Follow Me Back

by Nicci Cloke

  Farid and Jody both left school at sixteen and are already getting some games with the reserve team. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be with them. What it would be like if I’d never gone back to Aggers after this summer.

  It almost happened that way, actually. But not out of choice.

  Autumn’s window blinks again.

  im guessing not, but are you watching SITS?

  no, I’m not

  A feeling of inevitable dread seeps through me.

  Is it bad?

  umm

  Kinda

  The sensible me knows I shouldn’t. But, like I’ve said, the sensible me is not very persuasive. I reach over and turn on the TV.

  The camera’s on Cheska, up close so we can see the tears filling her eyes. Her mascara is leaving sticky little rings underneath her eyelashes, but her hair’s down and done now, not in the serious ponytail she’s been trying out for the last couple of episodes.

  ‘We’ve just got to be strong,’ she’s saying. ‘We’ve got to carry on as normal, and hope that she’ll come home. She knows we love her. She knows we’re waiting, doesn’t she? We’ll be here when she gets back.’

  The show shoots a couple of days before each episode airs, so I reckon this was before Lizzie’s clothes were found. I can at least give Cheska the benefit of the doubt on that one, although as I look at her fake-worried face, I remember the status update I’ve just seen her post. Then the camera swivels round to show who she’s talking to and I almost spit out the mouthful of drink I’ve taken.

  Lauren Choosken, orange tan glowing, tiny white see-through t-shirt showing her pink bra. She’s leaning across the table to hold Cheska’s hand, and she’s nodding.

  ‘You’re right,’ she says. To the left of her face a caption says ‘Lauren’ and underneath that ‘Lizzie’s best friend’.

  that bitch

  I know!

  did Lizzie even like her?

  No, I type, but then I realise I don’t know if that’s true.

  Well supposedly they went out together over the summer

  Really??

  that’s weird

  I know

  not friends with Lauren then?

  no

  I went to primary school with her

  she’s a total bitchface from hell

  even when she was 5

  not surprised

  Can’t believe they’ve got her on there

  I can

  they asked me too

  Omg really?

  yeah

  don’t tell anyone that

  They wanted me to pretend to be her boyfriend

  omg

  it’s pretty sick, isn’t it

  yeah it is

  I look at the screen. Cheska is giving Lauren a hug. ‘Come on,’ she says. ‘Let’s go and get a real drink.’

  Turn off your tv immediately

  lol, is that an order?

  yes it is

  It’s a health warning

  haha

  it’s off, it’s off

  Good

  So what do you like to watch when you’re not catching up on Spoilt in the Suburbs?!

  Well obviously nothing compares

  but i like sports stuff

  and 24, Game of Thrones, that kind of stuff

  Action stuff

  me too

  Also some trashy stuff

  like what

  REVENGE

  it’s amazing

  Haven’t seen it

  *whispers* and I do watch some reality shows

  Better ones than SITS though!

  you’re saying there’s a show better?! :p

  haha believe it or not…

  i’m not sure i do

  I’ve just flicked the TV over to the news instead of turning it all the way off, and I lean back in my chair to watch the sports headlines. The presenters on all the sports shows are so familiar to me that hearing them is kind of soothing. They remind me of Saturday afternoons on the sofa with my dad, listening to Final Score and feeling sleepy, usually full of junk food because he always liked treating me.

  Autumn’s window blinks again.

  So when will you next be in London?

  erm

  weekend after next

  to see my dad

  do you still have a lot of friends here?

  yeah

  i mean, i don’t see them much

  but still speak to them on here and stuff

  cool

  you must’ve met lots of cool new people?

  yeah

  everyone’s really nice

  and there’s a lot more stuff to do

  after school i mean

  Oh yeah, like what?

  I do an art class at the local community centre

  And there’s a drama school that runs weekend courses that sound fun

  Lizzie, Lizzie, Lizzie. Why does it always come back to you?

  Suddenly I don’t feel much like talking any more.

  WE WERE THE leads. Me and Lizzie, in the drama department’s production of A Streetcar Named Desire. I never expected to get Stanley, and when I saw my name on the cast sheet pinned up outside the studio, I wasn’t that excited, to be honest. The rehearsals plus football training plus revision time meant a lot of hours I didn’t really have. And, well, he isn’t the nicest character to play. He’s cruel and a bully and the person who gets the brunt of that for the whole play is the other main character, his sister-in-law, Blanche. Lizzie. I didn’t know if I could be convincingly horrible to Lizzie for an entire play.

  But Lizzie. Oh my god, Lizzie. She was all anyone could talk about. At school she was practically invisible, or at least she tried to be, trying to avoid the latest Cheska storm. She kept quiet, kept her hand down in class, and the only person who could bring her out of it was Mrs Gerber. We were still doing Twelfth Night in English, and Gerber always asked Lizzie to read Viola. Viola suited her; she’s young and smart and witty. But Blanche DuBois… I didn’t think she could do it. Blanche is broken and manic and a fantasist; nothing at all like Lizzie. I didn’t see how she could play her.

  But she did. In rehearsals and on the night, on all three nights, Lizzie was Blanche. She was perfect. She said the lines in this high, haughty, quivering Southern Belle voice and the audience hung off every single one. She moved around the stage and even her steps were different, the way she moved her hands, the way she sighed. She had become someone else, she had gone somewhere else, and it was horrible and haunting and incredible.

  And the, I don’t know, the energy between us – it was crazy. She made me feel like I was Stanley. She stood in front of me and she stuck her chin in the air, defiant, and I grabbed her wrist and I could feel everyone believe it. Because of her. Because she was so good.

  She was Blanche. She was broken and she was manic and she was perfect. Lizzie was Blanche and I was Stanley, and she was afraid of me.

  That’s the part I remember most, now.

  I MAKE MYSELF invisible on chat, because I don’t want to talk to Autumn or Marnie or Cheska or even Scobie right now. What I really want is to talk to some of my old friends from London, but none of them are online, and every time I start to draft a text or a message, I can’t find the right words.

  Instead, I find myself clicking idly through the bookmarks at the top of my screen. The football homepage on the BBC. The Norwich City message boards. My email inbox; my other email inbox – both full of junk mail and things I haven’t bothered unsubscribing from. Facebook. An article about core strength exercises. An essay about A Streetcar Named Desire I bookmarked during the rehearsals. That role was everything to me for those few months. I might’ve bitched about the rehearsal times, but something changed each time I got on that stage. I realised that I was good at it; that, like my mum said, Lizzie and I were good together. I realised the play could actually really work, and I saw how much Lizzie cared about it so I spent hours online, reading reviews of different productions,
watching clips of different actors playing Stanley. I said my lines to myself in the mirror. I said them to Lizzie in the warm blue light of the balcony over the pool.

  It meant something to me, and then it scared me. And even the thought of being on stage now, of not having Lizzie to rehearse lines with, not having Lizzie’s face to look into while the audience disappears, makes me feel sick. I delete the article.

  The next couple of tabs are more random links – a boxset I wanted to buy Mum for her birthday, a Doctor Who t-shirt I wanted to get for Scobie. My Twitter account, which I never use. Then my Instagram profile.

  I glance through the photos – I haven’t updated it in a while. I find the whole site kind of annoying, because it’s mostly just pictures people take of their own faces or their dinner. And it’s covered in hashtags, which are kind of my pet hate. Why not just have a photo of a sunset, without screaming ‘#sunset #beach #holidays #yes’ all over it? The photos on mine are mainly of the crowds at matches I’ve gone to watch, and, yeah, even I’m guilty of it, a couple of dinner shots from a fancy restaurant that Kevin took us to for Mum’s birthday. But here, right at the bottom of the page, is a photo of Lizzie, backstage in her Blanche costume. She’s dressed in white with her hair in old-fashioned curls tucked behind her ears, which have pearl studs in them. And she’s looking right at me, her phone held up in front of her face, the camera flashing. I’ve tagged it with her username, @lizbethsums and, for once, I’ve used a hashtag: #blancheandstan. I click on it, and there are only two photos that come up. One is mine, and the other is the counterpart, the one Lizzie was taking on her phone. It’s me, in my Stanley costume: a shirt with the sleeves rolled up, braces, my hair slicked back. And half my face is covered by my phone, its camera flashing too. The half you can see is smiling.

  I miss that smile.

  I click on Lizzie’s username and her profile loads. It’s much fuller than mine, rows and rows of photos, right up until a couple of weeks ago. I look at the most recent ones and it’s a shock to see Lizzie like that, to actually see her face. They’re all selfies, mostly her phone outstretched to take a picture of her face, one or two of her in her bedroom mirror. This isn’t the Lizzie I know. This is Lizzie in lipstick, pouting; Lizzie with her hand on one hip. Lizzie in the toilets at a club in town, one that’s pretty famous for letting underage kids in. All from a month or so ago.

  I look further back, even though I’ve got a crawling feeling in my stomach. There are pictures of the summer: Lizzie’s feet in flipflops on bright green grass; one of a cloudless blue sky. They feel more authentic, they feel more like her, and I’m relieved. But then there are more of the selfies, more pouts, more tight, small dresses. There’s a picture of her and Lauren, faces pressed together to fit in the frame, both blowing kisses. And one of Lizzie with a group of guys I recognise from the Abbots Grey football team, all holding cans and jeering at the camera. It’s dark and they’re in someone’s back garden. Lizzie looks drunk. I don’t know who’s taking the picture. She’s hashtagged all of these photos with ‘#goodtimes’ and I wonder if they were. I wonder if Lizzie was happy, if she enjoyed letting loose and getting drunk and having boys flirt with her, finally, instead of Cheska getting all the attention.

  I wonder if she thought about me.

  I flick back, and this time, I notice that under some of the photos there are more quotes.

  On the one of her in the club toilets, her hair all hairsprayed and big, her pouting lips red, she’s written:

  ‘who in the world cares for you? or who will be injured by what you do?’

  And on the following one, posing in her bedroom mirror in a pair of tiny shorts and a vest top:

  ‘i care for MYSELF’

  Under another, the one with her flip-flopped feet against the green grass:

  ‘you never really understand a person until u consider things from his point of view… until u climb into his skin and walk around in it’

  I recognise that one. It’s from To Kill a Mockingbird, and it makes me feel like yelling at her: We’re all trying to understand! Why are you making it so hard? But the next photo takes my anger away instantly. It’s another pouty one, but underneath, she’s written:

  ‘I want to kiss you, just once, softly and sweetly on your mouth!’

  That’s a Blanche line. I can remember her saying it in that strange, other voice, her eyes bright and soft.

  I flick through the rest and there are a few more selfies she’s hashtagged as ‘#icareformyself’, and one – one of the most recent ones – where she’s used another quote I recognise: ‘I am not what I am.’ It takes me a minute to realise that I’ve seen it on her AskMe profile, but this time, I remember where the line’s originally from. It’s one of Viola’s, from Twelfth Night. Ophelia, Viola, Blanche. The women Lizzie’s been, the parts she’s played. I wonder which one she feels closest too. I see the photo of myself as Stanley again, and a chill runs through me.

  My Facebook bleeps at me, and I see I’ve got a new message. It’s Autumn, writing to me even though I’m supposedly offline.

  So… how long are we going to play this game for?

  I sit up straighter. Game?

  huh?

  come on… you must be dying to talk about it to someone

  My heart is suddenly beating faster.

  what do you mean?

  Oh come on, Aiden, she writes. The truth about you and Lizzie

  What??

  I know, Aiden

  all of it

  the meadow

  the leavers ball

  I know what really happened

  And I believe her.

  OKAY, SO I haven’t been totally honest. I haven’t told the whole truth, or anything like the truth. When I say that Lizzie and I were just friends, that isn’t true.

  When I say nothing really happened between us, that isn’t true either.

  But I guess you already knew that.

  Our last exam was English, and after it, we met outside the Rec. We grinned at each other and then we hugged, her hair hot from the patch of sunlight she’d been sitting in for the whole exam. She smelled clean; like sun cream and, faintly, strawberry. Fake strawberry, like strawberry sweets.

  ‘Let’s go,’ I said, and I shouldered my backpack.

  We cut through the car park and into the Grove, the tree-lined footpath that follows the river. The trees are overgrown and the path was shaded, just occasional spirals of sunlight breaking through. Everywhere smelled hot and green and we could hear the quiet shhhh of the river. After our other exams we’d analysed the questions, worried about our answers. But after this one we didn’t talk about it once. We didn’t talk much at all, actually, but it was a comfortable silence. We were so used to being with each other after Streetcar and all its rehearsals, after the many afternoons we’d spent in the common room or in the Rec café revising together, that we just fitted with each other, without needing to talk.

  About halfway down the Grove, the river narrows and there’s an ancient lock. We pushed through the trees, long grass scratching at Lizzie’s bare legs, and we climbed across the lock and into the meadow.

  The meadow is actually rows and rows of fields and it goes for miles; on one side is the river and beyond that Abbots Grey and then Kings Lyme, on the other are a few farms and, hidden from view, the motorway.

  We walked along for a while, staying close to the riverbank where the grass was short, Lizzie trailing her hand through the long blades that bobbed alongside us. There wasn’t a sound coming from anywhere, and a faraway plane cut a single white line through the bright blue sky.

  Eventually we got to the perfect patch: a little flat circle that still had enough tall grass around it to hide us from view, no cows or sheep in the field, the sun in front of us and the river wide again. We sat down and I opened my backpack, which had two biros, one pencil and six bottles of cider inside. The purple, berry-flavoured cider that was Lizzie’s favourite. Usually too sickly sweet for me, but that d
ay? That day it seemed like the perfect thing.

  ‘We did it,’ Lizzie said, and I smiled.

  ‘I guess we did.’

  ‘It feels weird.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Like we’ve been working towards this for so long and now we’re here.’

  And I knew what she meant but I wasn’t sure we were talking about exams any more. I leaned closer to her, nudged her a little. ‘That’s a good thing, right?’

  She looked up and smiled at me, and it was one of her full-beam smiles, the kind that dazzled you when you least expected it. ‘Definitely,’ she said.

  We opened the ciders with a fridge magnet bottle opener that Lizzie had taken from her parents’ kitchen. It was warm but not too warm and it fizzed inside my mouth like static.

  ‘Cheska asked me about you,’ she said, looking mischievous.

  I lay back and raised an eyebrow. ‘What about me?’

  ‘She asked who I kept talking to all night. She could hear my laptop bleeping.’

  I laughed. ‘Why don’t you turn the sound off?’

  She looked down at her lap. She was wearing a pair of jeans she’d cut off into shorts and a pale blue t-shirt with the sleeves rolled up. ‘In case I fall asleep,’ she said, and the words went through me warm and clear like the day. She wanted to stay awake to talk to me. She was afraid she’d miss a message, didn’t want the conversation to end. She felt the way I did.

  I would’ve kissed her then – I was already moving closer to her, to the sun-warmed, strawberry smell of her – if it wasn’t for the dog that bounded into her lap; literally into her lap, a little thing, long curly ears, white with reddish-gold patches. It was off the lead and its tail was wagging like mad, face turned up to Lizzie’s.

  ‘Hello!’ she said, ruffling its ears with both hands. ‘Hello, gorgeous.’

  ‘Sorry –’ A woman staggered up to us, red in the face, a lead in her hand. ‘He just loves people.’

  ‘That’s okay.’ Lizzie was still fussing over the dog, her face close to his. ‘He’s just friendly, aren’t you, poppet?’