‘See you next week,’ the girls said, as though there were no question of my return, and I flushed, grateful at the implication.
I took the long way back, past the beach, where the sea whispered a soothing, steady rhythm, a tenor crooning from the pavilion at the end of the pier. In the streets close to home, lonely people watched families on flickering TVs, curtains illuminated in the same, mocking patterns; the neighbour’s dog sniffed at my hand through the fence, before the grizzled old woman who lived there called him in.
‘Good evening, Mrs Mitchell!’ I shouted, in my best talking-to-the-elderly voice. Her grandson – a squat, apple-cheeked boy with a bowl haircut, a year or so older than I was – sat at the lit window above, white walls papered in posters of dragons and wizards. I looked up at him, and smiled; he pulled the curtain shut as Mrs Mitchell slammed the door without looking back.
All weekend, I couldn’t sleep. I paced the halls, watched reruns of Murder, She Wrote with Mum at 3am, the news at six, seven, eight. I scraped the mould off the crusts with a knife and made toast for us both, while I mimed conversations I might have with the girls (assuming they invited me back). I worked the theoretical common ground at which our personalities might intersect, making lists of topics I could raise that might somehow make me seem interesting, or witty, or both. I scrawled opening lines and points of conversation in my diary, before tearing them out, ashamed to see my desperation on the page.
I found a stack of mouldering catalogues by the door, and made a list of clothes I thought might make me more like them, make-up they might wear, so wholly unlike my own. I mimed my mum’s voice on the phone while she slept, nervously peeling strips from the wallpaper by the stairs. She didn’t notice.
On the Monday, however, there was no sign of the girls at school. I wandered from one class to the next, imagining them around every corner, among the faceless crowds. I walked by the sports fields, hoping to catch sight of Alex, whose name I had seen on the team rosters for both netball and lacrosse; wandered the cavernous halls of the library, looking for Grace; and by the art studios, imagining I might find Robin there. Not, that is, that I would have admitted this, to either myself or the girls I was balefully stalking. I told myself I was exploring, finding my way around.
As I waited outside the English classroom, I saw the quote from Chaucer written in arched letters on the blackboard. I still remember it now: ‘How potent is a strong emotion! Sometimes an impression can cut so deep / That people can die of mere imagination.’
‘Hey, new girl,’ a sing-song voice rang behind me, startling in the silence.
I spun around to find myself watched, warily, by a short – petite, I suppose, is the word – blonde girl, dressed head-to-toe in the school’s sports colours. She fingered the tape wrapped around her fingers. She was pretty, in a sleepy way, eyes heavy-lidded, like a doll’s. The kind you want to close with your thumb.
‘What are you doing?’ She looked at me with a half-smile, a mixture of sweetness and suspicion.
‘Just … Getting my bearings,’ I said, twisting my fingers, palms tight and sweating.
‘I saw you last week with the weird girls. Not that it’s any of my business, but … Well, you seem nice. If you want to make friends around here, you might want to avoid getting stuck with them.’
‘Why?’ I was less surprised at her opinion of the girls – though naturally, I was curious – than the very fact of having been noticed at all. I’d imagined myself invisible, disappearing into the crowd.
‘You really want to know?’
I nodded. A soprano began singing halfway down the hall, a little off-key. The girl winced.
‘Okay, well,’ she said, shifting her backpack from one shoulder to the other. ‘You remember Emily Frost?’
I wound the name around, picked at the threads. It had a familiar ring to it, but where I’d heard it, I couldn’t say. I shrugged.
‘Where’d you go to school again?’
‘Kirkwood.’
‘So you’re from round here. You must’ve seen it on the news. The one that did a Richey.’
‘A what?’
‘Richey. Manics Richey. Disappeared. Never seen again. Jesus, do you even read?’ Her tone was oddly sweet, gently chiding; I nodded. ‘Emily was all over the news last year. She looked like you, except …’ She trailed off. The image came back, and I knew what she was going to say. ‘Pretty. Prettier.’
‘Oh yeah. I remember. But—’
‘Right, good.’ She grew more animated, stepped towards me. I heard the rustle of tissue paper, smelled the chemical scent of Clearasil and body spray, a chemical musk. ‘So she was best friends with Robin, and the four of them did everything together. And then they had some kind of fight one day, didn’t speak for like a week, and then poof! Gone. Everyone says she killed herself, but they never found the body.
‘I mean, clearly there was more to it,’ she went on. ‘If you even mention her name near them, they just get up and leave.’ She lowered her voice. ‘I mean, if something like that happened to my best friend, I don’t think I’d be quite so cool about it, you know?’
I tried to muster a half-smile, a non-committal response. ‘Why are you telling me this?’ I said, finally.
She shrugged. ‘Care in the community, I guess. Do you want to get some lunch? I’m Nicky, by the way.’
In the grim heat of the canteen, I found myself in a cloud of strange associations and artificial smells – coconut, lavender, lemon, all wrong – while girls with avian limbs and immaculate teeth giggled and clucked. The girl beside me had a laugh like a pony’s whinny, the dead eyes of a beetle.
They talked quickly, the conversation bouncing easily from one topic to another in long, breathless sentences, all featuring people whose names I didn’t know, though I nodded along, trying to keep up. A girl opposite painted her nails, brush dripping slow rolls of indigo blue; another doodled incomprehensible lists in a sticker-covered notebook, and for a moment, I wondered if I might fit in.
And then I saw them. Robin, Grace, and Alex, walking slowly across the grass, just as they had on that first day, the three of them smiling with quiet satisfaction, careless and somehow wild. I saw Robin’s hair burning fiery in the light, the moth-bitten chic of her coat; I saw Grace, preternaturally pale, large sunglasses covering the dark circles that seemed always to haunt her eyes; the crisp white of Alex’s pressed shirt, the sophisticated, sidelong glance across the Quad.
‘Ugh,’ Nicky said, her shoulder pressed against mine. ‘They’re so weird.’
I made a vague murmur of agreement, felt a pang of envy, a bitter ache in my teeth. As I stood to leave – making my excuses, the girls nodding and smiling blankly before resuming their chatter – I felt Nicky squeeze my wrist between bony fingers.
‘We’re going to the pier later – want to come?’
‘I … I’ve got homework.’
Nicky groaned. ‘We’ve all got homework. Come on. It’ll be fun.’
I felt the sharp edge of her thumbnail in the soft swell of my wrist; a brief flash of irritation, first at her, then at the other girls, for leaving me here.
‘Okay,