Follow Me Back

by Nicci Cloke

  But then I find one of Autumn and Lauren Choosken, arms linked as they grin at the camera. And then another, both of them in pyjamas on someone’s sofa. And another, the two of them on a skiing trip somewhere, pink-cheeked and laughing, their jackets zipped up high. Suddenly I’m suspicious. So she’s friends with Lauren, the girlfriend of the person who hates me most in this town. That can’t be a good sign.

  I go back to Autumn’s profile page and scan down it. Lots of messages from a couple of girls – friends from her school, I guess – posting funny links or saying hi, or commenting on her photos. Her status updates are the same as most of the girls in our year: Autumn Thomas is soooo bored. Autumn Thomas is looking forward to the weekend. One about a week ago catches my eye: Autumn Thomas is worried about an old friend

  She must have meant Lizzie. I look at it for a while. It’s weirdly touching, that little sad face, and the fact that she doesn’t mention Lizzie by name. So many of the girls at school are desperate to pretend that they were best friends with Lizzie, just to get attention. Maybe Autumn really is just worried about an old friend. And maybe she really is just talking to me because we went to school together, not because she wants the gossip on Lizzie, or because Deacon Honeycutt is somehow trying to get at me through one of Lauren’s friends – and thinking that through, it does sound totally ridiculous.

  So how’s life in Abbots Grey? she writes, and I think you know what – why not? Why not talk to someone who doesn’t want to ask me about Lizzie (yet, anyway), someone who doesn’t know anything about me past what happened in Year 10, that first year at Aggers. The good year.

  Oh the same, I type

  You miss it?

  Ha no

  Not at all

  Too many fake people

  Yep well that’s still true

  I haven’t been paying attention to the telly, but at the sound of a familiar voice, I look up and see Cheska’s face. Of course. It’s Sunday night, and the newest episode of Spoilt in the Suburbs is on. I roll my chair round to watch it properly.

  Cheska is in one of the cafés in town, sitting at a table by the counter with Ricky Dean, another member of the cast who’s tall, tanned and impossibly good-looking – and the biggest bitch of the lot of them. They’re both clutching hot chocolates with huge towers of whipped cream and the staff behind the counter are trying to pretend they haven’t noticed the cameras. They aren’t doing a very good job.

  Cheska is wearing a grey hoody, her hair pulled back in a ponytail. It’s a very different look for her, and I guess she’s too worried to care – or that’s what we’re supposed to think, anyway. She isn’t too worried not to bother with make-up, though – her face is loaded with it as usual. Big fake eyelashes and shiny lips, just to drink hot chocolate in a café?

  ‘…the police,’ she’s saying. ‘Going through all her things.’

  Ricky is doing his serious face, nodding, his perfectly plucked eyebrows drawn into a fake-looking frown. ‘Oh, babe. How are your parents doing?’

  ‘Terrible.’ Cheska looks down at her cup. ‘I’m just trying to protect Evie from it all, you know? She’s too young to understand.’

  ‘You’re being so brave, babe,’ Ricky says, reaching out a hand to stroke her sleeve. ‘You’re amazing.’

  Yeah, right. So busy being brave and looking after her little sister that she’s got time to sit in cafés drinking hot chocolate and being filmed.

  The scene changes to one of Thomas Jay, Cheska’s boyfriend, with his thinks-he’s-David-Beckham tattoos and greasy man-bun. He’s playing golf with Marlon, one of ‘the lads’ who bulk up each episode with parties, pub crawls and cheating on their girlfriends.

  ‘How’s Cheska?’ Marlon asks, leaning against the golf cart and drinking from a bottle of beer.

  Thomas Jay takes a swing at a ball and watches it sail up into the sky. ‘She’s doing okay. It’s tough.’

  Right, so Lizzie is the focus of the whole episode. Great. I knew Cheska was pretty shameless about using her life for publicity, but this is too far.

  are you watching this? Autumn writes.

  unfortunately yes

  what is with that bitch?

  shes so fake

  i cant believe shes talking about it on tv

  i can

  lizzie always used to say she was fake

  even before s in the suburbs

  I never met her though

  On the screen the scene switches back to the café, where Cheska and Ricky are leaving, their hot chocolates untouched.

  ‘Coming to Marlon’s party later?’ Ricky asks Cheska, linking his arm through hers as they step onto the street.

  ‘Yeah. Just what I need to take my mind off everything,’ she says, leaning her head against his shoulder.

  Urgh. I reach over and turn the TV off.

  going to bed

  night

  k

  sweet dreams x

  ‘AUTUMN THOMAS’

  THIS IS EASIER than I thought it would be. He’s clearly lonely. Clearly wants someone to talk to.

  I’m sure he looked through my photos. Trying to see what he could find out about me. Trying to see what kind of girl I am. Some people think you can judge something like that from the things someone posts about, from the people they hang around with. Unfortunately he’s one of them.

  He probably didn’t remember me. I didn’t expect him to. Just the girl who sat behind him in English. Not important enough to pay much attention to.

  But then Aiden doesn’t really pay attention to anything much that goes on around him. All he really cares about is himself.

  If he cared about anyone but himself, then maybe this wouldn’t be happening to him. Then again, maybe none of this would be happening at all.

  If he did care about anyone but himself, he’d probably remember that the redheaded girl who sat behind him in Year 10 English was called October Thomas, not Autumn.

  AIDEN

  LYING AWAKE, ALL I can think of is an English lesson, a weirdly sunny February morning last year. Mock exams are coming up, and we’re looking through a past paper, talking through the questions. We’ve got held up halfway through, on the question about An Inspector Calls:

  How successfully is the idea of collective responsibility explored in this play?

  ‘Isn’t that the point?’ Katie Jupe says. ‘That’s the whole point of the play? They’re all to blame?’ Everything Katie Jupe says is a question.

  ‘Yeah,’ Harry Yates chimes in, looking down at a page in his book where he’s clearly scrawled everything Mrs Gerber has ever said about An Inspector Calls. ‘“We’re all responsible for each other”’.

  ‘No man is an island,’ Ollie Birchall says. Smugly.

  And it is. It is the point. A girl is killed. A girl kills herself. A girl is gone, forever. And each and every person has played a part.

  ‘Well, yes,’ Mrs Gerber says. ‘But how successful is it? Do you agree that they’re all to blame? And how has Priestley presented each character, their language, their directions, their reactions, to make you feel that way?’

  This sets off little pools of conversation, which Gerber loves. An Inspector Calls was the text we all liked the most, really, or the one that started the most discussions, anyway.

  Probably, nine times out of ten, nobody would’ve heard what Lizzie said. But it just happens to be one of those moments when, as if by magic, there’s a gap in everyone’s conversations and everything goes quiet.

  ‘Gerald,’ she says, quietly but fiercely. ‘Gerald’s to blame.’

  ‘Whaaaat.’ Kieron Decker, from the back. Not really like Kieron to volunteer an opinion on literature, but what Lizzie’s said is controversial. Gerald’s part in the play is pretty small, over early. He’s not even part of the Birling family, the ones who have all, without realising, contributed to the girl’s suicide. Even if you don’t buy into the idea that everyone is equally responsible for the welfare of the people they come across in the world,
however small that meeting might seem to them – and that is the point of the play, Katie Jupe’s right – even if you do think some of the cast are more responsible than others, Gerald’s probably the last person you’d accuse.

  ‘Interesting, Lizzie,’ Gerber says, her face neutral. ‘What makes you say that?’

  Everyone is listening now, and the sun comes through the greasy old window and makes Lizzie look gold again, just like her Ophelia moment.

  ‘He made her love him,’ she says. ‘And that’s where it all went wrong.’

  I KNOW SOMETHING is up as soon as I get into our form room. I’m not late for once, which is especially rare on a Monday, but when Radclyffe looks up and sees me, his face changes from its usual confused owl smile to something harder, something that looks almost… anxious. There’s still a couple of minutes until the bell for registration, and there’s only Jorgie Mitchell and Kirsty Allison in the room. They’re both pretty wrapped up in their phones, perched on the windowsill, and Radclyffe beckons me over to his desk.

  ‘This is for you,’ he says, sliding a slip of paper to me.

  I look at him before I look at it.

  ‘Nothing to worry about,’ he says, but if he convinces himself, he definitely doesn’t convince me. I look down at the slip. It’s typed, and at the top is the school logo. Beside it is a crest which, when I look closer, reads ‘Hertfordshire Constabulary’. It says that I’m required for an interview today during first period in the headmaster’s office. And it says that my mother has been invited to be present, but that if she is unable to, Mr Selby will be present on my behalf. It’s very formal and it makes my stomach turn in loops. I take it and turn away without meeting Radclyffe’s gaze.

  I look at the note again as the rest of my form drift in, trying to read between the lines. I don’t think anyone else who’s been talked to in the temporary interview room the police have set up got a note like this. I don’t think anyone else’s parents were asked to attend. Or maybe they were, and I haven’t heard about it. Maybe it’s just the law, because most of us are under eighteen. Or maybe… No. Stop. No maybes.

  I hardly even notice when Scobie sits down beside me. ‘Alright?’ he asks.

  I push the sheet of paper across to him. His eyes flick back and forth across it at high speed. ‘Oh,’ he says.

  ‘Do you think that’s weird? That they’ve asked my mum to be here?’

  He shrugs. ‘Nah. I’m sure it’s nothing. We’re minors, aren’t we?’

  ‘Has everyone else had their parents around?’

  He looks away. ‘Maybe. I think Selby sat in on most of them.’

  This does not make me feel better. Neither does the fact that Jorgie and Kirsty have started talking about how last night’s episode of Spoilt in the Suburbs was ‘so sad’ and how Cheska is being ‘so brave’ and ‘so sweet’. I’m pretty sure that they, like everyone else in our year, spent the whole of the last series telling Lizzie what a slag her sister was for stealing Thomas Jay from Aimee, and then, later, what an idiot she was for taking back him after she’d found out he was cheating on her, too. But now Cheska’s brave, and sweet, and the star of the show.

  ‘Want me to come with you?’ Scobie asks as the bell goes for first period. ‘I’ve got a free.’

  I shake my head. ‘Thanks, Scobes. I’ll be alright.’

  ‘You’ve got nothing to hide, right? So don’t worry.’

  Yeah, sure. Nothing to worry about.

  The headmaster’s office is in the north wing of the school, also known as Nightingale. It houses a couple of classrooms, which are hardly ever used, the school nurse, a conference room, and the offices of the two deputy heads and the school governors. There’s a reception desk where you’re supposed to sign in if you’re late or a visitor, and the walls are covered in work Aggers wants to show off. Artwork, presentations and, in the main corridor, a ‘Wall of Fame’, with past students who’ve gone on to be actresses or writers or scientists. Because students only ever come here if they’re ill or in trouble, it’s deathly quiet. I smile at the receptionist, who’s a skinny guy in his twenties and has, in the past, seen me about to sign in as late and waved me away. ‘I’ll pretend I didn’t see you,’ he said to me that time, and maybe I’m being paranoid, but it seems like the same goes for today.

  The offices are through a set of double doors just behind the reception. A long, narrow corridor, dimly lit; the doors all closed. The head’s office is right at the end, and the corridor seems to stretch ahead of me, impossibly long. I’ve only been here once in my time at Aggers, but I remember it horribly well.

  The current headmaster of St. Agnes’s, Martin Maclaren, is relatively new. He started just a bit before me, so I guess maybe three years ago now, and at first he wasn’t very popular with either the parents or the governors. He’s reasonably young – in their eyes, anyway – at fortyish, and he’s got a lot of new ideas about how to run the school. Aggers is not the kind of school that uses new ideas. It’s all about tradition. They make the pupils wear blazers and ties and even the sixth-formers are supposed to follow a dress code, although hardly anyone does.

  Most people only see Maclaren when he does his full school assembly once a week, and since the sixth-formers don’t attend that – we have our own, in the Keep, with Selby – I haven’t really seen much of him since term started. He does stalk around the school occasionally, in his perfect suit and his stiff shoes, his thin curls flapping in the breeze, but apart from that, he keeps himself to himself. I’ve been glad of that. The last time I saw him was the day after prom, and that isn’t a meeting I want to repeat. Even the idea of being in his office makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

  It’s less of an office, more of a, I don’t know, suite. The main door is open, but I knock anyway. Inside, at a small dark wood desk, Maclaren’s secretary is on the phone. There’s also a female police officer sitting in a chair to one side with a laptop open on her lap. She looks up.

  ‘Interview?’

  I nod.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Aiden Kendrick.’

  She glances down at an iPad on the seat next to hers. ‘Right.’ Am I imagining it, or does the tone of her voice change? ‘We just need to wait for your mum to arrive. Take a seat.’

  ‘My mum’s coming?’

  ‘Well, she said she was when I called her half an hour ago, so I assume so, yes.’

  I don’t know if that makes me feel better or worse.

  The police officer takes the iPad off the chair so I can sit down. She also shifts her chair round, ever so slightly, so that I can’t see her laptop screen.

  Maclaren’s secretary finishes her phone call and smiles at me before returning to her computer. Then there’s just silence, broken occasionally by the click of a mouse or soft tapping on keyboards. Behind the secretary’s desk is another door. It’s also made of dark wood, a glass panel in the centre. The glass is frosted so you can’t see through, but occasionally I think I see a shadow move behind it, like a shark deep below the surface of the sea.

  I listen to the tap tap of typing, and I wonder if Lizzie ever got sent to this office. It seems unlikely but then everything I’m hearing about her these days does. I remember how upset she was last year, coming back to start Year 11 with everyone talking about Cheska and Spoilt in the Suburbs, and I wonder what she’d think about Cheska talking about her on TV, or the way everyone’s suddenly feeling sorry for her sweet, brave big sister.

  The double doors out in the corridor creak open and I hear footsteps coming down the hall. Someone wearing heels. I hope against hope that it’s Mum, although I’m dreading seeing her. Just like me, she’s only been in this office once; the last thing I want to do is remind her of it. I try to think of other times she’s visited the school, and I remember our shows. She came to see our shows; me and Lizzie on stage together. The thought makes my stomach lurch.

  Mum knocks on the half-open door just like I did. Maybe a bit less nervously.<
br />
  The WPC rises. ‘Mrs Cooper?’

  It’s still weird to hear her called that. They got married two years ago, but it’s still strange to think she has a different name to me. She was going to keep Kendrick at one point; she said it felt like hers, now; that it was a part of her. But Kevin persuaded her that it was better to have a new start.

  ‘Hi.’ Mum is in the room, relaxed smile, hand extended, as if the policewoman is someone she’s interviewing for a job.

  ‘I’m WPC Gilligan. Thanks so much for coming.’

  ‘Not a problem.’ My mum glances at me. ‘Okay, Aiden?’

  I nod.

  ‘Are you missing any classes?’ Her voice is pointed. I hear it, and Gilligan hears it too.

  ‘Sports studies.’

  ‘Let’s see if we can get started,’ Gilligan says hurriedly, and heads for the inner office. ‘Get you off before the end of the lesson.’

  I move closer to Mum. She leans towards me as we stand. ‘I thought they’d asked you everything.’

  I shrug. I can feel her studying my face.

  ‘Is there more?’

  ‘No,’ I hiss.

  When Gilligan knocks on the frosted door, I hear Hunter’s voice.

  ‘Yeah?’

  She opens the door a crack. ‘Aiden Kendrick and mum, ready for you.’

  ‘Great.’

  She holds the door open for us and I follow Mum in. It’s almost the same as I remember it: a big wooden desk dominates the room and there’s a long bookcase against one wall. There’s all Maclaren’s stuff – a brand new Mac, some framed photos – but then there’s two laptops and a load of cardboard files spread messily over the desk. Police stuff. Mahama and Hunter are both sitting behind the desk. I notice that Hunter has Maclaren’s leather desk chair while Mahama has to make do with one of the plastic ones we have in class. They both get up when we enter.

  ‘Mrs Kendrick, nice to see you,’ Hunter says, coming round the desk.