing me to tell her how I’d been feeling. But that meant trying to explain, and I didn’t know how. The word knot was there again, and untangling the words and getting them in the right order seemed impossible.

  And so instead I asked, ‘How’s the book?’

  She made an ‘Eek’ face. ‘I fi
nished it.’

  ‘Wow! Daisy, that’s great!’

  ‘Thank you.’ She hooked the hairband from round her wrist and twisted her hair up into a knot thing. ‘It took a few all-night editing sessions, but I’m really happy with it.’

  ‘It’s amazing. That’s such an achievement.’

  I was totally in awe of her, and it made me feel happy. I know that’s going to sound like a lie, with what comes next, but it did.

  ‘I’m working on a sequel,’ she said. ‘Well, by working on, I mean writing random things in a notebook.’

  ‘You’ve got to give the people what they want,’ I said.

  She smiled. ‘Yeah. Pretty nerve-wracking to be honest. I’ve had loads of comments already from people saying what they want in the sequel. I don’t want to let any of them down.’

  ‘You won’t. Seriously, Daisy. You know this story. You’re the only one who can tell it.’

  She slid her sunglasses down and looked over them at me again. ‘You liked it then?’

  I hadn’t read it.

  And I hate myself just as much for that, trust me.

  ‘I love it,’ I said. ‘But I haven’t finished yet, so no spoilers.’

  I thought I saw a flicker of disappointment on her face and it felt like a knife in my gut.

  I’d wanted to read it, I really had. So many times I’d picked up the laptop and started, but I just couldn’t get the words to go into my brain. I’d spend hours focusing on them, trying to concentrate, but then I’d end up looking at tumblr or comics instead. That’s how stupid I was. Only pictures for the idiot in his bedroom.

  Daisy lay back on the grass, hands resting on her belly. ‘Did you talk to Zack? What he did to JB on results day was so unbelievably unacceptable.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I talked to him.’ I wanted to add, And I’m not talking to him any more, but it seemed so childish, so completely avoiding the problem, that I couldn’t bring myself to say it.

  ‘Good.’ She reached out and stuck her hand in the chicken-bites packet. ‘It’s got to come from your friends, I think. If your friends can’t tell you you’re an absolute asshat, who can?’