Follow Me Back (14 page)

I
NEVER WANT
to hear from Autumn Thomas again. So, naturally, the first thing I do when I get in my car, face and fists throbbing, is pull out my phone and send her a Facebook message.

I sit, waiting for her to reply, watching for the little words at the bottom of the screen to change from ‘Sent 11:07’ to ‘Seen’. The throbbing in my face becomes an actual
pain, and there’s a horrible ache in one of my ribs. Each second on the dashboard clock seems to take an age to tick over, but still the words on my screen stay the same. Where is she? She usually writes straight back.

After another five minutes, I can’t take it any more. I start the car and drive without really caring where I’m going. I don’t slow down for the speed bumps in the car park and
I bounce in my seat, all my bones jolting painfully.

Out on the road that leads through town, I try to focus on driving. Stop at the red light, clutch up at amber, go at green. Slow for the corner, remember to check the crossing. Give way to the old lady trying to turn out of one of the tiny little side streets. Indicate and turn onto the busier main road, where I can put my foot down and try
to get some kind of distance between me and Abbots Grey.

I didn’t know Deacon knew about what happened in London. Looks like everyone knows all of my secrets, these days.

I glance down just in time to see the petrol light click on. Perfect timing. Right now I’d like to keep driving and never stop.

Great, run away
. Suddenly, and furiously, I’m not angry at Deacon, or Lauren, or Cheska, or
Autumn. I’m angry at myself. I’ve lied, and I’ve hidden, and now I’m trying to hide again. I’m a coward.

I turn into the next petrol station. It’s a big one, eight pumps across a spotless forecourt, and I head for the furthest, not in the mood to bump into anyone I might know.

The smell of petrol always reminds me of my dad – weekends driving to watch football, or him taking me to training
camps. A couple of family holidays, when I was much younger, before the arguments started. That’s not to say
oh, poor me
– my parents are good friends now, they’re both happy, I had a nice and not neglected childhood. But, you know, they still fought.

I fill my car with petrol, thinking about how much I really want to call my dad. The thought calms me a bit and I decide that, instead of spending
the rest of the day driving around like a freak, I’m heading home. Kevin’s at a meeting in London, and Mum’s visiting her friend Eleanor in Bridgington, a biggish village the other side of King’s Lyme. She won’t be back till dinner, which we’ve agreed to order in from the new Thai place that’s opened up by the river. I’ll go back, read up on the sports science stuff I’m missing today, catch
up on my English reading, call Dad and then hit the gym before Mum gets back. Possibly gym first; I could do with working some of this tension out.

I shift to put the petrol pump back and there’s a painful twinge in my rib. Hmm. Maybe not gym. I look at my face in the window. It’s starting to swell, around one eye and across the opposite cheekbone, too. I poke a finger against it and wonder
if it’s fractured. How am I going to explain that to Mum? The thought sends a new wave of anxiety through me. Mum has had to see my face like this way too often. Why am I putting her through it again?

I head inside to pay, belatedly checking I’ve actually got my wallet on me. Outside the shop are the usual half-wilted bouquets of flowers and the grey plastic display cases of newspapers behind
their finger-smeared lids. It’s one of those times that the knowledge something is bad for you and the fact that you’re going to do it anyway occur to your brain almost simultaneously. I know I’m going to see Lizzie. I look anyway.

She’s not on every cover; not even close. A Cabinet Minister has been caught taking drugs and another has been recorded accepting a bribe and those stories are taking
up a lot of the broadsheets’ reporting time. Lizzie makes it onto the cover of one, but even then only in a tiny box at the bottom of the page, no photo.

But the local paper’s a different story. That’s Lizzie, A3, a photo taken I don’t know when, although a sick voice inside me says it was that week, the week of the last exam and the meadow. It’s summer and she’s wearing a dress I recognise,
a pale yellow one with skinny straps and lots of tiny hearts over it. She’s smiling, but not really at the camera, and I wonder who or what she can see.

The headline reads
LIZZIE
LIVED
SECRET
LIFE
ONLINE
,
and though I try to stop them, my hands reach out and lift the lid and take a copy.

There’s just a paragraph of text underneath the huge photo:

It makes me feel ill, and the throbbing in my ribs increases. This is bad news. They’re trying to portray her in a certain way, trying to – what’s the word? –
smear
her. A week ago, she was a lovely, well brought-up schoolgirl who’d been tricked by some sicko on the internet. Now she’s some stupid girl who flirts
with strangers online, a girl who’s asking for trouble. As if anyone would ask for this.

I want to turn to page 4 but one of the attendants comes out and pointedly starts rearranging the newspapers. So I take the paper with me and pay for it with my petrol. The guy who serves me looks familiar somehow; tall and skinny, longish dark hair, a tattoo of a mermaid – an old school, retro kind – over
his forearm. He’s looking at me funny, like he recognises me too. Or maybe he’s just wondering what the hell I’ve done to my face.

‘Aiden, right?’ he asks, handing me my card back.

I nod.

‘Luke,’ he says. ‘I met you at a game once. You’re friends with Farid, right?’

‘Oh, yeah,’ I say. ‘How you doing, man?’

He nods. ‘Yeah, good. Same old.’ His eyes run over my face again. ‘You doing okay?’

‘Yeah. You know.’ I keep looking at him, though, because the match, that isn’t it. That isn’t why he looks familiar. It’s something else.

‘Have you got a brother my age?’ I ask, thinking maybe it’s someone from school, or training.

He shakes his head. ‘Nah, older. You probably know him, though. He’s on
Spoilt in the Suburbs
. Dick.’

That’s it. He looks just like Thomas Jay, Cheska’s boyfriend.

‘TJ,’ he says. ‘You watch it?’

I shake my head. ‘I know who you mean, though. He’s going out with Cheska Summersall, right?’

He shrugs. ‘He was. Dunno now.’

‘They broke up?’

He gestures at my newspaper. Lizzie’s face. ‘All that stuff going on, they just film her mostly. Guess she doesn’t need him any more.’ He smirks as he says it, like Thomas Jay’s getting what he deserves.

‘Harsh.’
I fold the newspaper. I don’t like Lizzie’s face looking out at us. I don’t like looking at hers.

A guy comes up behind us, waiting to pay for his petrol. ‘Cool, man,’ Luke says, as I edge out of the way. ‘We should get a drink sometime.’

I nod. ‘Yeah, for sure.’

He taps at the till, tells the man, ‘Forty-five sixty’, and then, to me, he says, ‘Add me on Facebook.’

I nod and wave, and
as I leave, I think that I’m never going on Facebook again.

Just as I pull into Kevin’s – still, after three years, it takes a bit of doublethink to say
my
– driveway, my phone buzzes. Facebook notification. A new message.

It’s from Autumn, and when I read it, I forget about things like turning off the ignition or taking my foot off the clutch. I just sit in my car and I read the message and
I read the message and I read the message.

And underneath that, she posts a photo of a baby’s clothes.

I
PICTURE HIM
getting that message. I see it turn from ‘Sent’ to ‘Seen’, and I imagine him sitting there, his phone in his hand. I imagine his eyes getting wide, his face turning pale.

What’s that supposed to be,
he writes, as if he doesn’t know.

I don’t get it
, he puts when I don’t reply.

Is this some kind of joke,
he writes, and that’s when I know he’s really panicking.

And that really makes me happy.

S
HE DOESN’T REPLY
. I wait and I wait, the engine running, my heart pounding, and she doesn’t reply.

I turn off the engine, my hand sweaty. I try to tell myself to be calm. I try to tell myself that she’s just a girl who used to go to my school. She doesn’t know anything about me. Autumn sat next to Lizzie in one lesson two years ago and then she moved to London. She’s just playing a
joke – a really, really sick joke. I try and laugh. As if Lizzie would tell some girl who used to go to school with us. The laugh falls flat.

I have no idea what Lizzie would do.

Eventually I go into the house and close the door behind me. Out there, it feels as though there are a million eyes on me, as if suddenly everyone in Abbots Grey can see right inside me, inside my head, inside my
memories, inside my past.

‘Aiden?’

Kevin appears in the kitchen doorway, his hands pushed into his pockets, and I nearly jump out of my skin.

‘Hi –’

‘Why aren’t you at college?’

I keep my face turned away from him as I hang up my jacket. I don’t want him to know about the fight. ‘Sports studies got cancelled,’ I say. ‘Connolly’s off sick. I’ll get more work done here.’

I don’t expect
to get away with that for one second, but all Kevin says is, ‘So you’re not going in this afternoon?’

I sit down on the bottom step to take my shoes off, keeping the most swollen side of my face turned to the wall. ‘No lessons. I thought you were in London all day?’

‘Just on my way now.’ He grabs a laptop case from the kitchen counter behind him and shoves something inside. His Converse squeak
past me on the tiles, and he pauses at the door. ‘You sure you’re okay? Want to talk?’

I shake my head, keeping it lowered over an imaginary knot in my laces. ‘I just need some space. Too much –’ I trail off. There isn’t an end to that sentence that can explain what I’m feeling right now.

I expect him to push me further, to sit down next to me or something. But instead he just puts a hand
on my shoulder and squeezes. ‘I’ll see you later.’

But at the door, he turns back. ‘It’s all going to be okay,’ he says softly. And then he’s gone. I hear the roar of his car starting up, the silky purr of it pulling away.

I sit on the bottom step for a long time. The house is quiet and cool, and I close my eyes and try and calm my heart. I close my eyes and try not to picture those tiny little
baby clothes.

I close my eyes, and I remember.

I
REMEMBER THE
night of the Year 11 prom. We didn’t have dates. Nobody was doing dates.

Lizzie was my date.

I got ready at Scobie’s – both of us in our tuxes, drinking cheap fizzy wine in fancy glasses with his mum. Scobie had a white bow tie, I had a gold waistcoat. The wine went to my head and made me giggly.

The wine went to my head and made me different.

We took a taxi, which Jodie
gave us a tenner for, and in it we drank the four cans of lager Liam had bought us in secret the night before. We looked out of the windows and watched Abbots Grey roll by, everything just slightly different, even as it was the same. The end of school, and even though we’d be back to the same place in September, it felt big. It felt like the end of something or the start of something. I was happy.
There was Scobie, there was Lizzie, and I was happy. I’d finally left London behind. I’d started again.

I was drunk.

The prom was held in the Burford Hall, the events space that joins the Rec and the drama studio. The place where we’d been in
Midsummer’s Night Dream
. The place where Lizzie had been Blanche. And now the car park was filled with limos and sports cars, full of Abbots Grey parents
with their fancy cameras and their expensive outfits, cooing their kids into the frame. Boys in tuxes, some with tails, some with all the trimmings – cummerbunds, braces, the works. Girls squeezed into long and puffy dresses, so many sequins that in the late evening sunshine it made you dizzy. The air was hot and full of perfume and hairspray. And money. Everywhere in Abbots Grey smells of money.

The theme – decided by the Year 11 Prom Committee, who had been elected by a vote that we all had the right to take part in and which about twenty people actually did – was ‘A Whole New World’, and so there were
Aladdin
-themed things everywhere: silk scarves swooping across the ceiling, ornate pots and lanterns on the tables, incense burning somewhere so that the air smelled smoky and strange.
Inflatable palm trees and the occasional toy monkey kind of spoiling the effect.

Two girls from the prom committee were on the door, taking the gold-edged tickets printed on parchment, like when you’re little and you use tea to stain paper to make it look old. They checked their clipboards and told us where our table was; we’d put our names down for one together: me, Scobie, Birchall, Darnell
Hudson, who I was closer to in those days, and Greg Marshall, another guy from the team. I knew Lizzie and Marnie and some of the other girls they hung around with had the table next to ours. Everything was just fitting right into place.

Inside, in the dark, with the pink and purple and red lights that they’d set up, it looked kind of incredible. For once, I was glad that Aggers was a place
where people cared about stuff like this, where people had the money to buy metres and metres of fabric and to pay someone to climb a ladder and hang it from a ceiling, over and over.

We headed for the bar. To get there we had to wind our way through all the clothed tables, with their parrots and their monkeys holding namecards, and then across the dancefloor, already starting to fill even
though it was still light outside.

I saw her. I saw her caught in a pool of pink light, and in it she was gold. She was Ophelia again. A long, pale dress; not puffy but straight down and pooling round her feet. Tiny straps against her smooth skin. Her hair was wavy and pinned up and falling down, and there were flowers in it.

She looked beautiful.

‘Hey,’ she said, and up close I could smell
the flowers.

We danced. Me and Scobie and Lizzie and Marnie and Birchall and other people, coming and going, moving round us like the lights that fluttered in patterns across the dancefloor. We drank from plastic water bottles smuggled in handbags, and from fancy hip flasks hidden in suit pockets. My mouth felt sticky and I was laughing. Sometimes, when nobody was looking, Lizzie would grab
my hand. It was just for a second, just the way she was dancing, but it felt just right. And I knew that it would be the night that I’d ask her to be with me, be together properly. Not a secret. I wanted us to be together all the time, everywhere, me and her.

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.