Follow Me Back

by Nicci Cloke

  There were more secret bottles, more hidden hip flasks. I’d had enough, but I was having fun.

  I had had too much. But I was having fun.

  There was dinner, I know, but I don’t remember much, just snatches: perfect white plates, chicken too dry, Scobie flicking his gravy at me and laughing. I remember the rumour that Jorgie Mitchell had thrown up over hers on the other side of the hall, but I don’t know if that’s a memory I’ve added later, when I knew for sure it was true (her parents were called to collect her; she threw up over Radclyffe too). We were too happy to eat, too silly to sit, and as soon as we could we were back on the dancefloor, scrumming each other with man hugs and play fighting, all dancing in a circle, arms around each other, heads thrown back as the pink and purple lights shone down on our faces.

  I think I remember – although maybe I wish I remember – looking across at Lizzie and smiling. In my head, it’s a moment that is longer than any other, everything around us fading away. Just us. I wanted to ask her then and I think I even reached out my hand, might even have started to say ‘Let’s go –’

  But then Marnie grabbed her and tugged her away, laughing, whispering, and they disappeared. And Scobie put a hand on my shoulder, passed me Birchall’s dad’s hip flask, full of Birchall’s dad’s whiskey – and that was better, even better, drinking the deputy head’s booze.

  I don’t remember Lauren coming over; one minute it was just us, the boys, and then there she was, her and Maisie and Rochelle Johnson, winding their way into our group, dancing in between us. We were happy, so happy, and nothing could spoil that, and we put our arms round their shoulders, cheered, passed them secret booze bottles and half-empty hip flasks. It didn’t matter that they never lowered themselves to speak to us in school, because we weren’t in school any more, we were in A Whole New World, a little secret bubble where everyone was smiling, everyone was together.

  I don’t remember Lauren beginning to single me out; don’t remember at what point she began to grind against me, her mass of caramel hair pushed up against my jaw, her hands reaching back to hold my hips. I don’t remember the first time she turned her face and her lips grazed my neck, or the second; I just remember becoming aware of it, like a bucket of ice water thrown over my head, and single words bleating an alarm through the pink and purple glow of the whiskey. Lizzie. Wrong. Stop.

  I pushed Lauren away, gently at first, but she just came back for more, her arm round my neck, her face close to mine, her eyes all heavy-lidded and unfocused.

  ‘Oh, come on, Aiden,’ she slurred at me. ‘You know you want to.’

  I shoved her away hard then, and that’s when I noticed that people were looking at us, like they’d been looking at us for a while. Some of them were whispering, some of them were smiling like they were expecting trouble. Scobie was looking at me like he’d been trying to get my attention for ages.

  I didn’t care about any of them. I looked through all the faces, at everyone dancing, but Lizzie wasn’t there. I turned away and started pushing through the crowd, because suddenly I was feeling unsteady on my feet and being drunk wasn’t so much fun. I hung around the back of the hall, checking the tables to see where Lizzie and Marnie were. But then I spotted Marnie heading back to our group on her own.

  I started panicking. What if Lizzie had seen me with Lauren? What if she’d left?

  My phone vibrated in my pocket, and the message was from Lizzie.

  Can you meet me outside? she put, and my heart gave a little leap, even though a sicky taste was spreading through my mouth.

  I snuck along one side of the hall and found the fire exit. The alarm doesn’t work; all the drama students who smoke use it for crafty fags when they’re waiting backstage. I headed down the stone steps and into the little alley that runs along the back of the Burford Hall.

  I turned the corner and found her sitting there, on the black iron stairs that wind up to the drama studio. Lethal in the winter when there’s ice – Hussie spends half her term carefully gritting them because she doesn’t trust the caretakers to do it properly. But now it was summer, the air cooling but still soft and warm, and Lizzie was sitting there, gold and pale against the black, her arms wrapped round her knees. She smiled when she saw me coming; moved her feet along to make room for me to sit down. I sat on the step below looking up at her; the white flowers in her hair, the moon fat and creamy behind her.

  ‘Hey,’ I said, and she smiled.

  ‘You’re drunk,’ she said, and I nodded.

  ‘Are you having a good night?’ I asked, resting my head against the wall.

  She nodded but she wasn’t smiling any more. ‘I need to talk to you about something,’ she said.

  I remember: ‘I think I’m pregnant.’

  I remember: ‘What?’

  I remember the world tipping and I remember feeling hot, too hot, and I remember thinking that the sicky taste was worse, much worse, and everything was closing in.

  I remember: ‘You’ll have to get rid of it.’ The words spilled out but now they don’t feel as though they were mine.

  I remember her face, shocked like it was slapped, the way she pulled away from me, the way she stood.

  I remember realising, remember hearing the words echoed back at me and wanting to rewind, wanting to revise, and I stood up too, but I was drunk, so drunk, and the world was reeling and my mouth wasn’t working and so I just grabbed, blindly, grabbed at her hand, tried to stop her leaving, tried to stop, tried to stop, but I slipped, or she slipped, me pulling her, her off-balance, her heel caught in the grating of the step.

  I remember her swinging for a second that went on forever, and then I remember her fingers slipped out of mine, and she fell thump thump metallic clang, her head hitting the wall.

  I remember her at the bottom, her head in her hand, the flowers crushed, and I remember the way she looked up at me, the way she looked.

  She ran.

  I ran.

  Her footsteps sounded like shots in the dark car park, and she’s fast, Lizzie was fast, and I was drunk. I could see her, the little light shape of her, growing smaller and smaller, and then there were other shapes closing in on me, there was a thud at my back and I was flying, sprawling, the still-hot tarmac coming up to meet me.

  I lay there, winded, and then I tried to roll over, tried to push myself up. Hands on my arms, hands with fistfuls of my jacket, hauling me up, and then Deacon speaking in the dark beside me.

  ‘You think you can touch my girlfriend?’ he said to me, and he spat in my face. ‘You think you can disrespect me?’

  There is a rage in me I had kept locked down through those twenty months at Aggers. When he hit me, I let him. I let him unlock it, let him set it loose, because it was dark and black and I was drunk and Lizzie was gone. We knocked everything out of each other: air, blood, booze. We fought until they couldn’t pull us apart. We fought until his final punch swung through the air, past the moon, and connected with the side of my head.

  And then there was only black.

  I CAN’T BREATHE. I’m sitting on the bottom step and my head is in my hands and my mind is still back in the Rec car park on a night at the end of June. And I keep thinking. I keep thinking.

  What if?

  I sat on this step the morning after that too. That was as far as Mum let me get. It was Kevin who picked me up from the hospital, who asked me if I was okay and listened to me list my fractured knuckle, my chipped tooth, my concussion. Kevin who took in my black eye and my fat lip in silence and led me out to the car and he didn’t ask, but he listened as the words came spilling out of me anyway – I’ve hurt someone I care about; I don’t think she’ll forgive me; I took it out on Deacon. Kevin who put a hand on my shoulder and told me that it would be okay, that he’d make sure it was okay.

  He dropped me outside the house, sped off in his car. Leaving me and Mum to it – giving us our space. The worst of it was, I knew I should feel worried, knew I should feel bad, scared of what was comi
ng. And I did. But not about Mum. Not about Deacon. Not about the fact that Selby had been at the hospital and had told Kevin, apologetically, practically tearfully, that the school would have to investigate, that we could both have our sixth form places rescinded.

  All I could think about was Lizzie.

  I let myself in and Mum was there, in the kitchen doorway, in her dressing gown, arms folded, face bare. Face furious.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I tried, taking a step towards her, but she put up a hand so sharply I shrank back, sank down onto the stairs.

  ‘How could you do this to me again?’ she said, and then she started crying.

  The crying was the worst.

  I look up now at the empty hallway, at the place in the doorway where she stood. I remember later, hearing her crying to Kevin while I was in my room, calling Lizzie. Calling Lizzie and calling and calling and calling. I threw up, at one point.

  I think I might throw up now.

  She called me, in the end. Two days of me phoning, leaving voicemails, texts, Facebook messages. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. And then, at 11a.m. on the first Monday after the ball, she called.

  ‘I’m not pregnant,’ she said, and her voice was small and hard. ‘You can stop calling me.’

  I want to say that I felt relieved, because that might be normal. I want to say that I felt sad, because that also might be normal. But I can’t remember.

  I’m scared that I didn’t feel anything.

  ‘What?’ I said, just like I did on the steps, because I’m an idiot, because I’m useless.

  ‘I made a mistake,’ she said, and she hung up.

  And now I’m wondering if the mistake she meant was telling me.

  The doorbell rings and I jump, the hairs on the back of my neck shooting up. Just for an instant, a sick instant, I know it’s Lizzie out there.

  But it isn’t. Of course it isn’t.

  It’s Marnie.

  She raises an eyebrow as she takes in my bruised face. ‘Can I come in?’

  I stand aside to let her past, too exhausted, too caught up in thoughts and memories, to say no. She heads for the kitchen, clicks on the kettle. I sink onto one of the black and chrome bar stools Kevin bought on his last trip to Stockholm.

  ‘What was all that about?’ she asks, looking through the cupboards for mugs. ‘With Deacon?’

  I shrug. ‘He hates me. He always has.’

  ‘Aiden.’ She turns round to look at me while the kettle burbles its expensive whisper. ‘You looked like you wanted to kill him. You looked… possessed.’

  I feel possessed. My whole body is pulsing with an energy that isn’t mine, isn’t me.

  ‘He pushed me,’ I say. ‘I let him get to me.’

  ‘What happened with Lauren? Everyone’s saying you started on her.’

  I roll my eyes. ‘Of course they are. I just yelled at her.’

  ‘Because of the show.’

  ‘Yeah. Kind of.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  I think back, and at least have the grace to feel ashamed. ‘Nothing smart. Called her a bitch and a slag.’

  The kettle clicks off and she turns her back to me and starts making the tea.

  ‘I don’t like that word,’ she says, still not looking at me.

  ‘I didn’t mean it as a compliment,’ I say, kind of sulkily.

  ‘I heard what you said to Deacon, too,’ she says, bringing a mug over to me. ‘About Lauren sleeping around. It’s not okay to talk about girls like that, Aiden.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I was just so mad.’ I feel about two inches tall again.

  She takes a seat at the third bar stool, leaving one between us. ‘Yeah, but it’s the way you use that as an insult. It pisses me off.’ She glances at me and then looks away and sighs. ‘It’s just – in the summer, people saying stuff like that about Lizzie. Like it made her a bad person, just because she was seeing guys. And now, in the papers, they’re making out like she had it coming, and I hate that. That’s not right.’

  I didn’t think it was possible, but I feel instantly worse. It’s all flooding back again, over and over, the waves crashing down. Lizzie. The photo. Prom.

  ‘Marnie,’ I say. ‘On prom night, where did you and Lizzie go?’

  She frowns. ‘When?’

  ‘I don’t know, sometime in the middle. After the dinner. You guys disappeared for a bit.’

  She shrugs. ‘We went outside for a while. It was too hot in there.’ She smiles a small smile to herself, one which instantly dissolves. ‘Lizzie stole a glass of wine from Selby’s table so we shared that.’

  I try to picture them out in the car park, laughing, their silky shiny dresses against the gravel.

  ‘You left her,’ I say softly. ‘Why did you leave her?’

  She looks at me in surprise. ‘She said you were coming out to meet her. She wanted to talk to you.’

  I see Lizzie on the steps looking down at me, and my stomach lurches.

  ‘Did she tell you about what?’

  She shakes her head, looks at me more closely. ‘Is that what this is all about? What did she say to you?’

  I shake my head. ‘No. Nothing.’ My hand twitches instinctively towards my phone. ‘I got in that fight with Deacon in the car park, didn’t I?’

  ‘Funny how history repeats itself,’ she says, darkly, and takes a sip of her tea.

  ‘So, did you just come round to have a go at me?’ I get up and take my untouched cup to the sink.

  ‘No ,’ she says, irritated. She gets up too and gets her phone out. ‘I need to show you something.’

  My heart skips in my chest. ‘What?’

  She looks up at me, and for a second it looks like she’s reconsidering showing me whatever it is.

  ‘I was annoyed about Lauren, too,’ she says, lowering her phone for a second. ‘Like really annoyed. I mean, I know how to control my feelings, unlike some of us –’

  I let this pass without comment.

  ‘– but I was mad about it. And I wanted to know who’d agreed for her to be on the show. Without even, you know, checking if she actually was “Lizzie’s best friend”.’ She makes exaggerated quote marks in the air, and if it wasn’t for the situation, I could almost laugh. She’s jealous.

  ‘I couldn’t believe my dad would okay that. So I broke into his office.’

  ‘Seriously?’ I’m reminded suddenly of that first time I saw Marnie and Lizzie by the lockers, Marnie yelling about her sexist science teacher.

  She waves a hand distractedly. ‘Just his office at home. Not, like, the actual Spoilt in the Suburbs office.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ I say sarcastically. ‘Right, well, that’s fine then.’

  She picks the phone up, and again I see a flicker of something cross her face. ‘The thing is,’ she says, ‘my dad’s the exec producer, so he gets cc-ed on everything.’

  ‘Right…’

  She sighs. ‘And when I was looking through his emails, I found this.’

  I have to actually hold my hand out before she finally turns the phone round and gives it to me.

  I frown. It’s a photo of a screen, so the quality isn’t great, and I have to zoom to read the email. It’s from a woman – Olive Garner – and the subject line reads CHESKA SUMMERSALL – CONTRACT EXTENSION.

  ‘Olive’s one of the producers,’ Marnie says. ‘She’s a total bitch.’ I think of the woman with the shiny bob and the clipboard.

  The email is short.

  Hi guys,

  Attached is proposed extension for Cheska. In summary, we’re guaranteeing twice the filming time each week, with appropriate payment, and we’re also guaranteeing at least two solo scenes for her each episode.

  Cheers,

  Olive

  I glance at Marnie. ‘So?’

  ‘Scroll down.’

  I do, and I realise that there’s part of an email from Cheska left at the bottom.

  O!

  Brill – thanks. Let me know what they sa
y. This is going to be an amazing storyline! Promise!

  Chesk xxx

  My heart starts thumping. ‘She’s surely not talking about Lizzie?’

  Marnie’s face is grim. ‘She must be. What else has got her more airtime?’

  ‘But she sounds so excited.’

  ‘That’s not the worst bit.’

  I raise an eyebrow at her over the top of the phone.

  ‘Scroll back up. Check the date.’

  I do, and my stomach lurches. The email was sent on the first of October.

  ‘That’s –’

  ‘A week before,’ Marnie finishes for me. ‘A week before Lizzie went missing.’

  ‘SO, WHAT ARE we saying here?’ I ask. ‘That Cheska knew Lizzie would go missing?’

  Marnie looks at me without saying anything.

  ‘That she had something to do with it?’ The words feel surreal leaving my mouth.

  Marnie swallows carefully. ‘I don’t know. But it doesn’t look great, does it?’

  We both look down at the phone.

  ‘Okay, put it this way,’ Marnie says. ‘Cheska needs a new storyline, and she knows Lizzie’s acting out, spending a lot of time online… So she makes up the Hal Paterson profile, and lures Lizzie to London –’

  ‘And what?’ I say. ‘She does what with her? With her sister? Come on, Marnie… I know Cheska’s awful but even she wouldn’t do that just to get more time on TV, would she?’

  We look at each other and neither of us say anything, because neither of us are sure just how far Cheska would go to get more airtime. I think of the way she sat me down on the war memorial and tried to talk me into going on the show. They’d pay you. The way the producer said, We’ll do a scene with Aimee, instead. I think Cheska would do pretty much anything to stay on TV.

  ‘Come on,’ Marnie says softly. ‘Let’s clean up your face.’

  I watch her run warm water into a bowl. She searches in the cupboards and finds a clean, soft cloth, and all the time I’m thinking of Cheska and Lauren on screen. Crying together. Comforting each other. Fake, fake, fake.