Young, Gifted and Dead

by Lucy Carver

  ‘I know – too awful,’ I sighed.

  ‘Which begs the question – what is this?’ Emily asked. ‘I mean, what kind of warped psychopath would interfere with a corpse?’

  chapter six

  I’d already been sleeping badly, but now it became ten times worse. I lay in my narrow bed, tossing and turning with eyes wide open all through Saturday night, waiting for it to be light again. In the bed across the room I heard Paige sigh and turn over to press a button on her bedside alarm. The small light to show the time came on then went off again.

  ‘What time is it?’ I murmured.

  ‘Six fifteen. Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.’

  ‘You didn’t. What you told me earlier about the pathologist’s follow-up report is what’s keeping me awake.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be. I’d have found out anyway.’ There was a long, uncomfortable silence which Paige eventually broke.

  Alyssa, there’s something else.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about Lily’s email.’ Her disembodied voice floated through the darkness and sounded different – quieter and less confident than usual. ‘I don’t want you to think I’m obsessing, but I’m trying to run through her entire message in my head, wondering why she would write the email if it turns out not to be suicide after all. I’ve got through the Hey, Jack, I hope you’re cool bit at the start, then Lily wanting to say goodbye to him because she knew he’d miss her. But what comes after that?’

  ‘She says she’s sober,’ I recalled. ‘Then she tells Jack she’s pregnant – two tests and they both came up positive.’

  ‘Right. Then she says the only person around here that she told was the baby’s father.’

  ‘Who she doesn’t name,’ I said pointedly. ‘And anyway he didn’t want to know. “Why should he?” Lily asked.’

  ‘Because he’s the baby’s father, for Christ’s sake, and it’s a real live potential human being we’re talking about!’ Paige’s voice rose in anger.

  I sat up in bed and turned on my lamp, reciting the rest of Lily’s note from memory. ‘“And I’m telling you now, giving you the reason why I’m going – it’s because I don’t want to go on living the out-of-control way I’ve been living these last few weeks that I’m out of here and won’t be back (too shitty and painful and head-fuckingly awful, and anyway what kind of mother would I be?).”’

  ‘It’s OK, stop there,’ Paige begged. ‘Thanks, Alyssa.’

  ‘So tell me – exactly why are we torturing ourselves by remembering this?’

  Swinging her legs out from under the duvet, she paced from her bed to the window and back again. ‘First off, to remind ourselves that she definitely didn’t say it was Jayden.’

  ‘Yeah, I got that. It bothered me too at first. But then I thought that was typical Lily – even then she was thinking about how he’d cope if everyone pointed the finger at him after she’d gone. She really loved him – she says so in her diary.’

  ‘And, second, I wanted you to run through the message with me so I could be sure that Lily doesn’t actually say that the plan was to kill herself.’ Paige wasn’t really listening to me. ‘I mean, double check that with me – she doesn’t come out in the open and say that that was her plan?’

  I frowned and concentrated. ‘No. She talked about saying goodbye – I suppose that could mean more than the obvious suicide thing.’

  ‘“I don’t want to go on living the out-of-control way I’ve been living these last few weeks”,’ Paige repeated, speaking faster and louder. ‘That’s not the same as wanting to die either. It might mean she was running away, aiming to find a new life where no one knew who she was.’

  ‘“Too shitty and painful”,’ I quoted. ‘But maybe you’re right. ‘You could read it another way – not that she planned to kill herself but that she was going away to get an abortion because she didn’t think she could handle being a mother, and after that she would just disappear and start over.’

  ‘I am right!’ Paige said, sitting beside me in her cosy Joules pyjamas, dark hair tangled into bed-head curls. ‘The way Alyssa wrote the email made it look like she was planning to kill herself because for some reason that’s what she would want the school and her family to believe.’

  ‘Yeah, because if people thought she was missing, presumed dead, the police wouldn’t put so much manpower into finding her. She’d be on a missing-persons list – no big deal.’

  ‘But she sent the email to Jack because he was the one who knew her best and she hoped that sooner or later somebody – him, you, me – would read between the lines and see that this wasn’t a suicide note.’

  ‘We were idiots,’ Paige groaned. ‘Why didn’t we think of it earlier?’

  ‘Lily was secretly telling us she would be on the run from the tyrant and the school.’

  ‘And shit-face Jayden,’ added Paige.

  ‘No,’ I argued, staring sadly at Lily’s empty bed. ‘We were wrong about Jayden too – I was wrong.’

  I slid my hand inside my pillowcase and pulled out Lily’s diary, flicking through the dog-eared pages then reading out loud.

  ‘Monday, July 4th. Met J after school. LOVE HIM!!!’

  I flicked again, through to September to the point where the circle with the dot hieroglyph first appeared. There was a question mark and a smiley face. ‘This comes at the point where Lily and Jayden had the Upper Chartsey house all to themselves,’ I reminded Paige. ‘I still think the circle is code for when she got pregnant – it’s a diagram of a human egg. But, look, she’s using a different colour pen from the main written entry and there’s a question mark as well.’

  ‘Meaning she added the symbols later on and she wasn’t sure if this was the correct date but she wants it to be. She’d be happy if she was right – look at the smiley face.’

  ‘How come she wasn’t sure?’ I wondered.

  ‘Oh, come on, Alyssa.’ Paige’s scepticism was back, full volume. ‘Lily was probably still checking her cycle, finding out which was the most likely date. Maybe she didn’t even know exactly how far on she was.’

  I ignored Paige and followed my own train of thought. ‘Or she wasn’t sure because actually she’d slept with someone else around the same time. She’s saying in code that she’d be happy if Jayden was the father, but she’s not sure.’

  This sent Paige off on one of her rants. ‘Alyssa, Lily was not, I’ll say it again – was not a slapper.’

  I agreed. ‘I’m not even saying she slept with this other guy because she wanted to,’ I said slowly.

  Paige snatched the diary away, slammed it shut and stood up.

  We didn’t come out into the open with the ugly scene that my words had conjured up. In fact, Paige went completely silent on me, grabbed her towel and stormed down the corridor to the shower room.

  At 7.00 a.m., still sitting on my bed thinking, I received a text from Aunt Olivia.

  Dearest A, Dr W phoned – thinks you should come home. Will send train ticket. Keep chin up. Love, Olivia.

  Thanx. Am dealing with it, I texted back. Would rather stay here.

  ‘Wakey, wakey.’ Shirley Welford, our head of maths, came down the girls’ corridor knocking loudly on doors, brisk and old school. ‘Dr Webb has called a special assembly. All students to attend.’

  We assembled, in uniform and all present and correct, at 9.30 in the new library and waited for Saint Sam to show up. The teachers gathered on a small platform at the far end of the room while students stood in huddles right down the brightly lit main body of the building. I stood with Paige and Jack as cold rain blew hard against the floor-to-ceiling windows, making everyone feel grateful to be indoors.

  ‘What’s he going to tell us that we don’t already know?’ Zara complained to Luke and Harry. She obviously hadn’t had time to apply the lippie and mascara, or to fluff up her blonde hair, so she felt more like one of us – ‘us’ meaning specifically me and Paige.

  ‘Se
arch me,’ Harry grumbled. ‘But it had better be worth dragging me out of bed for.’

  That was the general mood at that moment, I guess – scratchy and bad tempered, like you get when a train is delayed due to an accident on the line and you know you shouldn’t criticize because someone was probably splatted out there and it’s a total tragedy, but you’re tired and it’ll make you late home from wherever so you go ahead and have a good moan anyway.

  ‘I should be writing an essay,’ Zara went on. ‘It’s on quantum field theory in curved space–time. I have to finish it by tomorrow.’

  ‘Fascinating,’ Paige yawned.

  Luke glanced towards the door for any sign that the principal was on his way. ‘We’ll probably get a lecture,’ he predicted. By the way, he wasn’t currently talking to Paige because, unwisely, she’d beaten him at tennis, six games to four.

  ‘Here he comes!’ Hooper warned from his position by the entrance. ‘Oh no, it’s only D’Arblay.’

  I wasn’t the only one who groaned at this.

  ‘God, we could be here hours,’ Zara said. ‘We don’t want him droning on as well.’

  If he picked up on the hostile atmosphere, D’Arblay didn’t show it as he skirted down the side of the crowd and stepped on to the platform. Soon afterwards Saint Sam came into the library and joined the bursar and a great hush fell.

  Saint Sam waited before he spoke. He has perfect timing, I have to say. And he has a strong voice that carries well, an actor’s voice, plus he’s tall and he has presence – all good assets in the principal of a stupidly expensive private school or in someone about to play Hamlet or Macbeth.

  ‘I wanted us to gather here for a special reason,’ he began sombrely. ‘And that is so that we can join together and remember Lily Earle during a minute’s silence, each in our own way.’

  He paused, slightly raised up on the platform, flanked by the staff, looking down on us with a sorrowful gaze.

  ‘But before we pay our respects to Lily I wish to take this opportunity to remind you of some of the principles on which St Jude’s was founded many years ago, and I hope this will bring you strength and comfort during this distressing time.’

  ‘Here we go,’ Harry grumbled.

  ‘Nihil sed optimus,’ Sam went on. ‘Nothing but the best, and it’s at times like this when the school motto comes into its own. Yes, we’re sad and shocked that Lily is dead – that’s only natural – but as a school we must work out the optimum way to cope with this disaster. We must look into ourselves and face it with truth and courage. We must stand together as a community.’

  Ah, now I got it. Saint Sam was extending the gagging order.

  ‘In other words,’ he said, ‘we have to behave with integrity. We do not run with false rumours or give way to pressure to sell our stories to the press. Instead we wait patiently and in a dignified way for the truth to emerge.’

  Paige glanced at me and stuck her fingers down her throat. I grimaced at Jack then turned my attention to henchman D’Arblay who was nodding gravely and rocking occasionally on the balls of his feet, hands clasped behind his back.

  Saint Sam looked down from on high. ‘St Jude’s has existed as a centre of excellence since its foundation in 1938 and I hardly need to remind you that each student here, from the school’s inception to the present day, has exceptional talent, exceptional intellect and an exceptional ability to rise above the difficulties that life throws in their path.’ (Flatter your audience a la Mark Antony in Julius Caesar. ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen . . .’)

  ‘That’s why we now expect the very highest standard of behaviour on all of your parts.’

  He paused for a mass squaring of mulberry-sweatered shoulders as we all got ready to accept the burden of his expectations. I’ll say this for the kids of St Jude’s – they were eager beavers. There was not much cynicism (except perhaps from me, Jack, Paige and maybe Harry, Luke and Zara), no twenty-first century apathy to dull their bright-eyed and bushy-tailed response to Sam’s speechifying.

  ‘But, of course, as members of staff at this outstanding institution we’re also acutely aware of our responsibilities to you and we will play our part in reducing the emotional impact that Lily’s death may have had on you. (Soften the rabble-rousing tone, show a more empathetic side.) In other words, my door is always open, as are the doors of all the teachers and administrative staff. If you have concerns that threaten to overwhelm you, please come and address them to us directly – we promise to listen and if necessary the school will take steps to seek professional help.’

  It worked. One or two kids lowered their heads to sniffle and hide their tears, many more nodded.

  (Get everyone on side. Job done.)

  ‘So now, if we’re ready, we’ll collect our thoughts and stand in silence.’ Sam’s voice was laden with solemnity that was one hundred per cent effective. Even I gave way to the pressure of the moment, looked at the floor and painfully remembered Lily.

  There weren’t many places on the school campus where Jack, Paige and I could talk without being overheard. The stable yard was one of them.

  ‘So what do we think?’ Jack asked, turning to me. ‘What’s the answer?’

  ‘What’s the question?’ Paige got in like a shot. ‘C’mon, you two – are we still talking about them refusing to hand over Lily’s body?’

  ‘You told her?’ Jack checked, and I nodded.

  ‘Jesus bloody Christ, this sucks!’ Paige groaned.

  Jack and I waited for Paige to finish mixing a bucket of feed for Mistral.

  ‘To make things worse, if anything could do that,’ I told Jack, ‘Paige and I went through Lily’s diary again and we think maybe Jayden isn’t the father.’

  Jack blinked then gritted his teeth – yet another unwelcome shock. ‘How sure are you?’

  Paige jumped in quickly again. ‘Pretty sure. I know Lily doesn’t come out and say so in the email, but once you’ve thought it through and studied the diary entries, it does begin to make sense.’

  ‘So when did we start liking Jayden?’ Jack wanted to know, quickly stepping clear of Mistral’s stable door as Paige led her grey thoroughbred out on to the yard. Like me, he sees a horse and thinks, Whoa, that’s a thousand pounds of solid muscle and bone heading my way. It has a brain the size of an orange and I wouldn’t trust it to save my life!

  ‘We don’t,’ Paige insisted.

  ‘No, we don’t,’ I agreed. ‘He ditched Lily when she needed him most.’

  ‘He’s still a shit face.’ Standing back, Paige watched her pride and joy lower his ripped neck and start munching.

  ‘But that doesn’t mean he was the father or that he was involved in her death – if anyone was, and actually we still don’t know if this new detail in the pathologist’s report is important. It may not be . . .’ If, if, if. If she slept with someone she didn’t want to. If her death wasn’t straightforward suicide after all. If some crazy psycho guy had damaged the corpse.

  Speculation brought the conversation to a halt and gave me time to realize, OK, so maybe I wasn’t as anti-horse as I’d thought. I mean, there was something beautiful about Mistral’s sleek combination of power and grace, as long as you kept a safe distance.

  ‘So enough already,’ Paige decided after we’d all silently chased our theories down dark cul-de-sacs.

  Jack folded his arms and leaned against the high stone wall, just below our re-entry point after Tom’s party.

  ‘Do you realize you’re in view of the security camera?’ I reminded him, thinking that we might want to keep this conversation off the record.

  ‘So? We’re not doing anything wrong – we’re helping Paige.’

  ‘Better fetch me his saddle and bridle from the tack room, then,’ she told him briskly, and Jack went off to find them.

  ‘You’re going for a ride?’ I asked lamely.

  ‘Duh – yeah! I’m hacking out with Guy, actually. That’s his horse, Franklin, the chestnut gelding next door to Mistral. He’ll
be here in five minutes.’

  ‘Is this what you need?’ Jack asked, standing at the tack room door with a saddle in his arms.

  ‘No. Mine’s the one with the green numnah – on a high rack at the far end.’

  He disappeared back inside.

  ‘So?’ I asked. ‘So, what?’

  ‘So why are you brushing Lily under the carpet and refusing to talk to us all of a sudden?’

  I admit it – I wasn’t expecting Paige’s next reaction, like Vesuvius erupting. ‘Bloody hell, Alyssa, don’t you know this was shitty enough for me without you introducing me to your latest lame theory?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I thought we agreed. I didn’t –’

  ‘Didn’t think?’ she yelled. ‘Look, I’ve known Lily ever since she started in Year Nine in main school. And yeah she could be bloody annoying and crazy and sometimes she was hard to live with, but even so she was my best, my very best mate, and she was my favourite person of all time and now you’re trying to tell me she didn’t actually drown herself in the lake, that there was a psycho who wanted her dead, and also that same crazy person or somebody completely different got her pregnant!’

  Her explosion brought Jack running out of the tack room, gesturing behind him as if trying to warn us about something. ‘What happened? What did I miss?’

  ‘I-it’s me. It’s my fault,’ I stammered.

  Paige subsided as suddenly as she’d erupted. ‘No, it’s not. I was the one who started you off. And it’s not a lame idea – that wasn’t fair. We’ll talk about it again later – OK?’

  I nodded, noticing that Guy Simons had followed Jack out of the tack room and there was a chance that he’d heard everything that had just been said.

  If he had, he didn’t comment – just nodded at me and Jack as he carried a saddle into Franklin’s stable and bolted the door behind him.

  ‘Guy rode Franklin in the trials for the Beijing Olympics,’ Paige told us, as if she’d never lost it with me. ‘He just missed out on a place in the UK team.’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ I said. I ought to have been more impressed, but Paige’s outburst had shaken me, and, anyway, I didn’t like Guy.