The Perfect Girl

ZOE

When I get my phone out, I see that panop has notified me again. It says:

How could you think you could keep it a secret? I’ve known all along.

And I understand suddenly that it has to be Lucas sending me the messages, because who else could it be? It’s Lucas and he’s known for a long time like he said, and he’s kept that totally secret from me. And in a way that’s a relief because it’s not somebody from back then, but it’s frightening too.

I’m confident enough that I’m right to send a message back:

How do you know?

I want to know how he found out and I want to know what it means to him, because I didn’t get the chance to ask him. I want to know why he kissed me. Was it real? Or did he just want to find out how it feels to kiss a killer. Lots of teenagers get off on that kind of stuff actually, and although I don’t think Lucas is that kind of boy, you can never be really sure about anybody.

I also want to know why he’s using panop to contact me, because that’s horribly, awfully freaky, but Lucas is a super tech computer person so I suppose it’s not that surprising that he’s found out about me. I close panop, because I’m still curious to have another look at Lucas’s email I open my inbox and I find it, but I can’t read the attachment straight away because for some reason I have to download it again as my phone is always such a fail and needs upgrading.

While I wait I try to control my breathing, which has become fast and shallow. To distract myself, I scroll around my phone, and I see that his email is surrounded by about twenty other unread emails, none of them personal.

The only one that interests me is a Facebook notification, where I can see what Katya is doing. When she first arrived, Katya was really friendly to me, like a cat rubbing up against your legs, and she wanted us to be friends on Facebook; that was before she worked out that I was Social Pond Life and had no proper friends, either online, or in real life. What being her Facebook friend means is that I can see when she changes her profile picture, and in fact she’s just done that. She’s just changed it from the vampy Kardashian pout that she put up last week and now it’s a picture of her and Barney Scott together, all nostrils and foreheads and sunglasses, all teeth and chins and my heart kind of sinks because they look sexy and funny and cool like teenagers are supposed to look.

There are no photos of me online from the trial because the press weren’t allowed to report my name or publish photos of me, which was a saving grace, as my mum said at the time.

The only photos of me online now are from a stupid website that my mum runs to manage my profile. In those photos, I’m always groomed and wearing a concert outfit. I’m never drunk, or stoned, or sexy, or funny or wearing sunglasses. My tongue doesn’t loll out rudely like a pop star. The only prop I have in any of my online photos is a shiny silver trophy, which my mum will soon be snatching from my hands so that she can take it away and get my name engraved on it, for perpetuity, just like my criminal record.

I can hear somebody coming. Chris takes the stairs up from the basement two at a time, passes the sitting room door, and continues up to the first floor. ‘Sshh,’ I want to say, ‘don’t wake the baby,’ but I would never dare. That phrase is in my head because it’s what he and Mum say all the time to me and Lucas, and once somebody has said something one thousand times it’s in your head for ever. I just let my mouth form the words silently instead. He reappears again quite quickly, holding bundles of things, heading back down. He doesn’t look at me, he doesn’t know I’m watching and I wonder what’s happening.

I think it’s best if I stay away from downstairs, though, because I’m messing everything up tonight. So I close the Facebook email and go back to the one from Lucas.

The attachment is downloading so slowly, which is incredibly annoying. I think about the title of it, and it makes my heart start to beat a little faster because now I wonder what ‘What I Know’ is referring to, and if the script is going to be about our life now, after it’s talked about his mum, and if it will tell me how Lucas knows about me. I kind of take a mental deep breath because I’m always wary now of people turning on me and I wonder if Lucas is about to. People can, even if they’ve kissed you, even if they’ve kissed you deeply.

‘It’s complicated that,’ Jason told me once when we were talking about what happened with Jack Bell, ‘because you’d be surprised how easily people can mix up feelings of love and hate. You wouldn’t think they can, but they do, and it’s because they’re both strong and sometimes frightening emotions.’

I had to agree with that, because although I’ve never told anybody about it, I fully remember what happened in the car right before we crashed, right before they died.

We argued. I was driving super slowly, and I mean super slowly because it was icy out and I was still struggling to handle the car. In the rear-view mirror I could see Gull’s head lolling and Jack said, ‘Come on! Let’s go to the lighthouse now – all of us – you can look after her, Ames – you won’t mind, will you?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I think I need to get Gull home.’

I felt odd then suddenly, queasy and dizzy, and the road ahead seemed to have a life of its own like a ribbon twisting in the wind. I blinked and it steadied. Ahead in the lights I could see frost-tipped hedges and I knew that around the corner, just after the junction to the lighthouse, was the lane where Gull’s parents’ house could be found.

I clasped the wheel carefully, hands at ten to two, and in the back Amy said, ‘For God’s sake, Zoe, you’re driving like such a girl.’

‘She is a girl,’ said Jack. ‘She’s doing fine,’ but then he leaned over to me and whispered in my ear, ‘Though you could probably speed up a little bit.’

He turned on the car stereo and cranked up the volume until it was blasting out: ‘“Highway to Hell”, ACDC,’ he said and he gave me a massive grin, which I just loved. As the music pumped around the car I put my foot down a little. Jack peered into the back seat. ‘Gull’s asleep,’ he said. ‘Come on, let’s just go to the lighthouse.

‘No, no,’ I said. ‘We should take her home. Actually, I don’t feel so good myself.’ In fact I felt disorientated and strange and uncertain, because suddenly the hedges we were driving between somehow didn’t look familiar and I wasn’t sure where I was.

‘Oh relax,’ said Jack. He was thumping the tops of his legs in time to the music. ‘You won’t believe how awesome it is at the lighthouse, honestly, I’m telling you.’

And then Amy said, ‘What are you planning to do with her there anyway, Jack? She’s just a pathetic little slut you know.’

And I heard that loud and clear and I turned around for just a second to say something to her, to tell her that her comment proved that she was the bitch who was sending me the panop messages, but as I did Jack said, ‘Zoe! You’re missing the turn,’ and I looked back round at the road to see the turn to the lighthouse but as I did I hit the accelerator by mistake and the car surged forward just as Jack reached out to turn the wheel away from Gull’s house and down the lane which led to the lighthouse, and it was only a millisecond before there were no memories any more because there was only blackness, until I woke up to hear somebody phoning for an ambulance, and then the rest of my life started.

I remember all this like a slow motion film as I’m watching the attachment trying to download, achingly slowly, like death by volcanic ash burial, when Tessa comes upstairs.

‘Hey,’ she says. ‘Mum slipped into the pool. She’s fine, but we’re not going to do dinner because it’s getting a bit late, so I’m off home.’

‘Did she go for a swim?’

‘No, it was more of an accident.’

My mum is clumsy like me but I think that this really takes the biscuit, as Jason would say.

‘Do you have to go?’ I ask.

I don’t want her to go. I really don’t. Aunt Tessa is sort of my best friend these days, and it’s like she can read my mind because she says, ‘Do you want to come and stay the night with me?’

And I do, I really, really so badly do, but I know that Mum might need me here and I don’t want her to be alone if there’s going to be an argument or ‘a talk’, so I say, ‘I’m fine. I’d better stay.’

She hugs me again, warm and lovely, and pats my back while she’s hugging me in the way that she’s always done. I feel a tear slip down my cheek. Just one.

‘I’ll call you in the morning,’ she says. ‘Be strong, Butterfly, you’ve nothing to feel bad about. Nothing. Remember that. You’ve paid for what you did and you have a right to a life.’

I stand behind one of the heavy drapes and watch from the front window as she crunches down the drive. She turns once to look back at the house before she disappears from sight.